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lvis44 · 5 months ago

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Sweet Escape - Wedding Pt. 2 // LH44

Lewis Hamilton x Y/N

Warnings: Language, Alcohol Consumption, Angst, Anxiety

Word Count: 5.4k

Summary: Paradise is supposed to be fun and relaxing... a Sweet Escape, but when unspoken feelings and jealousy rise to the surface, everything can be turned upside down in the blink of an eye.

Notes: The second part of our wedding... I was reading my doc and figured this part was solid enough to be put into the universe lol. More to come but, once again, I do not know the timeline. I hope this holds you guys enjoy and this holds you over in the meantime! *insert Lil Wayne - Sorry 4 The Wait - here*. I've said it a million times and I will say it a million more, I cannot get my brain to stay in one tense while writing so ignore it the best you can lol. I LOVE YOU GUYS!

I am not a professional writer and all of this is a work of fiction and is strictly for fun. Enjoy! xxx

Previous Sections: Prologue - Part One - Part Two - Part Three - Part Four - Part Five - Part Six - Part Seven - Part Eight - Epilogue - The Wedding Pt.1

You’re not sure how long you’ve been staring at the dark ceiling when you hear your phone start to vibrate on the side table, causing you to groan. Just because your nerves are keeping you awake doesn’t mean you want to talk to anyone. When you see his name flash across your screen your first reaction is to laugh at his insistence but quickly anxiety washes over you. Every possible thing that could be wrong flashing through your mind as you answer his call.

“Lew?” You croak out, your voice dry in your throat.

“Hey. Shit, I didn’t wake you did I? Just needed to hear your voice and this can’t possibly count as me seeing you before the wedding.” He’s quiet on the other end, probably trying not to wake Miles in the other room.

“No, can’t sleep.” You admit. You’ve thought a few times throughout the night that you should have given in and let him hold you tonight, knowing you more than likely already would have fallen asleep.

“Neither can I, my nerves are going crazy.” He sounds vulnerable and you can’t help but worry.

“Not backing out on me, are you?” You attempt to joke, even though the anxiety is real.

“What? No, baby, never.” He laughs at the absurdity of your question, making you feel that much better, “No, I’m just stressing over the whole thing. Thinking maybe we should have just run away and eloped.”

“We still can.” You giggle, knowing he’s joking but understanding the feeling.

He joins you in your laughter before falling silent. You know he’s too deep in his own thoughts so you let him settle on what he wants to say.

“I’m just worried something will go wrong like the catering will be shit or the decorations won’t be right. I don’t know, I just need it to be perfect for you. Perfect for us.” He finally shares, his voice is tired.

“Lew, the only thing that could possibly ruin tomorrow is if for some reason we legally can’t get married. Even if we end up in a courthouse, I’m ending the day as your wife. Everything else is just an excuse for us to throw a kick ass party.” You try your best to assure him.

His laugh comes through the phone before he lets out a sigh, “You’re right, nothing else matters. This is why I’m marrying you ya’ know.”

“Why? Because I would have said yes even if you proposed with a ring pop?” You tease him, your smile spreading across your face.

“Well that,” He laughs, “but also because with two sentences from you, I’ve felt calmer than I’ve felt since the second I got here to the hotel. You always manage to make everything seem okay and truth be told as long as I have you, it is.”

His words hit you deep, knowing how much he means them.

“You know you’re supposed to save the vows for later, right?” You joke, trying not to choke up, knowing if you’re too sincere with him right now you will end up in tears.

“I love you Y/N.” He says simply, aware you're trying not to get too emotional.

“I love you Lewis. You wanna stay on the phone?” It’s something you’ve done many times while he’s been away and the distance has gotten to be too much. You barely talk, just content in the sound of each other's breathing and the rustle of the others sheets.

“If you don’t mind?” He sounds nervous again, like he feels like he’s asking too much of you.

“Always. Good night Lew, I love you.” You say quietly, settling back into your bed.

“I love you baby.”

You don’t say another word, both falling asleep quickly after your chat. The comfort of each other being all you needed to truly relax.

* * *

Charlotte's soft voice ringing through the room is the first thing you hear as you try to adjust to being awake. The second you start to come into yourself, the nerves come flooding in.

“You didn’t hear a word I just said, did you?” Charlotte is laughing as you sit up in bed. Your phone is still sitting on top of the comforter next to you, the call now having ended. You can only assume Lewis is already awake and getting ready or his phone died. You can’t help but smile at the memory of your conversation last night, both of you needing a moment of solace within the other.

“What?” You ask groggily, attempting to wipe the sleep from your eyes.

