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poetic-vulgarity · 1 month ago

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ʍoN ǝW ɹɐǝH II - Karina x Reader

Word Count: ~ 5K

Prompt: Ever since they were trainees, Y/N knew just what buttons to push to frustrate Jimin.

Maybe she took things a bit too far when she decided to cheat on her.

Tags: Angst, Cheating, Ghosting

Part I, Part 2

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"I already told you I want the schedule changed!"

Jimin rolled her eyes at Y/N's irresponsible, petty, selfish behavior. "And I already told you, your schedule isn't being changed. Suck it up and deal with it!"

Y/N felt her words get stuck in her throat for a little while. You know? That feeling of injustice that just takes over you?

"This is ridiculous! I'm not flying 14 hours to Chicago for a four-minute shoot. Even you have to be dense to not see the problem!"

It was two o'clock in the morning, and they had a packed schedule the next day. Jimin could be in bed, like the rest of the members. Yet, there she was, in the middle of the living room, listening to Y/N.

"You're acting like an idiot," Jimin said, crossing her arms over her chest. Her glare was icy. Then again, she barely looked at Y/N without it anymore. "You signed a contract. Just follow it and keep your mouth shut."

"I'm acting like an idiot?" Y/N hissed, hands balled into fists at her sides. She felt like she was choking with rage.

The cold, unforgiving look in Jimin's eyes took her off guard even more—the way the older girl was glaring at her, like she was nothing more than a little nuisance.

She didn’t think, or even realize she was doing it, but she took a step forward until she was right in front of Jimin, staring her down.

"Had this been Minjeong, Aeri, or Ning, you would've fought to have the schedule changed."

"Well, it's not, is it?"

Y/N swallowed hard. She didn’t know why those words hurt more.

"I'm your member as well," Y/N gritted her teeth, fists so tight her nails dug into the rough skin of her palm. She swallowed hard, trying to keep her voice from shaking. "Fuck our relationship—you could at least treat me like your member. Do your job as a leader."

"I'll be a leader when you start being a member," Jimin scowled. "Because I'm done with your attitude. You're selfish, and all you do is create problems for the group. When have you actually been useful for us? Or do you serve only to create those stupid headlines when you decide to be a dumbass now and then?"

That made Y/N flinch. Jimin sounded disgusted.

"Fuck you, Jimin." She spat out, grabbing her jacket and shoes as she made her way to the front door of the dorm.

Jimin wanted to follow her.

She wanted to scream at Y/N too. Tell her how much of an idiot she was.

But no. Jimin was the older one between them. She was the leader of the group. It was her job to be the level-headed one between the two of them.

Her hands shook with pent-up rage. But she didn't say anything. She didn't follow Y/N to apologize.

Jimin stood alone in the middle of their dorm, feeling more empty than she ever had.

In the end, it was just another fight.

Another one of their usual fights.

And everything went back to how it used to be.

They went to Chicago. Y/N was there for a few hours before catching a plane to Italy for another event, then she returned to South Korea.

SM Town was close, and the girls needed to practice.

The fact that Y/N was exhausted, jet-lagged, and a little sick from the photoshoots outside in the winter changed nothing.

"Hello, guys! How are you?"

They waved at the camera, filming the scenes for a backstage vlog that would be posted on their channel.

"Today, we are here to practice for our upcoming performance at SM Town. As always, we are very excited!"

It was Giselle's turn to speak, so Jimin took a step back, arms wrapped around Minjeong's waist as she rested her head on the smaller girl's shoulder from behind.

Y/N could practically see the comments coming their way.

'Winrina is perfect'

'I want someone who looks at me the way Karina looks at Winter'

'They should just kiss already'

It was inevitable to find them in every single video where the two were a bit more touchy.

Y/N felt like a fool.

Jimin and her weren't together anymore. They broke up months ago, and yet…

When Jimin looked at Minjeong, Y/N could only see the love and adoration in her eyes.

She felt sick to her stomach.

She hung around in the background while the girls filmed the video, perking up with a comment or two just to make it seem like she was really there.

Other than that, she didn’t really speak.

She was too exhausted. Her body felt heavy. And it was starting to get difficult to keep a smile on her face. Her throat felt sore. Her eyes felt droopy.

She wondered if Jimin could feel her staring at her and Minjeong from behind Aeri. It was hard not to, when the older girl kept nuzzling her face on Minjeong's neck, making the singer giggle.

It wasn't something that was totally surprising, though. Not when it had happened so many times before.

It was during interviews, shows, recording sessions. It was in the studio, in the dance practice room, in the streets, at home.

With Minjeong, Aeri, and Ning. But mostly with Minjeong.

Again, not surprising. But it felt rather lonely for Y/N.

The group had always been so close. She had once considered Minjeong her soulmate, Giselle her older sister, Ning her little one.

Now they only looked at her when the cameras were on.

She understood them, in some way. In the other way, she was constantly angry at them.

No one had given her a chance to explain herself when the entire cheating incident occurred. She knew it looked bad, but they had been teammates for years. Minjeong had been her best friend since before they even met Jimin... and they couldn't even hear her out?

So, yeah, she felt petty enough to be mad at all of them for a while. It was a flame that still burned in her chest, but more softly now. She was getting tired.

"Y/N, what about you, how are you feeling about the dance routine?" The cameraman suddenly turned to her.

Y/N took a sharp breath in, her eyes widening slightly at the sudden question.

She looked towards the camera and sent it a smile.

"I'm excited," Y/N said, her voice coming out a little croaky. "I'm sure we're going to give the best performance we can. We've been practicing really hard for it. I'm very proud of all the members."

And she meant it.

They were like perfect machines on stage, able to work together and put on a good performance. It was almost as if they could tell what the other members wanted.

It had been what made Aespa such a hit in the first place.

But you can't be hits without a lot of work. And a lot of work happened to be the biggest problem in Y/N's life.

Only one day before SMTown, the girls were invited to a radio show, and management only refused offers when they literally couldn't find a single vacant spot in Aespa's schedule.

So, there they were.

"What is Winter's favorite color?"

Jimin was quick to jump on her seat, "Ivory!"

A small ding echoed around the radio studio, and a big smile took over the leader's face as she celebrated.

"Very well! We are at 6 points for Y/N, 4 points for Karina, Winter, and Giselle, and 3 points for Ning. This last question will either decide the 2nd place of the game or equalize Ning to the second place," the radio show announced as loud music played in the background.

"And the last question is... what is Y/N's favourite ice cream flavor?"

Jimin's hand flew to the button, along with Winter's, Ning's, and Giselle's.

The answer was obvious for them. They had spent countless hours making fun of Y/N for it.

"Cinnamon!" Jimin was the first to respond.

"Yeah, she likes cinnamon ice cream," Winter grimaced. "It's disgusting."

"Don't know how she eats it."

"That is correct!" The announcer turned his card around to reveal the answer, and a small smile appeared on Y/N's face.

"Jimin wins second place!"

Yeah, Y/N didn't want to let Jimin win. "Actually, I'm allergic to cinnamon."

Everyone froze for a few seconds. Karina, in particular, was quick to frown, head snapping to Y/N. She knew all of Y/N's allergies. "No, you're not."

"Yes, I am."

"You're not."

Y/N chuckled, looking around the room as she noticed how heavy the atmosphere was getting. "I am," she let out quietly. "It's quite recent."

Jimin was confused, to say the least. Y/N loved cinnamon. She liked it in sweets, ice creams, perfumes. Hell, Jimin switched her perfume for a cinnamon one when she found out Y/N liked it, years ago. She still used it to this day.

"Since when?"

"A few months ago." Y/N sent her a knowing look before turning to the host. "I say no one gets the point since they got it wrong."

Jimin refused to believe what she was hearing.

Was Y/N lying?

She had almost missed these little spats between them.

Almost.

"No, no! How am I supposed to know your allergies? I deserve the point!" Jimin argued in the most polite way possible, but Y/N could see the competitive fire behind her eyes.

"As the leader..." Y/N was definitely going there. "Isn't it... your obligation?"

Jimin opened her mouth to respond but Y/N was already talking again.

"You know what," she said, shrugging her shoulders. There was a small smile on her face. She was enjoying this—enjoying how irritated Jimin was getting, how competitive she was getting, how flustered she was. Enjoying how much it took for her to swallow the words that really wanted to come out. "Never mind, just give her the point. She needs it anyway."

And Jimin had to fight back the urge to glare at the other girl.

The host laughed loudly and pointed at Y/N, who had been mostly quiet during the entire show. "I like you!"

Y/N smiled back at him, and they soon moved on to another part of the radio show.

She didn't think much of the entire interaction, but apparently, Jimin did.

Y/N stepped away for a little while once the show had ended, needing to use the bathroom. The managers and members decided to make their way to the vans and told Y/N to join them when she was ready.

Which is why she wasn't expecting to come out of the bathroom and see her ex-girlfriend leaning against the wall of the secluded hallway.

Jimin turned to look at her when she heard Y/N coming out of the bathroom, looking more refreshed than before.

She let out a sigh, crossing her arms over her chest. "Don't you think you're being a bit petty?" she asked, eyebrows furrowed together but face soft, expression neutral.

Y/N was genuinely confused. "Sorry?"

Jimin let out another sigh. "What you said back there. During the show?" she asked, a little annoyed with Y/N. She always managed to make her emotions flare up.

"With the cinnamon?" Y/N shrugged. "What about it?"

"You lied just to get a rise out of me," Jimin grumbled out, looking at Y/N incredulously.

Y/N almost chuckled. "I didn't lie."

"Are you kidding me?" Jimin took a step closer, eyes narrowing into a glare. "You've loved cinnamon your entire life! Every perfume I bought, everything I ever baked for you had cinnamon. Hell, I'm still wearing the perfume right now!"

Y/N nodded, taking a step back as her back pressed against the bathroom door. "Yeah, maybe you should back off a little."

"Are you kidding me?!" Jimin said, hands on her hips now. She was frustrated with her ex-girlfriend, more than she'd been in a while. "You wanted the point so bad you had to lie about it like a child?"

Then it hit her.

What Y/N said.

"What do you mean by 'I should back off a little'?" she asked, taking another step closer.

"I mean, back off!" Y/N pressed a hand to Jimin's shoulder to nudge her away. She was gentle, but her glare wasn't. In only a few seconds, she was walking down the hallway again.

Jimin watched her go, the feeling of Y/N brushing against her skin sending warm chills up her spine. She couldn't help but let her body lean forward, subconsciously wanting to chase after the younger girl.

What was she doing? Why was she acting like this?

"Y/N—"

Y/N was gone already because she knew arguing with Jimin didn't take her anywhere.

She knew they would throw insults at each other until one of them had enough and left.

And she knew that because that's what always happened. And it would continue to happen, for as long as Jimin and the other members refused to hear her out.

So, she got inside the waiting van, put her headphones on, and closed her eyes, pretending she was far away instead of there.

Jimin got into the van shortly after, sitting next to Ning in the very back. She let her eyes wander across the van, taking in the way Minjeong and Aeri interacted with each other—laughing, giggling, smiling, and talking.

And then there was Y/N.

Honestly, Jimin tried to keep the cheating between the two of them. She had never wanted their relationship to affect the group. But Minjeong happened to find her mid panic attack, right after seeing Y/N with the man, and Jimin just couldn't keep the secret to herself. She made Minjeong promise to not treat Y/N differently after that—the two had been best friends long before Jimin appeared in their lives.

But Minjeong was simply unable to look at Y/N in the same way. And when Ning and Aeri noticed the attitude, they were quick to get the answers to their questions as well.

Y/N cheated on Jimin. Y/N was a cheater.

And cheaters didn't deserve kindness.

So, the dynamics within the group shifted, leaving Y/N on one end of the spectrum and the rest of the members on the other.

Jimin bit down on her bottom lip, leaning her head against the side of the van. There was some part of her that still cared about Y/N and this whole situation. She tried her best not to, but she was still so in love with the girl. And she understood her anger.

But that didn't change what had happened. Y/N had broken her trust. She had betrayed her and she had hurt her.

Jimin was lost in her thoughts before someone shook her shoulder. "Huh?" She asked, looking at Ning with a frown.

Ning pointed to the car window, "We're here."

The rest of the members were getting out of the van already. Jimin nodded, grabbing her own bag from beside her before getting out as well.

The five of them were quick to get home and settle in for the night.

Their schedule was impossible these days, so they could never wait to finally get comfortable in their beds.

It was what usually happened. They get comfortable in their b—

"Where the hell are you going?" Jimin was on her way to her bedroom, fresh out of a shower, when she happened to cross a fully dressed and prepared Y/N.

"Out." Y/N said bluntly, not even looking back at Jimin as she pulled a leather jacket over her shoulders. She ran a hand through her hair, a pair of heels in her hands.

Jimin's jaw almost dropped. "You're going out?" She asked, following the girl out towards the living room. She looked good. Really good. Her makeup was perfect, black shirt hugging her body. She always knew how to dress up.

Jimin crossed her arms over her chest, "Where?" She asked, raising an eyebrow.

Y/N let out a sigh.

This was the last thing she wanted to do.

Explain herself to Jimin.

"Just out."

Jimin shook her head, "It's almost one in the morning, Y/N. You're going nowhere."

Y/N halted by the door, jaw clenched as she turned to Jimin. Her expression was surprisingly calm and, if Jimin didn't know how to read her so well, she might have believed her to be civil.

"Since when are you the one who get's to tell me where I can and can't go?"

Jimin rolled her eyes, "Do you know how many creeps are out at this time? Just stay in."

"Only creep I see is you." Y/N huffed, reaching for the door handle to finally leave.

At that, Jimin let out a scoff. "You weren't saying that when you begged to come back to me after cheating on me."

Y/N almost scoffed. Bringing up their relationship and the cheating always felt like a low blow. "And look who's begging now."

"You—" Jimin's body tensed up, "You're pathetic! You'll go out there and do what? Get attacked and stabbed on the sidewalk?" Jimin asked, almost shouting at her ex-girlfriend.

"Close." Y/N smiled, "I'm gonna get laid."

That made Jimin's breath hitch. She could feel the way her blood boiled and her face heated up. She couldn't let herself lose control of the situation.

"Yeah," Jimin let out, sarcasm dripping from her words, "A new boyfriend. Of course. Cheating on me just wasn't enough, huh?"

"We can talk about it if you want. You know, it's not like we ever got to do that." Y/N was tired of the backhanded shade thrown her way every day.

"Oh, you wanna talk?" Jimin rolled her eyes, taking a few steps closer to where Y/N was standing. "You cheated on me and now you wanna talk? And what good will that do?"

Y/N's heart broke at the accusation. It still hurt to believe that Jimin would think so little of her.

What was the point in even explaining herself? If Jimin didn't trust her enough to even hear her out, then there was no salvation.

Her eyes dropped to the ground as a sigh escaped her lips, "Forget it."

"No, no. You wanted to talk, let's talk!" Jimin said, taking a step closer to Y/N. Her eyes full of anger, sadness, and confusion.

She really wanted to hear what Y/N had to say. She didn't know why, but she desperately wanted to hear it. Maybe she wanted some kind of validation for her own feelings. For the emotions she was still trying to get over.

"Explain yourself, Y/N. Try to explain yourself."

"So you want to hear me out?"

Jimin let out a sigh, "Please?"

She really did. She needed to understand what had happened.

Y/N was the sweetest person ever. She was the nicest and kindest person Jimin knew.

So how could she do this to her?

"No." Y/N shook her head.

Jimin felt her heart sink in her chest, the little hope she felt getting fainter. "No?" She asked, voice barely above a whisper.

"Stings, huh?" Y/N felt all her buried emotions surfacing, "Trying to make things work, only to be shut down? That was the response you gave me seven months ago, when I tried talking to you. And when I tried again a week after, and the week after that, and the following weeks- the fucking months following that!"

Jimin's jaw clenched. She remembered that. She remembered every detail of it. It hurt.

She wanted to take back everything she said back then. She wanted to take back every mean word, but it was too late. She couldn't go back and change how she felt. She couldn't undo it, but she wished she had let Y/N have peace of mind.

"You cheated on me, Y/N. Did you really expect me to be calm? To be gentle and nice when you hurt me?"

A small, broken smile appeared on Y/N's face. "I just wanted you to hear me out. Instead, you shut me out and turned the members against me."

She finally opened the door, "Very leaderlike of you, I must say."

"What the hell are you talking about? None of them turned against you because of me." Jimin shook her head. "They turned against you because you cheated on me!"

She could feel her blood boiling, the way her face heated. "They're my friends! Of course they were going to take my side!"

"Yeah, they were my friends too."

Jimin bit down on her bottom lip. She knew what Y/N said was true. But it didn't change how hurt the members were. Cheating was one of the worst things a person could do. And that was why none of them spoke to Y/N anymore.

"Maybe if you didn't get drunk with some random man you met at the awards, they would still be." Jimin said, voice cold and stern.

Y/N nodded. "Do me a favor and give them a warning for me, yeah? I'm about to be a whore again, so hopefully they can still look at me without vomiting by the time I come back."

"What-"

"And give them all a little kiss in the ass while you're at it too." Y/N closed the door behind herself and didn't look back.

Her friends were waiting for her downstairs, at the entrance door.

They weren't the best influence. Hell, they weren't even a good influence. But they talked to her, they looked at her, and most importantly, they didn't give a single fuck about her idol life.

"Dude, you gotta convince that stupid security guard to give us entrance rights. This is getting ridiculous." Daeun huffed loudly, nudging Y/N as they walked to her car.

The pub wasn't very far away.

Y/N spent her night just as she had promised Jimin. Drinking, dancing, and kissing strangers.

Most were too drunk to recognize her. The ones that weren't were, surprisingly, nice enough to just let her enjoy the night.

When she woke up, a massive headache had taken over her skull. She groaned, squinting her eyes closed when the sunlight slipped through the barely closed curtains and worsened her pain.

It took her a while, but she eventually realized that her phone was ringing. She groaned again, trying to turn around in the bed, when an unfamiliar weight around her waist kept her in place.

She froze, eyes finally opening to find a pretty stranger sleeping at her side.

"Shit."

Her touch was light as she picked up the woman's arm and set it aside. By the time she grabbed her phone, the call had ended, but it didn't take long for another one to ring through.

"Hello?" Y/N croaked out, voice raspy from the lack of water.

"Where the hell are you?"

Jimin's voice appeared through the other line, loud enough to make Y/N jump out of the bed. The last thing she wanted was to wake up the sleeping woman and go through the entire one-night-stand awkward conversation.

"That's... that's a very good question." Y/N's voice was low. She crouched to grab her jacket off the ground, holding her phone between her ear and shoulder as she got dressed.

"Y/N, don't play with me right now." Jimin had never been so angry at anybody. "We're all in the fucking venue—the managers are going crazy looking for you. Do you know how many times I've been yelled at already?! Where the fuck are you?"

"I-" Y/N looked around the room, trying to find any clue. Nothing. "Don't worry about it. I'll open Google Maps as soon as our call ends, it's no big deal."

"It is a big deal!" Jimin yelled as she started pacing back and forth.

The managers were yelling at her, her members were worried. Hell, even their seniors had noticed that Y/N was not around. Everyone was trying to find the whereabouts of the same person.

"You're in so much trouble, Y/N! What if this leaks? The fucking administration board has already set up a meeting to talk about this—do you have any idea of what you've just done?"

Y/N rolled her eyes. She was a grown woman. She had a right to go out and be normal for a little while. They were acting like she had killed som-

There was the door.

"What if someone caught you on camera, Y/N?! What if Dispatch was following you all along? You could destroy the entire group! How could you be so fucking selfish? How could you do this to me and the gi-"

Jimin was cut off by a loud scream on the other end of the call.

She stopped dead in her tracks, the anger from before immediately dissolving. "Y/N? Are you okay?"

The other line was quiet, which terrified Jimin even more. Her stomach twisted as she waited to hear something from the other end of the call.

Pretty soon, she heard another scream.

"Y/N!" Jimin yelled, her heart thumping in her chest. Someone was hurt, she knew it. Y/N was hurt. Y/N was hurt and instead of trying to find out where she was, she had been yelling at her until now.

"Y/N, I swear to God if you don't answer me right now!"

But Y/N couldn't answer—her phone wasn't even pressed to her ear anymore.

She was surrounded.

By two young women. They looked at her with wide eyes, fallen mouths covered with their hands.

"You're—you're Y/N! From Aespa!"

"Y/N from Aespa is in our flat—holy shit!!!"

It didn't take long for the woman Y/N had slept with to run out of her room—no doubt awakened by the screams. She paused to try and understand what was happening, but then her eyes landed on Y/N.

Y/N from Aespa.

Standing in her hallway with messy hair, an unbuttoned top, and heels in hand.

The woman jumped away. "Holy shit!"

Y/N gulped. She needed to get out of there. Right now.

"Can you give me an autograph?" one of them asked. Y/N stared at her.

"That depends..." Y/N looked around the group. "Does any of you have a car?"

Only an hour later, Y/N was stepping out of a Volvo, and the girls were driving away with their pockets a little heavier.

She was finally where she needed to be. The perfect place to continue getting yelled at.

And, indeed, she was.

She was escorted inside the venue by security guards that recognized her.

One of the group's managers was the first to find her.

He stormed through the hallways, looking for the same person that everyone in the building had been searching for. He had been to her dorm, to the dance practice room, and even to her favorite cafe. He searched so hard but found nothing.

That was until he turned a corner and spotted the face that had been driving him insane.

"Where the hell have you been?" the man yelled. "I've been looking for you everywhere!"

Y/N halted on her steps, knowing that she was in trouble.

The man was fuming, the blood rushing up to his head.

"Do you have any idea how much trouble you've caused this morning?! You're lucky the press didn't catch you out last night! If they had, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now. You would be in Lee Soo Man's office giving him an explanation on your shitty behavior this morning."

