#bc i feel like without knowing what it is

[cameronsbabydoll]

i have a request for a blurb please: puppy reader waking rafe up in the middle of the night bc she has to pee and she’s too scared to go to the bathroom alone so he goes and he’s holding her hand while she’s peeing bc she won’t let go!! he’s just grumpy but knows he has to take care of her🥸🥸🥸🥸🥸🥸🥸🥸🥸🥸🥸🥸🥸🥸🥸🥸

PINK PAJAMAS, BIG TEARS

rafe cameron x puppy!reader

WARNINGS: ddlg dynamics, infantilization, potty-related content, established relationship, implied age regression, soft!grumpy rafe, clingy/submissive puppy!reader, pet names (puppy, mutt, baby, daddy), caretaking

it’s sometime past 3 a.m. when you start tugging at the sleeve of rafe’s shirt, voice barely a whisper as you mumble,
“daddy…”

he groans. low and annoyed. doesn’t even open his eyes yet, “what.”

“i have to go to the bathroom…”

“then go.”

“but it’s dark,” you sniffle, already getting teary. “what if there’s someone in the hallway?”

he’s awake now, blinking hard, jaw tight. he’s still half-asleep, hair messy, face grumpy as ever. but he sits up with a sigh, already reaching for your hand.
“c’mon, baby. before you piss the bed.”

you follow behind him like a puppy on a leash, bare feet on cold tile. when you get to the bathroom, you try to go in alone—really, you do—but you immediately panic when he starts to let go of your hand.

“n-no! stay!” you whine. “please? please hold my hand while i pee, i’m scared…”

he sighs again, harder this time, but his fingers don’t leave yours. he stays standing just outside the bathroom door while you sit on the toilet, pink pajama shorts tugged down around your thighs, and your little hand clutches his like he’s the only thing keeping the monsters away.

“jesus,” he mutters under his breath, looking away with a hand over his face. “can’t even piss without me next to you. this is insane.”

“i’m sorry,” you mumble, embarrassed but not letting go. “i just feel safe when you’re with me…”

and he’s still tired. still grumpy. but his grip softens just a bit.

“…yeah, yeah. hurry up, baby.”

he gives your hand a squeeze. “and wash your hands after. i’m not holdin’ hands with my pissy little pup otherwise.”

you giggle, cheeks warm, heart fluttering. “yes, daddy.”

and when you finally come out, he carries you back to bed and lets you cuddle into his chest with his t-shirt clutched in your hand again.

“you’re not allowed to drink water before bed anymore,” he grumbles. but he’s already kissing the top of your head.

[tmblrplsdonutbanme]

My mistake was assuming that male defending "feminists" who will do anything, like nitpick the grammar of a bullet point list, to justify their internalized misogyny and call women hysterical... for their grammar... of a bullet point list.

MY mistake was assuming someone with a bio "I'm smarter than you" would be awake enough to realize that a post ABOUT OPRESSION AND DOUBLE STANDARDS wouldn't suddenly claim that men don't rape each other. OBVIOUSLY men rape other men

I'm SO glad that SOMEBODY cares about MEN! PHEW! They must be so thankful that you're rushing here to represent them!!!

I was really worried that in our radical feminist community on tumblr, we didn't have enough people who REALLY CARE about MEN!

THANK GOD FOR YOU!!!!

(i know you're the self-proclaimed "smartest", but i feel obligated to say that this was sarcasm so you don't embarrass yourself again)

Your logic left along with your allegiance to women

"Your source for the beauty statistics is shit, which was my point. So it doesn't matter what numbers are on that weird random website."

Have another!

And another!

For someone SO concerned about the laziness of "deceptive" research, PLEASE just LOOK IT UP! IT'S RIGHT THERE!!

It was SO easy to find! you clearly put NO EFFORT into your dumbass retort before you ran to your keyboard to DEFEND MEN IN THE BEAUTY INDUSTRY

I mean, seriously? Your whole point by saying that the source I posted is "setting women back" because it highlights men oppressing women through the beauty industry, and, for whatever reason - you don't like that!

You're here because you believe men AREN'T at a disadvantage in the beauty industry

but yet you have NO SOURCES! LMAOOOO

"And anyway, while women do inflict sexual violence on men (at much lower rates than men inflict sexual violence on women) I don't feel any particular obligation to prove that to you"

Because you can't LOL

"You don't know how to interpret the reputable sources that you have on there and are making wild blanket claims from unrelated studies with very limited sample sizes from two decades ago."

20 years ago?? Is that when you lost your brain!?

Also I SCREENSHOTED THE ACTUAL LINE IN THE ARTICLE! WDYM "interpret"

"So, yes. You are making easy work for anyone who wants to call you hysterical, as is anyone endorsing this post without reviewing your sources. People are eager to label feminists as hysterical or making up problems to advance their interests (deceptive) and stuff like this does their work for them."

You literally sound like a chauvinistic guy

You didn't review ANY sources, you just crossed your arms and went "Wah! Men aren't disproportionately represented in the beauty industry! I won't send you any sources, I know bc i said so!"

then you called me hysterical and said i was deceptive

It's just random ad hominem while attributing (very random) negative attributes to ALL women on behalf of ONE.

THAT'S sexist

THAT'S internalized misogyny

Notice how i caught you making up utter bullshit and having absolutely nothing in retort other than your internalized misogyny?

Did I attribute this, or your bad grammar to ALL women?

& I AM STILL waiting on those "women raping men" statistics that you said were "too specific" because they're not, rape can be a death sentence and men are violent. do you research at ALL??

in 2023, 100,000 women were killed for sex based violence

in 2023, 50 million women were sex trafficked

in 2023 30,000 women were killed in sex trafficking alone

Statistics- Again

men constitute 97% of (non fatal) strangulation attacks

men constitute 99% of acid attacks

men constitute 99.99% of child pornography

men constitute 98% of mass shootings

men constitute 99.8% of rapists

men constitute 86% of homicides

men constitute 95% of forcible incest

men constitute 99.99% of child sex abuse

men constitute 99% of molesting cases

men constitute 96% of domestic violence/abuse

men constitute 99% of drugging

men constitute 90% of stalking

men constitute 99.99% of human trafficking perpetrators

men constitute 99% of sex trafficking abuse

Men constitute 99% of animal abuse

Men constitute 98% of bestiality

_________________________Original Post_________________________

92.6% of makeup companies are male

97% of all creative directors are male

98% of modeling agencies are male

92% of fashion media is male

96% of the fashion industry is male

___________________________Rape_________________________

Women are 21x more likely to get raped, yet this is seriously underreported considering the dead bodies

1/3 of all women internationally report being sexually assaulted. we know this number to be much higher due to autopsies reported in the census

Women are 400,000,000x more likely to DIE from RAPE than a man

not one man has ever died from rape, accounts for no coroner report ever, whereas tens of thousands of women and children die a year.

i tried to find a statistic refuting this but i could not

________________________Sex Trafficking________________________

50 million women are sex trafficking victims

women make up for 95% of labor trafficking

70% of child labor is FEMALE

25 million women are forced into child marriages

650 million girls are in arranged marriages/ marriages consummated below the age of consent

_________________________Fetish / Kink_________________________

Men make up most 98% on average of every fetish community

Men make up 99% of pedophilia.

10% of men are pedophiles

_________________________International_________________________

in 70 countries - that comprise 26% of the world population, women need men's permission to learn, work, or travel.

There are 50 countries in which the law states you can sell and buy women into marriage. - These countries, including India and Pakistan, make up 38% of the entire world.

There are 178 countries that do not have the same legal rights for women, where written law specifically excludes women from freedom.

There are 2.4 billion women globally who are born in countries that have written law that restricts them completely, but even more so without a man.

6 billion people believe in a religion that states that women are less human than men

_________________________Original Post_________________________

Infographic Sources

_________________________More Studies_________________________

Study on objectification

Study on empathy

Some Fashion Industry Stats & Sources

Infographic

[binmeister]

Quick question how would huntr/x and the saja boy react towards a fem muscle mommy bodyguard reader as like the saja boys bodyguard or something 👀✨

honestly great question, i think it kinda depends on how fem!bodyguard is as a person

dropping some small loose HCs and thoughts on this - no content warning aside from be ware of completely unformatted thoughts below

if fem!bodyguard is a big softie, i think the girls love you and really suck up to you whenever you're at a shared event and checking in on them to make sure they're okay

probably concerned for your well being because it doesnt seem like you're aware of what the saja boys are but if you are aware of them they're like - wait but you're still working for them? and it's a whole little discussion on how you dont particularly care and want to make sure they still feel protected because imo human fans are scarier than demons could ever be

theres a few times that zoey crashes after an energy high and is just knocked out so the girls have flagged you down to ask if you could help them carry her to their car or to help move her to somewhere comfortable and you do so with the utmost care that when zoey learns about it from the girls she keeps staring at you with big adoring eyes like 'wow..!'

i feel like jinu ends up relying on you a lot more than he realises, the presence of a woman + allowing for emotional vulnerability, you'd unintentionally started to actually mother the saja boys during your time working for them and he knows he can trust you with their safety

highkey i am a believer that mystery always seeks you out so you can run your fingers through his hair, like he just likes to plop his head on your muscular thighs and loves the contrast with how your fingers gently comb through his hair

abby adores you as his gym buddy - he might actually be too excitable over it to the point you have to tell him to take a rest day because it's not healthy to go all the time and he argues and complains about it til your voice gets stern and he tenses up like oh.. oh you're like. serious serious.

it's a pretty common thing to witness in the boys' abode where you're picking baby up and scolding him while keeping him in air jail against his will but he's so just dangling there until you finally put him down after he agrees correct his mistake and then you've placed him back down on his feet and straightened out his clothes with a small apology about being rude

......i feel like a vast majority of people can agree that romance is really into it right- like i'm not crazy here- but he is into it, he likes to admire your figure without you knowing and maybe there's a chance that you've opened up to him about your insecurities at being so big and then he's complimenting you more frequently to make sure you understand he appreciates and sees your beauty when you're occasionally feeling a little out of it

a small thought i have is that when you get stern with the guys about them behaving inappropriately as idols a couple of them start to question their preferences because it's extremely attractive to them and then they're avoiding your gaze for the next week or so bc if they stare at you for too long they get flustered

[mona-risms]

Imagine Rumi with a patient girlfriend? And I'm not talking about "oh, she's an hour late, that's fine, I can still wait." No. I mean patient patient. Considering Rumi is a Demon Hunter and her girlfriend doesn't know about it so sometimes Rumi accidentally misses their planned date around 7 times in a row where you waited for (possibly) hours upon hours, and the only excuse she can give is "idol work".

But to her absolute surprise, in the midst of her ranting her apology to the point that you couldn't even understand what she's saying, you just reach over and cup her face, planting a soft kiss from her forehead down to her lips to make her shut up. She stands there like 🧍🏻‍♀️. And you just give her a small smile then hit her with:

"Calm down. You're apologizing like you failed to save my life from certain death. It's just a date, we have more days ahead of us to plan another one, love. For now, how about we go home and cuddle instead, you look like you need a long rest, yeah?" With the most gentle voice too?? Oh she's marrying you alright.

Oh. Oh she's weak for you :(

Every time she has to go to slay demons and completely miss a date or smth, she always gets way too into her head about it. Like are you gonna hate her? This is like the nth date in a row, how are you not fed up yet? What in the fuck is she supposed to do???? She doesn't wanna lose you ☹️. But every single time she is met with the most patient acceptance known to man, and she really really cannot help but overanalyse that too bc what if you're just being nice?

But then eventually she genuinely just realises that oh. No you're just genuinely patient. You actually mean it. You're not reprimanding her or angry or anything, you don't mind. Hell, you're kissing her without any bitterness whatsoever—you're offering to rest with her!! Even call it a nap date as well :3c bc you can see that she id trying so hard, even if you don't actually know what with. When she realises all of this, her heart feels so so so full and she tears up and cries a bit in your embrace bc oh. She didn't think she'd ever have something like this😞😞😞

I think this would be another main reason why she wants to push the Golden release and create the Golden Honmoon, in this case. Because once that's done and over with, not only will her patterns go away and the people will be safe, but then she can start making up for all the lost time that was taken from her bc of Gwi-Ma's demons popping up all over the place. Once the movie's events are over and done with? She's making sure that every ounce of free time is spent on you and that you are gonna be spoiled in EVERY WAY—gifts, kisses, affections, all the dates you can want!!! All to say thank you for waiting and being patient with her :3c and she'll keep being thankful even after death do you part :3c

[softsunnyy]

I'm having crazy thoughts at the moment 👉🏻👈🏻.

I can't help but imagine Quinn fucking me so hard that I have to beg him to stop, so overstimulated but no matter how much I push, beg or pull away he doesn't care. Going even harder and fast till I go gushing everywhere and almost pass out.

Sorry, I had to 🫣

- Bella 🫶🏻

no bc right now i can't stop thinking about this, i had to write something about it. I'm sorry it took me so long, my love. <3

now i need my man

i can 100% see this starting with something sweet, like you two on the couch, on a completely peaceful day while a movie plays in the background and a few candles leave your home smelling just the way you two like it.

you feel safe, confident, with your legs tangled with his as you caress his chest. It's the ideal situation. God, he even gives you that sleepy, half-smile that makes you think you're on the same page; but it was all part of his plan.

so when you get up to get something to drink and come back, he's already sitting down, but you don't think anything weird about it, not even when he takes you by the waist and gently makes you sit on his lap. You just do it, like second nature, sipping on what you brought while you try to pay attention to the movie again.

and he lets you be, at least for a while, until you set your drink aside and curl up against his chest, far too comfortable. He slides a hand in your hair, gently tugging and drawing your attention. You look up at him, and within seconds, his mouth is on yours in an overwhelming, sweet, slow kiss that melts you as you let yourself get carried away, not noticing how his other hand moves down to your waist, touching you beneath the fabric of your (his) shirt.

and you don't feel it right away, no, but the change is there, in his breathing becoming heavier, his lips moving faster, demanding, and his hands gripping you tighter, claiming his dominance over you while you feel like you're floating, drunk in his kiss, your mind numb, confused, trying to understand what's happening.

then your body moves, you rubbed unconsciously, drawing a stifled moan from his lips, and your skin prickles, and you do it again, expertly rolling your hips, feeling his hand on your body, trying to keep you still. But it's too late, because that primitive part of your head was ignited by Quinn, and now you can't stop. Especially when you feel a part of his pants rub directly against your pussy, stimulating you, making you gasp against his mouth.

your boyfriend is enjoying it, you know it, but what you don't know is that he's fighting the urge to smile at how quickly he can turn you into a nervous wreck. He knows you, what to say, what to do, and when the perfect moment is. He has also trained you; he has trained your body without you realizing it, so that you react every time he touches you with another intention

he knows a deep kiss will make your skin crawl, and he knows you're gonna whimper, that you're gonna get dizzy; because he's seen you in that position a thousand times, so it was the perfect way to confuse you, to start turning you on.

and you don't even suspect, you just keep rubbing yourself, feeling the heat on your face and how your pussy starts to get wet, soaking your panties, and creating a dark patch that gives you away.

and your pace increases, your hips roll, and your tits crash against Quinn's chest, making him have to hold back a deep sigh and his desire to hold you tight and fuck you his way.

he had a different plan today, and he wanted to enjoy you to the fullest, so he'll have to use his patience, even if it's bordering on insanity. So little by little, he begins to undress you, leaving kisses on your skin and murmuring sweet nothings in your ear. trapping you, keeping you in the soft, loving bubble, with small blushes and huge smiles.

you don't even think anything when he shifts position, hovering over you and transmitting his warmth to you; you just let him continue, moving down your neck, leaving small wet kisses while his hands gently grasp your tits, not using your nipples, just massaging, squeezing, and making your body react unconsciously, wanting to rub against his bulge.

and his eyes look at you with love. Don't get me wrong, but he's waiting, taking his time to engrave the image of your body in his mind, with every exposed area of ​​skin, every mole, every mark, as if you were the perfect work of art. And he lets you know it, repeats it over and over again, making you feel on cloud nine, completely sweet, and making you smile from ear to ear. And it's then, in the quiet of his living room, when you're calmer, that he moves his hips once, firm, precise, completely direct, rubbing his bulge against your pussy, still covered only by your panties. And it feels unfair, because he's still wearing his underwear and pants, so you can't feel him as well as you'd like; still, it draws a weak moan from you.

and he moves again, again and again, and again, while his kisses on your neck try to distract you. And Quinn can feel how wet you are, can see your clothes turning a darker color and your inner thighs glistening with your juices. He feels like he might drool at the sight, but he decides to stay in character, gently pulling down your underwear and using his fingers to prepare you, parting your walls, going at a slow, deep, but slightly rougher pace. You whimper, feeling exposed as your walls mold to his fingers, but you enjoy it, your eyes shining and your pussy growing soaked, dripping. Quinn hits your sweet spot, and has you squirming, whimpering, whining for him to let you cum, and he lets you without any problem, something that is rare for him, but you decide not to waste it, cumming on his fingers, letting your juices run down his hand, making a mess little by little.