“Well, to start I said Good Morning Ms. Soon to be Hamilton,” She started, her voice much too loud before realizing and quieting right down, “then I told you that hair and makeup are on their way to the venue and the car will be here in about an hour.”

You raised your eyebrows at her as she sat down on the bed.

“I know, I should have woken you up earlier but I heard you talking in here at almost three in the morning, I assume with Lewis, and I wanted you to get some sleep,” She explains softly, putting her hand up to stop you as you go to respond, “there’s a light breakfast here if you want some, but you have plenty of time to shower and grab some food. If you don’t eat now, I’ve already scheduled some food for you at the venue that you can eat while they're doing your hair before you get your makeup done.”

You let out a sigh, thankful that she has thought ahead, you go to thank her but she starts again.

“I’ve already confirmed with four different people at the venue that your dress is there, hair and makeup has a place to set up, your room is on the other side of the building from Lewis so you won’t run into him, and all of the decorations have arrived and are being set up. The only thing you have to do today is let us take care of you, know that Miles and I have everything under control, and get married!” She finishes her spiel with a smirk, knowing that everything she just covered were concerns running through your mind, always proving even further why she was your Maid of Honor.

“Thank you, you are an absolute angel.” You say as you grab her hand.

“I do have to ask, just being nosy,” She starts, laughing gently, “was it Lewis on the phone last night?”

You feel yourself blushing unnecessarily, there being no reason to be embarrassed for talking to the man you are about to marry.

“Yeah, neither of us could sleep, just needed to talk to each other for a second.” You say sheepishly.

“And that right there is why you two are getting married today baby!” She says enthusiastically, once again much louder than you would prefer for the time of day.

“I’m gonna take a shower,” You tell her as you push yourself out of bed, feeling your stomach growl, “food will be there for me?”

She laughs at your need to double check before nodding, “Yes there will, I heard that, you need some food.”

“Leave me alone.” You grumble, laughing softly to yourself too as you stumble to the bathroom.

“You’ve got an hour, let me know if you need anything.” You hear her yell as she makes her way out of your bedroom to let you shower in peace.

It feels like you’ve entered an alternate universe once you are out of the shower. You ended up taking longer than anticipated and were being rushed to get dressed before ushered downstairs and into the back of another town car. Charlotte had a small bag packed for you and said she would take care of your luggage that was still in the room after the wedding, keeping the suite for the bridal party to stay in after the event.

Your jaw almost dropped when the car finally pulled into the venue. You had been there before, a few times actually, over the last two summer breaks with Lewis, trying to finally decide. But now… now it was snowing, a winter wonderland surrounding the manor that had been deemed a castle by almost everyone around you and you couldn’t help but agree. A castle had been a dream of yours as a kid but never something you found realistic as an adult, safe to say realistic wasn’t in Lewis’ vocabulary when it came to your wedding. You had been watching Downton Abbey for the third time one night and made an offhand joke to Lewis about how you should get married at Highclere Castle, from then on he had made it his mission to find something that fit the bill. His first thought had been the castle itself but it hadn’t been an option, instead he found a place just outside of London that you had never heard of, something your wedding planner had never even seen, it was perfect. It was large and regal but still fit with both of your styles, allowing it to be decorated with a fine line of modernity and tradition.

When you pulled up to the front door it looked as though you had stepped into a movie, the snow painting the perfect backdrop despite your hesitance. You hadn’t been sure about a winter wedding but Lewis was impatient and winter was his favorite season. He had done so much of what you had dreamed of that you couldn’t help but agree, knowing it didn’t matter when or where you got married, as long as it ended with him.

Charlotte was quickly ushering you and your mother inside and out of the cold. The entrance was bustling with people moving flower arrangements, chairs, tables, everything you had asked for being set up right in front of your eyes. Charlotte was pulling you down the hallway to your left before you had a chance to even take it all in.

“I’m sorry, I know I’m rushing around but you can relax the second we get you into the bridal suite. I promise.” She was apologizing from in front of you while you tried to keep up with her brisk pace, your mom close behind you.

“Are we late?” You couldn’t help but ask, feeling nervous all over again.

“No , we’re perfectly on time, but the damn men are early and I will be damned if Lewis wins and sees you before you’re at the altar.” Her voice is serious and you can’t help but laugh out loud. It truly isn’t that big of a deal to you but the moment you mentioned it being part of the plan Charlotte and Miles made it their top priority for the day of the wedding.

“It’s really not that big of a deal.” You continue to laugh at Charlotte as she slows down once you’ve reached the doors of the suite. Secretly you wouldn’t mind a quick hello, or even just a glimpse at his beautiful face, but she was determined.