The man ran his fingers through his hair, breathing heavily. "I've been up since seven in the morning trying to find you, do you have any idea of how worried everyone was?"

Y/N pursed her lips, eyes drawn to the ground. "I'm sorry."

"You're sorry?" The man's eyes widened; he couldn't believe what he was hearing. "I don't give a crap about your sorry. I'm your manager, you're supposed to answer to me. You can't pull things like this!"

He stopped and took a few breaths, his heart beating faster than he would like.

And then he opened his mouth and continued his yelling. He was soon joined by the two other Aespa managers, and if the entire situation wasn't a loud mess with one man, you could be sure it was with three.

Y/N didn't have much of a choice. She stood there and listened.

She didn't agree with everything they shouted at her, but she wasn't mental enough to speak up.

By the time she reached the stage, where her members were already waiting, the group was an hour behind on schedule, and no one would look her in the eye.

Y/N had to take her hat off to the girls.

They kept their act up.

Be it during practice, when they got home at the end of the day, or the following day—during SMTown.

She was used to being sort of shoved aside, but they had never outright ghosted her.

Their resolve didn't even budge when they were filming an SM Town vlog, so Y/N got a good three seconds of screen time during the video. It, ultimately, didn't matter. Y/N didn't even know why she noticed it.

SM Town began. SM Town ended. The crowd loved it.

Y/N spent more time with her seniors and other groups than with her own members. And by the time night fell and everyone gathered around to go celebrate the show, Y/N was stopped by her manager.

"You should change."

Y/N frowned, eyes falling on the outfit she had just changed into. It was comfortable for her to relax a little but pretty enough to go out and celebrate.

"Why? Is there something wrong with it?"

The man shook his head. "No; it's just not fit for running."

Y/N didn't understand. "Running?"

From the corner of her eye, she noticed a security guard approaching them.

"Running," the man answered. "The higher-ups have spoken." The way he talked made it seem like they were fucking gods. "They want a punishment for your decisions of yesterday. It's not the first time you've pulled a stunt like this, and they've had enough of you."

He looked sorry for a second, but then he turned to the security guard as he walked away. "Fifty laps around the venue. Don't let her stop for too long."

The guard nodded in confirmation, and Y/N felt her mouth fall. "You're kidding."

Her manager just continued walking, so Y/N went on. "I'm not gonna run 50 laps, are you crazy?!"

He shrugged. "You're not leaving this venue without the 50 laps. Lee Yeon here will make sure of it."

She turned to look at the guard and he crossed his arms in front of his chest, eyes unforgiving.

And so there Y/N was. Running around the venue alone, cold air crashing against her red cheeks while she ran.

After the fifteenth lap, she could have sworn her lungs were about to collapse. Her muscles ached and begged to stop. But all she could do was keep putting one foot in front of the other.

One foot in front of the other.

Much like she did a week later as she walked up the stairs of SM Entertainment. She knocked but didn't really wait for permission to go inside the office.

She walked up to the director sitting at his desk and handed him the stack of papers she had arranged with her lawyer.

"I'm out. Sue me, do whatever you want—I'm leaving."

#karina imagines #karina #karina x reader #aespa x reader #aespa x fem reader #yu jimin x reader #karina x you #karina scenarios #karina x y/n #karina x fem reader

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goldsainz · 2 years ago

Text

THE MET GALA — one shot.

pairing: daniel ricciardo x reader

MASTERLIST.

NOTE: i was gonna do this with anok initially but smth told me to pick dua (also there’s more content from her)… so sorry for the rushed ending, wasn’t quite sure how to end it!! my requests are open, pls check my guidelines and who i write for!

liked by ynfan1, danielfan1 and 93,571 others

ynupdates in honour of y/n’s attendance at this years met gala, let’s all remember this two iconic looks (2019, 2022) and how she will serve yet again this year!!!

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ynfan2 mother will deliver i just know it

user1 didn’t she skip last years met?

⤷ ynupdates yes! but she did a photoshoot with what she would’ve worn (she had a show and the dates overlapped)

ynfan3 she better not disappoint

user2 i’m scared for this years theme

danielfan2 is daniel going with her??

⤷ ynfan4 i think so

danielricciardo has uploaded an instagram story!

liked by danielricciardo, florencepugh and 5,290,683 others

yourusername The First Monday In May 🤍 An honour to cohost the Met Gala this year celebrating Karl Lagerfeld and his incredible legacy. Thank you Anna and Vogue for having me. Thank you patrimoine de Chanel chanelofficial for making my dreams come true with my dream dress the FW1992 original bride dress and thank you to tiffanyandco for lending me the most unbelievable necklace - I felt very lucky to get to show it off for the very first time!

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danielricciardo My beautiful beautiful girl

⤷ yourusername i love you so so much 💛

⤷ landonorris ugh you both make me sick

ynfan21 YOU SLAYED THE MET!!!

redbullracing Our paddock princess!

⤷ danielfan21 rbr admin knows what’s up

user21 best dressed this year

danielfan22 WE WANT THE DANIELY/N PICS!!

scottyjames31 invite me to the met next

⤷ chloestroll she’s gonna be taking me, but keep dreaming!

liked by yourusername, danielricciardo and 31,758 others

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marwolaeth-76 · 1 year ago

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Hi (⁠ ⁠◜⁠‿⁠◝⁠ ⁠)⁠♡, Can you make a one shot of Veneer with a female reader, where the reader is also a singer (solo) but Veneer tries to get closer to her, in every possible way until at one point the attraction between the two of them is so noticeable that in interviews they begin to ask them about it, and in the end they start a relationship.

Hi!! thank you for your request and thank you for waiting, I hope you like it�� and I want to apologize for waiting request other people, I’m sick right now so I don’t have the strength to write😢

Veneer x !FemReader stars fell in love with each other

♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡

You take a deep breath as you walk down the halls of build preparing for your interview. Ever since your debut single dropped, your life has been a whirlwind. Fans, photoshoots, awards shows - it's all so exciting but also overwhelming at times. As you near the stage, you spot a familiar face in the crowd. Veneer gives you a small grin. Your heart skips a beat, you've been growing closer to the star singer over the past few months. Between running into each other at events and bonding over the pressures of fame, you've found yourself developing feelings for him. The interview goes well until the host notices your lingering glances at Veneer. "Soo tell me - are you two there is something between you?" Kid Ritz ask slyly, crossing one leg over the other, raising an eyebrow questioningly. You it’s hard to hide your nervousness, a chill of embarrassment runs down your spine, you should have guessed that such embarrassing questions cannot be avoided, people love drama, especially between stars. Before you can stammer a response, Veneer speaks up. "We just care for each other", -he says with a warm smile in your direction. "But for now, we're just enjoying each other's company and support as we both navigate this new chapter in our lives and careers." - His tone is calm, he must have planned this answer, it’s not just that he’s sitting among the audience? although maybe it's just a coincidence. His words are reassuring yet leave the door open for something more. After the show, you share a private moment backstage. "Before you think I'm a heartless ladies' man", - Veneer began to speak in his usual mannered voice. "I..I meant what I said earlier" - Veneer says softly, taking your hand in his. "You know? I really like you, It was already difficult for me to keep it to myself. Everything is happening so fast, I can’t say that I’m unhappy with it" To say that you are in shock is not enough to say, no, of course you dreamed of this, but to really have Veneer feel the same feelings for you as you do? You stand there like a real fool, staring at the guy with wide eyes for almost a full minute before coming to your senses, catching the slightly embarrassed expression on the singer's face. You beam up at him. "Um!..I like you too? this is so awkward, I'm sorry, Don’t get me wrong, I’ve really kind of... fallen in love with you for a long time.." Leaning in, your lips stretched out in an embarrassed smile, Your heart conquers the normal rate of beats per second, you pull the guy in to kiss him on the cheek. "Ohh only on the cheek?" - Veneer asks with a note of mischief, the slight nervousness left his face, although you could swear that his hand you were holding was shaking slightly, he looking at you with his sparkling blue eyes. Looking away slightly to the side, you shake your head, raising your eyebrows and answer excited: "everything has its time)" While love brings challenges, you're glad to face them with Veneer by your side.

♡♡♡

uhhh i really wrote little, srr, bad health does not allow me to think of something normally 😤

#veneer x reader #trolls band together #trolls veneer #velvet and veneer #trolls 3 #fluff #veneer trolls #velvet trolls

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familiarscars · 3 months ago

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Lost In Control | Bad Omens | CHAPTER 08

adult content | minors do NOT interact.

⋆ 𝐏𝐀𝐈𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐆. Bad Omens X ex-girlfriend and singer!Reader.

⋆ 𝐒𝐘𝐍𝐎𝐏𝐒𝐈𝐒. You and Noah had a difficult ending but you still need to support each other for the band.

⋆ 𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆(𝐒). melancholy, ex-boyfriends, difficult relationships, alcohol abuse, swearing, drug addiction, violence.

It's okay to not agree with the characters' attitudes during the fic. It's good to remember that the story is fiction from the author's sick mind and of course they will make dubious decisions according to my fantasies. Nothing is done to be compared to reality.

Your eyes seemed to burn from the intensity of the light streaming through the window as your eyelids slowly peeled apart. The sound of a beeping monitor, a white room, and unfamiliar blue bedding came into focus, along with the IV lines running from your arm, causing discomfort whenever your body moved.

The sides of your head throbbed with such unbearable pain that your fingers pressed against your temples, as if fearing they might detach from your neck at any moment. Everything in your mind was a dark blur, with no identifiable cuts of clarity.

Yet the one certainty you had was why you’d ended up here—your body’s reactions made that abundantly clear. Your mouth was so dry that your lips stuck together, and your heart threatened to pound out of your chest with its relentless rhythm. Taking a sip of water seemed like a good way to silence the gnawing pain in your stomach, but as soon as you stretched your arm toward the bottle on the nearby table, it slipped through your fingers as a wave of dizziness clouded your vision.

“Shit,” you murmured, barely audible.

A sequence of claps drew your attention to the door, and your body instinctively straightened in the bed, despite the lingering pain in your left arm. Each clap synchronized with a step, and the expressions on his age-marked face clearly conveyed his lack of enthusiasm to be there, along with a palpable sense of disdain.

“Congratulations!” Gerard ceased his clapping as he stopped beside your bed. “It’s astonishing how you continue to surprise me with your incompetence.”

His eyes scanned your state with the air of someone examining something detestable, and when they met your face again, he shook his head in a theatrical display of disappointment.

“As if it weren’t enough for your face to be plastered all over the internet because you lost it and attacked a fan, now I have to endure the media interrogating me about why one of my vocalists overdosed at a party in my house!” he hissed through gritted teeth, raking his fingers aggressively through his hair. “WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?”

“I’d answer if I could remember anything,” you sighed in exhaustion, laying your head back against the pillow, wishing only for the throbbing, miserable pain to subside.

“Right now, we were supposed to be at the photoshoot for the band’s new winter clothing line, and guess what?” he emphasized. “They all refused to go because of you!”

“Want me to feel sorry?” you retorted with a scoff. “We’ve never even seen a dólar from those clothes. Looks like I did them a favor.”

Arguing at this point required more effort than your body seemed capable of mustering. Each word exchanged only amplified the pounding in your head, made worse by the grating irritation of his voice drilling into your brain.

“Noah’s decided it’s time for you to step back from the band and focus on getting help. He’s compiled a list of specific places for that,” Gerard gestured animatedly with his hands. “Isn’t that lovely?”

Amid the chaotic jumble of your thoughts, you forced yourself to recall flashes from the previous night. You couldn’t be certain whether it was your mind fabricating memories or if you truly heard Noah’s desperate voice, even though it sounded distant in your ears.

If it had happened, and he still cared enough about your recovery to suggest stepping away, it meant that, in some small way, he still cared. But why did this realization prick at the fabric beneath your skin? You couldn’t find an answer.

“I accept.” You agreed, snapping out of your thoughts, raising your eyes to Gerard, who stood with arms crossed, leaning against the bed. “I want to go to rehab.”

“No, that’s not how this works.”

Your brow furrowed at the sly tone in his voice as he stepped closer. Instinctively, you leaned back, trying to distance yourself from him, but the edge of the bed stopped you.

“We have two festivals in the next two weeks and a tour starting next month, and I’m not letting you ruin them like you did today’s shoot. In our last conversation, I gave you incentives to endure the routine, just like we’ve always done since you proved to be weak. It’s your obligation to learn to moderate!”

“Get out of my room! Stay away from me!” Your voice cracked, the edge of its firmness faltering. Keeping composure was no longer possible when all you felt was exhaustion, and even that wretched emotion he insisted on suppressing.

“Of course, sweetheart.”

Slowly, he leaned over you, gripping the curve of your elbow where the IV was attached, pressing the needle into your skin. Your body flinched at the sharp sting tearing through your senses, and you found yourself forced to meet his expressionless eyes.

“But when Noah walks through that door, you’re going to be a good girl and convince him you don’t need help. It’s not like you’ve never lied to him before, right? You’ll return to work and fulfill your schedule without letting that idiot interfere with my plans to keep the band together! I’m not losing money!” He enunciated every word, never breaking eye contact. “And do you know why you’re going to do this?”

“You’re hurting me.”

“Because you don’t want me giving a statement that your overdose was caused by your ex-boyfriend, who just happened to be in the same place where the emergency team found your body,” Gerard said, pressing his thumb harder into your skin. “It won’t be hard to make them believe me when they find what I’ve planted in his room.”

A warm trickle of blood seeped from the IV site as he pressed on it, the same pace at which it began to sting.

“You’re contradicting yourself when you claim to prioritize the band’s integrity, yet your first ‘mature’ decision is to destroy it entirely. You know my absence won’t affect Bad Omens’ performance, but doing this to Noah would tear it all apart. It makes no sense.”

Actually, a realization struck you faster than you anticipated. Gerard knew that when it came to the band, you and Noah had always been as one, and any disturbance to one pillar would inevitably shake the other.

As had happened before.

“I met someone who helped me with this dirty work, and I found it fascinatingly ironic when I discovered he’s a mutual acquaintance of ours: Seth Reigh,” you said, sarcasm dripping from your tone. “There aren’t many guys with that name in that city, especially one with an identical name in your history. Seth is one of Richmond’s best suppliers. But, to my surprise, it took me less than half an hour of digging to learn everything about him, including that he’s your stepfather. The same one who’s been hunting you like an animal for years since you ran away from home.”

How far could someone go when determined to own another at any cost? This was the dirtiest move you’d ever witnessed in your life, hitting you like a slap to the face. Hearing Seth’s name after nine years still made your body react the same way it had years ago. As if nothing had changed.

“All this time, you’ve been safe, with my men guarding each and every one of you. He could never reach you, couldn’t even come near you. But with just one call…”

“You’re the filthiest creature I’ve ever met!” you snapped, your jaw aching from holding back tears of rage.

“And you’ll learn to honor contractual clauses. If not for yourself—which I doubt since you don’t care about your own life—then for Noah’s. He’ll be terribly upset when he gets reported for illegal drug possession after his ex-girlfriend hid them among his things...” Gerard feigned a pitiful tone, as if thoroughly enjoying himself. “No love can withstand that, right?”

You already felt guilty for wrecking the life of the man you’d loved since the day your paths first crossed. Burdened by the mess of your cursed history, you couldn’t forgive yourself for dimming the light in his eyes over the years. You couldn’t be responsible for another.

As though he had managed to plant what he wanted in your mind, Gerard released your arm, the dried blood trailing faint marks where it had flowed. Your head still refused to process the moment, and like a shadow swept away by a lapse in time, he vanished from the room. But unfortunately, this time, it wasn’t a fabricated memory.

That conversation had actually happened.

The nurse brought your meal; everything looked anemic, tasteless, impossible to digest. You weren’t sure if the food was truly bad or if you just weren’t hungry, feeding on hate instead. Your fingers absentmindedly nudged the chicken piece back and forth on the plate, letting it roll alongside a green jelly that smelled like plastic.

“Hey.” A male voice whistled from the doorway, tapping twice before stepping in.

Your smile came unbidden, and he returned it as he walked toward you, hands tucked into his pockets. As always, a cap paired with the hood of his sweatshirt, he was dressed entirely in black and smelled so good you dared to think it was the first scent you’d noticed since waking up. Noah wore the same clothes as yesterday—he hadn’t gone home, hadn’t left you alone.

A restless kind of peace came with him, and he had no idea that it was exactly what you needed.

“As always, I’m giving you trouble…” you began, a little embarrassed, but his soft chuckle cut you off as he gently moved your leg aside to sit on the edge of the bed.

“That doesn’t matter, but I’d like to know how you’re feeling.” He sighed, glancing at the tray beside you. “Why haven’t you eaten yet?”

You just wrinkled your nose with a grimace that made him smile.

“Come on, at least a little, okay?” he coaxed, adjusting the tray in front of him. With infinite patience, he cut and gathered the food onto the utensil, then brought it toward you. “Watch out for the airplane!”

Stifling a laugh, you accepted the food and closed your mouth to chew. Determined not to upset him, you ate two more bites before he moved the tray aside again.

“I don’t know if you’re well enough for this, but I can’t think of a better time to have this conversation with you.” Noah hesitated, running his hands over his thighs and biting his lips before looking back at your face. “I promise that the person sitting here in front of you right now isn’t your work partner. It’s Noah. I don’t know if you even remember him, but he used to be yours.”

“Please…”

A warm sensation ran through your skin when he placed his hand over yours, his thumb tracing over the exposed bones.

“I know what it feels like to lose you, and I swear to God, it doesn’t compare to how I felt yesterday when I found you in that place.” Slowly, he raised his face, his dull, lifeless eyes brimming with emotion. His lips trembled, but his touch didn’t falter. “That was one of the most selfish things you’ve ever done, and believe me, you’re the most selfish person I know.”

As though it were an involuntary command from your body, a single tear fell from your left eye just after one rolled down his cheek.

“I’m so sorry for that.”

“I can’t take this torture anymore—being forced to watch you die. Every part of me rots along with you every time you choose to hate yourself this way because I’d never do that to you. I’d never treat you like that.” He looked up, gasping for air, before continuing. “So, if you still hate yourself too much to want help, do it for me. I’m still your biggest fan.”

Your chest felt like invisible strings were being pulled tighter and tighter, suffocating you. But you couldn’t expect much from yourself. Closing your eyes, you prayed for this moment not to be real, for it not to demand that you say the things that would break him again. But when you opened your eyes, he was still there, as vulnerable as the night you first kissed.

“Noah…”

“I’ve found good contacts. It’s not too far, the treatment would be short, and I’ve already planned to visit regularly and…”

He was talking so fast that he could barely hear himself.

“Noah, I don’t need help,” you blurted, closing your eyes again to avoid seeing the moment the words hit him.

“What?” he asked in disbelief, adjusting his position on the bed. “Do you have any idea what happened yesterday, or are you going to ignore it like you’ve been doing all these years?”

No one warns us that struggles with addiction are destructive not only to the user but to everyone around them, reducing their world to a single life—yours. No matter how much you try not to make it about you, they relentlessly, almost obsessively, pursue your cure, forgetting they’re deteriorating along the way. But who catches the strong one when they can no longer hold themselves up?

“I know I crossed a line yesterday, and that’s enough for me not to repeat it, but not enough to accept being admitted as if I’m some addict!” You didn’t even believe your own words, but you needed to hold your ground. “If you really cared about me like you say, you’d never suggest something like that!”

“You’re acting like you didn’t hear anything I said!” Noah pressed his hand against his thigh, preparing to stand, but you grabbed his wrist just in time to stop him.

Gently, you got to your knees on the bed and crawled toward him, feeling the wind from the window brush against your back, exposed by the hospital gown. Noah was breathing heavily, his face damp, his red, irritated eyes framed by strands of hair tucked behind his ears. He didn’t resist your touch as your hand cupped his cheek. Shutting his eyes, he moved slightly when you tilted his face, shaking his head as though the scene was something he had lived through before.

And in truth, he had.

"Hey, I'm still here, look at me!" you whispered, and after he refused once again, you opened your eyes, anguish etched into your face as your foreheads collided, breaths clashing. "There’s no one else in this world who knows me as well as you do, so give me one more chance when I say I’ll get it right this time. I want to be better. I want to be good again, but I can’t do that unless you believe in me. Unless, just once more, you believe in me, Noah."

Your voice held steady, resisting the urge to falter, and for a second, in his silence, you thought he was considering your words. The way he listened so intently, down to the rhythm of his breathing, made you hope. You couldn’t resist the subtle way your skin brushed against his, even though desperation lingered in the air.

But something shifted in his eyes. They darkened, fixing on you with an expression you had never seen before. Noah seemed to take every ounce of his accumulated weight—exhaustion, fury, repression—and throw it all down at once. Gripping the hand still resting on his face, he let it out.

"I. DO. NOT. BELIEVE. YOU." His voice was strong, firm, rough, and left no room for argument. He pronounced each word deliberately, not once breaking his gaze.

Noah shoved your hand away from his face as if it carried a contagious disease, and in the next moment, he stood up from the bed in a hurry. He turned back toward you, eyes scanning your frozen figure, still on your knees. It seemed to hurt him as much as it hurt you—evident in the way his breathing hitched, his chest visibly weighed down.

"If you really want another chance to fix things, then accept my help. If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for me and all the time I stood by your side, even when you least deserved it, even when I forgot the way back home." Noah insisted. "But if you don’t, I want you to forget I exist outside of the stage. I want to be dead to you, just as you will be dead to me the moment I walk through that door."

Though his words wavered with hesitation, they struck like a promise. Avoiding his gaze long enough to keep him from noticing your cracks, you lowered your head, offering him only silence in response.

But he would never understand.

"Hey..." Three heads peeked around the doorway, and both of you turned to see Folio, Jolly, and Ruffilo entering, pretending they hadn’t been eavesdropping just outside.