but this was just the beginning, as he finally managed to leave you more sensitive, worked, stimulated, and when you closed your eyes for a moment, he took the opportunity to finish undressing, his tip hitting your pussy, drawing your attention, making you look at him with your eyes wide open, clouded, surprised, as if you'd forgotten this was still going on. And you tried to ask him for a couple of seconds of rest, but it was useless, because Quinn took advantage of the opportunity and slid into your pussy in a single movement, coming deep, hard, and fast, drawing a loud moan from you, and making your hands go to his shoulders, trying to find some kind of support.

and at first he moved slowly, sliding in and out, completely attentive to how your hole swallowed him, hungry, being received by your slippery, tight, and perfect walls. But his patience started to play tricks on him, and soon he started moving faster and faster, making your juices spurt, your tits bounce, your moans increase, your eyes close, and your hands start scratching his back.

now, in your living room, all you can hear are your moans and the sounds of your bodies colliding, obscenely wet, thanks to your dripping pussy, which is getting wetter and wetter from how fast Quinn is going, hammering inside you, completely forgetting the pity he had for you a moment ago.

and you moan his name like a broken record, getting more and more fucked stupid, unable to say any truly coherent sentences, with some drool escaping your mouth and running down your neck, which caught his attention, causing him to leave kisses there again, licking your drool, and starting to suck fiercely, leaving reddish and purple marks, painting his work of art, and taking advantage of your complete cockdrunk state to do whatever he wants with you.

his hands moved down to your waist, gripping you so tightly it left a mark, and he used you to steady himself, going fast, ignoring your whimpers urging him to slow down. And your pussy throbs, completely sensitive, your swollen, irritated clit rubbing against his body over and over, bringing you closer to your orgasm.

and you try to warn him, to beg for mercy, to even say something, but you can't, and he won't listen to you anymore, not now that he's taken control of your body, making you his once again. So you just let it happen, the knot beginning to form as he breaks you, abusing your cervix and branding his name once again deep inside you.

and you leave reddish lines along his back, which will surely hurt the next day, but right now they do nothing to help you, instead making him even wilder, eager for you, to destroy you, to use you until nothing remains of his sweet girlfriend.

the couch shakes, the romantic atmosphere completely shattered, the sweet words spoken between sighs, like false promises while in the middle he takes the opportunity to tell you what a whore you are for him, letting you be fooled, and letting him use your body as if you were nothing more than a toy. In a perfect balance between compliments and insults that has you whimpering, blushing, your stomach aching, ever closer to cumming for and because of him.

your eyes are glassy now, and you look at him for mercy, for kindness, but he looks at you with a wild look, completely different from the Quinn of a moment ago, and the image is so raw, so delicious that you let yourself go, feeling your walls clench even tighter around his cock as you cum, moaning his name over and over, making him feel powerful, in control of you.

but he doesn't stop, doesn't give you a second to breathe, to rest, and keeps moving at the same pace, with the same stamina, hammering into you hard, watching tears start to run down your cheeks and noticing your legs trembling uncontrollably, trying to close, but finding it impossible since he's in the way.

"Quinnie..." you whimpered, as he brought a hand to your jaw, gripping it with some force, completely possessed by the desire to destroy you.

he just kept moving, using his hours of training, his athletic routine to last, and without even cumming, just watching you crumble in his arms, cumming again and again, losing count, increasingly sensitive, broken, and even losing your voice after begging him so many times to give you a second to rest.

he just kept going, using you, increasingly driven by the image in front of him. His own legs trembling, completely tense, his balls aching and his cock swollen, reddish, wanting to fill you with his cum until your hole overflowed and you could no longer hold it inside.

and when he came, he moaned your name loudly, but even then he didn't stop, instead he kept going, even though his hips trembled, and even though his heart seemed to jump out of his chest. He continued, watching you completely lost, drunk on his cock, whimpering, cumming, surrendering to him after he'd tricked you with a couple of kisses and caresses.

and he wouldn't stop, not until he'd left you almost unconscious, unable to form coherent words, and trembling. So you'll have to prepare yourself, because you're going to end up stuffed with his cum.

all because you let yourself be fooled.

[juyofans]

Hi.. since you asked me to finish this reblog i am back.. (also because i hold this fic dear to my heart so. Let me reread) doing this the cat way! it's 8:40pm on a monday night and i'm listening to billie eilish!!

i mentioned in the first version of this rb that i could already tell this fic was gonna be good from the first sentence. i still agree with that btw!! i feel like it emulates Doom so much like yeah we're cooked bro LMASOWIEJFLWE

it doesn't matter anymore. you've lost the chance to figure out what it had meant.

this is like me forreal right now bc sunwoo's just another ex to me now. HELP

you've been selfish for long enough, you think, indulging in pleasures that should have never been yours. and no matter how tightly you want to continue clinging onto sunwoo's sweet words and empty promises, the little voice in your head drowns it all out in the end. 

FUCKKKK. what yall know about Selfishness (i say as they drag me into the void. the void where gravity!yn and fid!jungwon sit together)

also like. rereading this is reminding me of how i used all of this to cook up that hanahaki plot. i was like She needs to face her consequences and then i proceeded to come up with the most torturous plot ever im so sorry jungwon

you can practically feel the pensiveness in the buzzing. the bated breath, the knit brows, his finger tapping on the table as chanhee waits for your voice to replace the dialing tone over the speaker. you have half a mind to just let it ring.

yeah bro only you can make the sound of a phone call so torturous FAWKKK

something in your chest sparks, a flicker of a flame that lends itself to “we both know—” before you cut yourself off, catching the growing volume and thickness in your voice before chanhee can pick it out and lay it bare. “we both know it was never going to work out like how we wanted.”

the imagery... cat exploding gif..

Sorry i dont know how to do serious reblogs like this. I think u already know how i feel about ur writing though

(heat surges to the bridge of your nose, pressure builds at the back of your eyes. those three minutes had passed, so it was okay now, right? it was okay to let go?)

i forgot if u continue this imagery throughout the rest of the fic but the heat.. the flames.. Ugh...

“ah, i see,” jihoon nods faintly, a spitting image of a cool class representative, and you stifle a snort beneath a hidden smile. as if jihoon didn’t only just get accepted into yg entertainment two months ago. he’s lame as always.

HELP MEEEEDKWJELKFEW dont clock him like that

songs were stories, after all, even without the lyrics. like putting together parts of a puzzle and assembling it piece by piece, it was your job to find what part of the story was untold and fill in the missing words.

me trying to meet the word count on my cover letter for spotify (Sorry.)

sunwoo nods as he hurries to scribble down a few words onto the sheet of paper. the puzzle piece clicks into place. “that’s what i was thinking too. like there’s still something left to remember even if it’s all over, like…” “like even in the hurt, it’s still—“ “—love.”

subtle foreshadowing.. trips over a rock.

sunwoo insists again, but you can sense his fight against his heavy eyelids growing closer by the second, the yawn that he stifles every time he pauses, so you force down the confession, keep your wish tucked away within the flickering candlelight. he would know, right?

NOOOOOOODIWEJFEWJFLKWEFEW geumanhaja..

you contemplate, humming. “birds of a feather?”

JUNGWON i scream as u lock me in the wips closet.

but it wasn’t not really your sunwoo anymore, was it? not really. not since he became more than that kid in the practice room with a pen between his teeth and a metronome in his hand, not since he became synonymous with the brand his name was attached to. and it was unfair of you to expect those kinds of trivial things from someone so far out of your reach now, right?

tigger walking away sad gif..

“i mean, i’m fine,” chanhee says, a hint of ‘of course i take care of myself, who do you think i am?’ in the retort, “but.” he pauses, taking a breath, and you can tell he tests the words on his tongue before he speaks them. “are you sure it’s me you’re worried about?”

CLOCK IT.

the shirt scene is too long for me to copy paste but i just wanted to say you're my thirteenth reason and i will really be reconsidering my lack of commitment to sunwoo because you're making me miss him

"you and me together forever" LIKE HELLOODIWJEFLKJW. dont piss me off. i miss him and his stupid carefree childish energy like there's no thought behind his eyes

ugh i feel like this fic is what i tried to emulate in fid and it didnt really work out like that FUCK its ok i already posted it so i have to live with this regret.

“how could you!” he exclaims, pulling his hand away. “ye of little faith…” sunwoo’s voice goes grave and solemn. “don’t you want to see me in a sexy apron.”

now..hold on.. lightbulb flashing..

“if it doesn’t…” you don’t want to speak it into existence—they’ll do well, they have to. you try to form your words carefully, deliberately, so that they’ll be spoken correctly and convey exactly what it is you mean, but it all comes poorly anyway, clumsy and messy as you trip over your own tongue. “you don’t have to…you know.” your mouth goes dry. “stay.” 

FUCK. FUCKKKKK. the way u phrased the middle sentence. ugh..

sunwoo is a star, you think—no, you know. you’ve known for quite some time now, how he was bright and shining and meant for things lightyears away from anything you could ever see, and yet here he was instead: inside your apartment late at night in your bed, talking about how he was ready to fall back down to earth to be with you. like you were tying him down to somewhere he was never meant to stay, he was never meant to be.

its giving my sunwoo healing fic (that will probably never get finished.. shibal..)

currently reading the voicemail scene and ugh. UGH..... he's so unknowing in this fic and it makes me so sad. i wish i had voicemails like this irl and not ones from the lady from my bank asking me to sign up for a credit card again

i want to know what ur reasoning was for framing the scenes like this. like ik they're before and after but like the specific reasons for where each scene is bc they dont seem chronological yk. or maybe u already mentioned/implied it in the fic but im too lazy to read into it MMSDLKJWFEW

the swingset scene is giving tornado warnings FUCK.

also spotify is giving me the worst soundtrack as i read this btw like its really happy music and idk where its coming from but i dont feel like changing it

maybe it’s the way it brings you back to that classroom and that swingset and everything you know you can never go back to; or maybe, despite the voicemail that you still come back to on the loneliest of nights and the wrinkled shirt that remains crumpled in the corner of your room, a part of you knows that the salt in the wound would be nothing compared to digging an even deeper, uglier wound in a cut scabbed over. that’s only what it could feel like, if you listened to him before you were ready. 

the scab imagery.. lets all just k!ll ourselves okay..

and usually when you wake up from a good dream, you fall asleep again soon after, just to catch the traces of the dream before it’s gone forever. but you’re trying, slowly in your own way, to not do things like that anymore. after all, eventually the shirt needs to become just another shirt, and your voicemail will one day go back to having no more recordings saved. 

me core (but im not healed im just indifferent about everything now)

it’s all wrapped up in pretty lyricism and intricate metaphors to keep the listener guessing for the true meaning, but you’ve always understood him best when it was through song

FAWKKK WHAT SONG IS THIS. is this something real that he's written or were u just making up stuff.. might be a fake fan for not knowing his solo songs

and yet you were the one who had smeared the paint before it could finish drying, the one who had felt so alone in watching the wear of a bridge you had deemed impossible to save. and at the end of the day, maybe the fault fell partly on both of you, stepping onto that unsteady footing together with the rope of the bridge fraying with the weight of time, but you were the one who had taken that last step to the other end without him even knowing.

fuck my stupid baka life.

lit match in your hands, you had burned that bridge for what you’d perceived to be the greater good, to destroy it before it could collapse and take both of you with it. an act of cowardice disguised as selflessness, you’re left to stare at nothing but the ashes and cinders you had set aflame. but in the wreckage, only after everything do you finally understand what that indiscernible emotion was in his eyes when he looked at you, what he had meant that night by choosing to love you.

HELL YEAH FLAME IMAGERY

your lip trembles as you press the phone harder to your ear, heat surging to the bridge of your nose, the back of your eyes. you try to keep your voice steady but it comes out watery instead, words spilling over before you know it. “hi. it’s me.” and despite everything, gravity fails, just for an instant, and you and sunwoo collide into each other once again.

^ my honest opinion reading that btw

erm i dont know how to end these. i feel like i've already said too much but like. ur worldbuilding is really good or whatever.. kicks rocks.. u made me want him again i hate it here

gravity (is the distance between you and me)

kim sunwoo x gn!reader

you tell yourself that this is for the best, that you’re only doing what needs to be done. even if it hurts now, even if it never stops hurting, maybe this is truth you’ve been running from this whole time. maybe this is just acceptance. — or: you break up with sunwoo because you love him, because you refuse to let him fall back down to earth with you; everything that follows after is an inescapable gravity.

idolverse!sunwoo x non-celeb!reader, exes!au, mostly reader-centric // 13.6k // angst with a teeny bit of fluff in between // told in alternating past and present timeskips, vaguely canon timeline but don’t look too close // 🪐fic playlist (for full experience)

if you enjoyed the fic, please leave feedback!

prologue. (love is…)

it occurs to you on a sunday night, the second-hand of the clock only a few ticks away from midnight, that this was never meant to be.

you try to not hear echoes of sunwoo’s voice in your head, admonishments scolding you gently to go to sleep, but it plays in your head regardless. truthfully, it had always sat on the edge of nagging, but you supposed that when it was him, it ended up more endearing than anything else: the pout in his lips, the scrunch in his brow, the worry in his eyes as he'd brush a strand of loose hair out of your face. 

there was always something else in his gaze, something you could never quite pinpoint—like he saw something you couldn't, like his gaze had stripped you bare of everything you'd put up to protect yourself. you try not to chase the rabbit's trail thinking about it, shoving the ghost of the memory beneath a quick, heated blink of the eyes.

it doesn't matter anymore. you've lost the chance to figure out what it had meant.

you almost laugh at the reminder; it seems you haven’t changed, even now. greed had always been your deadliest sin, despite everything. you want, and want, and want.

you want what you can’t have, you tell yourself, but you stop at the thought. that's not it. 

pause, rewind, play.

because the truth of the matter is, you just want what you don't deserve. you don’t deserve this—the sun-soaked kitchens, the teasing glances, the rhythmic sway in each others' arms as you wait for the rice cooker to beep, your timer set for the oven to ring, the world to finish turning from gold to dark blue to midnight. it's softness that makes your lungs collapse in on themselves, tenderness that burns your skin from even the gentlest brush.

you've been selfish for long enough, you think, indulging in pleasures that should have never been yours. and no matter how tightly you want to continue clinging onto sunwoo's sweet words and empty promises, the little voice in your head drowns it all out in the end. 

it's not supposed to be painless; it's rational, practical, inevitable, but so is snipping off the dead leaves off your plant after they've died, tying a tourniquet to a limb before cutting it off to prevent the infection from spreading. 

(it's for his own good. you should have done this a long time ago.)

so you pick up your phone, send a single text message to sunwoo, and wait; your knuckles turn white with the knife in your hands, like the first press of the blade to your skin. tie the knot tight, grit your teeth, you can never go back to what once was.

it's 12:03AM when your phone lights up again, eyes burning in the brightness. you can only watch as you bleed.

after. (love is sacrifice.)

chanhee calls you monday, the morning after.

it’s not so much that you weren’t expecting it, moreso that you were hoping that you’d be proven wrong, that maybe chanhee could have let it go, let it all play out without any extra fuss, but thinking back on it now, you suppose the mere thought of that was already a hopeless endeavor. phone vibrating on the counter, the caller id blares ‘choi chanhee’ in big white letters, predictably incessant. 

you can practically feel the pensiveness in the buzzing. the bated breath, the knit brows, his finger tapping on the table as chanhee waits for your voice to replace the dialing tone over the speaker. you have half a mind to just let it ring.

after all, what more could he really say? it was all over and done with, and he’d just be wasting his breath trying to convince you otherwise. but still, your phone continues to ring, and despite your better judgment, your finger slides to accept.

(if you were going to start it, you might as well go until the very end of the aftermath.)

“hello?”

chanhee lets out a sharp breath, his voice falling to a hush. “are you serious?”

not even a ‘hello’ back, you lament silently. your bottom lip catches between your teeth, nail picking at the loose skin on your thumb as you try to form a reply on your tongue. “about what?”

he calls out your name in response, exasperated. you can practically see the wrinkles knit tight in his forehead, each word stressed more than the last as he continues to scold you. “don’t play dumb with me,” chanhee retorts. “did you seriously break up with sunwoo?”

ah. straight to the point, as expected. you shift your gaze to the clock on the wall, focusing on the rhythmic ticking as it works its way through a new hour. your breathing slows to match, heart steeling, your voice thinning out into something you know you can control. “he told you?”

he scoffs, harsh breath crackling over the speaker. “he didn’t need to. he’s locked himself in his room since last night and won’t talk to anyone else. it isn’t hard to figure out when you were the last person he called.”

the influx of questions almost come pouring out before you bite your tongue—doesn’t he have schedules today? do you know if he slept last night? did he even eat at all since then— “oh,” you manage to breathe out.

“what are you doing?” he asks plainly. it’s a simple question, and it’s one you don’t know how to answer.

“i…” you chew your bottom lip, eyes picking out a small scuff on the side of your coffee table. funny, you don’t remember it being there before you had moved. “i’m not sure what you mean.”

“don’t do that, you know exactly what i mean,” chanhee counters back. “why did you break up with him? and don’t give me some bullshit excuse, because we’d both know you’d be lying.”

the clock continues to tick on the wall, and you drag your eyes over to it once more, its needle in a constant state of motion. three minutes. you could unravel the truth to chanhee in three minutes, at least the parts that really matter. choi chanhee is many things—nosy, opinionated, a gossip, but he isn’t tactless. no matter who he ends up spilling his complaints to about you and sunwoo and this entire situation, you know not a single word from his lips will ever reach sunwoo’s ears. no matter how close you and chanhee are, you would have ended the call then and there if you weren’t certain of it.