“It’s part of the plan therefore we will be sticking to it, everything will be exactly how you want it today.” Her voice is stern before she opens the door to the suite and welcomes you in.

You’re immediately welcomed by the crew you had hired to take care of everyones hair and makeup. You had spent a while choosing the perfect team and had been in touch with them frequently over the last few months and the familiar faces made you excited. Charlotte tells you to take a seat on the plush couch off to the side and makes her way over to talk with the crew, making sure everything is taken care of for you. Your mom comes to join you on the couch, mimosas in hand with a shocked look on her face, acting as if she doesn’t know where they came from. You giggle as you happily take one from her hand while someone sets food on the small table in front of you, immediately reminding you of how hungry you were back at the hotel.

“You should have something to eat, even if it’s just a nibble. You have some time before you need to start getting ready.” Your mom tells you softly, gesturing towards the spread sitting in front of you.

You nod, leaning forward to grab a pastry as you watch Charlotte in amusement, animated as ever while she gets everyone and everything organized. You take a moment to sit in silence, well as silent as it can be with people bustling about, letting yourself take it all in. You continue to eat as much as you feel you can keep down before someone is suggesting you get in your robe. When you come back from the changing room there are many more people in the room, everyone finally arrived and ready to get ready. You had decided to keep the wedding parties small on both sides. You had Charlotte as your maid of honor, your cousin who had become a sister to you over the years, and your childhood best friend. Miles was Lewis’ best man, Nicolas, and Daniel. Your mom was getting ready with you as well as Linda, Carmen and Lewis’ sisters.

As you sat in the chair watching your hair transform, joking and laughing with your stylist Javier, you took in the sight around you through the mirror. Both families and friends blending into one big happy group, laughing together and sharing mimosas. You were thrilled at the thought of everyone becoming one large family, beyond excited for the next chapter of your life.

“Ladies! I need to say something before everyone starts with their makeup,” Charlottes voice commanded the room getting everyone's attention, “thank you! Okay, I just need to start by saying Y/N, I love you so much and I am so beyond thrilled that you are marrying my second best friend,” she sends you a wink as you both laugh with Lewis not even in the room to defend his decade long friendship, “he is like a brother to me and you very quickly became my little sister. That being said, I want to stress to every one that today is supposed to be perfect and WE are going to make sure it is,” her words are firm as she gestures around the room to your bridesmaids, “these two mean the absolute world to me and after everything it took to get them to this point I will not settle for ‘okay’, we’re looking for perfection.”

“Char, it’s-” You try to stop her, feeling like she’s making far too big a deal out of your day.

“Nope, Y/N, let me say this, you deserve it.” She shushes you before continuing, “I want everyone to have an absolute blast but most importantly I NEED Y/N and Lewis to have the best day of their lives. Annoying guest? Figure it out. Issue with the rings? Find me or Miles. Trouble with your dress? Suck it up, today isn’t about us.” Her voice is that of a strict teacher as she lectures your family and friends and you can’t help but roll your eyes and laugh before the comment about the rings latches on to your brain, “Y/N, babe, I love you so much and I am so happy for you. You are marrying the best human I know, well second to you of course, and I cannot wait to see the life that you two create together, I know it will be magical. Cheers everybody!”

You barely even register the sweet words she directs at you as she finishes her speech, your body working on auto pilot to raise you mimosa for her toast. The moment she sees the look on your face she’s rushing over to you.

“Hon, what’s wrong? You look worried.”

“What’s wrong with the rings? They’re here, right? They look correct? Nothing’s broken? You said there’s a problem with the rings, what's the problem?” You rush out your new concerns, not taking a moment to think once she’s in front of you.

“What? No, no, everything’s fine. Why would there be a problem with the rings?” She asks you confused for a moment before the realization dawns on her face, “Oh sweetie that was just an example, everything is totally fine. It’s exactly like we talked about, I have your band and Miles has Lewis’, I even texted him when we got here to make sure he had it. Do you want to see yours? I have it in my bag, I can go grab it.” Her words of reassurance are rushed as she tries to calm the new anxiety fluttering through your mind.

“No, oh my god, sorry, I just…” You shake your head, wanting to laugh at yourself for becoming so panicked so quickly, “I think my brain just blacked out after I heard ‘issue with the rings’, I don’t know why I let that freak me out so much.”

“It’s okay, you have a lot going on and this is a big deal, don’t worry about it, it’s what I’m here for.” Charlotte calms you, rubbing your forearm as she squats in front of your chair.