"Didn’t know we’d be walking into a funeral. We can come back later," Folio said with a flat smile, gesturing his thumb toward the hall.

"No need, boys. Noah was just leaving," you said with a friendly smile in their direction. From the corner of your eye, you saw him nod and storm out of the room like a furious bolt of lightning.

The trio exchanged glances, silently communicating in their own cryptic way before each of them found a spot on the bed, squishing together to keep you company. As the conversation flowed, you tried to distract yourself, even laughed at the absurdities spilling from their mouths, but your mind kept drifting back to the same place.

This was the first time you’d truly kept a promise to him.

You had finally broken his heart.

Once again.

⭑ @collisionofyourkissmakesitsohard ; @iluvmewwwww75 ; @anarchydomainglory ; @foliosgirl ; @lma1986 ; @chey-h ;

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scary-grace · 8 days ago

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um and [pda]. for you know who of course. THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thank you for the prompt! Since I'm apparently incapable of answering these cute prompts normally, I'm going to extend my usual offer of a rewrite if you really aren't vibing with it. In any case, this is a part 2 to magnum opus, aka the serial killer Tomura AU. 10.8k, all the standard warnings for a fic about serial killers, Tomura being Like That. Dividers by @cafekitsune

videre licet

Six months after he kidnapped you, the Symbol of Fear's laid out his most gruesome crime scene yet - and this time, he's taken the victim's heart hostage. While the rest of the police force grasps at straws, you follow the clues Shigaraki Tomura left you, hoping to find the heart so his victim can be laid to rest. Tomura is hoping for something else. (cross-posted to Ao3)

The call this time came from four hours away. With the cops well aware of where you and the others are headed, you can speed, and you and the rest of the forensics team make the trip in a cool three hours and fifteen minutes. No one will tell you exactly why you’ve been summoned there, but you know. Monoma knows, Aizawa knows, Shinsou knows, Hagakure knows – but you’re the only one with a sick, guilty pit yawning open in your stomach. You know what you’re going to find when you get to the new crime scene, and you know why. For the last six months, Tomura’s been quiet. If you and the team are getting called outside your jurisdiction, it means he’s back.

It’s been six months since Tomura kidnapped you for a photoshoot, and you didn’t tell anyone what happened. You should have. You know you should have, and at the same time, you couldn’t. If you told them that Tomura had come after you, they’d take you off the case. You can’t let that happen, not when you’re the only one who knows where to look for the clues Tomura leaves, the clues that you have a bad feeling he’s been leaving just for you. You’ve tried your hardest to get everyone else inside his head with you, but they can’t or won’t – you’re not sure which. You couldn’t tell anyone. You have to stay on Tomura’s case.

Tomura’s case, which has gone six months without a new murder, until tonight. Why did he go quiet for so long? Why did he come back now?

“We treat this like any other crime scene,” Aizawa says as Shinsou parks the car. “Regardless of what we find.”

He’s never said that before. Whatever’s happening at this crime scene, you know it’ll be bad. Tomura’s savagery is unparalleled, matched only by his obsessive need to make himself known, heard, seen. Based on your conversation, the former serves the latter, but that’s not particularly comforting. When you’re looking down through your camera lens at another mutilated body, it doesn’t matter why Tomura does it.

“His motive’s changed,” Shinsou says, after you all have stared at the gutted corpse for a solid ninety seconds. “It’s sexual.”

You can’t stop the scathing noise that exits your mouth. “It’s not sexual just because the victim’s a woman.”

“This isn’t even the first female victim,” Monoma adds in. “One of the early ones was a woman, too. He treats them the same as he treats the others.”

“So he’s a bisexual sexual sadist. There’s no way he goes to all this trouble if he’s not getting off on it.”

That’s not it. You know it isn’t it. “No,” Aizawa says flatly. “There is a message he wishes to convey. Shinsou and I will retreat. The rest of you, catalogue the crime scene, and then we’ll search.”

Monoma sketches while you take pictures, and Hagakure follows behind you, dusting every possible surface for prints. You work your way inwards to the body from the perimeter of the site, noting the direction the victim’s wide-open, staring eyes are angled. He hasn’t done anything with the hands or feet this time. The victim’s hands are folded over her abdomen, and there’s something folded up between them. You zoom in, snap photos from every angle, and then call for the others.

“It seems he’s growing less subtle.” Aizawa pulls on gloves while Hagakure carefully separates the item from the victim’s hands. It’s a paper flower, clumsily folded out of what appears to be a copy of a court order. That fits Tomura’s MO – almost. Tomura leaves hints, but not in plain sight like this. And Tomura never leaves bloody fingerprints all over whatever clue he’s left.

You try to point that out, but no one listens to you. They’re all congratulating themselves over how all serial killers make a mistake eventually, how he’s slowing down and losing his touch. You’re the only one who’s looking at the body itself, the only one seeing that something’s wrong with the ribcage. “Look at this,” you say. Then: “Hey! He didn’t just open her up. He –”

You reach down with a gloved hand, and the victim’s sternum splits open at the slight pressure. Next to you, Monoma makes a strangled sound and yanks out his sketchbook, drawing fast with a heavy hand. You peel off your gloves and lift your camera again. No wonder Tomura left such an obvious clue. He wanted the team to focus on that. Not on the fact that the victim’s heart has been carved from her chest.

Tomura removes his victims’ organs not infrequently, but he leaves them at the crime scene, artfully and disgustingly arranged. The heart’s nowhere to be found, and although you follow the victim’s eyeline, the heart’s not there. What’s there instead is a message scrawled on a piece of paper, in Tomura’s handwriting. It’s yours if you can find it. He’s taunting you. That asshole. You turn the piece of paper over, only to find an instruction. An awful instruction. Start where we met.

Where the two of you met? You met in his basement. Or you met in the park where he chloroformed you. No way are you going back to either of those places. Tomura’s sending you on a scavenger hunt for a victim’s heart – and worse, he’s guaranteed that no one is going to help you look. You’re dead certain that the fingerprints on the court order aren’t his, but they’re taking up all of your colleagues’ attention, just like he must have known they would. If you’re going to go looking for his latest victim’s heart, you’ll be doing it alone.

So you’ll do it alone. Tomura’s other victims, as mutilated as they were, at least got to be cremated whole. This victim deserves the same, whoever she was. You remember Tomura’s instructions to look up, the one he left at multiple crime scenes, and do it of your own accord this time. Tomura watches his crime scenes somehow. He must have, in order to spot you, which means he’s probably watching now, waiting to see what you’ll do in response to his challenge. You nod a few times to let him know that you’re willing to play. It’s uncomfortably easy to picture his smile.

You show the note to the others, but they aren’t interested, except to tell you to go through the crowd photos from the previous crime scenes. “Start with the earliest one,” Aizawa says. “If he’s referring to his first encounter with the police, he won’t have been as skilled at hiding his trail. You might find him in the crowd.”

You already tried that. Your first day at work after the kidnapping, you went over all the crowd photos with a fine-tooth comb, searching for the identifying features you remember – messy blue hair, red eyes, scratched-raw patches on the sides of his neck. There was nothing. Even from the beginning, he was too smart for that. By the time you came to one of his crime scenes –

It clicks into place for you all at once. Tomura’s mind doesn’t work the way a normal person’s does. To him, your first meeting wasn’t the kidnapping. Your first meeting is the first time he saw you. And if he’s watching his crime scenes, the first time he saw you is the first time you took pictures of one.

It’s a painfully long night at work, and there’s no rest for you even when you do clock off. You head straight to the first of Tomura’s crime scenes, long since cleared away. There’s a small memorial featuring a moldering teddy bear, which you can’t look at too long, and some graffiti that you’re not interested in reading. You walk to where the victim’s body lay and try to put yourself inside Tomura’s head. He wants to be noticed. Everything he does is in the service of getting noticed, of making sure that people can’t ignore him or what he wants them to see. And for a while now – at least a few crime scenes – he’s been trying to get you to notice him specifically. Not his crime scenes. Him.

You’re good at noticing things, but at this first scene, you missed something. You noticed the direction the victim’s eyes were looking, but you didn’t follow it, which means that whatever message Tomura left here went unnoticed. Maybe he wants you to find that message and get it out there, and then he’ll give back the heart. You call up your memory of the crime scene and follow the corpse’s empty gaze. Sure enough, there’s something tucked into a carved-away portion of the concrete wall.

It’s not the original clue. You know what kind of clues Tomura leaves, and this isn’t it, which means that he came back here at some point to leave something new. And he came back recently – the date on the receipt he left here is from three days ago. Did he already have the victim when he bought whatever this was? You and the others have had a hard time figuring out Tomura’s timeline. He does such a good job destroying the victims’ identifying features that it takes weeks to identify each one, and the longer it takes, the more likely it is that people’s memories of the last time they saw the victim alive will be too faded to use.

Whatever he’s planning, he started it in the last three days, which means his planning for it overlapped with the murder, if not the capture, too. You can’t decide which is worse – the thought that he had the victim already, and decided to carve out their heart to mess with you, or if he had the idea for the scavenger hunt and killed the victim specifically to set it up. Either way, it feels like it’s somehow your fault.

You’ve had dumber thoughts, but not in a while. You know there won’t be fingerprints on the receipt, so you take it with you bare-handed, studying it on the train. It’s a pickup receipt for something that’s already been paid for, and Tomura’s obscured the price, the transaction ID, the form of payment, and most of the letters in the name of the business. He’s good. You write out the number of spaces in the business’s name, fill in the letters you know, and start trying to guess what on earth Tomura bought.

Tomura bought coffee and a bagel, but he’s too wound up to eat them. Just like he was too wound up to sleep last night, or the night before, or the night before that. If he’s being honest, he hasn’t slept since he had this idea. Tomura needs you to hurry up and find all his clues, so he can finally get some rest. He got a little too used to getting some rest over the last six months. He needs to be careful, or he’ll lose his edge.

The high from his photoshoot with you lasted for weeks. Whole weeks where Tomura could look at the pictures you took of him, and the footage of you from the hidden cameras in the basement, and feel instantly calmer. He slept better at night, too. Killing people who deserved it and forcing everyone else to see the truth didn’t feel quite as urgent as it did before. The police were on it, as useless and corrupt as they are, and thanks to you, the whole world knows that Tomura has something to say. Tomura didn’t need to widen his victim pool for more crime scenes, more chances for the cops to figure it out. He could be selective, and make his crime scenes even more spectacular for you.

It was a great plan, until Tomura remembered that you’re only paying attention to him when he’s killing people. Six months where he doesn’t kill anyone is six months where you’re not looking at him, and once Tomura figured that out, he was so pissed at himself and so desperate to do something that he killed someone off his list on purpose, in a messy, ugly crime scene that you’d never associate with him. Then he got his shit together and started thinking about what he’d really need to do to recapture your attention. Something to give the so-called detectives a hard-on so they wouldn’t get in your way, and something to make sure that this time, you’d have to seek him out yourself.

You found Tomura’s first two clues already, and he told himself that he was going to wait to see you until you found them all – but then he had some stupid dream about you taking his picture again and knew he couldn’t wait that long. So now he’s here, staked out in the park across from the shop where he left the third clue, with a coffee that’s getting cold and a bagel he feels too nervous to eat, waiting to see if today’s the day you’ll come looking.

It’s not like Tomura hasn’t seen you at all. He’s been watching you since the second he brought you back to your apartment, carried you up the stairs and used your keys to unlock the door and took off his shoes and yours to carry you inside. He’d set the drone up already, so he could be in and out in five minutes rather than lingering, and he still ended up staying longer than he should have. He’s had that drone at your house, and there’s another one that follows the forensics unit to crime scenes so he can watch you work, and every so often he hacks into the CCTV cameras nearest your favorite places to hang out in case you’re there.

Tomura likes seeing you. Likes seeing you go about your day sometimes, even if he has to stop himself from adding new people to his hit list any time you come across somebody rude. But watching you through a camera isn’t the same thing as seeing you in person. And you taking photos of his crime scene isn’t the same thing as seeing him.

He forces himself to drink some of the coffee, and to eat some of the bagel, but his hands are shaking so badly that he ends up with cream cheese everywhere. Having cream cheese all over his hands turns out to not be the worst, because it attracts somebody’s off-leash dog over to him, and Tomura gets way too much satisfaction over being the better offer than the dog’s actual owner. He feels calmer by the time the owner finally lures the dog away, but it doesn’t last long. There you are, right across the street, walking fast with headphones in your ears and headed straight for the shop Tomura’s been staking out.

You look tired. Like you’ve been losing sleep over Tomura the same way he’s been losing it over you, which isn’t a thought Tomura should be having in public. He hides behind his coffee and watches you make your way into the store. He should have picked a better place to camp out than the park across the street. He wants to be closer. He wants to hear what you’re saying. And why shouldn’t he get closer if he wants to?

Because it’s stupid. Because you’re smart. Because you’re smart enough to guess that Tomura’s watching you, and you might be expecting to see him here. Tomura doesn’t let any of that stop him from crossing the street and sneaking into the store, browsing with his back to you while you discuss his clue with the shopkeeper.

“Can you tell me anything about the person who bought it?” you’re asking. “What else were they looking at when they came in?”

“The young man only came in to pay,” the shopkeeper says. “This wasn’t a purchase, but a repair. He brought the item in, made his specifications, and informed me that you would be by to pick it up.”

“The person with the receipt.”

“No, you. By your name,” the shopkeeper says. Tomura wishes he could see your face right now. You probably look surprised, even though you should already know that he knows your name. “Wait here a moment. I’ll bring it up to you.”

If you get bored and start looking around, Tomura’s screwed, but Tomura hasn’t lasted this long by freaking out for no reason. Just because he prefers to watch through drones doesn’t mean he can’t handle himself in public. He pretends to browse, keeping his back to you, fighting the urge to glance over his shoulder and see what you’re doing. That’s an amateur mistake. He can watch you as much as he wants later. Right now, he just needs to make sure you get his next clue.

Your voice is quiet when you speak up – quiet, and rattled with exasperation. “You’d better not have left me a murder victim’s jewelry.”

Tomura almost shits himself. You know he’s there. How do you know he’s there? Did you see him across the street before you came in, or did you expect him to be following you this closely? Why haven’t you called the cops yet? If you knew he was there, you’d have called immediately, which means you don’t know he’s there. You’re just talking to yourself. Tomura’s drones catch you doing that sometimes. You’re just not usually talking about him.

But now you are, and you’re thinking about him, too. And he didn’t leave you a murder victim’s jewelry – at least, not one of his victims’. Tomura stays put, trying to calm his racing heart, as the shopkeeper comes back with the clue. “The clasp and fastening on the locket have been repaired,” the shopkeeper says, “and the new picture has been included. Would you like it wrapped, or would you prefer to wear it out?”

Tomura can leave now. You’ve got the clue. He doesn’t need to hear your answer. “I’ll wear it out,” you say, and all of Tomura’s efforts to calm the fuck down go out the window in an instant. “Thanks.”

“That’s cute,” Hagakure says, leaning across the lunch table to examine the necklace a little more closely. “Where did you get it? It looks old.”

“Thrift shop,” you say, wishing for the billionth time that you’d taken it off. “I’m not sure it’s my style, though.”

“It’s a locket, right?” Monoma slurps his soda. “What’s in it?”

“Not sure. It doesn’t open.”

It opens, all right. One of the photos you took of Tomura is in it, and on the other side, there’s a pressed flower, one that you’re pretty sure has been there for decades. But Tomura wouldn’t have left the flower in there if it wasn’t important somehow, so you’ve spent the last couple nights going blind on the internet, comparing the tiny flower to picture after picture and trying to figure out what it is. You’d rather fixate on the flower than on the picture of Tomura, which unfortunately is a really good one – one of the best ones you took during the photo shoot six months ago. You wonder why he picked it.

Regardless of why he picked it, you’re treating both the photo and the flower as a distraction. Tomura might think he’s leaving you clues towards the heart, but he’s also leaving clues towards himself.

You had a feeling the locket was old, so you went to an antique dealer to have it looked at and found out that it’s close to seventy years old. The maker’s mark on the back of it is from an obscure but well-respected jeweler whose better-kept pieces go for quite a bit of money. All his pieces were numbered, the antique jeweler told you. If you’d like, I can look up who it was sold to first.

He gave you the owner of the locket, a man named Shimura who reportedly bought it for his daughter. You tracked down photos of the daughter, Shimura Nana, and found multiple photos in which she’s wearing it. You also found out that she was murdered, her case never solved, which means that Tomura did give you a murder victim’s jewelry – a murder victim whose death he can’t possibly have been responsible for, since he’s close to your age and wouldn’t have been born for another forty years. But that begged the question of how he got the locket in the first place. And who the locket actually belongs to. According to the articles you read about the murder, Shimura Nana was survived by her only son, Kotaro.

You looked him up, thinking you’d give it back to him once you figured out the flower clue, only to discover that the Shimura family’s bad luck didn’t stop with Nana’s death. The entire Shimura family was murdered twenty-five years ago, and their case was never solved, either. You’ve requested the original files from the jurisdiction where the murders occurred, working under the assumption that there’s some kind of connection. Tomura wouldn’t have had this locket if there wasn’t some connection to the family who owned it. You’re just not sure what it is. Or why he’d give it to you. Pieces of paper with clues scribbled on them are one thing. Jewelry looks suspiciously like a present.

“Hey,” Monoma says from next to you, and you snap out of it in a hurry. “Is that thing an evil amulet or something? You were checked out.”

“Maybe there’s a cursed spirit inside it,” you deadpan. Hagakure snickers. “No, I’m just tired. What were you saying?”

“I was just saying we’re having trouble with the fingerprints,” Hagakure says, and you nod. “Have you had any luck finding the heart?”

You shake your head. “I’m still looking.”

You get your big break with the flower after work when you discover that it’s a rare species of miniature orchid, something that’s only grown under specific conditions. The botanical gardens in Tokyo are the only place that has them. It looks like you know what you’re doing on your next day off.

Tomura’s never staged a crime scene in Tokyo, so you’re not sure why he’d send you here, but you go anyway. It seems like a weird move for him, given how many people are around, given how hard it’ll be to get a close look at whatever he’s left you. If he’s even left you anything. You wander the gardens until your feet hurt, inspecting the orchids every time the crowd parts enough for you to get close. There’s nothing. You thought he might have buried something in the plot where the orchids grow, but the earth’s undisturbed. Did you follow the wrong clue?

Maybe. Tomura will be disappointed, but it’s his own fault. He should have given you something less ambiguous to work from.

At least that’s what you think, until you stick your hand in your pocket on the train ride back and come out with a folded piece of paper that you don’t remember picking up. The first thing you see is his handwriting on the back of it: You’re getting warmer. When you flip it over, you see that it’s a movie ticket for tomorrow night. That’s your clue. You didn’t make the wrong guess about where to look. You were just wrong about where you’d find it, and a bolt of terror and anticipation runs down your spine.

Tomura was here. Tomura got close enough to you to plant this in your pocket, and you didn’t even notice. That’s why he picked the botanical gardens – not to send you on a wild-goose chase, but to give himself crowd cover, and to make sure you’d be so distracted looking for the clue that you’d completely miss him giving it to you himself. Tomura’s not just dangerous. Not just better than you thought he was. Tomura’s brilliant. And for some reason, he used that brilliance to plant a movie ticket in your pocket, for a theater in your town that’s showing exclusively Best Picture winners as a lead-up to the Academy Awards.

You remember seeing posters advertising Silence of the Lambs and wonder if Tomura’s really that much of jackass. Or if he forgot what happens to the serial killer at the end of the story. You didn’t have plans tomorrow night, anyway. It looks like you’re going to the movies.

Tomura shouldn’t be here. At all. He’s already taken way too many risks, and he doesn’t even like this movie. He had to buy a ticket in order to plant your next clue, and since it didn’t matter which seat he was in – since he wasn’t staying – he picked one two rows behind yours. But then he sat down. Sat through six or seven previews. Put up with idiot couples in his row and the row between your seat and his. It’s your fault Tomura’s still here, because you haven’t shown up yet. As soon as he knows you’ve made it, he can leave.

You slip into the theater just as the lights are dimming, when it’s too late for Tomura to get out without causing a scene. Now he’s going to have to sit through an entire movie in a theater, and as bad as Tomura is at sitting still through movies he’s actually interested, he’s going to be even worse at sitting through fucking Titanic. He wishes he’d had the idea to send you to the movies last week instead. Then you could have watched Silence of the Lambs.

It's three hours of Tomura’s life that he won’t get back, but so what? He’s got things to think about. Based on how badly the press is freaking out about his most recent murder and the fake fingerprints he left all over the scene, he’s got their attention, so now he needs to capitalize on it. He’s spent enough time screwing around on the lower tiers of his list, figuring out how to stage a crime scene for maximum impact. Now it’s time to go after the lying hypocrites who let this happen.

Who to start with, though? Tomura doesn’t want to bite off more than he can chew by tackling his biggest target too soon, but if he starts with the others and his main target catches on, the bastard will beef up his security and make himself all but inaccessible. Tomura needs to get him second, maybe. Or third. And he needs to be careful. His targets might not be able to put the pieces together, but Tomura knows you can, and you’ll be the one taking pictures at his crime scene.

Most of the couples sitting in the same row as Tomura are making out, like Tomura’s wandered into some bullshit PG-13 orgy by accident. Your row isn’t much better, but at least the seat to your right is empty, so you can get an armrest to yourself without picking up an STD. You got popcorn and a soda, which is what Tomura should have done if he was planning to stay, and you don’t look like you’re hating the movie. It’s hard to tell when Tomura can’t see your face.