“it’s for the best,” you say softly, and it sounds so simple when you put it like that. like the nights toiling over sending that final text were all for nothing because this was just how it was meant to be, like you were just fighting the inevitable.

“you can’t actually believe that.”

something in your chest sparks, a flicker of a flame that lends itself to “we both know—” before you cut yourself off, catching the growing volume and thickness in your voice before chanhee can pick it out and lay it bare. “we both know it was never going to work out like how we wanted.”

you tense, waiting for chanhee’s incoming rebuke, but he goes quiet for a few moments before trying to speak again, slowly and carefully. “what happened?”

“nothing happened,” you stress, shaking your head, and you smear over the memory that flashes by, the hurt and loneliness that fades into nothing more than streaks of color and silence. “i just did what i should have done a long time ago.”

“you—”

“i have to go, chanhee.” choke it back. hold it in. “take care of him, okay?”

chanhee makes a noise of protest, but you hang up before he gets the chance to say anything more. you try not to look at the clock on the wall again—you already know those three minutes had passed a long time ago.

(heat surges to the bridge of your nose, pressure builds at the back of your eyes. those three minutes had passed, so it was okay now, right? it was okay to let go?)

on monday morning, six minutes past ten, you sit tourniquet-tied in a pool of dried blood of your own making, and you cry.

before. (love is youth—)

it all starts out as whispers at first.

rumors of a new transfer student spread quickly through the halls, jokes about new competition within the school said just as easily and nonchalantly as discussing the new main course added onto the lunch menu, or the latest news about which celebrity they think would make it onto dispatch headlines within the next year. it’s routine, at this point, their gossip becoming just another common occurrence during the school year. all of it is just too familiar, too predictable, your classmates’ voices droning on in your head as their gossip goes through one ear and out the other.

the new kid gets introduced during homeroom first period, and the whispers grow to a murmur. the clacking of the drumsticks from a couple kids in the back of the class stop, and the boys playing guitar in the corner of the room go silent, eyes bright and watching.

he introduces himself as kim sunwoo, an applied music major, and you wonder if he’s just another kid wanting to fulfill their idol dream—a trainee? a trainee-wannabe? there certainly weren’t a lack of those in the applied music department, and at a school like hanlim, most transfer students ended up being one of the two. repressing a sigh, you bury your head inside the crook of your arm, slumping against your desk. as if there weren’t enough empty desks scattered around the classroom belonging to students skating by their classes in favor of trainee and idol life.

you’ve heard too many whispering aspirations from other trainees about gaining fame and popularity, thousands of adoring fans loving them through their music, but you know it never really is about the music—it’s always just a means to an end, not that you could really fault them for it. everyone was working hard in different ways for their dreams, but after months of being paired with and surrounded by people who were barely around and hard to reach with a noticeable lack of passion for the same music you came to hanlim for, you’ve grown a little tired of it all. 

even the class president, park jihoon, couldn’t be excluded from that nasty habit. with more absences than attendances on his record, you had to wonder if all that struggle as a trainee at such a major entertainment company was worth it. but still, at least he tried his best at his job whenever he was here: leading the class, keeping everyone under control whenever they inevitably got frisky, and—(your eyes catch him walking over to the sunwoo’s desk and introducing himself)—making small talk with the new kids.

“where are you from?” jihoon asks, head tilted curiously. “seoul?”

sunwoo nods, and from the bits of conversation you overhear from a few desks away, it’s just as you guessed. the transfer to hanlim was only to get him one step closer to becoming an idol. you can see it all so clearly, another empty desk, another dream of wanting fame.

“are you in a company, then?”

“no, i…” sunwoo rubs the back of his neck, shaking his head half in a stupor. you can practically hear his thoughts in his poorly-veiled expression, the culture shock of the applied music department in a school like hanlim striking him swiftly. “not yet, i’m looking for one now.”

“ah, i see,” jihoon nods faintly, a spitting image of a cool class representative, and you stifle a snort beneath a hidden smile. as if jihoon didn’t only just get accepted into yg entertainment two months ago. he’s lame as always.

the boy sitting behind sunwoo chirps in after, asking him questions and starting up conversation along with another kid in their column. chin rested on your hand, you turn your head towards the window again, tuning out your classmates in favor of watching the clouds outside drift slowly along with the wind. 

(he was planning on being a trainee, after all; there wasn’t really a point in becoming invested in someone you knew you were never going to see much of again.)

except, a couple of weeks later, your teacher announces a month-long songwriting project, and sunwoo’s name gets called out next to yours as random pairs are chosen as partners. he meets your eyes from across the room, giving you a small nod of acknowledgement, and you try not to let the apprehension show on your face when you give him a polite smile in response.

you don’t even know if he knew how to write lyrics.

“so we’re writing lyrics given our assigned theme, right?” sunwoo asks after class, chair pulled up to your desk as you brainstorm for ideas.

you nod, peering over at his sheet cautiously. “do you have any ideas on how to start?”

“well,” sunwoo starts, lips pursed as he taps his pencil on his paper. “the theme is ‘love,’ right? so we could do anything about that, but…”

“it’s too broad of a topic,” you finish, frowning.

“yeah,” his eyes flicker to yours, mouth gaping open slightly, his eyes a little wide. “exactly.”

you hum in thought, a few seconds passing in silence before you pull your wired earphones out of your pocket, offering him an earbud after. you figured if you were partners, you might as well work hard together. “let’s start with this, then,” you try. “what do you think when you listen to it?”

songs were stories, after all, even without the lyrics. like putting together parts of a puzzle and assembling it piece by piece, it was your job to find what part of the story was untold and fill in the missing words.

sunwoo furrows his brows, leaning closer. the earbud wire dangles precariously over the desk, headphone jack connected to your phone in the middle. breath held, you try to ignore the close proximity in favor of focusing on the chords, the bass, the melody. even with just the guide melody, each note sounds like a confession, like a secret waiting to be unveiled, wanting to be stripped and laid in the open.

“it’s a sad song,” you comment, breaking the silence, “but it’s like…it sounds like there’s more to it than that?” you let the question hang in the air, looking at him half-expectant.

“it almost sounds…” sunwoo begins, trailing off as he mulls over his words.

“bittersweet?” 

sunwoo nods as he hurries to scribble down a few words onto the sheet of paper. the puzzle piece clicks into place. “that’s what i was thinking too. like there’s still something left to remember even if it’s all over, like…”

“like even in the hurt, it’s still—“

“—love.”

before. (love is lonely.)

party streamers littered on the floor throughout the living room, the metallic gold strips of paper and plastic scattered amongst silver glint in the darkness, catching in the lowlight. balloons of all different types of assortments were sprinkled throughout your apartment as well, regular colorful latex balloons floating above your couch and set atop your coffee table and fallen beneath your stools, while the fancier balloons had been pinned on an empty wall of your kitchen, ‘happy birthday’ with an extra exclamation mark and heart balloon spelled out in big bubble letters.

sat at the kitchen table, you watch in silence as a small candle flickers in front of you, placed in a single cupcake that your friends had insisted on saving for you after the party. 

(for when he calls, they had said gently, pushing the cupcake and the unopened candle towards you. you can blow it out with him, make your birthday wish together.)

it paints you orange, the soft glow just warm enough for you to barely feel it as shadows dance on the table. ten minutes away from midnight, you hold your breath, something in your chest deflating as you close your eyes, readying yourself to blow out the candle.

your phone lights up, ringing; you scramble to salvage what lingering traces of hope you have left.

you try not to think too much of it when the incoming call shows up as a voice call rather than video like it usually is, but your greeting slips out a little too quickly, too obvious to tell that you were waiting for him to call. “hi, sunwoo.”

“hey,” sunwoo greets back, words spoken slowly, his voice tracing the edge of a drowsy rasp. any trace of bringing up the voice call goes out the window. if this had been any normal circumstance, you would have teased him for mistapping his screen, playfully badger him to switch over to video call so you could see him in all his bare-faced glory. (but then again, a small voice in the back of your mind interrupts,  if this were any normal circumstance, he would have just been here instead of across the world.) you push the thought away; a small drop of wax begins to melt down the candle.

“we just got back to our hotel,” he tells you, and you can see it clearly almost as if you were there. the contents of their luggage messily splayed about the carpeted hotel floor, outfits for tomorrow draped on the chairs, and dirty clothes piled in a hamper in the corner. you can faintly hear a shower being turned on in the background, and sunwoo comments on it before you can ask. “can you believe this? changmin-hyung kicked me out of the bathroom as soon as we came into our room,” he complains, and you know that his lip is jutted out in a pout of indignation at the injustice of it all. “he said that i’d take too long and use up all the hot water if i went first.”

“well…” you chide softly, a smile faint on your lips. “he’s not exactly wrong, sunwoo.”

sunwoo whines, and you can hear him kick the sheet on the mattress. “you’re siding with him?”

“sorry,” and you don’t sound apologetic in the slightest. “you know i can’t lie.”

he grumbles something unintelligible as you breathe out something resembling a laugh. silence lulls for a few seconds, your shadow long on the tabletop, and you try to harden the twist in your gut, gathering the courage.

“i—”

“today—”

you stop, and so does he.

“oh, you go first,” sunwoo offers, but you hesitate, offering back.

“no, it’s okay, you go.”

sunwoo insists again, but you can sense his fight against his heavy eyelids growing closer by the second, the yawn that he stifles every time he pauses, so you force down the confession, keep your wish tucked away within the flickering candlelight. he would know, right?

“no, i mean it—what were you going to say? how was your day? how was the flight?”

there’s a moment of uncertainty where sunwoo tries to decide whether or not to continue the exchange, but he gives in eventually. “the flight was good,” he begins, albeit still reluctant. “the plane food was better than usual, surprisingly.”

you hum in acknowledgement, encouraging him to continue.

“and i fell asleep an hour in and—chanhee-hyung,” he interrupts himself, suddenly remembering. “i fell asleep and chanhee took these photos of me and—”

“were you drooling?” you guess, sympathetic.

“how did you—i mean no! i was not drooling!”

“chanhee’s newshots will never lie, you know.”

“ugh,” sunwoo groans. “remind me why you’re friends with him again?”

you contemplate, humming. “birds of a feather?”

(chanhee had actually sent you the photos earlier this morning, along with the text “happy birthday, here’s a loser as your gift.” he followed it up with an additional message of “your loser…i guess.”)

“oh, speaking of birds,” sunwoo adds, “that reminds me. i saw two ducks swimming in the river today. mandarin ducks, i think.”

“oh?”

“yeah.” his voice grows quieter, almost embarrassed as he mumbles, “they reminded me of you.”

you go still. you try to fight the hardened knot in your stomach from softening and twisting further. he’s just a hopeless romantic, you tell yourself, but the knot wrings tighter, creeping up into your chest the more you try to not think about it. mandarin ducks, the symbol of love.

(“they mate for life, you know?”)

sunwoo tries to change the subject, ears surely burning red as he stammers his way to the next topic while half-muffled into a pillow. “anyway, i didn’t call you too late, did i? it’s three a.m. over here, and i wasn’t sure. i didn’t wake you up, or anything?”

your ears ring as you swallow hard, eyes burning as you look at the clock on the wall. it ticks, once. “no, it just turned midnight here.” 

(you suddenly remember that chanhee had sent you another message afterwards, one that you never opened properly to read. “he’s said happy birthday to you already, right?” you had wanted to open it when you could respond with a “yes.”)

“oh, okay,” sunwoo smiles over the phone, love and affection still tangible even through the tiredness in his voice, the drowsiness that permeates through the speaker. “that’s good to hear. you should probably sleep soon, though, i don’t want to keep you up too late.”

“yeah,” you say, barely audible. were you expecting too much? “changmin should probably be done by now, too.”

“hey,” he frowns. “you okay?”

“yeah, i’m okay. just tired,” you tell him, tight-lipped as you smile.

“we never got to talk about your day,” sunwoo mentions, a reminder with gentle insistence. even on the verge of sleep, he was still trying.  “i’m free after dry rehearsal, so we can call again tomorrow night? i wanna hear about it first thing.”

you draw in a breath to agree, but something else slips out instead, the one thing you had tried to keep contained since the beginning. maybe you had brought this upon yourself, holding out for it until midnight slipped between your fingers, the hope in your chest slowly unfurling. you wonder if it was obvious, the remnants scattered at your feet.

"sunwoo," you call softly. the line goes quiet. you almost regret it, the words catching in the back of your throat when you try to speak them, but you imagine what it would be like if you forced your tongue to form them anyway, awkward and wooden and hurt. “i…” it was my birthday, today. did you know? did you forget?

by the kitchen, the big trash bag tied to the outside of your trash can is filled to the brim with plastic cups and paper plates. there’s still wrapping paper you need to throw away left on the counters, leftovers that need to be transferred and stored and put in the fridge. you wonder if you would have felt better about the hassle if sunwoo was there with you—to toss an empty cup into the open bag from across the room, to listen to you talk about your favorite memories from the celebration, to turn off the final light with you at the end of it all. like the old times.

even on call, he could have done most of those things, maybe even save you time from giving him a chiding look when he’d inevitably miss throwing the cup into  the trash bag by half a foot. he never really had to be here, he had just always been with you, in one way or another.

but it wasn’t not really your sunwoo anymore, was it? not really. not since he became more than that kid in the practice room with a pen between his teeth and a metronome in his hand, not since he became synonymous with the brand his name was attached to. and it was unfair of you to expect those kinds of trivial things from someone so far out of your reach now, right?

so the question remains a lump as you swallow it down—close your eyes, blink back the tears, it's your fault in the end, anyway—and smile. "no, nevermind. you must be tired, you should sleep soon."

“are you sure—“

“bye, sunwoo.” 

you watch as the reflection of the flame trembles in the small pool in the center of the cupcake; the wax has long since melted onto the frosting. you blow it out, and the candle leaves only a trace of smoke curling in the air in its wake—silent, alone.

it wasn’t so much that sunwoo had forgotten your birthday, but it was everything that it encapsulated, everything it makes you realize. how he was so much bigger than this, than you, how you shouldn’t have expected him to remember every little thing when he already has so much on his plate and a hundred more important matters to worry about. didn’t you hear the rasp in his voice? the exhaustion that coated each word? how he still took the time to call you at three a.m even after a full day of work and schedules?

you place the melted candle into the trash, carving out the tainted top with an extra knife lying on the counter. don’t be a bother. don’t hinder him with needless things.

the next morning, sunwoo calls in a panic, hurried apologies blurring all his words together in a flurry as he frantically promises to make it up to you when he comes home. you tell him it’s fine, you knew he was tired and busy and you didn’t want him to worry about it, but the soft assurance can’t hide the underlying hurt that splinters between him and you.

and he does keep his promise when he returns. the day after the plane arrives home, sunwoo’s first order of business is to insist on a full day spent together, making it his mission to be at your beck and call the entire time. he showers you with countless presents from his trip overseas and twice as much affection for each day that he was gone, but even underneath all the cheery smiles and excited banter, you can’t shake the feeling from that night. the mess on the floor, the shadows distorted in orange light.

it never really is quite the same, after that.

after. (love is a martyr.)

life goes on; it always does.

not much changes, at least nothing that isn’t glaringly obvious. you throw yourself into your work like you always have, going to countless songwriting camps and workshops, sending in drafts of songs to a&r teams of various companies only to be rejected then revised and then offered again for other songs and artists by other companies, a continuous cycle that seems to blur all the following days together. the only difference is that your phone stays eerily quiet—no scheduled ding at lunchtime reminding you to eat, no pictures shared throughout the day, no good night phone call to lull you to sleep.

though, you still talk to chanhee from time to time, if only because of his persistent insistence on the matter.

“we’re recording tomorrow,” he mentions, voice crackling over the speaker. you pause for a split second over a half-open cardboard box, hand faltering over the frayed edge of the flap. you’d only recently gotten around to unpacking the rest of your boxes from your move months ago; it wasn’t as if you were too busy to get around to it, but you suppose a part of you wanted to prolong the finality of it all, whether consciously or not. and on this wednesday afternoon on a day off, you figured it was better to do it now than never at all.

you let out an “oh”  in response, grabbing a few things from the box and placing it on the floor to reorganize later. “another comeback?”

chanhee’s chair squeaks as he hums, leaning back. he was in his practice room at the company—you can tell by the way he doesn’t whisper his words to you like they were a secret kept and hidden away. not like whenever he calls you at the dorm, careful of what wounds may open up again if someone were to overhear. “the teasers should be released soon.”

“you seem busy, lately,” you comment distantly, placing the phone on the table and setting it to speaker as you collect as many mini decorative plates and bowls in your hands before you stand up, ready to place them in various places around the living room and kitchen. remnants of the afternoon’s rain slips down the window glass, clouds casting the sky and your apartment a wash of dull gray. “first the tour, then a japanese album, now a comeback—are you sure you’re okay? you’re still taking care of yourself, right?”

“i mean, i’m fine,” chanhee says, a hint of ‘of course i take care of myself, who do you think i am?’ in the retort, “but.” he pauses, taking a breath, and you can tell he tests the words on his tongue before he speaks them. “are you sure it’s me you’re worried about?”

you place a bowl down on the windowsill a little harsher than you mean to. “chanhee.”