“Alright beautiful bride! Ready to make that gorgeous face even better?” Javier’s voice comes excitedly from behind you, rubbing your shoulders as he tries to coax you to turn around so he can start on your makeup.

You take a deep breath, the reality of the day settling into the pit of your stomach, before turning around, ready to be transformed. You’ve had him do this look on you numerous times, wanting to make sure it was exactly what you wanted and you trust his skills, but still the underlying anxiety refuses to leave you. You had opted for a more natural look, similar to what you would do on the day to day but elevated, you wanted to look like yourself, like the you that Lewis fell in love with. As you sat in the chair being pampered, listening to people bustle around behind you, a billion new scary thoughts and anxieties swarmed through your head.

You know you’re making the right choice, there is no one in the universe better made for you than Lewis and no one who you could love or love you more than him. You know everything is taken care of and planned to your liking, but you didn’t place each flower or taste every dish prepared today. You know all of the most important people in your life RSVP’d yes, but you haven’t laid eyes on them today, you don’t know if they’ve arrived on time. Every single detail that has been a stress in the back of your mind for the last year has now become the only thing you can think about. You’re trying so hard to let them slip to the background, to stay in the moment, enjoy the laughter of your bridal party and the random chatter from Javier, but it doesn’t work.

Your mom is the first to notice, seeing you with a furrowed brow and your eyes shut tight as Javier steps away to grab something.

“Sweetie, what’s wrong?” She asks quietly, her hand resting on your shoulder, giving it a tight squeeze.

The sound of her voice almost brings you to tears and you can’t quite explain why. You look at her through the mirror, noticing the deep concern on her face.

“Everyone wants it to be so perfect, what if it isn’t? I asked everyone to travel so far and what if it lets them down. The Hamilton wedding is supposed to be THE event, what if it’s not right or something goes wrong or it isn’t what people were expecting?” You ramble so quietly you’re worried she won’t be able to hear you.

“Oh, my sweet girl,” She says through a pout, wrapping her arms around your shoulders and meeting you cheek to cheek, “not an ounce of what you just said matters, I know you’re nervous but don’t stress yourself. Today is supposed to be one of the best days of your life, not because of how fancy it is or what caterer you hired, but because you are marrying a man that will love you, protect you, and take care of you for the rest of your life. I know that it feels like it’s all about the party and the flair, but today you are taking a step for you and Lewis and that is all that matters, you are building your life with an amazing man who would move mountains for you and that is all that matters. All you have to worry about is making it to the end of the aisle, saying I Do, and kissing your husband. We’re all just lucky that we get to witness it.”

“Fuck,” you breathe out with a dry laugh, “you’re right. It’s just so much.”

“Just keep reminding yourself that that beautiful man is going to be legally yours till death do you part.” She laughs before kissing your cheek, lightening your mood as you picture his perfect face. While her words do ease your nerves a new very important thought pops into your head, a new non-negotiable.

“Charlotte.” You call out urgently, aware of your time crunch.

“I’m here, what do you need?” She asks quickly, rushing to your side like a lady in wait.

“Lewis,” You start, watching as her eyebrows shoot up in a disapproving look, “no I know, I won’t look at him or let him look at me, I just need to squeeze his hand and hear his voice, I promise.”

She still doesn’t look quite convinced as you plead with her, “Y/N, no seeing Lewis was a very hard rule from day one of wedding planning. Are you sure?”

“Char, please, figure out a way so I don’t see him, we’ll stick to the rules but he’s been there to calm me down and make sure I’m okay for every major thing in my life for a more than half a decade and I don’t know about you but I’d say this is a pretty major thing! It won’t be any worse than me talking to him last night, I swear.” You plead with her, grabbing her hands, suddenly very set on needing to at least speak to Lewis before walking down the aisle.

“Okay, okay, yes, I will make it happen, but before you get into your dress, just in case, gimme a sec.” She agrees as her face softens, seeing your desperation, realizing that she too would need Lewis for a moment before something this big. He may be your lover, your fiance, the man you are about to spend the rest of your life with, but at the core he is your best friend, the man that has been there for you since you showed up at game night years ago, your other half.

Charlotte quickly leaves the room after squeezing your hand and telling Javier he can start working again. You assume she’s headed to find Miles, or she’s gone straight to Lewis. You start to get anxious yet again that you may be causing Lewis anxiety, you should have told her to tell him that you’re fine and just being selfish, remembering the moment of fear you had last night when he had called you.