Tomura wonders what movie you’d have picked, if you were the one buying the tickets. You can probably handle a horror movie, given what your job is, but Tomura’s willing to bet that you don’t like them. He doesn’t like them, either, and he can handle blood and guts even better than you. What other kinds of movie are there, really? He can’t picture you being into romcoms or something stupid like that. Tomura doesn’t think he’s ever watched a romcom. He’d put up with one if you wanted to see it.

This movie’s not a romcom. The more time Tomura spends paying attention to the movie, the more annoyed he gets, until he finally gets up and leaves in the middle of some stupid car sex scene, not caring about how much of a scene he makes. He’ll hang out outside the theater, make sure you leave with the clue, plant it on you if you didn’t find it, and go home.

You’ve got the clue with you when the movie lets out close to midnight, and Tomura watches you – but he’s not the only one. The guy from the concession counter is still here, even though Tomura watched him clock off an hour ago, and he stops you partway to the doors. Tomura drifts a little closer, close enough to hear that this guy wants to know why you were going to see a romance movie all by yourself on – Valentine’s Day? Is it really fucking Valentine’s Day? You shoot back that you’re only in it for the shipwreck and shrug him off, but Tomura sees you glance back over your shoulder as you step out onto the street. The guy from the concession stand doesn’t wait more than a few seconds before he follows you.

Fucking amateur. Tomura tells himself that’s why his blood’s boiling. Watching another criminal, one who’s not even good at it, always bothers him. If the concession stand asshole knew anything, he’d know he’s already blown it – you’re wary of him, and you’ll be watching out for him, and you’ll change your behavior to minimize his chances to get you alone. If Tomura was this creep, he’d find a new target. This creep keeps following you. Tomura doesn’t think twice about following him.

He memorized the grid of streets around this theater, just in case he had to make a quick getaway, and he knows exactly where to be. When the creep walks past the alley, so intent on following you that he doesn’t question whether anyone’s after him, Tomura grabs him and yanks him into the darkness. It’s not how Tomura likes to deal with people, but it’s how he learned to do it, and there are some things it’s not possible to forget.

The creep is bigger than Tomura, heavier than Tomura, and he must have been serious about whatever he was planning to do to you, because he’s got a knife. He takes a swing at Tomura that scores across Tomura’s ribcage, then grabs Tomura by his shoulder and throws him against the wall of the alleyway, hard enough to rattle Tomura’s teeth in his skull. But victims have fought Tomura before. Stronger victims, in better shape, with actual training. He’s killed cops and former soldiers. This guy is nothing.

It gets messy, and Tomura gets hurt, but he wishes he had time to drag this out. He wants this guy to suffer, and he wants to leave you a pretty crime scene, one that’ll tell you exactly what Tomura did for you. When Tomura knocked you out to bring you back to your apartment after you took his picture, he could tell that you didn’t believe him when he said he wouldn’t kill you. He’s not going to kill you. Killing for you, though – Tomura’s got no problem with that.

He guts the creep with his own knife, his sleeve wrapped over his hand so he won’t leave a fingerprint, and steps back to admire his handiwork. It’s not his best, but you’ll understand. And if you don’t – you’ve got his last clue now. Tomura can explain it to you when he sees you in person.

Tomura’s last clue is straightforward – a location, a time, and a warning that you’ll never get the heart if you tell anyone or if you don’t come alone. How badly do you want the victim’s heart? Really badly, and after Tomura’s led you on an unhinged scavenger hunt halfway across Japan, you’ve got no interest in backing down. Maybe he’s gotten distracted setting this up for you. Maybe he’ll make a mistake, and you can find a way to bring him in.

When you get to work the morning, the Shimura files are in a carton on your desk, but before you can even lift one out, a call for forensics goes out, summoning you to a murder scene downtown. Aizawa’s off for the day, so Shinsou’s running the show. Monoma’s off, too, which means it’s just you and Hagakure, and you’re going to have to sketch the scene in addition to photographing it. You have time for a longing look at the Shimura files before you’re hustled out the door.

Three seconds after looking at the scene, Shinsou declares it as a copycat of the Symbol of Fear, and you have to admit that it doesn’t look like Tomura’s work. The body’s barely been gutted, the limbs haven’t been removed or rearranged, and the victim’s eyes look like they’ve had thumbs jammed into them. This wasn’t Tomura, even if it did happen only a few blocks away from the theater you were at last night. Tomura must have been there to plant the clue, but there’s no way he left after you did. Tomura doesn’t strike you as a movie type, but of all the movies he could possibly sit through, you don’t think Titanic is anywhere on the list.

It’s not Tomura’s work, but something still feels odd to you as you sketch the scene and pick up your camera to do your real job. Hagakure is dusting for prints, and Shinsou’s thinking out loud, the way Aizawa never does. “The victim’s been partially eviscerated, but that likely occurred postmortem, due to the lack of blood spatter. The true cause of death appears to be strangulation with a rope or some other object, which is not present at the scene. The killer must have taken it with them.”

You keep snapping photos, starting at the victim’s feet, then working your way upwards, trying not to trip on Hagakure in the bargain. Shinsou’s still talking. “The victim’s phone and wallet are missing. Combined with the short distance between the scene and the victim’s workplace, it’s likely that this was a crime of opportunity.”

“His workplace?” you repeat. “How do you know where he works?”

“Nametag,” Shinsou says, and you take a picture of it. “He worked at the theater a few blocks away.”

The victim’s face is a distorted mess, but you remember the name on his nametag. You made sure you remembered it, because the vibe was off when he stopped you on your way out the door, and you took the slow train home just to ensure that you’d be surrounded by people for as long as possible. He creeped you out last night, and he’s dead this morning. That can’t be a coincidence. You need it to be a coincidence, because if it’s not –

“Detective! Look!” Hagakure is bent over the victim’s right hand. “He must have fought his attacker. There’s hair in his hand.”

The strands of hair she’s lifting from between the victim’s fingers with tweezers are longer than you remember, but it’s been six months since you last saw Tomura. That’s enough time for his hair to grow. They have his hair now. They’ve got his DNA. “Check under the fingernails on that hand,” Shinsou is saying to Hagakure. “I’ve got skin fragments here, too.”

“Over here!” The officer who called in the body is beckoning to you, and you make your way over. “Blood spatter. Think it could be something?”

You’re not a detective, just a photographer, but the distance between the blood spatter and the body is significant – and it’s pointed in the wrong direction. The victim would have been trying to move out of the alley, back towards the street, but the blood spatter is close to the other end of the alley. Tomura left it when he was escaping, which means Tomura’s injured, which means that the police now have his skin, hair, and blood attached to an open murder case. This was a stupid kill for Tomura to make. Why would he take this kind of risk?

For you.

The thought is horrific, but once it’s in your head, you can’t shake it loose. It clings to you through the rest of the crime scene documentation, and it’s in your head as you upload your photos and write your report back at the station. It’s still there when you finally get to sit down and read through the Shimura file, documenting the annihilation of an entire family. Shimura Nana was murdered almost fifty years ago, and twenty-five years after that, her descendants were murdered, too. Shimura Kotaro, his in-laws, his wife, and his children.

No. Not his children. His daughter was murdered, but not his son. His son, five years old at the time, went missing, and has been missing ever since. You flip through the file one-handed, looking for more information about Shimura Tenko. With the other, you wake up your computer and navigate to the missing persons database. Shimura Tenko is in there, sure. Shimura Tenko’s listed as presumed dead. His profile is bare-bones – no photo, no last known place or last known sighting, no information about any search that was conducted. There’s nothing in the file, either. Did anybody go looking for this kid?

No. Even when you dig up newspaper articles about the murder, Shimura Tenko’s barely mentioned. If people were looking for him, they stopped looking fast. You think of Tomura’s obsessive need to be looked at, of his insistence on drawing attention to the failures of people who are supposed to protect others, and feel sick to your stomach. This can’t be it. This can’t be who he is, where he came from. So what if the locket you’re still wearing belonged to his grandmother? So what if he risked his mission to kill somebody who bothered you? So what if he went six months without killing anybody after somebody looked at him just once? You’ve seen what Tomura’s capable of. There’s no way this is where he started.

There’s a school photo of Shimura Tenko somewhere in the file. You stare at it for an hour, searching for Tomura in the few details you can see, but it’s been more than twenty years since this photo was taken. If you’re right about this, Tomura’s your age, and you don’t look anything like your old school pictures, anyway. And it’s not like you have anything to compare to. You’ve never actually seen Tomura’s face.

He'll be watching you when you go to pick up the heart. Maybe you can find a way to get a message across to him. Knowing who he is won’t make him any easier to catch, but maybe if you let him know you’re looking at him, you can buy a little more time.

You’re almost here. Tomura checks his tablet screen, flipping through drone camera after drone camera to make sure you’re alone, sends one final message, and sets it aside. His nerves hum in anticipation, not quite the same way they do when he’s about to execute a planned kill. Tomura planned this from the beginning. You were always going to end up here on this rooftop, and he was always going to be waiting for you. Tomura just wasn’t expecting to be such a mess.

He's got a black eye and a split lip and scratches on his hands, and he was going to put on clean clothes, but his stupid washing machine broke. The best he can say for his clothes right now is that they aren’t bloodstained, but that’s not going to last – the cut on his ribs keeps opening up, and the bandage he put on it won’t stay in place. Tomura’s not sorry he killed the creep who was after you. He’s just pissed that he got himself beaten up in the bargain.

He hears your footsteps on the stairs, fishes the hand out of his coat pocket, and settles it on his face, wincing like an idiot. He was going to sit down, but if he sits down, he’s going to grimace standing up, and he doesn’t want you to know he’s hurt. Tomura leans back against the wall instead, arms crossed over his chest, as you appear around the corner.

Tomura’s mouth goes dry. He liked carrying you to his workshop, watching you sleep and then wake up, but this is better. You’re wide awake, and you came to see him purposely. You’ve got a backpack, like Tomura’s got a backpack, and your camera bag is slung over your shoulder. You’re still wearing the locket Tomura left as the second clue, but when you see Tomura, you rock back a step in shock. “Hey,” Tomura says, and his voice cracks. “You made it.”

“You’re here,” you say. Tomura doesn’t know how to read the look on your face. “You promised me the heart.”

The heart. Right. That’s how Tomura got you to play in the first place. He knew you wouldn’t be able to leave even the most useless victim to be cremated in pieces, and he knew you’d keep looking, because that’s what you do. “It’s on its way.”

“It’s not here?”

“It’s on its way,” Tomura repeats. Your stare turns accusatory in a hurry. “Look, if you walked up to the police station holding somebody’s heart in a cooler, they’d get suspicious of you. I’m doing you a favor.”

“They’re going to be suspicious of you. Your DNA is all over the crime scene from this morning.”

So you found that one. Tomura’s stomach clenches. “It doesn’t matter. They’re not going to find it anywhere else.”

“They still have it,” you say. “Where’s the heart?”

“I said it’s on its way. You don’t trust me?”

“You tricked me,” you snap. “I’m leaving.”

“No.” Tomura swallows down a surge of panic. He could get ahold of you, stop you – if he hadn’t gotten hurt. His injuries won’t slow him down much, but it’ll be enough, especially since he doesn’t want to hurt you. “I’m having it delivered to the police station, but I’ll cancel it if you leave. Do you want it to get there or not?”

“I want proof,” you say. “Do you have package tracking?”

Tomura takes out his phone, unlocks it, holds it out to you. You’d have to come closer to him to take it, and you won’t. “If you were just going to ship it the whole time, why did you do this?”

Don’t you know? You should know, just like you knew what Tomura meant by his crime scenes, just like you know how to make him look human when you capture him on film. When you speak again, your voice is quieter, anguished. “Why did you kill that guy for me?”

You do know. Tomura feels the knots in his throat and stomach relax slightly. “Why do you think?”

“He was never going to get to me,” you say. “I was in a crowd the whole way home. Nobody’s that stupid.”

“He was,” Tomura says. “Did you want me to just sit there and do nothing?”

“I didn’t want you to do anything!” You look upset. Why are you upset? “I don’t understand.”

You don’t understand, but you came prepared, probably. All this stuff you brought with you in your backpack is probably for transporting the heart safely – except for one thing. “If you don’t understand, why did you bring your camera?”

“I thought you might have left something for me to look at,” you say. It’s quiet for a second. Tomura waits, fixated on the slightest flutter of your eyelids, the way your chest rises and falls. You look up and make eye contact. “But I think you did.”

It’s a good thing Tomura put the hand on. His face turns red so fast that he’s surprised he doesn’t combust. “I’m not leaving until I know the package got delivered,” you say. Tomura nods and gives himself a headache. “And while we’re waiting, I could always take your picture.”

“I brought your camera,” Tomura says. You brought it up first, so he doesn’t feel weird about saying it. He lifts it out of his backpack and hands it over to you, watching as you deftly adjust the settings. “Is the light okay?”

“I’ve worked with worse,” you say. “Don’t worry. I’ll make you look good.”

You said the same thing last time. It was dumb last time, too. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

“You have seen it,” you say. “Last time, I – um, I’m pretty sure you liked the pictures I took.”

Tomura liked them. He’s also pretty sure that’s not what you’re referencing. “I’m not going to do that just because you’re taking my picture.”

“Okay.” You take a test shot, then another, and if Tomura hadn’t gotten beat to shit last night, he’d already be ordering himself to calm down. “Do you care if I pose you more this time?”

Posing him was where you got him into trouble last time, but again – beat to shit. “No. It’s fine.”

You want him to sit down in a specific spot, in a spot that’s catching faint afternoon sunlight. Tomura sits cross-legged at first, and you take a few pictures like that, but then you tell him to get comfortable. “Just move when you feel like moving. I’ll take care of everything else.”

At first Tomura does what you said, shifting this way and that, but when he sees how tightly you focus in on everything he’s doing, he can’t resist experimenting a little bit. He draws his knees up and sits forward, ignoring the protest from the cut on his ribs. The pictures you take aren’t of the places he’s expecting. He’s expecting you to take a bunch of shots of his arms wrapped around his knees, but you’re ignoring them. You’re taking a lot of pictures of his face.

Tomura’s not great with eye contact. Eye contact through a camera lens isn’t much better. “Should I make different faces or something?”

“Most of these aren’t of your whole face. Here.” You show Tomura the pictures you’ve taken so far, and he sees photo after photo of his eye, visible through the fingers of the hand. His hair, which he hasn’t cut in forever but did try to brush, and the way it falls over his cheek and his shoulder. A couple shots have zoomed in on the back of his neck, the angle of his jaw to his neck to his shoulder. “What do you think?”

Tomura thinks it’s like his dreams. He’s thinking how weird it is that you see him like this, that you can take a photo of a part of his body that he scratches raw more often than not and make it look normal. “You have really nice features,” you say. Tomura looks away from you in a hurry. “But you’d be worth looking at no matter what.”

Tomura’s stomach twists. “I was wondering,” you continue. “Last time I wouldn’t let you, but this time – I think it might be nice to get some shots of your face.”

“Of my face? So you can tell the police what I look like?”

“This is your camera. You’re not going to let me take the film with me.”

“And I’m supposed to think that will stop you?” Tomura asks. His heart is beating so hard that he’s giving himself a headache. “You could draw me. I’ve seen your crime scene sketches.”

“If you’ve seen my crime scene sketches, then you know I couldn’t draw a person if my life depended on it.” Your voice is softer. Tomura can almost picture you smiling. “It’s okay if not. But if you wanted me to –”

Fuck it. Tomura pulls the hand off his face before he can lose his nerve and looks back at you. He sees your eyes widen in surprise, then worry. “Tomura,” you say, “what happened?”

“What?” Tomura’s expecting you to explain, not to reach out to the side of his face that the creep slammed against the wall. “Don’t. It’s fine.”

“You got it fighting that guy. For me.” You set the camera down. Your hand forms to the curve of Tomura’s cheek, then jerks away. “It’s warm. Hang on –”

You leave, but you’re back a second later, crumpling a single-use ice pack to activate it. Tomura’s expecting you to hand it to him, but you hold it to his cheek instead, and he can’t resist tilting his head against it. “Do you just keep this stuff around?”

“I brought it for the heart. I wasn’t sure what kind of packaging it was going to be in.”

“I kept it on ice,” Tomura says. He’s not an amateur. “What are you doing?”

You’re digging in your backpack again, coming up with a first-aid kit. “There was blood spatter at the scene this morning, leading away from the body. Where else did you get hurt?”

Tomura must have screwed up that crime scene even worse than he thought, and he doesn’t care at all. As long as he’s extra careful with his other crime scenes, it’ll be fine. The weirder part of this is that you’re helping him. You’re not just taking his picture. You want to help. Why?

Tomura decides it doesn’t matter. “He pulled the same knife I gutted him with,” he says, and your eyes widen slightly. “He got me in the ribs.”

“Is it still bleeding?” you ask. Tomura can feel it dripping down his torso. He nods, and although he should have seen what you say next coming from a mile away, it still catches him completely by surprise. “Take off your shirt.”

The cut on Tomura’s ribcage is jagged, deeper in some places than others, and it’s too wide to stay closed without help. The bandage he’s slapped over it is hanging on by a thread. “You should have gotten stitches,” you say nonsensically, trying to avoid the old scars you can see on his torso, or the fact that you can almost count his ribs. “How big was this knife?”

“Big.” The Symbol of Fear watches you, eyes wide and face flushed. He’s still holding the ice up to his cheek, and you see the offensive wounds on the backs of his hands. Shinsou assumed that the killer used a ligature, but based on those, you’re pretty sure Tomura strangled the victim by hand. The victim must have clawed them to pieces trying to get Tomura to let go. “He had a knife, and he waited an hour after his shift to make sure he saw you leave. I had to do it.”

Tomura thinks all his murders are justified. You know that. This is the first time you’ve found yourself fighting the urge to agree with him. “Like you had to kill the others?”

“Someone had to,” Tomura says. He grimaces as you pull the edges of the wound together with a steri-strip. “Did you figure out who the last one was yet?”

Shinsou and Aizawa tracked down everyone whose name was in the court order Tomura left in the victim’s hands. Only one of them went missing recently, and a couple of DNA samples from family members later, you had a positive ID. “She was a child welfare worker. Not your usual type. A real –”

“Bleeding heart,” Tomura fills in, and you groan. “Come on. That was funny.”

“No, it isn’t. What you did to her wasn’t funny at all.”

“She had it coming.” Tomura’s voice turns cold. “Go look at her cases. There’s not one time she didn’t place the kid back with their fucking family.”

You remember something in the Shimura file, something about concerning behavior in the Shimura children, behavior that hinted at something going wrong at home. “What I did to her was over fast, and it only happened once,” Tomura says shortly. “She had it a lot easier than the kids she threw away.”

“I’m not defending that,” you say. Tomura gives you a skeptical look. “I’m not defending her. Almost everyone you’ve killed has done something awful. But there are ways to punish them that aren’t –”

“Like what?” Tomura waits for you to answer, but he doesn’t wait long. “She hurt people who nobody else gives a shit about. Do you think anybody’s going to stand up and defend them? They don’t even want to look.”

You don’t know what to say. “I got tired of waiting for people to open their eyes. They’ll see when I make them see. When you make them see.”

This is why Tomura won’t kill you. He needs you and your photos, or he thinks he needs them, to spread the word, to take his vision and transmit it to the world. It doesn’t matter to your coworkers why Tomura does what he does, but it matters to you. Tomura wants to send a message to the world. He wants to teach the world a lesson. “If they saw,” you start, as you carefully apply another steri-strip. “If you knew they’d seen. Would you stop?”

“They’ll never see.”

“But if they did,” you say. “Would you stop?”

“I’ll stop when it does,” Tomura says. He closes his eyes.

So, never. Why would he? Tomura has power as the Symbol of Fear, so much power that he’s not scared of leaving DNA evidence, that he’s not scared of you seeing his face. If he really is Shimura Tenko, a kid no one cared about when it counted, why would he ever give up the chance to force everyone to care about him? To watch him, to hang on his every word and move, to devote themselves to understanding him at last? Tomura won’t stop. He’ll never stop. But maybe he’ll pause.

Only one way to test. “I thought you might have stopped,” you say. You apply one final steri-strip, then put a bandage down over it. Then you reach for the camera. “Six months without a crime scene is a lot.”

“I was lulling you all into a false sense of security.” Tomura startles when you snap the first picture. “I wanted to see what you’d do when you thought it was over.”

“I never thought it was over.” You take another picture. Golden hour’s in full swing, and the light is perfect as it scatters across Tomura’s body, gilds his eyelashes and his hair. “You’d been busy. Did you take a vacation?”

“No.” Tomura scoffs. His face is flushed, and it’s spreading, down his throat and over his scars until his collarbones are dusted pink. You can’t help taking pictures of that, either. “No. I wanted. I –”

He squirms slightly, even though you aren’t touching him – as if your gaze through the camera lens is something physical, something as tangible as your hands on his skin. It doesn’t stop when you lower the camera. It gets worse. You remember this from last time, and you tell yourself that’s why you’re reaching out to him. You’re trying to recreate the same conditions as before, the ones that led to the six-month pause in his murders, trying to give him what he’s looking for through a different mechanism. It’s not because you know what happens next. It’s not because you want to see it again.

Tomura shudders when you touch the uninjured side of his face, trace over his jaw. You pause with your fingers at his throat, feeling his pulse racing, and force yourself to remember that he choked someone to death less than twenty-four hours ago, that he’d think nothing of closing his hands around another person’s throat. Then you move on to his collarbones, more deeply flushed with pink. The light is beautiful. You’d take pictures if this wasn’t so much –

“More,” Tomura breathes. “Don’t stop.”

You run your fingers lightly along his sternum and remind yourself what it would have taken to carve out someone’s heart. A scalpel to cut through skin and fat and muscle. A sternal saw to crack open the chest, a rib spreader to pry it apart. His hands, the one scratching at his neck and the one clawing for something to hold onto, would have been covered in blood. Human hearts are smaller than people think. He could have held it in one hand.