“sorry.”

chanhee at least sounds apologetic when he says it, but he interrupts the silence that falls soon after slowly, tentatively asking. “you’re going to listen to it though, right?”

you swallow hard, breathing out a long sigh as you pick up the phone again, holding it to your ear as you speak. “of course i am. did you even need to ask?”

“no,” he replies, a second’s pause where you think he shakes his head. “i just wanted to hear it from you for certain. to hear that you were still listening to us.”

 ‘to sunwoo.’ the words go unspoken, lying heavy in the air. it’s almost cruel, the way chanhee picks and pulls at the confession you have hidden like a wound just finished scabbing over, especially when he knows your answer just as well as you do. of course you would still be listening to sunwoo—that’s what you had promised him, way back when.

(the memory flashes by in an instant. the chill of a cool spring night, the squeak of the swing, the dim golden light of the street lamp above. you can still feel it, sometimes, the condensation slick on your fingertips, the bite of cold metal through your palm—the warmth, in spite of that.)

a small part of you whispers, what were promises really worth, in the end? you aren’t the same person you used to be, and neither is he. sixteen is a far cry from where you are in your twenties, the weight of the years lived through making you let go of the things a teenage-you wouldn’t have ever dreamed of—and that was normal, letting bits and pieces of your past selves be carried away by the passage of time. you know the same holds true for him, too.

but still. even if everything else had changed, you feel like it’s your duty, almost. to always be listening to him till the end.

“i have to go, chanhee,” you tell him, quiet. he makes a small noise over the phone, and before he can apologize, you interrupt with a small, “you’re fine. i just need to finish unpacking my stuff, and i promised myself i’d finish it all today.”

“you still haven’t unpacked?” he asks, baffled. “it’s been months?”

“i know,” you sigh, giving a little shrug. “i’ve just never gotten around to it. that’s why i have to finish it today or else i know i’ll never get back to it again.”

chanhee tells you to take care of yourself, to which you dryly remark to focus on following your own advice first and you say your farewells goodnaturedly, pressing to end the call.

it’s like a switch flips, silence falling almost immediately throughout the apartment, the heaviness in your chest weighted down even further in your solitude. you run a finger along the textured edge of the cardboard flap again, staring blankly at the items still wrapped tight in the box. a breath—in, then out, and then you blink it away, getting to work.

the box of posters and prints gets emptied out first, a roll of tape by your side as you hang up any remaining decorations that you’d left to a later affair when you’d first moved into the apartment. afterwards comes the books that you shelve carefully in alphabetical order in the small slot beneath the tv, then the living room curtains, the pack of postcards and holiday wishes kept in a tin case for safekeeping, the old journals you wrote in years ago and never looked back on since. you sometimes wonder if you should just throw them away, but you could never bring yourself to do it; you try to chalk it up to being too attached to the idea of the memories, even if you could never truly look at them again.

you heave the final box into your bedroom, hours later, huffing as you set it down in front of the drawers. sliding the bottom drawer open, the crumpled pile of clothes stuffed inside stares back at you. outside the window, golden hour peaks through your blinds, the sunset shedding just enough light for you to see in the dimness of your room. you crouch down onto the floor, knees knocking against the wood as you slowly take each article of clothing out, one by one to refold.

it was all clothes that you could afford to spare a second glance at, old shirts and pants that you never truly wore on a daily basis, clothes that were kept as another ‘just in case.’ and like the postcards and the journals and everything else in those boxes, the clothes crammed in that small space just seemed like something you kept choosing to not look at, to refuse to address in any way but in brief memory. you had told yourself that you’d always come back to it whenever you’d unpack the rest of the box of clothes, but looking back on it, maybe that was just a way of comforting yourself amidst the avoidance.

still, in the faint darkness of the room, you take each shirt out carefully, smoothing out the wrinkles and folding each crease to be in its proper shape. you had forgotten some of them existed, drawing out a small smile when you see the old mickey mouse shirt your mom had gotten you on her trip to disneyland, the student-made shirts from your high school graduating class, the club shirts you had joined in college. each refolded shirt gets stacked onto a pile beside the box, a reminder to go back and put the clothes from the box back in the drawer as well, but when you pull out the last shirt jammed in the far end of the drawer, you stop.

it’s nothing special, really, just a faded pink t-shirt with what seems like some semblance of a barely legible logo printed onto the front, but you clutch the fabric between your fingers, a memory from long ago surging back.

(“sunwoo…”

“yeah?” sunwoo pokes his head around the corner, morning sun dyeing his black hair a shade of light brown. he has a towel half-folded in his hands, corners lined up unevenly with one another. “what’s up?”

you frown, partially because you see a very near future of refolding all of the laundry he didn’t pay enough attention to, and partially because of the thing in your hands. “...you didn’t happen to put that one vintage white shirt you had in the latest pile, right?”

he frowns, eyebrows scrunching as he thinks. “i don’t know, maybe? why?”

slowly, as if to make him bear witness, you present to him his formerly treasured white shirt, freshly washed and dried, now dyed a clean shade of pale pink. “you put them in with my reds.”

sunwoo’s mouth gapes open just slightly, a small ‘ah’ escaping his lips. “i’m guessing we can’t do takebacksies on that?”

you groan, smothering your face into the shirt as you let out a long, exasperated “kim sunwoo…”

he tosses the towel in his hands onto the edge of the hamper as he steps into the laundry room, taking a closer look at it. “hey, it’s not even a big deal!” sunwoo reasons, trying to gently pry the shirt from your hands, but you wave it around accusingly before he gets a chance to get a firm grip on it.

“what do you mean,” you stress, waving the shirt that much more vigorously. “it was vintage! who knows how much you spent on this damn thing! and now it’s…” your eyes fall to it, defeated. “pink…”

“you know what, though?” he begins, taking your hands in his, and you meet his gaze, doubtful. “this is good. i’ve been wanting to give you one of my shirts anyway.”

“wha—”

sunwoo’s eyes light up, holding your hands excitedly. “it’s like, symbolic, you know? your shirt with my shirt dyed all together, it’s like…” he pauses, giving you a cheeky smile. “it’s like it’s you and me together forever.”

you can’t control the giggle that escapes after he says it, letting go of the shirt as you smack him lightly with bubbling laughter between your lips. as infectious as his smile is, dust floating in the streams of sunlight between, you call him lame for the cheesy comment because he is—he is lame for coming over to your place on his rare weekend off and of all the things he could do, he offers to fold your laundry together while simultaneously ruining one of his pieces of clothing in the process of trying to help, and then spins it in a way where none of it really matters because at the end of the day he knows it’s always just going to be him and you.

“and also, i just really want to see you in another one of my shirts.”

you throw the abandoned towel from the hamper into his face and tell him to go fold it instead, affection ever-present in your eyes. lame.)

that morning seems so far away when you think of it now. you bring the shirt to your face again—maybe for nostalgia’s sake, maybe to get some trace of what once was. wrinkles littered throughout the fabric, the smell of old wood from being stuffed in a drawer for months permeates through the shirt; darkness falls in the room as the sun fully sets, leaving only a sliver of dark orange lining the horizon.

you remember it, still. the scent of freshly washed fabric softener and the soft morning light and the heap of other clothes you and sunwoo had painstakingly gone over twice to make sure nothing else had leaked through and been dyed other colors, playful and teasing. you wonder what he would say to you if he saw you now, sitting on the floor with piles of clothes folded even with the wrinkles still tight. what he would say to you, if you listened.

and when you hold the shirt still for a second longer, breathing it in again, you realize that even the small traces of his old cologne were gone, too, all washed out with time.

you remember it all, and none of it is there anymore.

before. (love is like clouds, like fog.)

it’s a bit floaty, how the night comes to an end.

(sunwoo had arrived at your place around one a.m., hands shoved in his jacket pockets as he rocked back slightly on his feet, giving you a half-cheeky half-abashed grin. “i don’t suppose you’d be in the mood for a midnight snack, would you?”

already clad in warm pajamas and almost all finished washing up, you had stared at sunwoo for a long moment, slowly blinking, before creaking your door open wider and stepping to the side. “it’s cold. do you want ramyun?”)

he’d come immediately after practice, the sessions where they’d spent the entire day at the studio and only managed to come home at the insistence of their managers. it was for something they were preparing for, you know that for sure, so you hold your tongue from chiding him for not calling you ahead of time and instead shuffle to your kitchen, pot clanging onto the stove.

he was under enough stress as of late; you tried to support him in the ways you could, no matter how little they were.

when you both finish the two packs of ramyun and he offers to wash the pot, you shoo him away with a threatening slap of the pink rubber gloves by the sink, telling him to go wash up instead under the pretense of his post-practice sweat stinking up your entire apartment. sunwoo gasps, retorting that he smelled perfectly fine, but you give him a single look and he trudges away into the hallway, a weak indignant kick to the floor as he mumbles under his breath.

it never really comes up directly, the topic of disbandment, from you or from him. you talk of the preparation of road to kingdom, the exhaustion and stress that comes along with it, the weight its potential success carries unspoken between it all. you’re not entirely sure if the avoidance of the topic is deliberate on his part or not, but you try not to push for it too much. you know just as well as he does, and neither of you try to make it anything more than that.

“you know what,” he starts, later in the night when both of you are washed up and curled up in bed. “i’ve been thinking about it recently; it wouldn’t be so bad.”

you raise a curious brow, propping your head up as you turn to get a better look at him. “what wouldn’t?”

“you know, becoming a house husband.”

“sunwoo,” you blink. “what.” it was way too late for him to just be saying shit like this.

“i am just saying!” sunwoo gestulates dramatically with a hand, trying to prove his point. “if it doesn’t work out, i can definitely do the cooking and cleaning around this place while you go to work.”

“you can’t even clean up after yourself.”

“i can, i just don’t want to!”

you cast him a doubtful look, one filled with the knowledge that eric still complains daily about the pile of clothes tossed in the living room that are definitely sunwoo’s no matter how hard he tries to deny it, and that changmin loses half a year of his life every time he discovers another face mask sunwoo had slapped onto the wall or ceiling of their dorm room, and that the electricity bill at their dorm would run them to mere pennies if younghoon was never there to turn off the lights that sunwoo was supposed to. “is there a difference…”

“yes!” sunwoo insists, a strangely adamant look on his face. “i could totally do it. you would come home from a long and busy day of work and i’d have your entire dinner hot on the stove with a warm bath ready for you—you wouldn’t even have to lift a finger if i was there.”

you place a hand slowly on his, a placating gesture. “baby…” you coo, appeasing, and sunwoo tries to control his expression to keep up the indignancy. poorly, with the way he almost fumbles his entire stance at the mere mention of the petname, but at least you can tell he’s trying his hardest. “i think you’d burn my entire apartment down. or flood it, depending on which one goes horribly wrong first.”

“how could you!” he exclaims, pulling his hand away. “ye of little faith…” sunwoo’s voice goes grave and solemn. “don’t you want to see me in a sexy apron.”

“if i wanted to see you in a sexy apron, i would just give one to you.”

and even though sunwoo sulks and pulls a face at you, his insistence turns a bit softer when he repeats, “really, though.”

 he goes quiet, picking at a loose thread on your comforter. “it wouldn’t be so bad, if…if it doesn’t work out.” ‘it’ being road to kingdom, ‘it’ being their next album, ‘it’ being the boyz as a whole; your heart sinks. “i think the rest of us would just go back home, you know? maybe we’d pretend that these past years never happened, maybe all these memories would just turn bitter, but…” sunwoo gives you a lopsided smile, soft. “i would still come back home to you.”

the sentiment aches a little, your breath hitching as you try to rifle through the layers of emotions that sink to the bottom of your stomach, like picking at skin still raw underneath and not yet ready to peel. you wonder if he means it, if he truly sees you as a home to come back to or if you’re just something familiar, something safe; it’s not much of a distinction, but the details make all the difference—whether you’re somewhere he belongs, or if you’re simply kept sepia-tinted as a place to keep his preserved youth. the words escape from you before you can stop them.

“you don’t have to, you know.”

sunwoo pauses, and there’s a silence that falls soon after that makes you shrink into yourself, regretting words that can’t be taken back. “what do you mean?”

“if it doesn’t…” you don’t want to speak it into existence—they’ll do well, they have to. you try to form your words carefully, deliberately, so that they’ll be spoken correctly and convey exactly what it is you mean, but it all comes poorly anyway, clumsy and messy as you trip over your own tongue. “you don’t have to…you know.” your mouth goes dry. “stay.” 

sunwoo tries to not look offended at the suggestion, even if his furrowed brows say it all. but despite his own feelings on the matter, he tries his best to reign in his instinctive reaction, instead going to slowly coax you away from the ledge you’ve driven yourself to.

“i mean, i know i don’t have to,” he purses his lips, frowning. “it’s not like i feel obligated or anything, but i want to.” i love you, he means. i want to love you, i choose to love you.

there are a lot of things about sunwoo that you don’t quite understand—how he can internalize his envy to fuel his ambition, or how he still remains soft-hearted even after all these years, but you can’t begin to understand why sunwoo still holds onto you when you’ve long since stopped being something that he needs, nothing but a safe reminder of what once was. does he know? can he sense the way the two of you have started constantly tiptoeing around each other while trying to keep up an easy sense of normalcy, the memory of youth neither of you can return to? 

you’ve been holding back from each other—not just him, but you too. it’s easy, to slip into old banter and avoid the things bothering you, to play the part of your teenage selves full of passion and hopeful, unattained dreams, and maybe sunwoo knows this too. maybe he knows and he doesn’t want to admit it, allowing his world to be rose-colored to cling onto a past that leaves him loveblind to what he really needs, to keep him from acknowledging the fact that you’re nothing but a fragment of the past, something kept to fester.

sunwoo is a star, you think—no, you know. you’ve known for quite some time now, how he was bright and shining and meant for things lightyears away from anything you could ever see, and yet here he was instead: inside your apartment late at night in your bed, talking about how he was ready to fall back down to earth to be with you. like you were tying him down to somewhere he was never meant to stay, he was never meant to be.

and an hour later, when time sits between the precipice of twilight and dawn, you whisper an apology to him so faint it lingers in the air, floating between you and sunwoo’s still form. you’re sure he doesn’t hear it, that he’s been sound asleep for the past couple of minutes and it remains a secret between you and the not-yet-risen sun, but sunwoo shifts slightly, blinking at you in the dark, and ah. he wasn’t asleep after all.

turning to fully face you, he sits up to match your posture and takes a breath, a hand coming to rest on the back of your head as he bumps his forehead gently into yours. his eyes flicker over your features, concern etched clear even in the blinking drowsiness. “what?” what are you talking about, are you okay?  “what for?”

you shake your head, leaning into his touch as if to have the memory of him last just a little longer on your skin. it’s too much to say, too much of a weight to have sunwoo shoulder alongside you. so you tamp it down, swallowing back the lump in your throat as you blink away the heat behind your eyes. i’m just sorry. for everything.

sunwoo’s brows furrow, sheets rustling as he shifts again to sit up straighter, but you find his hand gently, threading your fingers through his as you smile—something soft and tender and so full of burdens it slips through and becomes fragile instead.

“it’s okay. nevermind.”

after. (love is a dream, lingering.)

you’re not sure if you can feel your face by the time you come stumbling back into your apartment.

fresh from a work dinner, the alcohol still buzzes in your system even through the barbeque you’d eaten along with the soju, even after the taxi ride home. too many seniors had offered to pour your drinks, all attributing them to the success of the most recently released song you’d worked on, and of course, you had to take it all with two hands, a polite smile, and the burn of the liquid on its way down. even if the taxi ride home had sobered you up slightly, your head still remains fuzzy and unfocused by the time you find the right key to your apartment and fumble with it before opening up the door.

you kick off your shoes by the front and drop your bag somewhere by the kitchen before making your way to the living room, coat thrown on the ground as you crumple yourself in the space between your coffee table and the foot of the couch. slipping your phone out of your pocket, you wince at the sudden brightness of the screen as it lights up. the apartment always seemed loneliest, like this.

it’s late, almost two in the morning from what you can make out from the glare of the screen, but you only look at it for a second before you swipe up, squinting as you enter your passcode. everything after this, you know, has morphed its way into being muscle memory more than anything else. 

you ignore the warning that pops in the corner of your phone in a red-laced ‘20% remaining’ and you let the practiced motions take over, tapping phone, then voicemail, and before you know it you’re back where you always are, staring at the only recording in your inbox before you press play.

a few seconds of silence fill the air, static crackling over the speaker, and then a voice speaks.

“hey.” it comes out shaky, just barely enough for you to tell. you want to say you probably wouldn’t have been able to hear it if you hadn’t listened to it so many times by now, but truthfully, you’d heard the slight tremble in the voice since the very first time.