You’re not sure how long it takes her but once your makeup is finished she has returned and is requesting for you to follow her. You feel silly walking out of the suite with pinned hair and your robe on but all you can think about is talking to Lewis, eager to hear his voice as if you’ve just started dating. Charlotte ushers you down a hallway to an empty room with a door on the other side. You’re far enough away from everyone that the noise has quieted and you can subsequently feel your brain calming down, realizing just how overstimulated you’ve been for the last few hours. Charlotte guides you to the far wall of the room, next to the door frame, turning you to back up against it before gently knocking on the door. It takes only a second for the door to open, Miles’ smiling face appearing next to you.

“Well hello beauty, you look fucking incredible.” He says before leaning in to kiss your cheek.

“It’s not fair that I don’t get to see her.” You hear your fiance whine from the other side of the wall, making you giggle and your cheeks warm.

“All in due time brother, you’re the lucky one though, you get to see her at the altar.” Miles says teasingly, leaning back through the door to look at Lewis before coming back to you, “So I have your fiance here as requested. Char and I will give you guys some privacy.”

“Thank you Miles, I’m sorry if this is a pain, I just needed a minute.” You tell him, reaching out to squeeze his arm.

Before he can respond, Miles is bursting out into a laugh, “Love, this was a help on my end, mans has been so annoyed that he hasn’t been allowed to see you all day, he hasn’t shut up about you once. Enjoy, you evidently both need it.” He says as his laughter begins to die down, sending a disapproving look into the room behind you where you assume Lewis is giving him the same back. “You guys have five minutes, and absolutely no peeking.”

“We won’t.” You and Lewis both promise in unison, making both of you giggle as Charlotte and Miles walk away to another room to give you your privacy.

“I mean it!” Miles turns around to yell, still walking backwards as he points his finger at you, “ I will know just by the look on bruvs face if he caught a glimpse of you, don’t you dare.”

“We’ll be good, I promise. Thank you guys!” You yell back at him as they disappear through a nearby door.

“Hey you.” You hear Lewis’ soft voice after a moment, your heart swelling just upon hearing the recognizable timbre.

“Hi.” You squeak, forgetting everything you had wanted to say when you asked Charlotte to make this happen.

“Are you okay?” He asks you, his voice filled with concern and care.

“Yes, oh my god yes,” You start, your anxiety of concerning him coming back tenfold, “I’m so sorry, I just, I don’t know, I was getting really anxious and then I realized that I haven’t had a big moment in life without you either being right there or calling me for like more than five years and then I got worried that I wouldn’t make it through something like this without talking to you first, which is silly because I know I’m literally preparing myself to marry you, like I’m going to see you at the altar in like an hour but I don’t know, my mom said all this stuff about how amazing you are trying to calm my nerves and then I realized I absolutely had to at least talk to you and I’m sorry if you were busy, I’m not trying to be needy, you just calm me and this day is so much and there's so much going on and it has to be perfect and-” Your words are rushed, not thinking them through as you ramble to him, not stopping to even take a breath.

“Y/N,” Lewis cuts you off, his voice firm but gentle, “it’s okay, please take a breath.”

You drop your head, almost embarrassed by how calm he sounds with the emotions swirling around in your head at the moment. You listen to his request and take a deep breath, trying to calm your breathing and your mind.

“Good, now another.” He instructs you calmly as you feel his hand sneak around the door frame and brush your hip.

The moment you see his skin you reach down and grasp his hand firmly, needing him to ground you as you take yet another deep breath.

“I’m sorry.” You whisper as you squeeze his hand, trying to breathe like he wants you to.

“Baby, you have nothing to be sorry for,” He starts softly, squeezing your hand just as firmly, “I know this whole thing is a lot and there’s so much going on, but none of that is important. I don’t give a fuck how anything goes as long as I get to end the night married to you, that’s all that matters today,” His voice is soft as he assures you, washing over you like a warm blanket before it turns cheeky as he adds, “well I also want to see you in that dress and obviously whatever you have underneath it.”

You want to laugh and cry at the same time, amused by how easily a stupid (yet serious) comment could lift your spirits, simply because it came from him. Amazed that the same sentiment that has been spoken to you by everyone around you with no avail, could take a burden off your chest simply because they came from his mouth.

“I love you so much Lew.” You reply, squeezing his hand so hard you’re worried you’ll hurt him, trying to fight back tears as you do.