Tomura’s chest rises and falls rapidly, but it’s not until your hand slips past his sternum to rest on his abdomen that a sound leaves his mouth. You reach for your camera, needing to capture the look on his face, but Tomura’s hand closes around yours, holding on painfully tight. His grip is like iron, even as his hand shakes, and you recoil at the same moment as your heart skips a beat. How far are you planning to go here, with him? He’s a murderer. He’s done such awful things. You can’t hide from them. You’ve seen them up close.

But you see this, too. You see vulnerability alongside viciousness, loneliness alongside rage. Someone who knows what it’s like to be forgotten, someone who would do anything to stop it from happening again, someone who doesn’t make mistakes – except when he’s making them for you. The thought sweeps through you in a hot, painful flood. You can’t tell anyone about what happens here. That means it doesn’t count. You know just as well as Tomura does – if no one sees, it’s like it didn’t happen at all.

You turn your hand in Tomura’s with an effort, one he resists until he realizes that you aren’t trying to make him let go. His eyes fly open when you lace your fingers with his, and for a moment you’re holding his gaze, seeing more than he wants you to see, seeing everything. Then his phone starts buzzing, and whatever tension lies between you dissolves into awkwardness. This isn’t why you’re here. You pull your hands away, and Tomura reaches for his phone. “It’s delivered,” he says. “Look.”

There’s a photo of the package, left on the steps of the police station – a cooler, with a barely-legible message written on it in black marker. Who’s heartless now? A question occurs to you. “Would you have given it back if I hadn’t played your game?”

“No.” Tomura sits up and pulls on his bloodstained shirt. “It was for you.”

“And this.” You touch the locket around your neck. “Do you want it back?”

“Why would I want it back?”

“It’s a family heirloom,” you say, and his shoulders stiffen. “Don’t do that. Did you think I wouldn’t look?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Tomura says shortly. “It won’t help you find me. I don’t care.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” you say. “I think you wanted what you’ve always wanted.”

Your phone starts going berserk, too. You don’t even have to look to know it’s from work, to know that you’re being called in because the heart’s been found, because there’s yet another development in the serial killer case of the millennium. Tomura’s on his feet now, looking away from you. “You don’t have a clue what I want.”

It’s not much distance between the two of you on the rooftop. You aren’t crossing any lines you haven’t crossed already when you step forward and wrap your arms around him from behind. You know how strong he is, but he’s so thin, his vertebrae too prominent when you’re pressed against his back. His breathing catches. “What are you doing?”

“You don’t have to kill someone to make me see you,” you say. His breathing hitches again, and you squeeze your eyes shut, forcing yourself to recite what he’s done, even as you speak up again and prove just how pointless you’ve rendered it. “I can’t look away.”

Your phone starts ringing, and you ignore it. Work will call back again. It’s more important that you make this lesson stick. Tomura doesn’t try to pull away from you, and you don’t let him go. You stand there together until the last scraps of the golden hour have faded away.

Tomura examines his body in the mirror. He tells himself he’s checking on the last remnants of his bruises, on the healing knife slash across his ribs, but really, he’s looking for what you see when you look at him. What made you take so many pictures, the kind of pictures Tomura can’t look at without feeling dizzy and hot. What made you touch him like that, hold him that way. Tomura can’t see it yet. But maybe he will, if he keeps looking. He has to find what it is that makes you want to look at him, that makes it so you can’t look away.

Giving the heart back to the cops threw them for a complete loop. Nobody in the department mentioned anything about you being the reason Tomura gave it back, and that’s fine with Tomura, but the press is having a field day trying to figure out why he’d remove someone’s heart just to give it back. Why he took this heart and not somebody else’s. What he wants them to see this time. What it says about him that he’d do something so –

Not good. Good isn’t the word. There’s not a word for what Tomura is, and the sooner everybody remembers that, the better. Tomura’s already got the beginnings of his next crime scene in his head, and all he has to do is decide whose illusion of safety he wants to shatter – Detective Aizawa’s illusion that he can protect his team, or his brat apprentice’s illusion that his mentor can’t be torn down to his level. He’s leaning toward the apprentice – he doesn’t like his attitude, or the way he’s talked to you, and when you see what Tomura’s done, you’ll –

You don’t have to kill someone to make me see you.

No. There’s nothing in Tomura’s reflection to draw you in. Whatever magic you work with your photos, there’s no evidence of it in what Tomura sees in the mirror. He knows the kinds of things you can do with your camera. You take hideous things and make them striking, you take horrible things and turn them beautiful. Turning Tomura into something worth looking for is probably nothing to you. So how come your voice is in his head like that? You don’t have to kill someone to make me see you. Is there any way that could be true? I can’t look away.

There’s a way to find out, and Tomura feels the plan tugging at his thoughts. He could set up another game for you, one without any body parts at the end of it, one that doesn’t have anything to do with his mission or his murders. Something for you to find, because you like finding things, and maybe you’ll like finding Tomura at the end of it. Maybe he could get you another movie ticket, to something he won’t hate this time, and he could sit next to you instead of two rows back. If you want to see him. If you weren’t lying.

Bodies don’t lie. Tomura’s well aware of every tell that reveals disgust or fear. He can spot every crack in a person’s resolve, dig his fingernails in and pry it open to get to the terror beneath, and that’s how he knows you aren’t scared of him at all. There are parts of what happened on the rooftop that he can’t think about without squirming and parts that yank on him like magnets, pulling him back to the memory. Your fingers interlaced with his, your gaze steady on his face, your arms wrapped around him and your body pressed against his back. No one’s ever held Tomura like that. He’s never been that close to someone he wasn’t actively murdering. Not since before.

And you were so warm, not the damp, panicked sweating of somebody whose adrenaline reserves are running dry. Just warm. Just close. Tomura wasn’t anywhere close to done when you pulled away, and he knew even before you left that he’d kill to feel like that again. Anybody would.

But Tomura doesn’t have to, according to you. He’d be stupid to believe it, when it’s the only way it’s ever worked, and he has crime scenes to plan. He’s going to kill your boss, or your coworker, and the crime scene’s going to be a masterpiece, a work of art in real life as well as through your camera lens. Maybe he’ll set up a game for you to go with it, body parts or no body parts. Either way, you’ll have to come looking for him again. It’s the only way to make sure.

Still, though – I can’t look away. Every time Tomura passes by the mirror, every time he finds himself looking at the photos you took of him, every time his drones follow you to somebody else’s crime scene and he sees his locket around your neck, he wonders if you might not be telling the truth. You don’t have to kill someone to make me see you. Tomura hears your voice in his head, remembers the brush of your fingers across his skin, and wonders what it would be like to find out.

#asks #shigaraki x reader #shigaraki x you #tomura shigaraki x reader #tomura shigaraki x you #shigaraki tomura x reader #shigaraki tomura x you #man door hand hook car door #x reader #reader insert

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hellishattempt · 1 year ago

Text

𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐢𝐭 - false positive

cr 101strk on twitter, src from pin

🢥 summary : celebrity!au jjk men and rumours swirling around your established relationship, wc 2.4k 🢥 series includes : choso, fushiguro toji, geto suguru, gojo satoru and nanami kento, part two of five 🢥 content : celebrity!au, female reader, mostly angst, some fluff, married, body dysphoria, pregnancy, photoshopping / body editing, miscarriage, sickness, blood, fake newspaper used, paps being an ass, lying, use of pet names, suggestive content if you squint so hard your eyes are almost closed, i hate winter so this is set in like summer, jasper simping for nanami the entire time, the ending is what it is, not proofread we die like robins /ref

. . . BEING MARRIED TO AN AUTHOR has its perks, especially when you're a reader yourself. you always got to read the first drafts, and the second, and the final drafts before anyone else, including your husband's editors. nanami claimed that if it wasn't good enough for his wife, then it wasn't good enough to be published. you always thought that was a bit extreme, but you loved his writings either way. however, sometimes it was hard to find the time to read the latest chapter he sent you, because your job drained you. you were an influencer, and had currently signed a promotional deal with koh gen do, a popular japanese makeup brand. recently, you were barely home, busy with photoshoots and videos for koh gen do, on top of the content you had to make yourself.

neither of you really liked the limelight, nanami especially. you were young and naive when you joined social media, rising quickly to popularity. it was something you enjoyed, and you still do enjoy it, but it felt more like a tiring obligation than an aspiring career. you blame the paparazzi, nanami blames societal expectations, although he's not the paparazzi's biggest fan either. throughout your dating, and going on six year marriage, you and nanami have had your fair share of scandals. this one had to take the cake, however.

you were out, doing one of the last rounds of photoshoots for your endorsement deal. nanami was home, trying to churn out the latest chapter on his to-do list. he wasn't very successful. the mostly blank document had two words on it: CHAPTER THIRTY in the fancy font you had selected to be chapter headers. any attempt to write after that failed. every paragraph had been written, rewritten and deleted. so the buzz of his phone was a welcomed distraction.

it was an article post from red sun times, a relatively newer newspaper company in japan. nanami preferred them because they were quieter, at least compared to japan newsline or tokyoto sistership news. but the article title cause a deep frown to wrinkle nanami's sculpted face.

. . . "IS NANAMI KENTO'S WIFE PREGNANT?" was in big bold print on your phone screen. you didn't see it right away, but your makeup artist did. she got your hairstylist's attention, who read it just before your phone shut off. they both began to pepper you with compliments.

"congratulations, nanami okaa-san!" aki, your makeup artist beamed. your eyes widened at the term. 'okaa-san' literally translated to 'mother' of which, you were not. she should've used 'oka-san', which meant wife literally, and ma'am respectfully. "you look so skinny, i couldn't even tell!"

"yes, congratulations! how did nanami-san respond?" your hairstylist added, smile wide on his face. "better yet, how did your families react? oh, i bet they were overjoyed."

you sat there confused, racking your brain over what the two were referring to. "wh-what? what are you talking about?"

they stared at you with blank faces, their excitement slowly fading into a confused expression that matched yours.

"y-your pregnancy," aki stuttered out, as though it was obvious.

"pregnancy? i'm... i'm not pregnant," you stated, getting out of your chair. "who told you i was pregnant?"

"we just saw the news flash on your phone," your hairstylist defended, gesturing to your phone. "there was an article from red sun times and the title read: is nanami kento's wife pregnant?"

"i'm not pregnant," you repeated, growing in frustration. the fucking nerve. "do i look pregnant?" you snapped, causing the pair to furiously shake their heads and protest the article. you scoffed, grabbing your phone and your bag, storming out of the dressing room. the directory of photography called after you as you exited the studio, but you paid no attention to him.

safe inside your car, you opened the article. you also had a slew of texts and missed calls from your husband, but you didn't have the patience for him right now. the article was crudely written, at best. red sun times had been losing subscribers and readers lately, and this seemed like a last ditch effort to get their subscriptions up again. it didn't make sense to you, however. neither you nor nanami were a-lister names in the celebrity world. nanami didn't even consider himself a celebrity. sure, you both had a hefty fan base, but it was nothing compared to some of the other celebrities of japan, like the model gojo satoru or the mma fighter fushiguro toji.

it didn't matter, anyways. it wasn't the words of the article that hurt. it was the pictures. all them were of you with nanami on your latest outing. your anniversary was coming up, and nanami always got really sweet around that time, taking you out on dates on the days leading up to your anniversary. your anniversary was in three days, and a couple of days ago, nanami had taken you to a strawberry farm where you each filled a bucket's worth of strawberries, that were then all eaten on the picnic following the farm. the picnic spot was the riverside where he had proposed about seven years ago. you had an amazing time, and fell a little bit more in love with your caring husband. his sensible attention to detail, his doting words, his thoughtful actions, all of it made the date, and your relationship, perfect. now this article and its malicious pictures tainted that saccharine memory.

. . . THE IMAGES HAD CLEARLY BEEN EDITED. that's what your logical brain was trying to scream at you, but your emotions weren't listening. a small bump had been added to your stomach in each photo, your hips had been wider, and in a couple, your breasts had even been adjusted, as though they were full with milk. you felt sick. it was so hard to tell the difference between what was edited and what wasn't. did you really look like that? did red sun times even have to adjust these photos? "you look so skinny, i couldn't even tell!" the words of your makeup artist bounced around your pounding head. if you were so skinny, why did she still assume you were pregnant?

you had tried so hard that day to look pretty for your husband, wearing his favorite yellow sundress of yours, with the sweetheart neckline and puffy sleeves. nanami always said he preferred your natural look, but you had still glossed your lips, tinted your cheeks a faint pink and dusted your nose with highlighter. you had tied your hair up with a soft yellow ribbon, curling the loose strands. you had checked your reflection at least fifteen times before deeming yourself fit for the day. you had looked good in the mirror, so why didn't you look like that in these photos?

tears threatened at your eyes, but you swallowed them with the lump in your throat. you were almost home now, and you were sure that nanami had seen the article. he loved the red sun times because they didn't do stupid stuff like this. guess they just lost another reader.

"darling?" nanami's voice rang out as you entered your home. he walked into your vision, looking worried. you hadn't answered your phone at all, hadn't even read any of his texts. "oh, koibito..." his voice softened as you raised your head to meet his gaze.

you look so despondent with your watery eyes, and sullen posture. you hadn't even removed your shoes before he had scooped you into his arms and you were sobbing into his shoulder. you don't know how long you stood there in the foyer of your home, everything silent except for your choked breathing. there was a dark blemish on his wool sweater now, but nanami waved it off when you tried to apologize.

he guided you to the living room, helping you sit on the grey sofa that you had bought together six years ago. nanami worked wordlessly as he removed your shoes and coat; he took your phone and bag, placing them on the stand by the front door. a high pitched whistle echoed from the kitchen, and moments later he returned with a cup of steaming sencha, your favorite kind of tea. you felt so pathetic, sitting there sniffling while your husband tended to you.

when he returned for the final time, nanami had changed into a black t-shirt, and sat on the leather ottoman opposite from you. his elbows rested on his knees as nanami watched you sip the tea he had made you. he didn't speak, but only because he couldn't find the right words.

nanami prided himself on his syntax and vocabulary. he was the type of person who always said the right thing at the right time, it's why being an author was the only career option he cared for. but here, you sat in a stifled silence. he knew he should say something, but what? what were you were supposed to say in a situation like this? you were clearly distressed, and it was nanami's role as your husband to offer you words of encouragement, but his tongue was dry.

if nanami was honest, he almost wanted there to be some truth to the article. you hadn't exactly been trying for kids, but you hadn't not been trying. kids was something you both knew you wanted, but you hadn't discussed it in further detail. reading further into the article and viewing the photos made it clear that it wasn't true, at all. nanami knew almost immediately that when you saw this, you were going to breakdown, and he would be there to pick you up. so he ordered your favorite ramen, made your favorite tea and held you in his arms until you had calmed down.

nanami knew that you would believe the edits, that you would see yourself like that. despite how much he praised your body, you hated it, and he hated that. anytime you made some side comment about your stomach or thighs, it almost started a fight. he loathed the way you saw yourself, and nothing he argued stuck with you.

in the last few months, however, nanami was starting to see some progress. you stared less in the mirror with your meticulous eyes, pinching flaps of your skin between your fingers. you began to buy less healthier foods, and stopped mentioning the stupid diet you had placed yourself on. you wore clothes that you specifically avoided unless you had nothing else to wear, because of the way they displayed your figure. he knew that this article had erased all of that progress.

"i'm sorry, nani" you croaked, curling your knees into your chest.

"shh, no, koibito," nanami disregarded your apology. "you don't ever have to apologize about your emotions, especially not to me." he moved from the ottoman to take the spot next to you, pulling your small frame into his. one hand held yours while the other stroked your hair amorously. "the article was cruel, and any person with a heart would be reacting the same as you. don't worry, i've already called their editor and he said he doesn't know why the piece was published when it wasn't supposed to. it's being removed as we speak."

your heart welled at his words. he was so patient and understanding. moments like these made you love nanami more. and it gave you the confidence to tell him the truth.

"kento," you began, pulling away from him slowly. you used his given name over your nickname, nani, for him. you only used it during fights or confessions. he immediately perked up. "i..." you sighed. words were always nanami's thing, not yours. "i'm not upset about the photos."

"oh?"

"okay, well, i am, but for a different reason than you think."

"and what reason is that, koibito?" his tone was emotionless, as if he hadn't decided how to respond yet.

"i know you think it's because i'm always stressing about my body and the way it looks, and you're worried because i haven't been fretting over how i look as much, right? well, that's because i was pregnant, and i decided i couldn't care about that when i had bigger concerns, like the tiny life in my stomach." it became harder to speak, your sentences broken by tears and sobs.

"...was?" nanami's voice cracked, and his misty eyes matched yours.

you nodded, "was. i... i had a miscarriage."

"w-when?"

"about a week ago. i was about a month and a half along."

"you mean that time you canceled girl's night because you were sick? you told me that it was just your period, and you sent me out to get you stuff from the store." nanami's brows furrowed.

"yeah, that's.. that's right." you took a breath to steady yourself. "there was just blood everywhere, and i was a wreck and i didn't have the courage to tell you. i know how badly you want kids of our own, and i just didn't want to hurt you."

"hurt me? baby, you were the one hurting, and i just played it off like it was normal. i feel terrible."

"you couldn't have known," you reassured him. "but that article, and those photos, it just tore me apart all over again. that's how i should look, that's how i want to look, but i lost that part of me, that part of us."

nanami didn't respond at first, just reached back out for you. you both sat there, quiet sniffles and crying the only sound in your home. he continued to comfort you, even though you felt like you should be offering him comfort. after all, nanami is learning that you were pregnant and now no longer pregnant all at once.

"koibito," he murmured after a while. "i want you to know that i love you no matter what. i don't care how you look or how you don't look. you're my wife, and i didn't marry you because of your body and figure. i married you because i fell in love with your laugh, your smile, your unpredictable personality, and all the other beautiful things about you. i'm always going to support you and love you. and if you want to be pregnant, then i'm happy to oblige."

you laughed despite your sadness, swatting at him playfully, which elicited a "what? i'm serious!" from nanami.

"shut up," you muttered, still chuckling. he smiled, happy to see that you were laughing along with him. nanami pressed a kiss to your temple, humming an "i love you" against your skin.

you snuggled deeper into him, craning your neck to meet his eyes. "i wanna be a mom, nani."

he wrapped both arms around you, meeting your gaze. "then a mom you shall be, my koibito."

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itsthestutterforme · 1 year ago

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Wanna Bet? 1/2 (Johnny Storm x model!reader)

Summary: You were a midsized model in New York City and Johnny has taken a liking to you. But you thought it was a sick fetish he had and Johnny was more than happy to prove him otherwise.

Notes: GIF is not mine, all mistakes are my own, mature themes (grinding, allusions to sex), MINORS DNI, reader is black

—

You half listened to your girls gossiping about who they took home the other night as the group of you walked out of the photographer’s studio.

You look to where Johnny is normally parked as he waited for your photoshoot was over.

Your gaze fell to Johnny leaning against his crimson red Corvette, pushing his shades up the bridge of his nose. His black leather jacket hugged his frame nicely.

He smiled at you but you could tell something was wrong.

You left the girls to talk among themselves, tightening your grip on your bag when you neared Johnny.

“What happened to going out to lunch, Y/N?” One of them calls after you. “Raincheck,” you said over your shoulder. “That’s what she said last time,” she said under her breath.

“He’s going to break her heart,” her sister said in disbelief. “I know. But she’s just going to have to find out for herself,”

Your eye brows knit together when you noticed blue and purple streaks peeking out from behind his shades.

“Hey sweetheart,” he greets and you hum in response, crossing your arms. You reached for his shades and he let you take them off, wincing when the side grazes against the sensitive skin.

“What the hell happened to your face, Johnny?”

“Awe, you worried about me? I knew you cared.” He teases, but you weren’t laughing. His left eyelid was starting to bruise but it wasn’t to the point of swelling. Not yet anyway.

“Tell me what happened,” you prod. He sighs, gently taking the glasses from your hands and clipped them on his shirt.

There were some guys talking about you at the bar. And I didn’t like what they had to say, alright?”

“Well, what did they say?” He kicks off the curb and opened the passenger’s side door. “Come one. Let me take you home.” “I can’t. My driver is waiting for me.”

“I told the driver to take the day off. He happily agreed.” He says in amusement. “Johnny,” you scold.

He cocks his head to the open door and you signed in defeat, stepping around his large frame to slide into his car.

“Are you going to tell me what they said?” You asked when he piles into driver seat and cuts a guy off when he merges into the highway from the parking lane.

“It doesn’t matter what they said,” “It matters if you fought them over it,”

“They said commented about my weight, didn’t they? Do people not get that modeling agencies purposely hired midsized women and plus sized women. It’s not like we were shooed in or something. We have to earn that shit,” you add, looking out of the window.

“It was something like that, yeah.” Pulling your eyes from the window, you looked at his bruising cheek.

He held your gaze for a moment before returning his attention back to the road. He clenches his jawline as he concentrates on crossing over to the left lane to make a turn.

You stare at his plump lips for a moment. There were countless times you’d envision what kissing him would feel like.

Had he not been Johnny Storm, things would have been entirely different.

“And why would you do that? You realize that if word gets out that you defended me, people will start to-“ “I stopped care what people think a long time ago, Y/N.”

“So you don’t care if the media spins that we’re a couple?” “The media can think what they think,” he says with a shrug.

“Are you okay?” “Emotionally? I’ve had better days.” “You’re insufferable, Johnny.” You said with an eye roll and he chuckles.

“Well if you didn’t make pissing you off so entertaining. I’d stop doing it.”

“No you wouldn’t,” “You’re right. I wouldn’t.” You shook your head but couldn’t help the smile on your face.