(it was sunwoo, after all. how could you not know?)

sunwoo takes in a sharp breath, the beginning of an apology readying to end the call caught in his throat; you sometimes try to imagine a world where the apology goes through, where he instead tells you sorry, i shouldn’t have called and hangs up before the point of no return, but you’re glad this is the world you live in instead. the one where sunwoo swallows past the regret and starts to speak again, too light and full of faux casualness for his easy demeanor to be sincere, the one where you have the chance to hear his voice again. “strange hearing from me, right? shit, i don’t even know if this is still your number—i guess i could have asked chanhee-hyung to make sure but i’m not sure he would have been too happy to hear me ask about you.” 

he pauses, and from the amount of times you’ve listened to it you’ve made into something resembling a little game, filling in the gaps of what he could have done in the pockets of silence—like he’d squeezed his eyes shut at the thought, or he’d pressed into the spot between his eyes to fight away the image of chanhee’s disapproving stare. “he always did that, you know. for a long time after…” sunwoo bites his tongue. “i think it was pity, like he felt bad. not that he needed to, or anything, but you know how he is.”

he pauses again, as if scrambling for what to say next, what direction to take the one-sided conversation. “i, um, i don’t know if you heard, but we recently moved to a new dorm. we split into three separate ones, so we all got our own room, and you think that’d be great and everything after sharing a room with kevin-hyung for the past few years but we played rock, paper, scissors for our room picks and—” indignancy sneaks its way into his cadence, and you smile at this part always “—i really think i got the smallest room. i’m pretty sure it’s smaller than the bathroom. and jacob-hyung got the biggest room!” sunwoo continues, grumbling. “i’m not mad about it or anything, it’s fine… it just seems a little unfair, don’t you think? and, and…”

your eyes flicker, watching the seconds on the timestamp tick by as sunwoo continues to ramble about the most miniscule of things: more dorm shenanigans that sunwoo insists he was completely innocent in, how he’d run into jihoon backstage during a music show after not seeing him for a while, the pictures his members had posted for his birthday that he claims could have potentially ruined his ‘sexy and charismatic’ image with the fans forever. it all feels like he’s scraping the surface, the real reason he called still buried deep beneath all the frivolous hedging; it’s become almost obvious, given the amount of times you’ve listened to it, how each word is just another second stalled trying to build up enough courage.

and finally, when all of sunwoo’s pretense dies, when the lull at the other end of the line comes again, whatever he was planning on saying next deflates as he goes quiet, finally gathering enough courage for the whole truth. you mouth the words, ears buzzing, the timing and cadence seared into your memory.

“you were in my dream last night.”

you remember the morning you’d woken up to this voicemail, remember your thumb hovering over play but not finding it in yourself to press it. you know—you’ve known since the beginning that the recording would only add to your troubles, but on a night like tonight where the noise of the work party still echoes in your head and the apartment feels lonelier than ever after a tipsy ride home, the bruise feels too tender for you to do anything but press into it, over and over and over again.

“i’m not even sure why i called you just to tell you that—i didn’t even get to say it to you.” sunwoo lets out a wry laugh. “i mean, of course you wouldn’t pick up, it’s five in the morning, i don’t really know what i was expecting, but i…no.”  the confession tumbles from his lips, shaky and vulnerable and no matter how many countless times you’ve heard it, it still feels like slicing open an old wound. “i think i just wanted to hear your voice.”

sometimes, you let this section play out fully, his words like tiny shards of glass forming cuts on your skin without stopping; other times, you press pause just to replay it, just to hear him say it again, just to feel the sting and ache as you try to recreate the rawness you’d felt the very first time you heard it. salt in a wound is still salt no matter what name it tries to go by, but you suppose that’s why you’ve trapped yourself in this routine in the first place—to make sure the bruise still hurts, to pick at the scab just to see it bleed.

“i guess it just didn’t work out though, did it? your voicemail’s still the same automated message it’s been since high school, so all i’m really doing here is embarrassing myself.” everything laid down and exposed with no walls left to hide behind, sunwoo’s words come quiet and fragile. “i think a part of me expected it to still be the same, but—maybe the other part of me hoped things had changed. isn’t that ironic?” he breathes out a small resigned laugh. “change is what got us here in the first place, and now here i am, talking to myself and leaving a voicemail to a number that i’m not even sure is yours. pretty stupid of me, right?”

sunwoo swallows hard and so do you, the memory of the words ringing in your ears before he speaks them. “i miss you,” he says eventually. “i’m sorry.”

the faint static on the other end of the line tapers on for one, two, three seconds more before the recording finally ends, stretching into true silence. the first few times you had listened to it, you’d kept your ear pressed to the speaker, replaying those last few seconds desperate for anything else you could have missed, anything you could make out after his final words. now, you simply stare at the screen, still burning bright in the dark.

it’s almost funny, the way this has formed itself into something resembling a bad habit. every time, you go through the motions like they’re old and used and worn because they are, no matter how much you refuse to admit it; and each time, you take the shame and the guilt that curls in your stomach and ball it up inside of you, letting it seep into your bones, so that the next morning when you wake up, you can look at yourself with your newly polished and clean exterior and pretend that it’s merely something left in the past.

but for now, you hit play on the recording again, watching the seconds tick by once more.

(the next morning, you wake up to your phone still in your hands, battery completely dead, the previous night nothing but a pounding headache and a blur of what might have been. a new day, and yet it all feels like the same motions all over again. 

you ignore the calcified shame within you, play ignorant to the cycle that will inevitably repeat itself the next time a night like that comes again, and you pretend that this is the one thing you won’t let go of, even if it turns into all you have left.)

before. (—you were my youth.)

it’s a tuesday night when you see sunwoo again.

dressed only in sweats and a jacket for extra warmth, you had just finished your regularly scheduled convenience store snack run, plastic bag in hand, when you turn the corner and see a glimpse of him: backpack slung over his shoulder, trudging steps, wearing single gray hoodie that was no doubt too thin for him to not catch a cold on an early spring night. blinking, you register the familiar face for a split second before you call out after him, half-jogging to catch up.

“hey! hey, sunwoo!”

for a moment, it’s almost as if he doesn’t hear you; and then, his foot stops in front of the other, hand moving to take out an earbud. sunwoo turns around, gaze wandering until he meets your gaze. his eyes light up in recognition as he makes out your face in the residual light from the convenience store windows, the glow of the street lamp a few feet away.

he holds up a hand for a polite wave. “oh, hey.”

“heading home?” you ask, peering at him. you hadn’t really seen much of him these past few months, other than the increasingly sparse times you’d spot him in class.

“yeah,” sunwoo nods, a slight smile to go along with it. “just got back from training.”

“ah, i see.” it’s a little strange, looking at him now. even if you hadn’t taken a good look at him recently, you could still tell something was a little off about him; maybe in the way he was carrying himself, the heaviness of his step, the half-hearted way his smile didn’t look quite like the one you were used to.

then again, what did you know? it wasn’t as if you were best friends or anything—after you’d partnered with him for that one project months ago, you’d only talked to him a handful of times, either in passing or when you saw each other around. calling him a close friend would be far from the truth, but calling him just a classmate wouldn’t exactly be accurate either. you suppose he stood in a strange middle ground, one you didn’t seem to mind.

but even so, maybe even just the implication of friendship was enough for the concern to fully settle itself into your mind, the reason why you can’t bring yourself to just brush off his exhaustion as a result of the late hour, and why you impulsively jab your thumb towards the neighborhood playground a block away, the plastic bag in your hands rustling from the motion. “you wanna make a small pitstop before you go?”

and surprisingly, despite a moment’s hesitation, sunwoo takes you up on the offer.

it’s how you find yourself sitting together on the swingset, the subtle squeak of metal on metal almost serving as a familiar comfort as you rock back and forth, heels digging into the bark beneath. “i heard you got into loen, right?” you try, peeling your awkward stare from the chipped paint on the side of the swing over to the boy next to you. “how is that going? i never really got the chance to congratulate you on it.”

“it’s good,” sunwoo replies, almost on instinct, but before he can continue, he closes his mouth instead. the rest of the sentence tapers off into an awkward silence, leaving you to fill in the gaps.

“tough?” you ask, more of a rhetorical than anything else. maybe you were overstepping your bounds by prying, but the least you could do is offer a lending ear, especially now that you were both here anyway. “i might not be a trainee,” you offer, “but i know it can’t be easy.”

sunwoo presses his lips into a line, swallowing in contemplation, before nodding.

“i don’t know,” he confesses, the toe of his shoe digging a hole into the woodchips. “it’s definitely hard, but it’s not just that… i like that it’s hard, you know? it means i’m challenging myself and it means i’m learning, it’s just—they said they’re selecting the debut lineup soon.” the swing chain squeaks between the rustling of the bark. “what if i don’t make it?”

(what if i never make it?)

you get it—the uncertainty that haunts every step of this path. you’ve seen enough of your friends and classmates drop everything to pursue their dreams, only to have it thrown back in their face, failures either resulting in a renewed perseverance or the battering of their soul. and even if you weren’t taking part in the same rigorous and merciless training process that plagues them, the crumbling foothold follows you too, at times, all for a dream you can’t ensure will spare you even pennies in return.

but you do it because you want to, because you have to, because you love it too much for there to be any other option you’d be willing to fathom. and in spite of the short time you’ve gotten to know him, you’re sure the same holds true for sunwoo, too.

“then you try again.” his head shoots up, and you meet his eyes with a smile. “and you keep trying and trying until you can’t anymore—because you love it, right? dancing, singing, performing? you wouldn’t be doing this if you didn’t.”

you watch his expression carefully as your words land, waiting for the smallest sign to back off, but instead, sunwoo gives you a resolute nod, taking each word to heart.

“you can do it,” you tell him, every word sincere. “i know you can.”

there’s a certain weight in his gaze afterwards that almost makes you regret having said it, almost like you’ve overstepped in your own direction instead. what were you even doing?

 the sudden intimacy of the moment settles into your stomach all at once, and you try to grasp at anything to bring back the lighthearted mood of a few minutes ago—for your own sake. clearing your throat, you try to dispel the sudden heaviness in the air.

“in any case,” you start, rifling through your bag. fishing out a container of strawberry milk, you stand up and walk over to sunwoo, pressing it against his cheek; he jumps from the sudden cold against his skin. “you know we have exams coming up, right?”

sunwoo groans, raising a hand to take the milk. “what if i just dropped out like jihoon?”

before he can grab it, you press the container harder into his face, frowning. “don’t even think about it!”

“but…” sunwoo looks up at you with sad, shining eyes, panhandling for a single ounce of pity. “that means no more exams…”

“and then what,” you reply dryly.

he finally takes the milk from your hands, pressing it to his forehead with his eyebrows furrowed, the beads of condensation threatening to slip down his palm. “okay, you have a good point.”

you roll your eyes, but sunwoo snaps his head up after a second of thinking longer, milk sloshing in the container at the sudden motion. “you wouldn’t leave me out to die all on my own, would you?”

“huh—”

sunwoo pleads your name in a dramatic fashion, hesitating a little before grabbing your hands to continue his spiel. you have a brief yet vivid image of his resemblance to a raccoon digging through your trashcan in your front yard. begging for scraps… “you have to remember me when you’re famous, okay…”

“sunwoo,” you exasperate, trying to pry your hands away from his, freezing and wet from the cold milk. “you aren’t dropping out and you are not becoming homeless.”

he nods enthusiastically. “right, because i’d have you!”

“don’t you have any other friends?”

sunwoo looks you dead in the eye, his grip tightening. “i have friends, but you would have the songwriting royalties.”

“for the last time,” you groan, finally slipping your hand away from his grasp. “you’re not gonna drop out, and you’re not going to become homeless! and you’re going to make it!” you rub your hand gingerly on the side of your jacket to wipe off the excess condensation. “enjoy the strawberry milk, i’m gonna head home.”

you turn and take a few steps, only for sunwoo to call out to you again. “hey, wait.”

pausing, you look back curiously. “yeah?”

“if…” he starts slowly, staring at the milk in his hands. “when i debut,” he rescinds, meeting your eyes. “will you listen? to me, i mean—even if you’re the only one?”

“i definitely won’t be the only one,” you chide, stuffing your hands in your pockets. the night air was growing colder by the second, remnants of winter lingering in the beginnings of spring. funnily enough, you don’t really seem to mind the chill. “we’ll make it, okay? we’ll make it together.”

you attempt to leave it at that, but the way he looks back at you, sunwoo holds the question between the two of you, still waiting for your answer—like he would have waited forever for it, if he needed to. and despite your previous unfamiliarity with sunwoo in this sort of setting, you figured it would be cruel to deny him of at least an earnest answer.

“to answer your question, though.” you try to look away to break the weight of his gaze, but you find yourself pulled back to it anyway. finding the resolve to match his, you step forward again. he needed to hear this; and maybe, you needed to say it, too. 

“of course i will.” tonight’s moon waxes, its light peeking through the clouds. “i’ll always be rooting for you, kim sunwoo.”

after. (yet. love is always, always, a choice.)

the first few times you see the video on your recommended page, you try to ignore it.

you shove it to the back of your mind and you tell yourself it can wait just a little longer, that there’s no difference from watching it a few days from now. except the days stretch on into weeks, and it still remains untouched, lingering forever in an endless present. the video itself isn’t anything big, objectively speaking, but the heaviness of it weighs on you every time you see the title, knowing what it consists of: special release from kim sunwoo of the boyz, self-composed track.

it’s not exactly breaking the promise you had made to him all those years ago, more like putting it on hold. and maybe it’s for the best, the waiting period, but the longer you wait, the more things just keep piling on and shoved into the shelf to collect dust over the past few months—their last single, the mini-album that followed after, and now this. you had tried, that first time chanhee had asked you about it. you couldn’t make it far before you had to turn it off.

you tell yourself you’ll get around to it when it stops hurting, a soft assurance to still keep your promise, but you know it’s hypocritical to give yourself that easing comfort when in the same breath you’ve been pressing into the bruise again and again, never giving it the time and space to heal. the pain has never stopped you before, rather, you’ve grown close with the ache, the faint memory of the wound, but there’s something distinctly different about listening to his music that hurts too much for you to continue. 

maybe it’s the way it brings you back to that classroom and that swingset and everything you know you can never go back to; or maybe, despite the voicemail that you still come back to on the loneliest of nights and the wrinkled shirt that remains crumpled in the corner of your room, a part of you knows that the salt in the wound would be nothing compared to digging an even deeper, uglier wound in a cut scabbed over. that’s only what it could feel like, if you listened to him before you were ready. 

you want the memories as a lingering taste alone, but you’re scared that if you go back to that promise with two feet planted and an open heart, if you delve into the memories completely, you won’t be able to come back out.

tonight is different, though.

you want to blame it on the hour that hosts the beginning of dawn, or the way you can’t go back to sleep, or the dream you’d had before you had woken up, the details fading more each second. but when the video appears once again, thumbnail ingrained into your mind, you don’t even need to look at the title before you finally click on it.

(you had dreamt of him, that night. 

it was a good dream, you think, at least in the moment—more of an old memory than anything else. sunwoo had come over the night before his birthday for an early celebration, insisting on being congratulated by you first thing once the clock struck twelve. you remember it being a small celebration, just the two of you in your apartment together with cheesy decorations and balloons blown up spelling out his name and a golden ‘hbd’ strung along the walls. 

the rest of it comes in and blurs together in flashes: the strawberry cake you’d bought to share together, the way you’d wiped the frosting on his nose only for him to smear a bigger chunk onto your cheek, the shoddy match that came with the cake that sunwoo couldn’t light, no matter how hard he tried to save himself from the embarrassment.

and usually when you wake up from a good dream, you fall asleep again soon after, just to catch the traces of the dream before it’s gone forever. but you’re trying, slowly in your own way, to not do things like that anymore. after all, eventually the shirt needs to become just another shirt, and your voicemail will one day go back to having no more recordings saved. 

you want to think you have it in you—to let the wound finish scabbing over and heal, to finally let it fade into almost nothing but a brief mark of time in your skin.)

the music starts the second the video starts to play, and you feel a pull at your gut, an inner voice whispering. you can still back out, it says, soothing. you haven’t hit the point of no return yet. it’s okay if you’re still not ready.

but then sunwoo’s voice cuts through the noise, each word sung with his heart on his sleeve, and that part of you grasping for any form of protection left instantly goes quiet. if it were about anything else, maybe you could have rationalized it to yourself and clicked out of the video, convince yourself to go back to sleep and that it was okay to wait. another time, another day, another world.

when he sings, he sings of you, he sings to you, and you remember that you had never truly listened to the words he’d wanted to say to you since you’d sent that text that ended everything that night—not really. didn’t you owe him, then, at least this?

so you swallow hard, and you blink until lights dot the inside of your eyelids, and you listen.

(sunwoo’s lyrics talk of love, how he had wanted to be yours. he had wanted to be yours forever, and yet he ended up losing you and maybe that was his fault; maybe if he had shown you his love better then you wouldn’t have let him go, then you would still be by his side instead of appearing only when he closes his eyes, unsure to call you a dream or a nightmare. not that it mattered, you were still his universe, no matter what. even in the hurt, it was still love)

it’s all wrapped up in pretty lyricism and intricate metaphors to keep the listener guessing for the true meaning, but you’ve always understood him best when it was through song. you think you had forgotten that, after so many years together and knowing him through everything else, but with the music playing through your headphones and the screen of your computer flashing the images in the silence of your apartment, it was like coming back to your roots. like you were in that classroom with a pen and paper and that playground with the chill of spring still warm on your beating hearts and how you’ve known him intimately before you even knew you could.

it all felt so simple, back then. like budding love was all you would ever need, before everything else got in the way, but—no. you stop at the thought. that’s not quite it.