“I love you so much my sweet girl and I will tell you just how much when you meet me at the altar. You’ve changed my life, you’ve made me a better man, a better human, you’ve made me happier than I knew was even possible and I want nothing more than to marry you today. I don’t care how that happens, if you want to run away right now and head to vegas we can, at the end of the day I just want you. You’re the best thing that has ever happened to me and nothing matters besides us. This whole castle could burn down right now and as long as I still had you I truly would not care. I love you so much and today is going to be incredible no matter what happens, but I bet you nothing will go wrong because we planned it and we’re pretty amazing.” He sealed his words with a kiss to the back of your hand, chuckling as he finished. His lips on your skin gave you a whole new sense of confidence and ignited a fire in the pit of your stomach.

You wished so badly that you could see him, that you could properly kiss him, but you reminded yourself that you were close to the finish line, that he would be all yours soon.

“I love you too, so so much, thank you for this, I’m sorry if I interrupted, I just needed to hear your voice and be close to you.” You admit to him with a sigh as you lean back against the wall.

“You’re never an interruption, whenever you need me I’m here, always. Besides, Miles wasn’t lying, I’ve been going crazy since we left the rehearsal dinner wanting to see you, touch you, kiss you, talk to you, literally anything. I know we’ve gone weeks apart from each other but everything feels different right now.” He tells you, making you smile, that you're not completely alone in your desperation. You take a moment, leaning against the wall in silence as you hold his hand, letting your nerves wash away.

“Alright, love birds! Time to go get fancy and hit the altar!” Miles’ voice cuts through your moment as he hollers and claps, returning to the room.

You let out a sigh, wishing your moment with Lewis could continue but reluctantly begin to move away from the wall. Before you can get too far, he is gripping your hand and pulling you back to place a kiss on your hand before leaving a lingering kiss on your pulse point.

“I love you Y/N, just come meet me at the altar. Nothing else matters.�� His words are muttered into the skin of your wrist before he finally lets you go and Charlotte is ushering you away back to your suite as Miles stands guard making sure Lewis doesn’t cheat and sneak a peek at you.

“Feeling better?” Char asks as you make your way down the hall.

“So much better, I feel perfect.” You say through a smile, meaning it wholeheartedly, “ I’M GETTING MARRIED!”

178 notes · View notes

lillikitty · 8 months ago

Note

Can I request a scenario with Chuuya in which the Reader acts very irritated and childish when she's sleep-deprived (who is a member of the Port Mafia)? Like they both have feelings for each other, but they haven't confessed yet 😔 (skill issue)

This is a fun idea! I hope I do your request justice! I did this right as I woke up so apologies if it’s not the best.

Chuuya x Sleep Deprived! Reader

The port mafia is not a place for the weak. Most can go several nights without sleeping and still be at their best. However, that doesn’t mean that lack of sleep can’t get to the best of them. Everyone needs sleep after all.

But you don’t believe that. You’ll sleep when you pass out and so far, you haven’t passed out. You got sent on a late night mission 3 nights in a row. You haven’t slept for 3 days and it’s starting to sink in on your brain. Thinking you might be able to finally get a night off, an emergency happened at one of the mafia’s weapon facilities that had you staying up for another night.

You and Chuuya got sent to the facility to wait and see if the culprit who’s sabotaging the transfer of these weapons comes back. You were dragging your feet as your eyelids felt heavy but you knew you had to stay awake. “Chuuyaaaaa, do we have to?” You whine, breaking the comfortable silence that had fallen between you two.

“Yeah, we do. The boss said so. So stop whining.” He scoffed a bit as he looked at you. You grumbled at him, “Well sorry if I don’t wanna do some stupid mission.” Chuuya is a bit taken aback as you aren’t one to usually call any mission stupid. He looks at you and takes in your demeanor. “Are you tired?” He asks. “Psh, no. I’m not tired, you’re tired.” You say as you stick your tongue out at him. A small smile forms on Chuuya’s face before he chuckles. “I think you are tired. You should’ve said-“ Chuuya was cut off by you tripping him. He caught himself before his face hit the ground and he looked up at you. “See? You’re the tired one.” You hum as you keep walking.

Chuuya picked himself up and followed after you. “Y/n, when was the last time you slept?” He asks with a bit of worry in his voice. “I dunno, 3 or 4 days ago or somethin’.” You’re words have been coming out a bit slurred and Chuuya is probably the only one who’d notice. He frowns a bit at that as this mission is supposed to last all night. It’s a stake out to make sure whoever was at the facility doesn’t come back.