He parks in front of your apartment, turning to find you already staring at him. Your eyes concentrate on his bruised kissed cheek.

“I know that look and don’t do that to yourself.” He states.

“I know I can be a bitch. But I never meant for you to get hurt, Johnny.” “I know you didn’t, sweetheart.”

His hand twitched in his lap as he practiced restraint from reaching to touch your face.

“You wanna come inside for a bit?” You offered, his lips parted in surprise. “You sure? You know, I respect your decision not to let me inside.” He negotiates.

“Johnny, we’re adults. I’m sure we can go inside my apartment and have a talk without it leading to sex.”

His cock twitched in his pants at you saying the word sex. God, he was much far gone than he cares to admit.

“You’re right.” He agrees. You opened the door and stepped out on the sidewalk.

Closing the car door, you took your keys out of your bag. Johnny waits behind you close enough to smell your perfume.

Tapping your keycard against the keypad, the two of you walked into the house you were renting.

“Wow,” Johnny says to himself, mesmerized by the high ceilings and crystal chandeliers. He had hoped your massive couch was as comfortable as it looked.

You clicked on the lights to the dining room and the kitchen on the way to your bedroom.

“Let’s order something. Maybe Chinese?” You suggest, setting your bag on the bed.

Johnny whistles before adding, “So this is what modeling will get you, huh?” “I’m glad you like it,” you respond, taking off your earrings and taking off your earrings.

He follows your voice to your bedroom, he nearly groans at the sight of the King bed in the center of the room.

“And they say you can’t make an honest living off of modeling,” he says, leaning against the doorframe.

“Who says that?” You quirked a brow in anticipation. “Bunch of idiots, that’s who.” He says, making the two of you laugh.

He smiles at you when you meet his gaze. You stood a few inches from him. “So, Chinese?” “Chinese works for me.”

“Great let me get my..” you turn to reach for your phone but Johnny catches your hand.

“I know this is wrong, but why does it feel so-” he starts until you interrupt him. “Don’t do that. Don’t make it about feelings or attachment. You just want to fuck me.”

“I don’t just want to fuck you,” he argues. “Oh really? Should I ask the laundry list of women that you’ve slept with in my model agency alone?” You retort, tearing your hand away from him.

“I’m not an idiot, Johnny. I know what this is about.” “If I didn’t care about you, do you think I would speak up for you?”

“I didn’t ask you to do that,” “That’s the point. I wanted to do that.” He closes the gap between you.

“I refuse to be just another notch on your belt. There’s countless women who want you, Johnny.” “I don’t want them. I want you.”

“Like hell you do. I know your track record. You like petite women. Women you can easily pick up and do cute little beach scenes with. I am anything but, and I’m okay with that.”

“So that’s what this is about. You think I’m not attracted to you because you’re curvy?” “No, I know you’re not attracted to me because I’m midsized,”

He stares at you with a blank expression and you narrowed your eyes at him to challenge what you had said.

He takes off his jacket and tossed it on the chair at your desk.

You said his name when he takes a step towards you. Before you could do anything else, he lifts you into his arms without so much of a grunt.

He wraps your legs around his abdomen and looked up at you with an amused smile. You had to hold back a groan threatening to leave your lips when your body pressed against his rock hard chest.

“Is this what you were worried about? Here, let me do you one better.” He slides his hands under your thighs and lifts you higher up his abdomen.

“Johnny,” you said fearfully, squeezing his shoulders. “Relax, sweetheart. I got you.” He said, breathlessly.

With that, he lifts your legs over his shoulders and buries his face against your cunt. You gasped when the tip of his nose nudged your clit.

Warmth spread through your body, your cunt throbbing with arousal. The vibrations of his groans against your core caused a breathlessly moan to leave your lips.

He casually walks towards your bed until his legs touched the base of the bed. Bending at the waist, he gingerly removed his face from you and set you down on your bed.

His tongue darts across his lips as he met your gaze.

You stared at one another in silence, his pink lips parted to let out a few a deep breaths.

“Sorry if I overstepped,” he tells you, grabbing his jacket and leaving the room.

As if your legs had a mind of their own, you rushed after him. “Johnny wait,” to your surprise, he was waiting in the hallway just before he reached the stairs.

You nearly run into his back, wrapping your arms around his body so he didn’t fall down the stairs.

He turns around in your arms and you quickly let go to take a few steps back.

He closes the gap between you and reached for your face but you press your hands to his chest to stop him.

“I have some conditions.” Your voice grew shaky the longer you held his seducing gaze. He needed you and you could feel it.

“I’m fine with this being a one time thing.” You start. “It won’t be a one time thing,” he says, walking you back into the bedroom.

“And I’m also fine with having no strings attached,”

Once the back of your knees hits the bed, you laid down with your arms holding you up. He tosses the jacket on the floor and kicked off his shoes.

You almost felt ashamed from how fast you spread your legs when he climbed over you.

Almost.

Your back arched when his painfully hard cock presses against your clit, putting more and more pressure every second.

He watches your squirm underneath him, begging for more friction.

“Oh there’ll definitely be strings attached,” he mutters, taking your bottom lip between his teeth.

#black!reader #midsized!reader #johnny storm x reader #johnny storm x black!reader #chris evans

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merbear25 · 5 months ago

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eek! your halloween event is still open so i was wondering if you can do an abandoned hospital setting with vash my loml in a zombie au?? like i just think zombie apocalypses just... fits vash's vibes??? like idk imagine having each other's backs... in a chaotic world. we would talk about our dreams to find a place to settle and become self sufficient... just that us against the world trope... so many thoughts aaa.. thank you in adv!!

- anon 🐸🌻

p.s. i survived internship and its my bday!! i went out with my friend for a ghibli themed and got some chiikawa plushies (more friends for vash,,) over my birthday weekend hehe. Got sick once i reached home though but i elly had tons of fun!! i hope you've been alright!! im so excited for spooky season too since i may do a ghost photoshoot with a friend later this month. manifesting good vibes your way~

Oh my goodness, thank you so much for requesting something for the event, especially with our lovely boy! And happy birthday!! I'm so glad to hear that things are going well for you. 🥺 Hope you like what I've written. 💜🧡

Even with the world being turned upside down, your relationship with Vash helped keep you grounded. In a reality that was voident of love and peace, he remained their unwavering advocate. His attitude was infectious, feeling as though it alone could be the cure this world needed. It was something worth keeping close, even when you feared it was all for not.

CW: SFW, gn!reader, fluff, romantic, some angst, established relationship, mentions of zombies, death, and survival situations

Us against the world (Vash)

The constellations were one of the only parts of life that remained consistent. Simplistic beauty held in their twinkling lights contrasted the horrors they shined down on. Through the change of the seasons, the possibilities of not only coming across the uninfected but keeping them alive became less and less likely, and yet you and Vash continued to overcome the odds. A dear friend, your other half, your one and only: there was no one better suited to have given your heart to.

A nightly activity of stargazing to just forget about the world you were living in became a form of comfort. Knowing there was still so much beauty out there gave you something other than yourselves to live for.

“Do you think we’ll ever be able to fully enjoy life again?” The somber tone, albeit appropriate, still made Vash frown because he didn’t know the answer.

“I hope so… but I know that there are still things to enjoy, even when everything feels like it’s been taken away.” That gentle flow to his words never ceased to soothe your fears. He took your hand in his, giving you a reassuring squeeze.

Keeping your gaze up towards the stars, the chirps of crickets were your only audience that night, letting that sense of peace wash over you. This rooftop had become one of many to be placed over your heads. Never could there be a place to truly call your own; it would be too risky. With the list of each place left behind getting longer, you still held onto the idea that one day you’d finally be able to find one to call your own.

“I’ve been thinking more about our place,” you whispered. “I was thinking that a place up north by the seaside would be nice.”

“The view would be breathtaking.”

“The air would smell so nice.”

“And the sounds of waves…” He trailed off in a dreamy tone. Closing his eyes, he imagined that place with you. The sea salt air on his skin and the sounds of seagulls overhead. “We’ll get there one day.”

Every part of your reality gave you reason not to hold out hope, but whenever you talked about that special place together, determination to continue working against the odds pushed you further. A shared goal to achieve the seemingly impossible—happiness.

The summer nights filled with the applause of rustling leaves had shifted into an echo of creaking bare autumn branches. Chilly weather kept your routine visits to the roughtop minimal. The rest of the world still played by its own rules which meant surviving in a zombie apocalypse was more than just fighting off the undead. The slightest cut could result in deadly consequences if left untreated, but even still there were some injuries that were unavoidable.

Picking the apples from a nearby tree wasn’t any cause for concern. You and Vash had chosen a farmhouse outside of the city to spend the winter. Although the distance came with a bit more security, you couldn’t risk going out alone—your essential lifeline being tethered to your side.

A scream carried over the trees as you fell from the ladder. Acting on the flip of a dime, he dove to try to catch you, but your cries gave away that he wasn’t fast enough. A broken arm—it could have been worse but wasn’t anything to brush off. He rushed you inside the house, placed you on the couch, and went to search for medical supplies.

The medicine cabinet didn’t have any disinfectant, neither did the drawers. Bandages had run out, leaving him no choice but to dress your wound with a clean cloth. How could I have been so reckless? I should have paid more attention to what we had, what we needed… He cursed at himself silently, not wanting to cause you any further stress.

“I need to make a trip in town.” He stood up after he tended to you. “We don’t have the proper supplies, and if anything were to happen because of that, I–”

“I’ll be fine!” You cut him off. “We can make do with what we have.”

His eyes fell on you, that hopeful look that he cherished so much made his chest tighten at the thought of losing you. “It’s not safe. It could get infected… We’ve even run out of painkillers.”

“I can handle it,” you attempted to lighten the mood.

The solemn smile he gave you made your heart sink. “Even if you can, these are things we can’t go without.” He leaned down to place a kiss on your forehead. “It’s still early. Maybe I’ll be back just after nightfall.”

Leaning into his touch, he stroked your cheek with his thumb, enjoying the warmth of your soft skin beneath him. “Be sure to barricade yourself, while I’m gone.”

You nodded. Though you had complete faith in him and his abilities to overcome any obstacle thrown his way, that “what if” still dangled above you.

“Come home, okay?”

“I promise.”

The hours passed long since he rode off on the horse. With the sun still hanging in the sky, there was still a chance he’d return around the time he anticipated, but anything could happen and that was what terrified you.

Streets appearing to be barren, the sounds of horse hooves clicking through them, and the threat of a hoard behind every corner: it’d been a long time since he felt this on edge. There was more at stake this time. Failing to return with supplies wouldn’t just mean leaving your break unattended to but leaving you behind entirely. That wasn’t an option.

Slowly, he managed to sneak past and evade some of them. Passing by the pharmacy that had already been cleared out gave him this sense of doubt that this place would be fitting to wait out winter. As he drew nearer to the hospital, there were more of them spaced out in the front. They hadn’t caught sight of him yet, which gave him a slim time frame to tie up his key to escaping. Petting the horse fondly, he promised it that he wouldn’t be long.

Some spotted him as he entered the premises, while others remained oblivious. Sprinting around the back entrance luckily led to an opening for him. With so many already on his heels, he needed some good fortune now more than anything.

Quick. I can do that. Now wasn’t the time to let his optimistic side falter. This wasn’t the first time he was caught in a sticky situation, and it sure wouldn’t be the last. Rushing down the halls, his feet carried him like a phantom—soft soles of his shoes deafened his steps. Avoiding as many as he could was his best chance at survival. It would be too easy to get swarmed; he’d seen the overwhelming size of their numbers take too many lives.

Skeeting around the corner, he came face to face with a few of them stumbling down the hall, creating a barrier between him and the sought after supplies. Quick motions that were followed by the cracking of skulls and squelches of brains. Although he knew these creatures were absent of humanity and life itself, it never got easier. The blood splattering on the walls and his face were things he hoped would eventually become a distant memory. Until then, he needed to get back to you, needed to protect you, but most of all he wanted to shield you from all of this.

Wishful thinking that left his heart aching at the end, he couldn’t resist his fantasies. Pocketing as much as he could, escaping posed another issue entirely. Those from the back were shuffling their way in, and the front entrance was a risk all on its own. There were too many filing in from where he came, leaving him no other option.

Don’t focus on killing all of them, just get them out of the way. He panted from their numbers closing in. Covering his head he shoved his way past two of them coming up the steps, the velocity of his sprint sent them flying on their open wounded backs.

He couldn’t look back because he wasn’t going to like what he would see. Eyes kept forward, the horse was his main focus. Tying it up far enough to have kept the zombies from catching sight of it was biting him in the ass. Their slow staggers meant nothing if they never got tired. Adrenaline pumping through his veins, the horse needed no direction to take off down the lawn.

Beads of sweat ran down the side of his face and were pressed into his skin from the chilly wind tearing past. Galloping through the streets, he took the long way back home in hopes of steering them clear of the house.

With night falling on the house, you sat at the window on the second floor. Your eyes combed through the trees, so dead set on any sign of him, or worse of unexpected visitors. The clock ticked into the late night, making you dread the worst. Hot tears ran down your cheeks, but you refused to take your attention off of the line of trees at the edge of the property.

Then, there emerged a figure on top of a four legged creature. Your heart felt as if it was going to leap out of your chest. You rushed down to the front porch and waited. The urge to run up and tell him how worried you were had to be suppressed. All the precautions you took in this world extended to every aspect.

As he approached you, he held out the supplies while wearing that boyish smile. “Sorry, I had to take the long way.” Without another thought, you threw yourself into his arms, ignoring any pain that came with it. “Be careful of your arm!”

“I don’t care!” You cried. “Right now holding you is all that I care about.”

His arms wrapped around you tightly, never wanting to let go of you. “I had to come back. We still have to find that place by the sea, remember?”

Your cries were muffled against his chest, but the sadness that accompanied the fear of loss could never overshadow the relief of a returned love.

#halloween event #x reader #trigun #trigun maximum #trigun x reader #trigun x you #vash the stampede #trigun vash #vash trigun #vash the humanoid typhoon #vash x you #vash x reader #trimax #trigun au

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hikarry · 4 months ago

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What do you mean Spencer missed Hallowen? Sacrilege!

Lil guy over here was actually wearing his best Crowley skin at a party until 3am with his dear brother - whom dressed as a demon himself, which I did not miss the joke on, mind you - some old and new friends and an angel of my own

Oh yeah, I managed to do it. Not exactly the angel I had planned to go with, but an angel nonetheless and, I'm happy to announce, we were not the only angelic&demonic lil pair at the party, or the only bloody Crowley and Aziraphale!

Now, I won't share any pictures my Aziraphale and I took together because the only 2 I have have a bit of a problem: the first one was taken by the worst photographer on the planet (my Aziraphale. She might be a dear, but Jesus Christ-), the second one is not for public eye, but we do have planned on meeting again and probably doing a little Christmas inspired photoshoot, so hopefully the actual photographic proof there works out better

Mind you, I'm a stubborn idiot. We walked to the club and yours truly might or might not almost have broken his nose, being literally saved at least twice by the angel that partnered up with me for the night, pulling me away from stray street lamps, because I refused to take off my shades for "My eyes are not cannot compliant because my contact lenses were delayed in transit and didnt arrive yet" reasons, so i could barely see a meter in front of my own nose.

Long Halloween party story short:

- My Aziraphale got hit on by one of my friends because apparently I inspire no fear on these God forsaken people

- I quickly figured out Crowley does not wear that ridiculous lil tie for style, but for "Being Dragged Around By The Angel Like a Bloody Dog" reasons

- I did end up finding 4 other Crowleys (a gorgeous one escaping the cliché the 4 other copies fell into and actually choosing Eden Crowley and, my man, all the kudos to her. Not only were her wings absolutely gorgeous, but they MOVED) and we absolutely ganged up together for most of the night

- I learned that one should never try and recreate the Apology Dance while wearing slippery shoes on a floor sticky with alcohol, at risk of breaking a bloody leg (not me. Did give me a good laugh, tho)

- A really cool guy with a Tenth Doctor costume joined the Crowley gang at some point and kept paying for free beers for the rest of us which <3 I will never forget you, random fellow David Tennant fan whose name I don't recall

- Most songs were, as predicted, spooky themed, Brazilian funk or portuguese romantic/folk, which can be fun, don't mind me, but they did play Under Pressure almost at the end of the night and the 3 remaining Crowleys - yours truly included - may or may not have completely butchered the song, trying to "sing" (I would call it yell, if we are being realistic) as loudly as we could and jumping through the whole "Can we give ourselves one more chance?" segment of the song as my Aziraphale and the girlfriend of one of the other Crowleys (wearing that really gorgeous Wednesday Addams black dress she wears for a party in the TVshow, ya know the one) very heavily pretended they didn't know us, but hey: brotherhood amongst demons and what not. If Queen starts playing and one Crowley starts yelling and jumping, the other Crowleys shall yell and jump. It's the law

- Dunnot! I repeat: DUNNOT! Try to pin a taller Aziraphale against a wall when you are a Tiny Crowley because you will end up embarrassing yourself

All this to say: Good Omens fans are terrifying. We are literally everywhere, and we are all equally bloody sick. Yet, my fellow crazies keep being some of the coolest people I've ever met in my life. I swear, this fandom is the gift that keeps on giving, and I lowkey own my wildest night in 23 years to this silly fandom

Alas, pics? I got some silly selfies i took while getting ready and sent to some of my fellow degenerates

And, as proof of the lighting at the party being absolutely shit:

You cannot imagine how much I enhance the brightness on that damn photo and it was the only one I bothered taking for obvious reasons (yes, at that point my blazer and tie were being carried around by my Aziraphale because they were annoying the fuck out of me and I'm an arsehole that doesn't like to carry shit on his hands and my angel was a sweetheart)

Alas, I said I would do it and I did it

Happy belated Halloween, sweethearts

#halloween #cosplay #good omens #gay #crowley #crowley and aziraphale #gomens #go #anthony j crowley #spencer actually goes out and lives a little #demon #aziraphale #apology dance #tenth doctor #david tennant #queen band #wednesday addams

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toujokaname · 4 months ago

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Mischief / Episode 7

Characters: Kohaku, HiMERU, Niki

"At what point did we lose this kind of 'earnestness'?"

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[ Read on my site for a better viewing experience using Ois~su ♪ ]

Season: Spring

Location: Department Store's Furniture Area

Kohaku: "I'm tellin' ya, we don't need such a gargantuan fridge."

HiMERU: "Are you unfamiliar with the aphorism, 'better too big than too small'?"

Kohaku: "That may be true, but it ain't like we're gonna be livin' together forever; a small fridge just big enough to chill drinks should do the trick—"

Location: Café Cinnamon

Kohaku: Snore... Snooore...♪

HiMERU: Oukawa fell asleep, possibly due to the program being so uninteresting.

Niki: His sleeping face's sooo cute~♪

HiMERU: Agreed. Moreover, since JoyLife requires absolutely no effort, Oukawa seems to have an abundance of energy to spare.

So, during his free time, he has apparently taken on various individual jobs.

And these are more proper, "idol-like" activities—dramas, magazine photoshoots, handshake events, autograph signings, and even some promotional appearances...

Niki: Kohaku-chan may be tiny, but he's full of energy, huh?

HiMERU: He likely only has the stamina suitable for his age and build. Yet, he pushes himself beyond his limits, which is why he ends up dozing off like this.

Niki: He's like a kid who plays 'til his energy levels drop to zero!

HiMERU: Hehe, indeed. It's rather enviable, and stunningly bright.

At what point did we lose this kind of "earnestness"?

Niki: I'm still the same way, though! Go, go, go, until I've got nothin' left in the tank! I'm always an elementary schooler at heart~!

HiMERU: ...That's more likely to be a result of your physical constitution.

Fufu. HiMERU is already an adult, so he tends to prioritize efficiency.

As it stands, there's no real need to stray beyond JoyLife. Its immense success alone brings both the fame and the wealth required.

In fact, some are even suggesting that we avoid additional activities and focus exclusively on JoyLife.

Niki: Man, the people who eat are pretty selfish, huh? We put all this thought into the nutritional balance when we cook, but then they're like, "I want curry rice every day!"

But if we actually give them curry every day, they start whining that they're sick of it.

HiMERU: That's an unusually nuanced remark.

Niki: It's pretty much how Rinne-kun was. He's basically just a tall kid, that guy.

HiMERU: Fufu. Parenting is no easy feat for either of us, is it?

Niki: Huh? I thought Kohaku-chan was the one taking care of you, though~?

HiMERU: Despite HiMERU being the one constantly supporting everyone from an adult's standpoint? Even this current project was brought in by HiMERU, was it not?

Niki: Nah, I meant emotionally.

Kohaku: Nn... Ah, shoot~ I nodded off.

HiMERU: Good morning, Oukawa ♪

Kohaku: Mm. I'd like to make an excuse, but I know it ain't proper for the actors to go criticizin' their own show. Still—this JoyLife's just plain too dull.

HiMERU: We are the performers, after all. Since we already know what's coming, it's bound to feel more monotonous to us than to the audience.

Kohaku: That's true, too. And I get that it's supposed to be the show's gimmick, but it's so uninspired it just makes me sleepier and sleepier...

I'm not askin' for car chases or nothin', but a gunfight or two wouldn't hurt.

HiMERU: ...That would be difficult to pull off in peaceful Japan.

Kohaku: It's precisely because we live in peace that folks start cravin' a bit of danger and excitement, ain't it?

...Or somethin'. Haha, funny, I used to be the one wishin' for a peaceful, uneventful life.

Niki: Well, having curry every day would get boring ♪

Kohaku: ? What're you talkin' 'bout?

HiMERU: Fufu. Just a little adult conversation. Right? Shiina ♪

Niki: Huh. Hmm...?

HiMERU: ...What's wrong?

Niki: Nah, it's just... for a sec, I thought I saw something creepy flash on the screen.