(pause, rewind, play.)

it was always simple to sunwoo. he was a star burning bright and blind to you, growing farther from your reach each passing day, but to him, you were never anything less than the universe itself. was it truly so horrible—bearing attachment to his youth? you were still growing beside him, right? you were the home he wanted to return to, weren’t you?

and yet you were the one who had smeared the paint before it could finish drying, the one who had felt so alone in watching the wear of a bridge you had deemed impossible to save. and at the end of the day, maybe the fault fell partly on both of you, stepping onto that unsteady footing together with the rope of the bridge fraying with the weight of time, but you were the one who had taken that last step to the other end without him even knowing.

lit match in your hands, you had burned that bridge for what you’d perceived to be the greater good, to destroy it before it could collapse and take both of you with it. an act of cowardice disguised as selflessness, you’re left to stare at nothing but the ashes and cinders you had set aflame. but in the wreckage, only after everything do you finally understand what that indiscernible emotion was in his eyes when he looked at you, what he had meant that night by choosing to love you.

in the silence, daylight breaks, your once dark apartment beginning to tinge a soft yellow glow.

(the ground beneath your feet steady, you look to the other end of what once was, carrying the pieces of wood in your hands. if you tried to build that bridge towards sunwoo again, panel by panel, could you rebuild something stronger from the ashes? would sunwoo help if he knew, repairing each step together with you?

you’re not afraid of finding out the answer—not anymore.)

epilogue. (love is gravity.)

the sun rises fully soon after, the sky turning into a brighter, deeper shade of blue as the hour passes. still lingering along the edge of dawn, you know if you looked outside you would see the frost beginning to melt on the blades of grass, the slow trickle of cars onto the road as people were starting to head to work. it’s subtle, the difference between five a.m. and six a.m., but it’s enough for you to feel the shift in the air.

gnawing at your lip, you reach for the phone lying on the table. it’s an aching sense of déjà vu as you unlock your phone and scroll through your contacts, searching for a single name. you can only imagine if this is what sunwoo felt like, the night he’d called you, half-hopeless as you press the phone to your ear, the first dial tone ringing. 

(you want to let yourself not hurt anymore—to allow the wound to heal, to finally let go of all the shame inside of you. it’s your first step in trying to repair that bridge you had once burnt down, your first choice where you try to move forward. but sometimes, to move forward is really to move back to where you want to be, back where you belong.)

each additional ring that repeats comes with decreasing expectation, and you brace yourself for the voicemail message that will inevitably come. of course he wouldn’t pick up this early in the morning, you tell yourself, another ring echoing. you wonder if this will become a new pattern, one voicemail to another, always barely missing each other in efforts to reconcile, always a little too late. trading in one bad habit for another, maybe this was just how it was meant to be.

but you suppose it’s always been like this, ever since the night you broke up with him—how sunwoo has been choosing to love you still, even after, and how you’ve been choosing to still love him too by refusing to truly let him go, orbiting around each other like how gravity is both the reason why a planet circles a star and why they can never ever fall into one another (again). perhaps this is just where the frayed edges of fate have left you, coming together only once before your ends are split away forever.

but when the sixth ring sounds and you prepare to hear the automated message, drawing in a breath to scramble together a message to leave at the beep, you hear a single voice instead. your breath hitches.

“hello?”

your lip trembles as you press the phone harder to your ear, heat surging to the bridge of your nose, the back of your eyes. you try to keep your voice steady but it comes out watery instead, words spilling over before you know it. “hi. it’s me.”

and despite everything, gravity fails, just for an instant, and you and sunwoo collide into each other once again.

[anjian03]

The sun will always be there waiting after the rain 🤍

established relationship bangchan x reader

content: angst, crying, petnames (baby & babygirl), mentions of fear of being intimate, mentions of SA/abuse and just chan comforting reader because of it, fluff + happy ending ofc

WARNING: i repeat, this post contains mentions of reader going through SA so please please, if it’s a sentitive topic and you don’t wanna trigger it please don’t read

this might also be really badly written, but i just wanted to share in hopes it brings comfort for someone who might’ve been through something like this 

promt: reader wants to be intimate with chan but at the same time she’s afraid of it bc she’s been SAed in the past and she finally tells chan about it

there’ve been several times where you and chan have had heated make out sessions, but never has he attempted to touch you anywhere else bellow your waist (and you’re very grateful for that). you guys have never actually talked about this topic. you’ve been going out for a few months and it’s starting to become something you need to discuss, yet you’re terrified of what he would say. you’re terrified he would think you’re broken. that if he knew, he wouldn’t want you that way anymore.

you actually don’t even know if he wants you in that way. yes, you are grateful that he hasn’t made a move passed those make out sessions, but to be honest you couldn’t help but think if that was because he was just being the gentleman he is, or him just not being interested in doing anything else beyond that. cause to be true you DID want sex with him. you desperately want to have the sex life everyone else has cause, i mean your boyfriend is HOT, in fact he’s one of the hottest people you’ve met and he makes you so horny it’s ridiculous. yet you were stick, you were so stuck, cause even if you want him you feel like you couldn’t have him. cause why would he want to be stuck in this messed up situation? when he could have someone that isn’t as broken as you, someone who isn’t broken at all actually. guess you kinda have to talk to him know, cause the more time passes the more it gets in your head, the more time passes the more you actually love him, and if this conversation ends badly… the harder it would be to let go if he decided he didn’t want you anymore.

you were on your friday schedule movie nights, this time taking place in your apartment. you both were now curled up in your sofa under the warmth of your blanket after just having dinner and catching up of what each of you did during the day. after a while you guys turned on a movie on the tv and got comfortable there. the movie was a rom-com so it naturally made you guys be a little clingy towards each other, and just when you were starting to feel at ease in chan’s body warmth it was like your head knew it was overthinking time. why? just why? you thought why does your head does this to you out of nowhere?

without even noticing your body got stiff as you were laying over chan’s chest, he of course noticed so he started rubbing your arm up and down maybe thinking you were cold, but that caused you to slightly flinch and grow yourself small. fuck…

“hey” he said as he slowly pulled you closer to him and looked down at you “you ok, baby?” you could sense confusion and concern in his voice and it made you feel so guilty.

“yeah, i’m ok” you respond as you try to sound as neutral as possible, but still laying very stiff over chan’s body, trying to keep focus on the movie to attempt to ignore all the thoughts in your head.

“you sure baby? you seem really tense…” you didn’t even answer him, there’s was a lot going on in your head, it was like you were dissociating from reality, movie long gone in your head and going back to those times, reliving those moments where you felt the most vulnerable, where you felt small, helpless, disgusting. used…

since your lack of response, he asked “are you cold? is this position uncomfortable?” hearing his voice again made you break your train of thoughts and go back to reality and your current situation. he tried to reach your hand but since now you were aware you avoided it and broke free from his chest, yet you tried to do it as gentle as possible cause you really didn’t wasn’t to hurt his feelings by pulling away from his touch, but you had to be honest. the last thing you want when your head goes those places is to be touch, any kind of touch.

you want to tell him, you want to just get it over with but, how do you even start that conversation? you guys weren’t even doing anything close to sexual, yet you still got all panicked out.

“i-….” you don’t even know what to say, how the hell do you explain yourself?

“is there something wrong, baby? you know you can tell me anything” there was still concern in his voice but now there was care as well.

“i- … c- can i ask you a question?” you felt your heart pounding in your throat

“yes, baby of course” he wanted to hold your hand in hopes to make you feel more at ease, but he got the hint that you didn’t want him to touch you right now.

you took a deep breath preparing to start the conversation you’ve been prolonging. “ha- have you ever…” you stopped mid sentence but he knew better than to rush you so he just waited in silence for you to talk “have you ever wanted.. or… have you ever thought of… going further… than like.. making out?” you said, eyes fixed on the floor. you hate to be the one to bring out the topic for the first time. would he think it’s to soon? would he think you’re desperate?

“i mean…” he started getting nervous at the sudden topic and started giggling to try to hide it and ease the tension “to answer your question yes i have… but if you’re wondering why i’ve never made a move, well… i just wanted to be sure we were on the same page, and i didn’t want to make you uncomfortable if you didn’t want to go there yet”

“oh” it’s all you managed to say. of course chan wasn’t like them, like those people who once took advantage of you, but you still didn’t expect him to be this considered and sweet, he was being so respectful towards you without even knowing your situation, and still you accused him secretly of not wanting you. you felt so stupid for thinking like this and guilty of having this issues while being with someone as sweet as chan.

“why are you asking, baby?” he said in a loving and curious tone. but he somewhat felt that you brought up the conversation for something more serious other than to just ‘be on the same page’ so he started panicking “wait, did i make you feel uncomfortable? i promise i never meant to push you, i’m so sorry if you felt like-“

“wait, no!” you cut him off to his rambling “no, channie. you’ve done absolutely nothing wrong” that made him release a breath he was holding but still he needed to know what was getting you like this.

“then whats wrong, babygirl? i kinda get the feeling you didn’t brought this up just to have ‘the talk’. you know you can tell me anything, right? is there something bothering you?” you still felt like your heart was gonna come out of your throat, but seeing him being so considerate made you get the courage left to just get it over with.

“chan… im about to tell you something that i probably should’ve told you a while ago and i’m so sorry i didn’t do it before. but i i’m gonna ask you to please just don’t say anything until i’m done cause this is already so hard for me. and if at the end you wanna end things then it’s totally okay, no hard feelings, i’ll accept if you don’t want to deal with it cause you totally don’t have to, you’re to good for it and-“

“hey, hey” he says so softly almost in a whispering tone. cutting you off, trying to catch on everything you just said and wanting to calm you down “y/n you’re okay. it’s okay. just take a deep breath with me, yeah?…” he inhales deep hoping you mimic his actions and you do “…and out” and you both exhale. “in again, baby” you do inhale a second time “and out again…” he sighs in relief seeing you more relaxed, as best as you can be right now “that’s more like it, baby” he says as he smiles at you with those beautiful dimples.

he takes a shot and offers you his hand, opening it in front of you and he’s happy to see that you do take it in yours, so he squeezes it slightly to help you ground yourself. “whatever you have to say, it’s okay. i promise i’ll listen till the end, but i promise you i’m not going anywhere, okay?”

“don’t promise…” you say, in a sad tone now, but trying to be realistic and understandable of him “i just want to let you know that you don’t have to deal with it if you don’t want to” you try and keep a steady voice to not cause him any pity but at the end your voice ends up breaking.

“baby…” his heart breaking at the sound of your voice. but he decides not to argue with it “can you go ahead and tell me…?”

you take another deep breath, trying to gather up the courage till you finally speak. “i- i guess. we- we never really talked in depth about my ex… not that we had to but, some things happened and… and i don’t really wanna get into detail but, we were together for a few years but overall, throughout the relationship, he was- he was very manipulative, and toxic, and… abusive… sexually.” you let out a shaky breath before you continue “took me months after we broke up to finally realize that he abused me and… i just wanted to ‘warn’ you i guess, cause… that’s like my only experience sexually speaking, and i haven’t been with anyone after that.” you take a small pause as you stare at the floor unable to look at his face “it happened years ago but… i still get flashbacks some times. and, baby, i’m so thankful that you’ve never pushed me into anything, you’ve done nothing wrong, i haven’t felt pressured at all.” you confess as you lift your face to now look at him in the eyes while you squeez his hand “and i’m not gonna lie… i do want you that way. i’ve been wanting to go further for a while whenever we make out i’m- i’m just afraid that… i guess.. i guess i’m nervous to be intimate again. i don’t want to be doing something and have a flashback in the middle and end up ruining it for me and you too…”

you both stay silent for a moment, letting it sink in before chan speaks up “babygirl…” he starts as he reaches with his other hand to reach yours, so now he holds you with both “babygirl, you are so strong. you’re so damn strong and i’m so fucking mad you had to go through that… cause baby, you are the sweetest, most loving and kind person i’ve met. i can’t imagine someone being so fucked up in it’s brain to do that to you, to hurt you like that” you can see he’s starting to get emotional by how his voice was beginning to shake “my baby, thank you for trusting me to tell me something like this… i just hope you know that it’s not your fault at all, you didn’t have to go through that, baby. and i would never ever do something you don’t want me to, i will never rush you into anything, i’ll never persuade you into anything. but i want you to know that we don’t have to jump into anything you’re not ready for, or that you feel uncomfortable”

you didn’t notice but tears where already rolling down your cheeks. they were inevitable. his words were literally everything you’ve been wanting to hear for years. to be validated. to be seen. to not be the one to blame, cause oh how many times you have blamed yourself.

“babygirl, please don’t cry…” he says as he caresses your knuckles with his both hands. “can i hold you?”

and you nod, because this time you do want his touch. you let down your walls, and you allowed yourself to be vulnerable with him, to trust him in your most intimate self.

he softly lets go of your hand and lifts his arms open wide for you to settle yourself in between them. you gently close your distance with him and you wrap yourself around his torso for you to cry harder against his chest.

you stay like that for a few seconds, with him holding you close, one hand resting on the back of your head, the second one rubbing up and down your back “thank you” you manage to say in between sniffles and hiccups.

“baby…” he starts

“no, chris” you stop him pulling away from his chest, whipping your tears and looking at him “really… thank you. i thought you were gonna want to leave, but you said just the right words”

“baby, don’t thank me for doing the bare minimum” he says as he lifts his hand to put a strand of hair behind your ear “i told you, this was not your fault. there’s no reason for me to leave. i love you so much baby. all i wanna do is make you feel loved, and safe. ever.”

“i love you, chan” you respond after a few more sniffles, feeling more calmed now “but… i…”

“you what, babygirl?” he encourages you.

“i… want to be intimate with you…” you confess a bit embarrassed

“mhm you do, babygirl? you sure?” and you nod slowly with a hint of shyness “i want to try…”

he takes your hand and caresses it again “i want to too, baby. but i don’t wanna rush you. not before and not now that you’ve told me this” he states and you can’t help but think that you won the lottery with this man “how about we take it one step at a time? we don’t go all the way in right away, but we take it one step further each time. how does that sound, baby?”

you nod at him giving him a soft smile “that sounds really nice, baby”

“i’ll just have to ask you something, babygirl” he says and you nod in confusion “communication is key. so you’re gonna have to tell me at all times how fare we go, what pace we go, when we start, when we stop, when we continue and most importantly, your boundaries, baby. i’ll never proceed without your verbal consent, okay?”

you let out a shaky breath, almost as a relieved sigh. not that you were expecting anything bad for him, but still relieved to hear those words coming out of him. you nod again “i love the sound of that” you confess, as you nod again, your smile, growing wider.

“i’m so glad to see that smile back, baby” he says as he brigs his hand to caress your cheek with his thumb in the softest way possible while he smiles too.

you lean in his touch while looking up at him, your sight flicking between his eyes and his lips “i love you, chris”

“i love you too, babygirl” he noticed your eyes flicking but he doesn’t make a move, he just stares at you the same way. his hand not leaving your soft face.

but you lean in closer, you lean in making a small pause when your lips are slightly touching, you rest your forehead against him before finally closing the distance between your two sets of lips. and this time feels different, you don’t quite know if it’s a new type of intimacy, if it’s a deeper love, or if it’s desire. but you know that you’ve finally found your sun, you’re finally where you needed to be.

💌: this has been sitting incomplete in my drafts for like a year and a half. i never intended to published it, it was honestly just my way of releasing my thoughts and finding comfort but it’s only now that it felt right to finish it and even tho it’s incredibly scary, i did decided to share.

to the writers with SA comfort in their stories, just wanted to say thank you for giving me the courage to actually do this. this feels so personal and scary to put out there but i feel like i healed a bit more <3. and to readers who have suffered from SA/abuse, just know that it’s NEVER your fault, don’t blame yourself for what other people did to you, you’re not alone. if someone needs a safe space to talk, my dms are always open <33

english’s not my first language i apologize any mistakes!

╰┈➤ Masterlist

: ̗̀➛ Requests open!

[runa-falls]

Pool boy Miguel 🥵☠️☠️

pairing: pool boy!miguel o'hara x afab!reader

cw: smut (18+), teasing, sexual tension, semi-public setting, over-clothes touching, fingering, squirting 🫢, size-kink, implied piv sex, ignore how his hands are covered in sunscreen...

wc: 1.6k

note: 2 years late BUT HERE MONA MY LOVELY~ I FINALLY FINISHED IT HAHA! this idea was based on THIS fanart 0-0 ( @p1nkmic you're doing the lords work). also i'd like to think this ver. of miguel is similar to @missdictatorme's The Sweetest Fruit In The Garden's bc i've been thirsting over him lately so def check out that fic too!!

---

Sweat glazes over his muscled back, glistening over the contours of his gorgeous body as he smoothly moves the net over the surface of the water.

He really doesn't need to be shirtless to clean the pool. And he really doesn't need to wear those tight swim shorts that perfectly hug his ass. But he always does.

You've been lounging on a pool chair all afternoon, sipping some lemonade and reading some crazy explicit romance novel as you watch him work through the dark tint of your sunglasses. You've been buzzing all day, legs crossing and recrossing whenever he'd walk by.

He has no idea how hot he is with his tan skin, pushed-back hair, and baywatch body -- a feast for your eyes. 