Once you and Chuuya get to your position to watch the facility for the night he looks over at you and watches as you sway a bit, your eyelids fighting the urge to close. He sighs as he takes off his jacket and wraps it around your shoulders before pulling you into his side. “Hey! What’re you-“ You start to protest but Chuuya shushes you. “Just shut up and get some sleep. I’ll wake you if something happens.” He says as he looks away to hide the blush that’s rising to his cheeks. “Nuh uh! I told you I’m not tired!” You protest vocally but your body curls up next to Chuuya’s as your head rests on his shoulder. “I don’t need to sleep.. I’m fine..” A yawn is followed shortly after your protest and your heavy eyelids finally win their battle and close, you were out in seconds.

Chuuya sighs as he looks down at you. He’s never seen you act like this before but he found it rather cute. He brushes some of your hair out of your face as he just holds you close to him. He has no intentions of actually waking you up. He’s just gonna let you sleep as long as you need to.

Nothing happened that night at the facility. Once it was dawn, Chuuya called up Mori to let him know that nothing happened but you and him were taking the rest of the day off. Mori understood and let you both have the day for yourselves. Chuuya ended up carrying you back to his place as you were still out cold. While sleeping, he found you quite peaceful. It was very different from how daring and crazy you were on the battlefield. He unlocked the door to his place and carried you to his room. He laid you down on his bed and was about to take his jacket from you when you grabbed the jacket in your sleep and held it. The blush he had before came flooding back and he just let you be and went to the living room to just relax for the day.

Around 2 PM your eyelids finally fluttered open. You yawned and sat up as you stretched your body out. When you finally took in your surroundings you realized you weren’t in your room, then remembered the stake out mission you panicked. “Oh shit- What happened?” You quickly got up and ran out of the room to only pause when you smelt some food. You peaked around the corner and saw Chuuya cooking. He glanced over his shoulder then smiled. “Good morning sleeping beauty.” He says with a smirk.

“What happened last night? The mission, was everything okay?” You choose to ignore his comment even if it did make you blush a little. “It was fine. Nothing happened. This morning I told Mori to let us have the day off so you could sleep, for 14 hours.” Chuuya chuckled. You went wide eyed. “14 hours? Why didn’t you wake me?” “Because you needed sleep. Now sit down and eat.” Chuuya set a plate of food on the table and pulled out the seat for you to sit down. You sighed and took a seat and looked at the food. You didn’t even realize you were hungry until you started eating, and damn was it some good food.

Once you had your fill you looked at Chuuya who had been eating as well. “Thank you..” You mumbled. “For letting me sleep.” You finished a bit louder that before. Chuuya looked at you and smiled, “Hang out with me more when you’re sleep deprived. You’re funny.” He chuckles. Your face reddens as you can’t quite remember what you said or did and you worry you did something embarrassing. “Oh shut up! I think you just want to be my knight in shining armor again.” You tease, hoping to get him back. Chuuya then grabs your hand and gives it a gentle kiss, “I always will be, and next time I’ll wake sleeping beauty with a kiss.” He teases back. You’re face gets and even darker shade of red as you weren’t prepared for that. However a small smile forms on your lips as you wouldn’t mind being woken up by a kiss from him.

#chuuya x reader #bsd chuuya #chuuya nakahara #bungou stray dogs chuuya #chuuyabsd #bsd x reader #bsd #bungou stray dogs

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housederiva · 1 month ago

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Lucanis lovers I wanna talk about the human brain in regard to sleep for a moment.

Sleep's one of the fundamental aspects about being alive, our bodies shut down without it. The longest recorded time somebody could survive without sleep was 11 days. Once the timer was up, his brain force quit his body and he collapsed. He would stop mid-sentence because he couldn't remember what he was saying

If you’re up for just 24 hours straight, you begin to experience the effects of sleep deprivation which is kind of like being drunk. Your inhibitions get lowered, you lose coordination, speech gets slurred and sentence (spoken and heard) don’t quite make sense. The longer the hours go, the more your mood will swing back and forth. Eventually you'll have auditory and visual hallucinations of varying degrees, your vision'll blur and everything'll feels heavy. Your head gets dizzy when you move it even the slightest bit and memory turns into sludge to the point you can’t recall what you were doing three seconds prior.

While we don’t know the severity of how long Lucanis stays awake or how or short the burst of sleep he gets are, but he’s nothing like what I just described

Lucanis is hyper perceptive, his speech is just like anyone else's and he’s extremely well-coordinated. That’s because he was raised as a Crow from a major house who was sleep deprived constantly from a young age.

But if you go too long at a time your brain gets to a certain threshold, an absolute extreme waaay past where any average person would ever get. Our brains become programmed with this sort of fall-back mechanism. It used to be that when we reached that level of exhaustion all the time because we were being chased by something that would kill us if we slowed or we needed to defend our young from wild animals or other dangerous humans.