Huh? I don't remember seeing anything like that last time I watched...? But I wasn't really paying attention, so maybe I'm wrong?

Kohaku: What d'ya mean by somethin' "creepy"?

Niki: Well, it's like... something that looked like Rinne-kun—

[ ☆ ]

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#event story #ephemeral festival #kohaku #himeru #niki

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smolwritingchick · 1 year ago

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The Bangtan Gal Chapter 77- Fire

Chapter Summary: BTS film for Fire. Jennie hangs with Layla and thinks about when BTS went to film BTS NOW 3 and the Save Me MV. Jennie gets bummed when she sees Prom videos and photos on social media since she never experienced it before. Jennie helps Jungkook when he gets sick before promotions for Fire.

Words: 8,000+

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2016 had been insane so far when it came to breaking news. Minzy had left 2NE1 and Jennie could not wrap her head around it. She was in tears, freaking out when she saw them reunite at the MAMA Awards and now she’s leaving, leaving the group as a trio? It just wouldn’t be the same.

She even tweeted herself listening to old 2NE1 songs with the caption, ‘Sad #Jen’

And then with Hyunseung leaving BEAST. Everyone was leaving left and right. It was insane. But as she thought about it, she thought about herself with Amity when she left. How she felt to move on to something beneficial for her. So she put herself in their shoes because she knew what they went through and understood why. And she understood from the fans' point of view to see a group member leave.

Was this how Amity fans felt when she left?

Finally filming and taking photos for their next comeback, Bangtan went to Jeju Island for the jacket shooting. Jen wore an off shoulder yellow dress for the shooting.

“I love this dress, ain’t it cute?” she asked on camera, spinning around. “No, I have not dyed my hair yet. Don’t be too upset, Army. It’ll happen one day. For this comeback I want to show a different side of Jennie, so stay tuned.”

She then took photos with a kite, which went successfully. Then they began the unit shoots. After Jungkook and Tae, Jen and Yoongi were up.

“Aw, your freckles look so cute.” she pointed them out.

“Ah...thanks smartie.” He tried not to smile at her compliment.

The wind kept blowing which made them shiver slightly. It was so cold but they got through it. They then took photos on the air balloon, standing back to back, as the camera got every angle. After they got what they needed, YoonJen high fived each other and got out while Hobi got in next, looking nervous.

“Scared?” she asked him.

“No, I am okay. This is fine.” Hobi smiled nervously. But once he got in, he started making loud sound effects, causing her to laugh. “Whaaaaaaaaaaaa~ What if I’m blown away?”

“You’ll be fine~!” she reassured

Once it was her turn to get inside the air balloon with Jin, she had a blast, not afraid at all at being a little up in the air. After she was done, she checked out the photos, in love with how she posed.

Next up for the comeback was filming for the Young Forever MV at Jecheon Airfield a few days later. Jennie wore a long-sleeved white shirt exposing her shoulders and black pants. The members were told to show emotional acting as they walked around the maze.

For her part, she walked around with one of her hands touching the steel fence. Then, while looking around, white feathers blew past her ethereally.

Once her shots were complete, she saw Yoongi snapping photos of Jin and walked over to them.

“Oh, oh we doing a photoshoot? Okay!” she joined in, posing with Jin. “Let them know, a future worldwide handsome model is standing next to me. Don’t forget about us when you make it.”

Jin laughed, “I won’t, dear.”

For the fire music video, Jen expressed her excitement as the cameras were following her, dancing around.

“I am sooooo ready for this! I love this song and I cannot wait to film it, it is going to be off the chain! I am telling you, y’all are not ready for this one!”

As the members walked in on the set for their party scene, Jen stood at a DJ booth, admiring the equipment.

‘DJ Jennie is here!’

“I just want to thank Big Hit for allowing me to DJ in a BTS music video, this is so exciting. Ahhh, this is heaven, right here!” she fangirled.

“What’s this button do?” Jungkook asked, walking up to the booth as she demonstrated. “And this? This? That?” he went on as she showed him.

While the set was still being prepared, Jennie was talking to the camera again, showing off her outfit which was just something to wear while she DJs. Sweatpants, white shirt, chain around her neck, looking fly as ever.

“I got Suga’s three dolla’ chain on my neck. Comfortable looking white shirt, these sweats, my Nikes-oh my Nikes! Check them out I designed them! Made a little something! Nike, I am still here! Give me a call! I got some great ideas for y'all!” she showed off the designs she made for fun which looked good.

"You are never going to let me live that down, huh?" Yoongi playfully glared at her for the inside joke from American Hustle Life.

"All in good fun!" she giggled.

There were so many extras for the party scene as Bangtan filmed performing fire until they got enough shots. And then they shot it again but this time with Jen at the booth. She was much more energetic for this comeback and it showed on camera, dancing around, flipping her hair all over the place, headbanging. The guys took a break while Jen started her individual shots at the booth.

They first filmed her turning to take a look at the DJ booth and then her walking over to it. Examining it while running her fingers over the equipment, she got a hold of the headphones and slowly placed them around her neck.

After that shot, she was filmed at the booth, dancing around until it was her cue to sing with the camera panning to her.

maenjumeogeul deulgo All night long

(Fire)

jingunhaneun balgeoreumeuro

(Fire)

ttwieobwa michyeobeoryeo da

Grabbing the mic, she started powerfully, doing what G-Dragon told her, “Errbody throw yo’ hands in the air, we gettin’-“

“Hot! Hot! Hot! Hotter!” the rest of the members joined in.

ssak da bultaewora bow wow wow

“Errbody throw yo’ hands in the air, we gettin’-”

“Hot! Hot! Hot! Hotter!”

ssak da bultaewora bow wow wow

Thinking of G-Dragon helped her as she even gave a mesmerizing stare at the camera that was sure to make Armies freak out. Starting again, this time Taehyung was with her at the booth, giving the Taennie shippers their fix as they partied. Then the rest of the members joined her, jumping and fooling around. Jen even threw her hands up and down while going over her verse for the end of the song, making things even more exciting.

“Yay!” she clapped and jumped off the booth. “That was hot!”

Going to see her footage from an iPhone, she smiled at her performance. ‘That’s really me up there jamming, huh? I look badass!’ she proudly thought.

The director praised her for her efforts and she went back to continue filming with the rest of the members on the stage. They even had Taehyung crowd surf. Jen could tell he was nervous and reassured him that it would be fine. Although the first attempt failed, he did much better the second time and it looked like he was having a blast.

Next was the members performing in an abandoned pool, performing the choreography. Even after one time of dancing, they were all out of breath as the stylists fixed their makeup and hair. When they worked on the dance again for the chorus, Jimin missed his cue to dance and they had to start over while he laughed and hugged Jungkook. But once they did it again it was successful. After that, Jin, Suga, V and Jungkook were able to leave since they were done for the day.

“Everyone gets to leave. I’m going to be the last one here. I have to film my little water dance.” Jen sighed on camera.

“Sucks to be you. I’m leaving soon~!” Jungkook teased while she rolled her eyes.

“Blah, blah, blah. Leave.” she playfully shoved him away, out of the camera’s view. As she continued to talk about what was going on, Jungkook would butt in occasionally. “Go away!” she laughed and pushed him again as he laughed.

After talking on camera, Jen waited as the staff members prepared the set for her, Hobi and Namjoon. With his things packed, Jungkook approached her again as he looked down at her with a smile.

“I’m about to leave with hyung. You sure you don’t want me to stay with you?”

Jen shook her head. “It’s okay. I’ll be fine. Go on ahead.”

He nodded. “Tony and I will be waiting when you get back to the dorm. I love you.”

“I love you, too.” she tried to go for a kiss but couldn’t reach him. She tried again, standing on her toes but he playfully avoided her kiss by not tilting his head down, watching her struggle. All he had to do was just put his head down to meet her lips but he wouldn't.

Frowning, she replied, “Wow, so you not going to give me a kiss goodbye?”

Laughing softly, he wrapped his arms around her and lifted her up. Now she was the one looking down at him as her heart raced. He then gave her what she wanted while she leaned down, pressing her lips on his as she cupped his face.

Taehyung quickly took out his phone to start filming them. A big smile was on his face as he thought about this being one of the cute moments to share when they decided to reveal their relationship to the public.

“Jungkook! Let’s go!” Jin called out, walking around to find him.

Yoongi walked with him and then spotted Jungkook with Jennie. “Good Lord...these kids.”

“What is taking so long-PUT HER DOWN!” Jin yelped while the 95 Liners cackled at him freaking out.

Before Jin could march over to them, Jimin made the save by jumping on his back to distract him. Meanwhile, Jennie and Jungkook tuned out what was happening around them as they kissed repeatedly, short and sweetly.

“Ahem!” the director cleared his throat on the megaphone. “Can we please have Jennie-ah on the set, Jungkook-ah?”

Reality hit the 97 Liners and Jen was slowly set down. The two let out a laugh while one of the makeup staff members pulled her away from Jungkook to fix her hair and makeup.

While Jimin was filming his individual scene, Jennie changed into her other attire for fire which was a pair of jean shorts, a black dragon crop top, and a dragon theme bomber jacket. She also had a secret tattoo of a dragon which was placed around her left inner thigh along with a thigh chain on her right thigh.

“Nini! You’re going to be the last one out of here.” Namjoon pulled her in for a hug while she sighed loudly.

“Why is everyone so happy they get to leave before me? Don’t rub it in. You excited?” she asked.

“Yeah, I am. It has been a while since we did something together in a music video. So, remind me, are you keen?”

“Fresh and keen, numba one chick when I step out on the scene.” she quoted, putting her twist on the Pussycat Doll’s song, making him laugh. “I had that song in my head all day. I blame shuffle. I was playing throwbacks on our way over here to film.”

Starting the scene, Jen and Namjoon coolly stood next to each other as she went first, adjusting the cap on her head

“Aye, live it up, Bangtan just exploded on the scene.”

Hey, burn it up jeonbu da taeul geot gachi

“Aye, shout it out! I’m turnt up, it’s okay, I’m keen~”

Hey, turn it up saebyeogi da gal ttaekkaji

With J-Hope walking through the door while a fire was in the background, he met up with the two, dancing around.

geunyang sarado dwae urin jeomgie

geu malhaneun neon mwon sujeogillae

sujeosujeo georyeo nan saraminde

Standing in between them, she shouted, raising a hand up with them, “So what~!”

Standing a little in front of them while they stood by her, Jennie showed off a little attitude while going over her verse, “Calling us extra yet you still want to hang. Bang to the tan, you wanna join this gang. Keep your eyes on me, I am still that chick!” she slapped her chest before pointing to the camera. “Don’t you stand too close, what, you think you slick? Admit we the shhh as we tear it down!”

When she said shhh, Rapmon and J-Hope dramatically turned to her while she placed a finger to her lips.

“BTS is the flame they wanna water down! Bangtan is still here and we killin’ it still. We always start the fire, you just a fire drill!” she smirked, shoving the camera away with her hand.

The three did the scene a few more times to make sure to get many shots. They even had Namjoon and Jennie back to back as they said their verse. Namjoon would look at her a few times, nodding before looking back at the camera.

“Okay, good job.” The director praised.

“It’s over! It’s over!” Hobi cheered.

“I’m still here~!” Jen dramatically dropped to her knees, making Hobi and Namjoon laugh.

Despite it being late and her being the last one here, she remained professional and went through with it, not giving anyone problems. She wanted these scenes to be great and she would do whatever she could to show how hard she had prepared.

As she walked on the set, the background was black and with water coming down them the ceiling and there was a large pool of water for her to step into that was up to her ankles.

“I’m just glad the water is not cold.” She said, preparing herself.

Once the music hit, she went hard while being expressive about it. Wet hair flipping around, popping and locking, she had a blast. Things went well as they made her dance a few more times to get the shots they needed.

For the final scene, she just had to lip-sync the song while in the water, doing whatever she wanted.

“Okay! Jennie can go home.” the director announced

She sighed out of relief, falling back, making a big splash as the staff laughed.

“Hallelujah!” she shouted.

For the second day of filming for their music video, after it rained in the morning, the members gathered around for their group set. Jennie yawned loudly, making Jungkook, Namjoon, and Jimin mock her yawn.

“Four hours of sleep. Four. Living the dream” she replied.

After filming the first scene of them talking and Yoongi shaking hands with someone, setting them on fire, Jungkook rode a bike around the man on fire and then watched his bike on fire.

Meanwhile, Jen was snacking on smarties until it was time for the group dance. She unzipped her bomber jacket so it could show off the black crop top. Afterward, she went with Jimin to practice the chorus of the choreography. He even got in front of her a little bit while she periodically glanced at him to make sure she got the moves right.

Standing in between Jin and V, she leaned to the right with the members.

Errbody say La la la la la

“La la la la la.”

Say La la la la la

“La la la la la.”

soneul deureo sorijilleo Burn it up

Strutting to stand in front, she flicked her nose with her thumb before tilting her head to the side, showing even more attitude.

Bultaoreune

Powerfully, she broke out into the choreography, going hard. She wasn’t expecting to be the one in the front to start it off and she wanted to make a good impression. It seemed like it paid off because the shot went well.

After being filmed watching the car drop down with everyone shooked at the scene, Jen had another solo scene in the same area Hobi and Yoongi were at night with a police car around. She started her verse with the bat she had from the danger MV. Carefully standing on top of the car, she performed, whipping her hair around. She even kneeled while pointing at the camera, continuing to lip sync.

“Jennie. Look at her go. She was not this expressive in the last music video. I’m pleased to see her so lively. She has been doing a great job so far.” Jimin watched her. “She is so cool.”

Then they had her lying on top of the hood of the car with her back against the windshield. After doing the group dance again, Jen fell on her hands and knees, acting like Patrick from that one Spongebob episode as she began dramatically coughing like him. The others were just as exhausted.

Finally preparing one more time, they successfully finished the group dance with the backup dancers behind them.

The last scene had Jin across the table with Taehyung having an iron on him. The members surrounded him as they did their final scenes fooling around. Afterward, they walked outside to the camera, expressing how happy they were that they were finally done.

“The Fire MV is complete!” Jen announced, clapping with the members.

“Fire~!” Jin sang

“Feel the heat!” Yoongi said, popping into the shot.

“Please enjoy the MV!” Jimin pointed.

“Go, Fire! Go BTS!” They waved goodbye.

The next morning, Jen went into her studio to see a cute note from Jungkook on her desk telling her to have a good day. He even made a tiny drawing of a smiley face on the note. There was also a pack of smarties next to it. Smiling, she ate them while going back to writing how she felt about him for songs.

Feeling a buzz on her desk, she grabbed her phone and looked at the caller ID, answering instantly. “Hey! It's been a while!”

“Hi! Wow. I’m surprised you picked up.”

“Of course I would. I’m not going to ignore you. How you been?”

“Happy. I wanted to tell you that I’m in Seoul, right now. I was wondering if we could grab a bite to eat, together. If you’re okay with it.”

Jen swung around in her chair, replying with no hesitation, “Sure, Layla. Send me the address of where you wanna go,”

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Jennie arrived at a small café where Layla had been waiting for her. Making eye contact, Layla smiled and waved while Jen made her way up to her.

Jennie didn’t know what came over her, but she embraced her tightly, taking Layla by surprise. Despite everything that happened, she missed every good moment she had with her. Layla was not expecting the hug, widening her eyes but hugged her back tightly, missing her just as much.

“For a second, I thought I was going to get punched like Hailey.” Layla teased as they let go.

“Nah. I have to admit, I’ve missed you.”

“I've missed you, too. Thanks for coming to see me. This means a lot.” she released her and they sat down.

“Trust me, I’m surrounded by men every day at the dorm. It is so nice to hang around you for a change.”

“I’m flattered. You still get this, right? When we were kids?” Layla pointed out what she had bought her. It was green tea and a cinnamon muffin. “You used to copy my orders to piss me off whenever you could. So, for today, I got you the same order I got...for old time’s sake.”

“Oh wow! Yeah, I remember!” she chuckled at the fond memories. “Remember the time we went to Friendly’s and I got every single thing you got?”

“Oh gosh...don’t remind me. I even asked for five cherries on top of my milkshake and of course, your ass got the same. Trinity had to escort me to the bathroom because I was about to pull your hair out.”

“I’m not sorry for that. Wow, I haven’t had a muffin and tea together in forever. It’s been a long time. I'm so used to eating other types of breakfast food these days. Thanks for buying this for me.”

“You're welcome! Aren’t you glad you came out with me, today?”

“Absolutely. What are you doing here in Seoul?” Jen took a bite out of her muffin.

Setting her tea down after a big sip, she replied, “Work related and also to just take some time to travel to new places. I’ll be going to the DR soon.”

“Lucky! I wish.”

“Hey, you have a comeback to focus on. I bet it’s going to be off the chain.”

Jen chuckled, “I hope! It’s my favorite song we made. It’s called fire. It’s pretty dope if you asked me.”

“I’ll be counting down the days for the comeback show. I’ve been writing a lot since that day with all of us in that hotel room. I have so many stories to tell. It’s getting me excited.”

“Your solo work is going to be good. Any idea what type of genre of music you want to go into?”

“R&B.”

“That suits your voice.”

“Thanks, Jen. I would love to get a Grammy someday for my music."

“You will. Anything is possible. So start saying that you will get a Grammy one day.”

Layla smiled at the thought. “I should. Do you remember all those dreams we had? We would talk for hours about what we wanted to do with our music careers.”

“Those were good times.”

“You always were talking about singing in Korean and we thought it was crazy of you to do it. But you went on and did it and you’re living your dream. Me, I am too. I’m writing the music I want to perform and I’m working on my solo stuff. Slowly but surely. We’re still young, learning and growing but we’re going to make it with our music careers.”

“No doubt about that. Muffin cheers to that.” she bumped her muffin with hers and they both took a bite, letting out a series of giggles. “Heard anything from Trin or Hailey?”

“No, not really. They kind of just fell off the face of the earth. No social media, no reports, nothing. It makes me a bit sad to see how everything is now.”

Jennie frowned, “Yeah. Deep down, I miss all five of us being buddies with each other.”

“It’s most likely going to take some time but I do hope that one day those two will come around, and just apologize for everything as grown women. Then we can move forward. Simple as that. But those two are so stubborn.”

“Very stubborn. They always want to be right.”

“Oh, I was hanging with Angelina a few days ago. We went boxing together and she almost gave me a black eye.”

Jen laughed, “Oh my gosh, why boxing?”

“In her words, she said it was to relieve all the frustration she had left for me over the years. That girl can pack a punch, my ribs still hurt from those body shots. But it was fun.”

“Yikes, I do not want to be on the receiving end of that.”

“I got another piercing, too.”

“Where?”

Layla pointed to her chest, which made Jen put two and two together.

“No way.” Jen dropped her jaw.

“Yeah! It’s my favorite!”

“Now I know getting your nips pierced hurts a lot.”

“Actually it wasn’t that bad. It was just sore.”

“You got that, I could never. How many piercings do you have now?”

“Uh...well it should be seven, right now.”

“Damn. Any more you want?”

“I want some nose piercings. But I’ll wait a little bit for that. I just hope this photoshoot goes well today.”

“Oh, you’re taking photos for work?”

“Uh huh! Doing stuff for my fans, I want to create a little photo album for them."

“That’s sweet. Ever thought of doing fan meets?”

“No, I haven’t. Any suggestions?”

“I have tons but just don’t make them have to buy hundreds of your albums for a chance to get into a fan meet. That’s something I disagree with when it comes to meeting our fans here. I just wish BTS could have regular meet and greets and all they have to do is buy a ticket. Or just buy one album for a fair chance instead of buying multiple. So you won't have to spend so much money for a chance in the lottery. But that’s how it is here, so I don’t have much say.”

“Oh nah. Yeah, I’ll do it for free. Maybe set up a location in New York. That would be fun. How’s it been over here for work?”

“I had to do a few commercials...one of them was very...cute which I cringed.” Jen thought back to the shooting.

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Jennie shook her head frequently, displeased at the fact that she would have to dance and sing cutely for the Smart Uniform commercial with G-Friend and the rest of BTS.

“Mm Mm! No. No. HELL NO. NO! NO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO~!”

“We’ll pay you in smarties! Come on, it’ll be fun!” Jin stated with a smile.

“Nah, fam. You gonna have to do a lot more than smarties this time. You tried it.”

The amount of suffering and cringing she dealt with when recording the song and learning the choreography in the practice room. And now here she was wearing a uniform, hanging around GFriend, feeling rather uncomfortable.

She hated this commercial with a passion, having a huge dislike for cutesy dances. It just made her feel so out of place. And fans got a kick out at how she was screaming internally in the commercial.

‘How did they make me dance and act cute like this?’ she pondered, as she felt mortified when they filmed themselves dancing.

She stayed professional and went through with it, faking it until she made it. One thing was for sure, she would be hating Wednesdays for a few months. And now she couldn't get the song out of her head.

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“Wooooooow! Kudos for you not dying that day, hah!”

“Not funny.” Jen narrowed her eyes.

Layla found the commercial and looked at it on her phone, cracking up at Jen’s performance.

“Stop laughing~!” Miss Bangtan whined and tried to grab her phone.

“This is hysterical! You are so adorable~!”

“Shut up! And don’t get me started on the Save Me music video filming. I just kept falling and falling. One of my pairs of Nikes got so messy when we filmed. I was not happy that day.”

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On the inside, Jen was in a foul mood, having to be forced to shoot the Save Me music video in this horrible weather. She was feeling herself getting sick and was not trying to let this upcoming cold win, making mental notes to fight it as soon as she got home. Her hair was straightened for the music video but due to the rain, her curls were already popping back up, and she decided to just roll with it, staying professional. She wasn’t the only one who did not want to be here.