Your mouth waters when he turns around, unintentionally giving you a hint of what's underneath. He's just so big, there's no hiding it. You physically ache for it, feeling so lonely and empty without him, practically foaming at the mouth. You glance at the sunscreen before sitting up and adjusting your light-colored bikini so it's just barely covering you.

"Think you could assist me over here, pool boy?" Your voice is slick with lust as you purr over at the hardworking man. Miguel stops what he's doing and looks up with confusion, like he's surprised that you're talking to him. He points at himself, as if there are any other pool boys around that you'd confuse him with.

"...What do you need help with?" His gaze shamelessly drifts down to your barely concealed tits. Dark pupils dilate as your nipples harden under his stare, buds pressing eagerly against the thin fabric. You hide them under your arms while shyly looking up at him, and he lifts a knowing eyebrow as your face flushes for him. "Tell me, cariño,” the deep tone of his drawl makes your body hum.

You fiddle with the sunscreen bottle. "Could you rub some sunscreen over me? I don't want to burn under this hot sun…"

"Sure..." He gives you a charming smile, placing the net gently on the ground before walking over to you. You recline back onto the chair and invite him to sit by your legs with a wave of your hand. You want him closer to you, leaning over your body as he takes care of you.

You meet his smile with a shy one of your own as he gently takes the bottle from your hand. His fingers briefly brush against yours before he opens it and squirts a good amount onto his palm. You hold back a shiver when his dark eyes drift over the front of your body.

“Where should I start?” He rubs his hands together, warming up the lotion and painting his palms white.

“Hm…”  You let your hand drift from your thigh to caress the top of your chest. His eyes trail your movements hungrily. “How about right here?” 

He starts at the base of your neck with his huge hand resting right above your collarbones. You shiver at the cool touch of his palm, chilling your sun-kissed skin. 

You wish you could see the white handprint that he’d leave wrapped around your throat, like a tattoo marking you as his. He methodically rubs the lotion into your skin, making sure to apply it underneath your bikini straps and over your shoulders. His fingers dip slightly under the cups of your top, making sure to cover every exposed part of your chest, but before he can go any farther, he pulls his hand away. 

You look up at him disappointingly, wondering why he won’t take the bait when it’s sitting so tempting in front of him. A small smile rests on his pretty lips, but he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he dutifully takes another dollop of the sunscreen and motions you to lean back. 

He spreads the cream evenly over your torso before moving down to carefully rub it right underneath the waistband of your bottoms. He ignores the way your thighs start to press closer together as his fingers work their magic. 

“You can put it on your legs yourself, can’t you?” He teases.

You pout. 

Can’t he take a hint??

“At least do my back for me?”

“Alright,” You sit up as he lowers the back of the chair for you, “turn over for me.”

You do so, quickly and obediently. You hear him popping open the cap of the bottle to get some more sunscreen on his hands. He covers your back efficiently, but it seems like he’s putting a bit more force in his application this time. It feels like a massage the way he’s pressing against your muscles. A soft sigh escapes your lips before you can hold it back. 

You hear him chuckle faintly above you, “That feel good, baby?”

Well, if you weren’t wet before, you’re soaking now. 

“Y-yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve had a massage, so…” 

He hums in understanding and finishes off by smoothing his hands over your lower back until he gets to the edge of your swim bottoms. Again, he dips just under the band of your swim bottoms, but goes no further. 

You feel him shift next to your body, about to get up and get back to work, but something stops him. You jolt slightly when you feel a probing hand against the back of your thigh, gently pulling at it to spread your legs apart. 

“Look what we have here…” Miguel’s touch travels upwards until his thumb teases at the edge of your swimsuit. “You made a little mess.” He presses the pad of his thumb against the wet spot, right against your covered cunt, watching as your slick continues to leak out against the light fabric. "I was trying to be good, you know. But you just can't help yourself, can you?"

"Can't help it when you touch me like this~" You moan, pushing your hips closer to his touch, urging him to continue.

"Touching like what?" Miguel presses his thumb harder against you and rubs over your slit, teasing your needy hole until you start whining. "I was being polite until I saw that you were dripping for me."

"Mm...but your hands feel so good on me."

"So you got wet the moment I touched you?" You nod helplessly at his taunting words. You can't even deny it, you've been thinking about this moment all day. "So needy..." He tuts, hooking a finger to pull your bottoms to the side so he can get a good look at your slick heat.

His fingers delicately ghost over your folds, admiring the tempting wetness that glistens on your skin.

"P-please..."

"You look so pretty like this, all exposed under the sun." Miguel presses a finger against your entrance, and it slips in easily. "Look how easily you're taking me. God, you want it so bad, don't you, cariño?" You whimper as he presses another finger into you. Just like the first one, your body eagerly takes it.

"I need it." You respond, arching your back so he can push his fingers in deeper. He gets the message and starts thrusting into you, angling downwards to press right against your spongy wall.

You choke out a moan as heat quickly blooms at your core and pleasure fizzles straight to your brain. There's an unfamiliar feeling that pulses within you, and with each thrust, it gets more and more urgent. You've never felt like this before.

Your legs snap together in shock at how he already has you barreling towards an orgasm, trapping his wrist within the plushness of your thighs.

"W-wait, Mig-mmph!" You beg. "This -- I-I think this is too much!"

"I thought you needed it?" He mocks as your body trembles underneath him.

"But there's something --"

"Don't worry, baby. Just let me give your cunt what she needs..." Despite your efforts to cease his movements, he easily works within the confines of your thighs. Though he can't move his wrist due to your hold, his long fingers curl deliciously and press shorter nudges inside of you. If anything, it's worse now.

"I think I'm gonna..." Miguel hushes you, as if comforting a kitten, and continues pleasuring you, uncaring of your desperate whining. The way he's constantly prodding at that hypersensitive spot within you has your eyes rolling back in ecstasy.

"I want you to let go for me." Using his other hand to keep your legs open, he expertly fucks his fingers your wet cunt, "I want to feel you cum around my fingers, okay?"

You can't even answer him as he speeds up, sliding so delectably against your fluttering walls. The sloppy noises of your slick hole fill the summer air, and you feel yourself quickly teetering off the edge.

Your body tenses and shakes as it dives into a pool of indescribable pleasure. It's so intense, it nearly blinds you in the moment. Your legs press together as you grapple with the rapid pulsing of your cunt -- and Miguel lets them close around him, watching in awe as you spasm with waves of ecstasy.

You've never come like that before. From pure penetration, let alone from a couple of fingers fucking you. Yet you've never felt an orgasm so powerful before.

As your weak legs rub against each other, you feel the mess you've made of yourself. You make an effort to roll over so you can look at the man who undid you. You watch as his lust-laced gaze roams over your ruined swimsuit.

"Damn," Miguel groans, "It's all over the chair..." His hand drifts up your wet thighs, spreading the mess uncaringly. Then, finally, those hungry red eyes meet yours.

"I didn't even know I could do that." You admit shyly.

He leans closer, pinning you to the chair, and a cocksure smirk appears on his face, "Wanna see if you can do it again?"

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im so sorry but the last line reminded me of:

did i ruin it?...lmfao

[undyingdecay]

(not requests! just thoughts) GAWD I cannot stop thinking about john. I hate that man SO MUCH!!!!! but freeuse!john being busy, attempting to finish a mission report late at night and drunk!user legit just finds him and rides his face until content. He doesn't even bother to argue about it, shutting his eyes and planting his hands on their hips while eating them out until they're shaking and has a droopy smile plastered on their face. OR... AND STAY WITH ME... Perv!user being caught in his room........ either huffing his boxers or humping his pillow, I don't know, but I can just imagine him grabbing them by the hair and forcing them to look at him while he just absolutely insults them, saying how they're such a slut, so nasty and gross, how they make him feel repulsed and user just absolutely gets off from it.

anyways, love your writing! make sure to take breaks bc you're legit my fav author and it'd kill me to see you burnt out <3 -🧣

perv!reader is precious to me bc they’re so pathetic and so genuinely strange about it, so warped in their own little world where it makes perfect sense to do the most deranged shit in the name of love, even when no one asked. especially john — especially a man like that, mean and careless in ways he’ll apologize for with a kiss to your temple and a slap on the ass before going right back to it.

and of course you start worrying. because that’s what you do, right? pacing the kitchen at night while he’s out too long. staring at your phone. wondering who he’s talking to, who he’s thinking about. and he’ll always come back, eventually — but what if one day he doesn’t?

that’s when the jar happens.

it starts without a plan. a little leftover in a condom he couldn’t be bothered to tie off, a streak of it across your stomach you wipe up with trembling fingers. you should clean up properly. you don’t. because it’s his, and it feels wrong to wash it down the drain. so you scrape it up, gather what you can, glass jar trembling in your hands.

and it’s disgusting. it’s pathetic. it’s the sort of thing no normal person would ever dream of doing. but you’re not normal, are you? you’re his.

it doesn’t take long for it to become routine. an ugly little ritual you tell yourself is harmless. collect it in the dark when he’s asleep, when he’s gone, when he pulls out to finish across your stomach with a grunt and a slap of your thigh. sometimes you even bait him into it, mouthy and difficult until he’s pinning you down and using you like he’s angry about it, which he probably is. you act like you hate it. you don’t.

the jar fills slow. little bits at a time. cloudy white streaks clinging to the glass. and you tell yourself you’ll stop soon, you’re just being cautious, just a backup plan. but then comes the night he leaves for two days without telling you.

and that’s when you break.

pour a little inside you, trembling fingers slick with it. tell yourself it’s to calm down, that you’re just keeping him close. it’s not even fresh but it doesn’t matter. feels good. feels like possession, like some sick little claim you get to keep when he’s not there to fuck it into you himself.

and you sleep better like that, full of him.

when he comes back, you don’t tell him. you just fuck him mean and desperate, biting his shoulder when he calls you a crazy bitch because he still comes inside you anyway. still tells you you’re his when you make him. still leaves you aching and ruined and grinning into the pillow.

ANYWHO THIS GOT TOO LONG LOVE YOY MORE DW IM IMMUNEE TO BURN OUT,

[z0mi3]

Streetlights flicker softly above, casting pools of golden light across the sidewalk as the two of you walk side by side. The distant hum of traffic blends with the low buzz of cicadas in the warm night air. A cool breeze brushes past, tugging at your clothes and whipping your hair into your face. Beside you, Nanami’s usually pristine hair, always neatly slicked back at work, is mussed slightly by the wind, a few strands falling loose across his forehead. It’s strange, seeing him like this. Less buttoned-up. More… human. Gentle.

“You really didn’t have to walk me home, Nanami,” you say softly, glancing up at him. There’s a hint of guilt in your voice, though you’re secretly grateful. It’s rare to have time alone with him like this.

He glances at you out of the corner of his eye, his hands tucked neatly into his coat pockets. “It’s really no problem,” he says, and a small, genuine smile appears, subtle, but unmistakable. “It wasn’t all that much trouble.”

You smile too, looking ahead again as the two of you slow your pace. “Still… I know you’ve been working non-stop lately. You could’ve gone straight home.”

“I could’ve,” he replies, calm as always. “But I didn’t want to.”

That quiet admission makes your heart skip. It’s simple. Honest. You don’t reply right away, unsure how to answer something like that without sounding like a schoolgirl with a crush. Which, unfortunately, you sort of are.

Nanami stops at the curb as you reach your building. He turns slightly to face you. “I know you’ve had a hard week. Between the mission and all the reports piling up… I just thought you might want the company.”

You glance at him again, the way his eyes soften when they meet yours. He always speaks so plainly, so carefully. Like every word is chosen with purpose. You admire that about him—his control, his composure. He never lets anything slip… and yet here he is, letting his guard down just a little.

“I do want the company,” you admit quietly. “Especially yours.”

For a moment, the air between you shifts. Something unspoken hovers just beneath the surface—warm, uncertain, but full of potential.

He exhales softly, almost like a sigh of relief. “That’s good to hear.”

You glance at his hair again, a small laugh escaping before you can stop it. “Your hair’s all messed up, by the way.”

He raises a brow, bringing one hand up to smooth it back with his usual precision. “Is it that bad?”

“Not bad,” you say, still smiling. “Just… different. Kind of nice, actually.”

He lets out a quiet hum, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, but the corner of his mouth quirks up again. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

You linger at the entrance of your apartment building, neither of you making a move to leave.

“Do you want to come in for tea or something?” you ask before you can talk yourself out of it. “Only if you’re not too tired.”

There’s a beat of silence, and for a second you think he’ll politely decline, like he usually does. But then he nods once, slowly.

“I wouldn’t mind tea.”

Your heart does another flip, but you manage to keep your face calm, at least on the outside.

You push the door open and hold it for him. He steps in beside you, and for the first time in weeks, something feels a little easier. A little lighter. You’re not sure where this is going, or what it means, but for tonight… it’s enough.

@bbyg4rlhelps for the beautiful dividers! | some nanami content bc he’s genuinely my man

[neptuneball]

TW: opinion, cussing (for the babies in this fandom)

i want to add in my two cents on the new reveal of earth and luna being siblings but first! we need to discuss my overarching opinion on familial relationships in this show:

i think it’s fucking stupid actually :D like in the case of neptune and uranus being cousins— it does absolutely nothing for ANYTHING!! there was no point in making them cousins especially bc they don’t even treat each other like that in canon (they hardly even treat each other like friends the majority of the time). by assigning them a familial relationship, alvaro did nothing but hinder fan creativity and prevent things like shipping uranus x neptune. like, i know it was based off of their similarities as the two ice giants of our solar system but that actually didn’t have to equate to them being related…

if you want to use that logic alvaro, fine. but then use it for venus and earth too, bc they are both also considered sister planets!! should they not be considered brothers? why are you picking and choosing?? i think that’s what people are mostly frustrated with. it’s not clear across the board who is related to who and WHY ykwim.

as for earth and luna being not only brothers but also the kids of proto and theia, i don’t like it either. like i was saying, it hinders fandom creativity, ruins the previously developed and established relationships dynamics between earth and the rest of the cast and also just feels thrown in there. (don’t even get me started about this info being patreon exclusive until now, that shit PMO so hard) and now with this finally being revealed to the general public, shipping is gonna take a massive hit which is just bad for the fandom.

people are going to get pissed off and leave bc suddenly their favorite ships have a weird—UNNECESSARY—ethical dilemma. the younger, inexperienced members of our fandom will take this as reason to start attacking people for having been apart of the, for example, earthluna shipping, and things are gonna get toxic and hard to be a part of.

i want to clear up that no, i don’t ship uranep (i do view them as family as i has written into many of my fics) and no i don’t ship earthluna (idk i don’t really focus on the rocky planets - i view them more like father/son or brothers) but i would like to come out and say i WANT THE OPTION TO DO IT. that’s what i LOVE about this fandom!! i love have the OPTION to ship characters and see characters as having a different/deeper relationship than in canon. i love being able to play around with character designs and make weird headcanons and generally have the freedom the do whatever i fucking want with the characters bc bro they are personified celestial objects, let them fuck AGAGAGAGAGA. i want the OPTION to ship whoever i want, the OPTION to view whoever i want a family (without fandom backlash) and the OPTION to think that two characters shouldn’t be related.

to reiterate in case i’m not being clear enough: by canonizing a relationship dynamic between two characters, you take away my ability to be creative with the characters!!! even if alvaro had never canonized uranus and neptune being cousins, i would still have had the OPTION to view them more like brothers/cousins than lovers—but he did and now if i were to ship them, id get laughed off the internet for being an incest shipper. if he had never canonized earth and luna, i would’ve STILL been able to see them as brothers but i also would’ve had grounds to explore a deeper connection between them!! like i said, that’s what people are mad about. they are mad that their options are being taken away and frankly they have every right to feel that way. if you are going to wait until 3 years into the show to canonize a character relationship that had been purposefully left up to debate, don’t be surprised when there is push back against it.

directed towards younger fans who have never been exposed to a situation like this in a fandom: BE NICE TO PEOPLE WHO HAVE DIFFERENT INTERPRETATIONS OF CANON. DONT ATTACK PEOPLE WHO DONT KNOW. DONT SHAME PEOPLE OFF THE INTERNET JUST BC YOU THINK YOU KNOW BEST. this fandom is already insufferable. DO NOT ADD TO IT.

[m1ssunderstanding]

do you think that paul refused to initially drop acid with the beatles/john bc he was scared that he’d have a potentially bad trip in front of them? i meant with tara you get the safety of someone trustworthy that u know but without that person being of upmost importance to you. meanwhile there was so much paul could possibly worry about saying/seeing/confronting around john that he avoided it ?

(I'm assuming this is referencing my fic where, from John's POV, Paul won't do LSD with John because he doesn't love him and he's scared of bonding and connecting with him in that way and he does it with Tara because he's just obsessed with rich people)

Yes. 100% that's what was going on in Paul's head. John going, "wow it's amazing it stripped away all my defenses and I was just fully living in the present and I'll never be the same again it's just really stripped me down to my core" like it's a good thing and Paul's like "yeah that sounds terrifying no thank you I'm going to keep reinforcing my walls up until the day I die I want those things high and thick."

Meanwhile, John's not really being open about the fact that he wants Paul to trip with him for bonding purposes. Instead, he's calling him a conservative loser. So, I think Paul tried LSD with Tara, not out of any real desire of his own (I mean a little. He doesn't do things he doesn't want to do but you know what I mean.) so that he could go "no I've tried it. I'm not scared I'm just not into it. Wasn't for me." Because you're right. He was scared of ruining his most important relationships. So Tara was someone he was close enough to that he'd be safe but not someone he'd be heartbroken about losing. Very strategic.