Looking down at her shoes, her Nikes were getting a lot of mud on them thanks to the weather, which got her even more upset.

“My Nikes are getting screwed up due to this mud. Ugh. But hey, Jennie here...cold...wet...trying to survive.” She said in front of the Bangtan Bomb camera, wearing a poncho.

Namjoon and Taehyung had huddled around her to keep her warm which helped a lot while she continued to suffer.

“Are there crabs?” Namjoon asked, looking at a nearby hole that he assumed had crabs in it. “Isn't it the crab hole?”

“I had eaten crabs a few days ago. It was very delicious.” Jen called out, making him shoot her a dirty look. A loud cackle escaped her lips at the offended look he gave her.

"Eating crabs...you're evil!"

"No, I'm not!"

This music video consisted of one take, so the members had to move around a lot behind the cameraman while another member had their camera time. They rehearsed in their raincoats/ponchos while trying to keep warm.

During filming, mistakes were made, such as Yoongi bumping into the director as he tried to film, Jennie slipping and falling, making her pants dirty as the stylists cleaned them without any issues.

“Not funny,” she called out Jungkook and Jimin who were laughing at her dirty pants. “Remember that when you want me to bake something for you.”

That shut them up quickly.

Getting soaked in the rain after many more takes for the MV, the weather was starting to get a little worse and Jen started shivering.

“So cold...I can’t even breathe with this wind.” she shivered violently.

Taehyung engulfed her in a hug from behind, to keep her warm as she continued to talk about how she was doing on camera, with him adding a comment here and there. Soon after, he grabbed her hands and blew his warm breath into them.

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“My favorite part of Save Me is the dance break. I have so much fun doing that. But the weather was not it.”

Layla snickered. “You always complain but you still get the work done. You've done it with Amity and you're doing it with BTS. How about that,”

“Yeah, some things never change. We went to Chicago a few months ago for our third BTS NOW DVD."

"Ooh, how was that? Did you win again?"

"Well..."

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In Chicago for their first day, the members got their makeup done and wore colored contacts for their photoshoot. Jen’s contacts were red as she checked herself out in the mirror.

“Now this is a look. I love this. Red eyes? This suits me pretty well.” she looked on in admiration.

‘How does it feel to be back in America?’

“Exciting! We’re here in Chicago!” she happily announced.

Jin was walking with her in the hallway of their hotel but then he tripped, making her laugh with him.

“I was trying to be cool, but I tripped,” he explained.

“Ennie, your eyes look mesmerizing. You should wear red contacts for a comeback one day.” V pointed out.

“Maybe! That would be fun!” she grinned.

‘What will today’s photoshoot be like?’

Once they got on the bus, Jen immediately fell asleep. Having some fun, the guys decided to take selfies with her knocked out, plotting to use them for embarrassing photos to post.

‘They arrive at the first location’

“Jennie!” Jungkook called out, making her turn around. Once she saw him with his camera, she posed for him.

Seeing him taking pictures of her, Suga and Jimin butt in, posing with her, making the 97 liners laugh. After goofing around, it was Jennie’s turn to take pictures as she posed effortlessly for the camera.

Standing in front of a metal fence, she grabbed it while looking cool.

‘Jennie looking fierce.’

She then took unit photos with Jimin. Once Jungkook was done taking unit pictures with Rapmon, he stood behind Jennie as she leaned back, resting her back against his chest while they checked out Rapmon’s individual photo shoot. They laughed at how he was running for his shots. For the next shot, all the members wore unique eye makeup. With Jen, she had purple lipstick and colorful eye makeup.

In the van, Jen had her earbuds in while Jimin, Jungkook and J-Hope had their English time. Taking an earbud out, she stared at them in confusion, trying to comprehend what they were saying.

“What are you saying?” she asked in her native tongue, making them laugh.

For their next location, Jin had unit photos with Jennie against a tree, showing various expressions and poses.

“BTS Now 3 Mission Start!’

‘Choose a desired theme’

‘Create a picture with a story. The winning team receives a great prize! Which team will win?’

Once choosing teams, Jimin shouted “YES!” and ran around excitedly, which made the members curious.

“Who did you get?” V asked.

“I GOT JENNIE!” he laughed. “WOO HOO!”

“What!? No fair!” Jungkook whined.

“Sucks to be you~!” Jimin teased and turned to Jennie.

"AYEEEE!" she high fived Jimin. "Let's get it!"

Jimin and Jennie called their team JenMin. For the remaining teams, J-Hope and Jin called themselves HopeJin, Rapmon and Suga called themselves six years and V and Jungkook called each other TaeKook.

Throughout the second day in Chicago, the members got ready for more photos outside.

With JenKook taking photos of the view, Jin and Jimin decided to mess with them.

Jimin threw a toy grenade at Jungkook. “Ennie! Jungkook! Run! Jungkook! Ennie!” he kneeled down, covering his head to try to take cover.

The couple glanced at him for a moment and then continued to check out the pictures they had taken of nature. With the toy grenade thrown at them again, this time Jin ran over to them and went down on his knees to take cover.

“AH! Jennie! Jungkook!” he yelled but did not get a reaction out of them.

The photographer told them that there were props they could use. Jen picked a skateboard for her concept, to show off the skills that her friend Kevin taught her over the years. Grabbing a skateboard, she skated around with it as the camera snapped away. It looked like she was having more fun than she anticipated, feeling elated.

“She’s so cute.” Jungkook smiled and snapped candid photos of her. One of these photos was going to be his new phone lock screen picture.

While everyone continued to set up, Jungkook had a speaker and put on Show Me Your BBA SAE, while recording himself with V. They nodded their heads back and forth to the beat and JenMin walked over to join them.

‘Let me hear you say! BBA SAE!’

As soon as the beat dropped, the Maknae Line danced and whipped their heads back and forth. Hyped, Jen began the Wutang dance, jerking her arms up and down and side to side with V trying to copy her movements.

“How do you do that?!” Jimin laughed.

“Easy! I’ll teach you!” she demonstrated for them.

It took a few tries but afterward, Jungkook restarted the song so they could Wutang with Jennie on video. The Golden Maknae even tried to convince Rapmon who was nearby to dance but he refused, laughing it off.

“Come on~!” Jen grabbed Rapmon’s hands, gesturing him to dance.

“All right, all right.” he gave in as she cheered him on with V joining him.

On the third day, they went to a house they rented to take photos. This was where their mission began. Jen and Jimin decided that their concept would be a parody of Tom & Jerry. After much debate, Jimin was Jerry while Jen was Tom.

“We have cheese!” Jimin brought out a plate of cheese.

“You’ll be eating and chilling and then I’ll come and try to chase you,” Jen suggested.

The first few shots included Jimin looking cute, and eating his cheese. Then it would show Jennie glaring at him with her arms crossed. As the photographer snapped away, she snuck up behind Jimin and tried to catch him but he quickly moved out of the way, turning away in shock. He started to run away, initiating her chasing him around. Later they were in the kitchen and Jimin had a frying pan, placing it against Jennie’s face for the photo to show that Tom was about to lose again to Jerry. After that, she was on the floor, on her stomach with a hand underneath her chin, looking annoyed at the camera while Jimin sat on her back, looking happy that he won again.

“Good! You two are done!” The photographer praised.

“Yay!” Jimin bounced up and down on top of her, making her laugh.

After their mission, the members continued with their pictures around the house. Jen, ate cheese curls while sitting next to Jungkook on the couch.

“Can I have one?” Jungkook asked.

Taking a cheese curl out of the bag, she fed it to him. Meanwhile, the camera panned up close to his face and he cutely said: “I’ll kill you.” revealing his bunny smile.

“The concept of this outfit is yellow,” he mentioned as the camera showed off what he was wearing. “It’s been a while since I wore red.”

“And he’s wearing red Nikes. I love them!” Jen pointed them out.

After the camera stopped filming them, Jungkook randomly said, “You’d look nice in red, Jennie.”

“Thanks, I wear red constantly if you hadn’t noticed.”

“That’s not what I mean.” a big grin came across his face.

It took her a second to get what he was implying before she smacked his chest.

“Dirty!” she scolded with a laugh and got off the couch.

“Babe! Come back!” he laughed harder, getting off the couch to chase after her.

Once filming was over, each team was interviewed back in Korea

‘Please introduce your team.’

“JENMIN~” the two joyfully announced and hugged each other

“It’s our ship name. We’re back JenMin shippers! We all know Jennie has a special place in her heart for me.”

“I could say the same for you,” she replied, making eye contact with him which would freak out shippers.

‘After finding out the teams, what were your thoughts?’

“CLOUD NINE! I love doing things with Jennie!” Jimin giggled.

“I was excited, too. I love working with Jimin. He’s so sweet and helpful.”

“Win or lose, we were going to have a lot of fun working together.”

‘Introduce your film’

“We reenacted a childhood cartoon of mine! Tom and Jerry!” Jen beamed. “This cartoon means so much to me. So, the fact that we got to do this was so cool.”

“We had a long debate on who would be who,” Jimin said.

“At first he didn’t want to be Jerry because he thought I was picking on him for his size. Which I wasn’t!”

“I know, I know. But still. You know how defensive I get about people calling me short.”

“Yeah, I know shortie.”

“HEY! I am taller than you!"

“I know. So, I was Tom and Jimin was Jerry.” she changed the topic, attempting to keep herself from laughing as he playfully glared at her. “Our concept was pretty simple. It’s cute and I’m sure people will like it and would want to check out some old Tom and Jerry episodes.”

When they were shown their best photo, Jen and Jimin cackled, holding onto each other.

“Your face!”

“My face? Look at yours! This turned out great!”

Everyone was in the room as they prepared to check out all the teams' photos. Six Years was first who did a parody of a horror movie.

“That’s so scary. Oh my gosh, the one when Suga is behind Rapmon with tissue paper, BRUH! His head is in the fridge.” Jen laughed. “Jimin and I voted for you guys to win. This was good.”

“Yeah, the pictures look nice.” The members agreed.

Next was to show JenMin’s photos and the members laughed at how cute the concept was.

“I like the one when you look like you lost and Jimin is on your back. That’s cute.” Rapmon said.

“This looks natural. And I’m not surprised Jimin was Jerry. He’s tiny.” Jungkook giggled.

“I am NOT tiny!” Jimin fired back

Next up was TaeKook’s pictures. They did a parody of an animation. The members couldn’t stop laughing at V’s passionate expression in his solo photo. Their shocking visuals were the main topic.

“The kick!” Jen laughed. “That was perfect.”

Last up was J-Hope and Jin who did a parody of a movie. Some of the members talked about how chubby their faces looked and joked around that they looked ugly.

“I gained weight for the concept!” Jin exclaimed.

It bothered Jennie that they were talking about how “chubby” their faces supposedly looked. They looked just fine to her.

“Guys cut it out,” she spoke up with a frown. “They’re not ugly, they look just fine. Don’t even listen to them. It doesn’t matter if you gained a little weight, at least you’re healthy.”

“Thank you, Jennie.”

When it was time to see who won, it was revealed that TaeKook got 18 votes, JenMin got 52 votes, J-Hope and Jin had 64 votes. For the winners, Suga and Rapmon, who had 68 votes, they shouted and hugged each other when they found out they won first place.

“Woo!” Jen clapped. “Congrats guys!”

“I can’t believe we won,” Rapmon said in disbelief.

“We gave up on winning.” Suga laughed as they received a $300 gift certificate

“Sharing is caring, I hope y’all know that.” Jen reminded them

“Not today!” Suga replied, earning laughs from the members

------

"Darn...sucks you didn't win that $300 gift certificate. That would've been great. But hey, I hope you win in the next BTS NOW filming, if you have another one."

"Fingers crossed! I’m sure things will work in my favor next time!” Jen reassured.

-----

For the next few days, Jen had been a little down after checking out prom photos on social media. She wasn’t as cheerful as she usually was and it was starting to become noticeable by the members. Some thought that it was just the time of the month but little did they know it was something much deeper than that.

“Hey, are you all right, munchkin?” Hobi had asked one day in her studio with Namjoon.

“Ah, not really. Just been a little down but I’ll feel better after a few days.” Jen shrugged.

“What’s got you down?”

“I just...I just wish I was able to experience prom,” she admitted.

“Prom?”

After that, she broke down, “Yeah. I knew the sacrifices I had to make when I came here to become an idol. I would miss out on school experiences such as prom. But just seeing everyone all decked out in their dresses, nails done, all beautiful, it just makes me sad. I will never get that American high school experience. My sisters got to go to prom. My parents got to go to prom. Angelina got to go to prom. But for me, I never will with this idol life.”

Wiping the tears from her face, she cleared her throat. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to get all emotional. Just give me a few days to cope. I’ll feel better, soon.”

“Munchkin...” Hobi looked at her in concern.

“I will be okay.” she smiled sadly and stood up from her seat. “I need to use the bathroom.”

After watching her leave her studio, Hobi and Namjoon turn to each other.

“I didn’t think it would be this bad.” Namjoon sighed.

“I know...poor thing. What should we do?”

“Why not do prom here?”

“Plan a prom? You think we can?”

“We can figure out something. Even if it’s something small. Something for her. Let’s talk with Bang PD and then the rest of the guys about it.”

---------

Once the fire M/V dropped, people were pointing out Jennie’s dragon tattoo and trended it on Twitter, making edits and asking if it was real. They were shooked to see that it was even hidden too, starting from her lower stomach and then going down into her inner thigh. It looked sexy and something they were not expecting her of all people to have.

‘Jennie is your tattoo real!?’ she was spammed with questions on Twitter and Instagram.

She tweeted adding an emoji sticking out its tongue to tease the fans, ‘Curiosity killed the cat. Come and find out at your own risk.’

The reactions towards fire were insanely positive as Bangtan was trending and rising up the charts like wildfire. It was exciting and records and views were ranking up. But what was even more exciting was Jen watching these reaction videos from K-Pop reactors on YouTube and Instagram.

“I am telling YOU! I feel like G-Dragon, EXO, and whoever other idols she talks to had something to do with her because her stage presence and charisma for this music video are giving me goosebumps! Do you see my arms!?” one YouTuber yelled. “Whatever these idols are teaching this girl, they need to keep it going because she keeps getting better each comeback. This is crazy! My edges are gone, my face is cleared, and my grades are great! I am gay for Miss muthafucking Bangtan! She is that bitch! I cannot wait to see this live! And is her tattoo real!? Like got damn, I was not expecting her to be this LOUD! She is just GLOWING! Like I dunno what is going on behind closed doors but she just looks so happy and is having a blast. Jen, sis, you make me so proud~!”

Jennie smiled at that. She was glowing? That’s something she’ll never get tired of. She scrolled through Twitter to check out what fans were saying about her:

‘She is so cute!’

‘GLOWING! She is glowing! Look at her go!’

‘That NamJen moment thooooo! I ship!’

‘Go off!’

‘She better back it up!’

‘I’m living for this!’

‘MAKE JENNIE DJ AT BTS CONCERTS! #DJJENNIE4BTSCONCERT

‘BIHHHHH the facial expressions’

‘She said you a fire drill, I’m doneeeee’

‘The hair flips are giving me life!’

‘She is so extra, I love it ahahahaha’

‘She is killing it!’

‘Jen is going so hard during these dance moves, did she get whiplash?’

She chuckled at the comment. She did get whiplash a few times for being so extra while dancing but it was well worth it.

“No, they didn’t...” she said when she looked at the trending chart to see 'Jennie’s Legs' trending.

She read the comments with amusement:

‘Why did she hide her legs for so long!? They’re so toned!’

‘Choke me with your legs!’

‘Queen!’

‘Jen got a little thick and I’m here for it!’

‘My GOD!’

‘Ruining lives! She is continuously ruining lives!’

‘I’m in love!’

‘I’m straight...I’m straight...I think?? She’s making me question myself!’

‘WAIT! WAIT SHE JUST WALKED TO THE FRONT AND WENT HARD!’

Checking out more reaction videos, there was a group of male K-pop fans who looked like they were in their late teens and early 20s reacting to Fire. There was one guy specifically who was known for having a massive crush on Jennie and called her his bias. From the video, it looked like his name was Noah, as his friends would tease him and think of ship names for them. He was Caucasian and had on a Jennie shirt and BTS cap over his messy brown hair.

He seemed captivated as he stared with his mouth open slightly at her dancing. He looked so in love right now, it was astonishing to her how she could charm someone from her MV shots.

“Pause it for a second, oh my God, she is so beautiful!” Noah stared at the screen, shaking his head. “Wow...just wow.”

“You all right man?” one of his friends asked while laughing.

“Do you think she would date someone like me? She like white boys?”

That caused her to laugh as she continued to watch the video. This was too cute.

“She said she’s open to dating any race, remember?” one of his friends reminded him.

“All right, and BTS may be going to K-Con, right? I gotta meet her. Like I need to meet her in person.” Noah declared.

“You’re drooling my guy!” one of his friends laughed and nudged him. “Should we start planning a wedding? Buy her a ring? Hahah!”

As the video continued, Noah exclaimed, “You REALLY want me to watch her while she is looking like THIS? I’m a committed man, this is my wife right here. But I’m not gonna lie, I’m not sure if I can handle all that. She is so sexy.”

Some comments under the reaction video were teasing him for "wanting the chocolate" and that he looked like he was "ready to risk it all" which amused Jennie as she read them.

She thought it was cute of him to admire her like that. She was very flattered as she pondered if she was starting to get more people to speak out about their love and admiration for her. When she first debuted in BTS, she never thought she'd be anyone's bias. But as she continued to grow as a performer, more people began to fall in love with her and it touched her heart that she was called someone's bias.

Later that day, she decided to post a photo of her wearing the fire outfit that she took during filming with the caption,‘*Insert Jennie leg and thigh appreciation posts on Tumblr/Instagram/Twitter* #EXPOSED’ which made fans freak out.

With G-Dragon, he was in the dance studio with Big Bang. He had been watching the fire music video on his phone, mumbling to himself about how Jennie was improving.

“Is that the girl you were talking about?” Taeyang asked, checking out what he was watching.

“Yeah, that’s her. Jennie.” he smiled proudly.

“Wow! I’d like to meet her. I keep hearing you talk about her.”

“You’ll love her. She's a very gifted performer. I’ll see if I can schedule something.”

----------

Days before their comeback show, Jungkook had unfortunately started to get sick. It was so sudden and the company thought about having him sit out during their comeback show just so he can rest and get better. He had developed a fever and once Jen found out, she went straight to the store to pick up some items.

The protective mode of Jennie was on full blast as she came back to the dorm and went right to his room to help him. Whenever Jungkook was hurt or got sick, her focus was on him 24/7, doing everything she could to make him feel better.

Wetting a few small towels with cold water, she placed them in small plastic bags and let them stand in the freezer for a while to get nice and cold. It was a method her family used on her and her siblings when they suffered fevers.

“We need to work on strengthening your immune system,” she said, setting things up in his room.

Jungkook sat up on his bed and was handed a glass of cold water. Watching her turn her back to him to prepare the small towels, he downed the drink and placed the glass on his nightstand.

As soon as she turned back around, she saw the glass empty and looked bewildered. “You drank it that quick?”

“Yeah, it was good.” He grinned.

“Good, drink another glass.” she gave him the second glass and he downed it quickly.

“You always take care of me.” he smiled tiredly as she kneeled beside him on his bed.

“What can I say? I like taking care of you guys.”

“Can you just take care of me though? Not the other hyungs. Jimin hyung always likes to rub it in my face whenever you take care of him when he’s sick.”

“Kook, not this again.” she giggled.

“And did you really bake him those cookies that I like after his sickness was gone? What about me?”

“So, you want me to let them suffer?”

“Yes?”

“Absolutely not!”

A whine came out of him, making her laugh. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Horrible,” he complained. “Why does this have to happen to me now? And our comeback is in a few days but I have to sit out.”

“I know it’s frustrating but your health comes first. We all want you to just rest.”

“I can’t even kiss you...” he grumbled.

She placed a hand on his forehead and was startled to feel how hot his skin was. “Wow, you’re really hot,”

“I know.”

She narrowed her eyes at his giggle and cheeky grin. “Annoying. I need you to take off your shirt so I can cool you down.”

Once he complied, she made him lay on his stomach. Taking a cold towel out of the plastic bag, she placed it over his back, making him shiver slightly from the coldness hitting his skin. After a while, the sensation began to feel nice on his body as it helped cool him down. She resumed cooling him down a few more times and made him lay on his back to place another towel on his torso.

“My bad.” she smiled apologetically at his facial expressions of discomfort from the coldness.

“Don’t worry about it, Jagi. It’ll feel good after a while,”

After cooling him down, Jungkook remained persistent to get a kiss from her.

“Can I have a kiss?” he asked.

“You have a fever.”

“Please?”

“You’re sick.”

“Please?”

“Kook...”

“I love you.”

“Stop.” She tried to fight her smile.

“I love you~.”

“I love you too but I’m not kissing you.”

“Can we at least cuddle?” he pouted.

‘I hate it when he gives me that look, I can’t say no.’ she thought as she relented and got into bed with him.

Holding him, she watched him fall asleep quickly. Slowly running her fingers through his soft hair, she thought about how he didn’t feel as hot as before. The towels helped tremendously. She just hoped his fever would go away quickly.

“Ah, stop staring at him with those worried eyes. He’s going to be fine. He’ll bounce back quickly.” Hobi poked his head into the room, catching her attention.

“I wasn’t staring.” she felt her face heat up.

“Uh huh. Says the smitten munchkin. How is he doing?”

“The cold towels helped. He doesn’t feel as hot. As long as he keeps drinking water, taking medicine and I continue to cool him down, the fever should go away soon.”

“Good. I’m glad. Thanks for taking care of him. I’m happy the kid’s going to be okay. He’s in good hands because of you.”

She smiled at that. “Thanks, Hobi. I try,"

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