And he wasn't wrong. There's that quote from George where he was like "you know why I don't trust Paul? Because one time when he was having a bad trip and he thought he was going to fall off this cliff I kept trying to offer him a hand to help him down and he wouldn't take it." Which is so indicative of Paul's issues that George would never understand. But anyway the point is, Paul's "bad" behavior while under the influence of LSD actually did have a serious negative impact on one of his closest relationships.

That's why, I think, he finally chose to trip with John when John was having a bad trip himself. Paul was terrified of being the problem but if John's already in a bad place he can't leave him there alone. Like George Martin said, something about "to be with him in his pain." Paul thinks it's his job to save John. And of course, with their soulmate psychic bond, they ended up melding minds and becoming one just like John had wanted and they deepened their bond and it was beautiful.

Sorry I'm up in the mtns and don't feel like looking up the actual quotes but thank you for this ask! It's so fun to get into why they did what they did and what was (I think) going on in their little messed up heads.

[francislangdon]

(POA anon) honestly between the molangdon, melangdon, and perlah&princess discussing if heather and frank have slept together, i need ED bicycle langdon. every woman has taken him for a spin. absolutely no one gives a shit that he's married bc they know if they're really hankering for an uncomplicated night of getting their pussy ate, he'll do it and they can go right back to work without any further issues. kim fucked him in an empty wing slated for renovation once and didn't find it that interesting tbh, but he and princess had a truly unhinged hookup in a bar bathroom after labor day 2023. samira hasn't fucked him yet but is due for it once they start really generating some friction during langdon's repeat PGY4 year. the few times abby actually steps foot in the ED she has no clue every woman there knows what her husband's dick feels like.

i would also like to spread my bisexual langdon agenda and suggest that he's also fucked donnie and jesse. he sneaks off into a supply closet and santos thinks he's doing drugs again but when she walks in he's railing whitaker. which is the worst case scenario in her eyes tbh. samiralangdon will have a rivalry all season until episode 10 where they fuck about it and then realize that their conflicting approaches to medicine fill the gaps of each others weaknesses. and then they save a life together and that's somehow more intimate than the sex they had. one day his whoring comes to an end and everyone is like "you're finally commiting to your wife after all this time?" and hes like "lmfao no. mel is possessive."

and that's why dana is always on his case about being a better husband cos she knows he's slanging it.

[zombiecowboy65]

Hello AGAINNNNN dear zombie <3 just to tell you that I'd die for more Jeremy with pots hcs if you have them!!!!!!!!!

(also to send you a virtual hug, bc as another member of the chronic illness squad, I feel ya, it SUCKS; we should definitely be giving them to Jeremy)

Also that bit about "his body robbing him of his future"................it hit 👍🏻

Hellooooo Iz :)))) . I am sending u a virtual hug right back 🫂🫂🫂🫂 . Chronic illness sucks booty cheeks. And NOT in the fun way.

Also Oh boy LOL do I have more pots Jeremy hcs ? I have SO MANY

Everytime my pots flares up I’m like. R u ready to die Jeremy Knox 😭😭 so a lot of this is probably me projecting. But within reason of course

These are in no particular order:

- Jeremy doesn’t get diagnosed until he’s in his mid twenties because I am too fond of the idea that Jeremy finally gets (mostly) everything he wanted and then his body starts crumpling after everything he put it thru to make his family happy / bearable. And now he’s got what he wants but his body is trying to take it from him 💔

-Jeremy gets diagnosed because he passes out after standing up after blowing Jean in the shower (hot water + the sudden change in gravity, it was over for him before it started) .

-likes coconut water because he’s a freak like that.

-hates taking salt pills so he steals salt packets from every fast food place they go to. Also hates having to eat straight up spoonfuls of salt all the time so he gets his hands on whatever condiments have a lot of sodium and just. Takes shots of them (soy sauce, salad dressing, pickle juice, etc etc.) (Jean is horrified the first couple of times but now he is used to it)

-doesn’t actually pass out most of the time so he has a tendency to push himself further than he should.

-doesn’t actually pass out most of the time so he constantly invalidates himself . (Well I’m not passing out so it’s not even that bad, and other ppl have it worse , etc etc)

-gets limited to one cup of coffee per day by his doctor and is mad as hell about it. Tries to drink more anyway. Jean threatens to throw out all caffeine , but the palpitations / chest pain Jeremy gets scare him (Jeremy) enough to make him hold off instead (sometimes)

-gets migraines like u would not believe. And he gets them with aura .

-there are a number of foods that make Jeremy’s blood pressure worse. Jeremy knows this. Jeremy eats them anyway. But Jean’s too perceptive & Jean stops cooking with them entirely , until Jeremy gets annoyed and asks Jean to stop treating him like he’s incapable. So Jean cooks with them as asked and instead just. Robs every convenience store in the area of every electrolyte he can find

-(I think the idea of Jean having Gatorade/electrrolytes/salt on hand all the time for Jeremy is really sweet lol)

-Jeremy got a lot of the symptoms pre passing out in the shower, he just chalked them up to other things. Being anemic for the dizziness / blindness / deafness w standing , random bouts of anxiety for the chest pain/heart palpitations, and once, asthma for the air hunger

-Jeremy also refuses aids (see the invalidation bullet lol) because it’s not that bad, really. He has to sit down in the shower and take breaks walking up the stairs and while working out and has to keep pulling himself out of games and can’t even get off the toilet without nearly passing out, but it’s not that bad. And then Jean buys him compression socks with Golden retrievers on them bc they look like barkbark, and Jeremy wears them all the time

-(he’s mad that they help)

-also this was in my other post but whenever Jeremy stands he usually has to grab onto something for support. Jean picks up on this and subtly puts himself at Jeremy’s side every time so Jeremy can grab onto him instead (and Jean can catch him if he falls)

That’s all I’ve got for rn . TRUST a fic will be coming LMAO. I’m too annoyed not to make this man suffer

[pavuchokk]

I believe that El was never really in love with Mike, bear with me.

In season 1, she didn't even know what a friend was, likeee a couple of days before their kiss? And... Wow. Shocker, obviously, she didn't know what love was either. Their 1st kiss gets turned into an inc3st joke (just like any other their "romantic" interactions in the show, it's not taken seriously).

El first learns about love in Hopper's cabin while watching the tv in season 2 , this is the moment when she realizes that Mike wants them to be lovers, and she gotta play into that lover role. Writers sort of fraimed it as a lavender marriage without making El gay. She's just too unsocialized to understand what love even feels like. My girl hasn't even experienced family love yet (which she WILL in season 5, cause that's her real arc).

After their reunion, her first intention was to kiss Mike, but its clearly not because she's head over heels for him, lol. It's just the only thing she knows so far, and she knows Mike supposedly likes it (so we see her performing and comforming to society [and Mike] as early as season 2).

In season 3, we are introduced to them "swapping spit." Mike is showing sort of "I'm uncomfortable" body language, dude pulls her hands away and starts singing to get over himself, i guess. El did NOT like him singing, and later, we learn that singing together is a sign of love [Dustin&Suzie and Lumax, both couples had a moment where they were singing together]. The only thing she wants is to keep kissing, which is lowkey giving: "I'm a toddler and found something i like, so I'm gonna do this thing until i throw up." They don't really talk with Mike, don't share common tastes and interests. (Moreover, Mike is embarrassed about being a geek, he doesn't want to show her this part of himself ). So there's actually nothing to connect with each other besides being physical.

Then we have the breakup, and El says that he's her FIRST boyfriend??? Soooo she doesn't even see him as something permanent? That's not how you think someone you love, idk. Ik the beakup itself has been milked hundreds of times already, but yeah, my girl didn't gaf at all when they broke up, and neither did Mike (yeah, so endgame couple behavior).

Then there's the mall's "crazy together 1.2" dialogue, where we see that El doesn’t have that "crazy" feeling for Mike, she doesn't pick up on what Mike is trying to tell her (one lil funny thing to me is how Mike freaks out at the word 'boyfriends', yeah dude we get it, you're not gay, chill).

Even tho the goodbye kiss is talked about a lot, it is not talked about ENOUGH. Idk why people purposely ignore El's facial expressions, girl is literally cringing hard at herself. And no, it's not because she's aware that Mike doesn’t like her, cause umm she literally begs for his attention and love in s4 lol.

Heading into season 4, we see El's performance in its full colors: cheesy love letters and a sort of altar for Mike lmao. Looks like an obsession to me, not love. We don't see any characters doing bs like that, bc, well, it IS weird, and she clearly learned this shit from books and tv. The most important "couple thing" for her is to say and write the word 'love.' Well well well, sounds like somebody likes to read/watch romance😭.

The airport and the Rink-o-Mania oh yeahhh, both El and Mike are soooo fake here. Once again, we are reminded how different their tastes are. They argue about food choices like 2 times here???

Untill her rescure I personaly see El just being upset with Mike lying to her (and i guess she heard Mike and Will aguring in the Rink-o-Mania + later she most likely saw the van scene on top of that).

Now the pizza scene, it was giving "the last laugh," both are so ready to break up, and i believe they would've if Argyle hadn't come up.

The monologue, it just made her mad tbh, we see that with vines tightening around her neck and her facial expressions... girl is crying inside and out: "bitch Mike, why tf are you lying again? god i wanted to end this bullshit relationship".

After the whole Vecna thing, the season ends with her being mad with Mike once againnnn and Mike has no clue why ("but.. but.. i- i- i said "the thing" why is she mad, damn these species😒") , oh okay😅

In conclusion, it's just crazy to me how dependent all 3 characters are on this love triangle.

Mileven being endgame:

Makes Mike a shitty friend and boyfriend.

Will ends up as yet another poorly written token gay guy that has to suffer.

And El becomes just another ass written woman among hundreds of ass written women in media.

[pollikipollanovich]

Since you've blocked me lol

You know deep down this is a massive amount of dishonesty — pretending that women not wanting to chop off their tits is solely due to medical paranoia, as if it has nothing to do with living in a society that elevates having breasts and devalues being breastless. It’s like arguing that women keeping their hair long has nothing to do with sexism — a claim so ridiculous it deserves to be pointed at and laughed at.

Repeating “there is no reason to chop off your tits” like a broken radio won’t make this dumb claim any more true. Every choice has reasons including the ones you viciously condemn or approve.

I don’t care what you consider “healthy” or “unhealthy.” Those are value judgments, no matter who they come from. Notremoving your breasts also puts you at risk for all sorts of health issues which doesn't seem to bother you even tho those risks are even more frequent that mastectomy complications, which when they appear aren't even that serious. Clearly, your “muh health” is a front to mask more controversial motives you wont even admit if you even if you were made aware ofthem.

You say women don’t consciously think about keeping or removing their breasts, so what? And..it's no longer a choice bc they're too self-unaware ? What ? You really think pointing that out changes anything I’m saying? They still make the choice to keep them, for unwate reasons, that’s it.

Why are you bringing up radfems when I was referring to women in general since the very begginning ? But even then, what I said applies to virtually allradfems too. There are social, subconscious and consciously reasons behind that bodily choice and any choice in fact. Not thinking about it explicitly doesn’t mean it’s not motivated lol

So fine, choose to keep your breasts — but leave surgically breastless women alone. You sound so dumb, still under the impression that i'm making prescriptions. A broken parrot this girl

No, you dumbass omg— don’t open your nasty mouth to throw around terms you barely understand. My statements are not prescriptive (“should”), but descriptive (“this is why people do what they do”). I’m not telling anyone what they should do with their own body, unlike you with your ''breasts *should* be removed only for this reason" look at yourself in a mirror, u projecting clown, u are the one prescribing things here.

“The point of my paragraph was to prove that you can have something considered conventionally normative without taming it to conventional standards.”

Which was a stupid and irrelevant paragraph based on the same misunderstanding you made at begginning. It doesn’t engage with my point, which again is: your conformist decisions are motivated by sexist motive. Your point — that in some contexts a seemingly normative choice can be subversive — is irrelevant here.

“Mainstream society doesn’t ‘require’ women to have breasts. Women naturally have breasts.”

Yes, it does. Society implicitly demands that you look a certain way, that you don't remove your breasts. It expects you to naturally develop them, and when you don’t, you get medicalized/othered. You just have a very narrow idea of what a requirement is — as if it must involve artificial things only. But requirements also includes expectations about biological development. So yes, women typically grow breasts *and* society requires them to have/keep them. These two facts are not mutually exclusive, unless your mind is too tiny to hold both.

“There is no ‘breast conservation decision,’ because having breasts isn’t a choice.”

It is a choice — because there’s an intent concious or not to maintain your body in a certain state, to preserve it, and that intent has causes, which makes what you're doing a decision.

“We don’t wake up with the choice to get a double mastectomy every day (or any day, unless there’s a medical reason).”

Totally irrelevant. Read the previous paragraphs.

“The reason there’s a mainstream expectation for women to have breasts is because women are adult human females.”

Yeah, right — like society expects women to have long hair ONLY because hair grows naturally. And not because, like breasts, it relates to the male gaze.

Don’t be so dense. You choose to keep things that grow naturally — like keeping your hair long, even though its growth is “natural.” Just like keeping your nails at a certain length. Same goes for breasts. These are all choices over things that develop naturally.

“There’s a societal expectation to have fingernails. So not ripping them off isn’t some beauty decision. Do you know how fucking stupid you sound?”

Just because you pick an example that you find extreme or ridiculous doesn’t mean it’s false. It just means you’re a shallow dumbass who believes the coherence of a comparison is based on how normal it seems to you, rather than its internal logic. Shus.

“There’s a societal expectation for you to have legs. So if you want to go against it, go hack your legs off with a cleaver. Tell me how that goes, idiot.”

Yes — and once again, you think you’re contradicting me because the example feels too extreme for your tiny brain to process. You also still seem to be under this stupid impression that i'm making prescriptions by the mere act of describing people choices and their motives, which again just shows that you have hugee struggles to distinguish between 'what it is '(description) and 'what should be' (prescription).

“I retain my breasts because I see no reason to remove them.”

Then ask yourself: what’s the social origin of that reasoning? If you dig deep enough, you’ll find different roots, meaning that you're not doing it just for the reason you publicly stated. And let’s be real — part of the reason you wouldn’t want to cut them off is because you don’t want to look like a “deformed freak,” and dating anxiety is probably floating somewhere in your subconscious too like so many radfems here despite their pretenses of not wanting to date anyone. But given how disigenuous you are you just wont admit it here.

'real feminists DO care about those “micro contexts”. more proof that you are a TRA with a fetish.''

0 relevance, always off topic. a conclusion that doesn't even make sense, and ''micro contexts'' is irrelevant to my point. you're so horribly dumb that you can't follow my argument

your big issue is that you have awful reading comprehension skills coupled with a very black and white thinking. You should get tested for autism if you haven't already bc it's massive. 'REWARDED' here means that you receive benefits, a better status compared to those who don't conform, not that you're treated like an untouchable queen, applauded everywhere lmao. Which i made it very clear in my previous post where i mentioned some of the reasons why women don't want mastectomy. It's a matter of better vs worse social standing. Your contextual thinking is rly terrible and u are pathologically dishonest. It must be a daily struggle having your kind of mentality, so many strawmen vomited in seconds

What your ''radical acceptance '' scam consists of : forcing people to keep a sex conformist appearance, nullify that choice, then problematize and pathologize other choices that runs counter to that, and ofc refusing to apply any radfem analysis to the decisions you deem neutral. Indeed, an approach radical in its misogyny for someone who is supposed to be a radfem. It feels like interacting with a right winger who fetishizes ''the natural ways of being''' in a more or less concealed way

radfems point out that a woman choosing to undergo a mastectomy for trans reasons or breast augmentation is rooted in misogyny in one way or another, and I agree to some extent. But why wouldn’t that also apply to women who choose not to undergo these procedures and are satisfied with their own unmodified chests?

That’s still a bodily choice, even if it’s usual, and this choice has causes and consequences. Those things still develop within a social context that’s heteronormative and misogynistic, just like the other bodily decisions and feelings about one's body.

So all those things considered, it's pretty clear that misogyny is still involved, undeniably even. To be breastless (especially out of nonmedical reasons) is to be socially read as abnormal, unfeminine, undesirable and that attracts all sort of worse social treatments, especially from men.

Keeping one’s breasts on the other hand, means the opposite: staying in the norm, so being more feminine, more desirable, more typical, and consequently having a better social/symbolic standing compared to women who removed theirs. Deriving satisfaction from having a 'standard' chest makes sense but still, that feeling is built indirectly on the male gaze, on a system that valorizes & rewards some bodies at the expense of others ouf of misogynistic reasons. The root is still misogyny not matter the choice, really.

Keeping your breasts or cutting them off isn't really any different in terms of misogyny, one could even argue that not removing them is actually more misogynistic than doing so because it would means caring more about being 'properly female' so appealing more to males and being more compliant to sexist cultural comfort

At least, tifs are doing subversive choices even tho they're rooted in sexism, while most of you are choosing to align yourselves with sexist ideals ouf of misogyny. Honestly, who's worse here ?