A baseline survival instinct kick in. We go on autopilot in the most hyperaware way possible. Our sensory processing goes into overdrive and we start reacting to any and all stimuli as if it is actively trying to kill us. The 4 F’s (fight, fear, freeze, fawn) are all at max capacity at the same time.

Our brain becomes a deer that darts out in front of a car’s headlights, bobbing and weaving wildly before it bolts back into the bushes. In this instance the bobbing and weaving doesn’t stop. Until you get to the crashing point, you’re a vegetable with cognitive functions shutting down one by one to conserve energy. One of these functions is the ability to separate things that have happened from things that haven’t or the system that catalogs short term memory into long term storage, that's not great for someone in Lucanis' situation

Eventually you start going through microbursts of REM sleep, the deepest stage of sleep there is. When someone gets that far into sleep deprivation, these bursts can happen and the person affected will look completely awake. You wouldn’t even realize you were going through one. There might be comments about how you’re spacing out or just kind of staring off in the distance. Your brain is essentially power cycling so you don’t die. This is how people can 'sleep standing up' but in reality, you’re mentally clocking out and leaving your nervous system to hold down the fort. This disassociates you and your body to the point where you could laugh at the face of danger because your brain is over on stage left tap dancing along the line between sleep and consciousness and it can no longer differentiate between the two. You can feel unstoppable, like you could kill a god.

Or even doing this for a short period put you at risk for a lot of long-term health issues. Stroke or heart attacks, your nervous system rewrites itself. Mental disorders like memory loss or depression or anxiety follow... t’s a big old list of symptoms and at the very end is death.

Our brain’s core mechanic is being lazy, which is an incredibly good thing. Evolution's allowed our minds to be able to do incredible things in short bursts of activity before settling back down - we all know what burnout is but think of that times eleven.

I’ve lost where I’m going with this, but I just think the nights after Lucanis and Spite reach a level of understanding would lead to him sleeping for long periods at a time and that aspect of what he’s been through with Zara would never fully leave him regardless of how much time passes.

#dragon age #dragon age veilguard #dragon age the veilguard #da4 #lucanis dellamorte #veilguard #long post

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arc852 · 4 months ago

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First Meetings 2/3

Summary: How Jimmy met Grian and Joel.

Warnings: anxiety, being/feeling trapped, hunger pains, fear, helplessness, arguing, and being grabbed

Word Count: 6756

Part 1

AO3 Link

It's finally here! So sorry about the wait, this chapter gave me a lot of trouble but I think I'm pretty happy with how it came out!

This is the meat of their first meeting, so we finally get to see just how badly it really went lol. I hope you guys enjoy!

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Jimmy woke up with a start to a blaring, ear piercing sound. He let out a yelp that was thankfully covered by the loud sound as he sat up, breathing heavily. As his brain caught up with him, he realized it was the sound of an alarm. He’d learned that humans usually set them so they could wake up and get to class on time. But if it was the weekend, then why was it on? And why had no one turned it off yet? Jimmy held his hands against his ears, trying to block out the sound.

“Joel! Turn off your alarm!” Jimmy heard Grian yell over the blaring bleeps, sounding annoyed and groggy, having also been jostled awake by the alarm.

Joel groaned and Jimmy watched as Joel’s hand came out from the bed and blindly tapped on his phone. The noise stopped and Jimmy let his hands fall with a sigh of relief.

“Seriously, Joel?” Grian asked.

“Sorry, I forgot to turn it off!” Joel said, also annoyed by his own mistakes.

“The two days we get to sleep in and you forgot to turn your alarm off for one of them.” Grian continued.

“I get it! You can shut up already!” Joel yelled back and then both were silent for a long moment. Jimmy thought they had both fallen back asleep until Grian spoke up again.

“...We should probably get up.” He said and then Jimmy felt the bed above him shifting before Grian’s feet hit the floor to Jimmy’s right.

“Yeah, yeah. I can’t go back to sleep after that anyway.” Joel agreed and Jimmy noticed him getting up and out of bed as well.

As the two humans went about their morning routines, Jimmy’s stomach growled and ached. Jimmy licked his lips as he realized it had now been a full day since he had last eaten anything and about the same since he’d had a drink of water. He was really starting to feel the effects of that now.

Still, there was nothing he could do about it.

Jimmy curled in on himself and watched the humans walk around the room, doing various things. They finally picked up their old clothes, throwing them in two separate hampers in the corner of the room. They then both took turns in the bathroom, walking out dressed and then started discussing breakfast.

Jimmy tried to tune them out as they talked about food, feeling his stomach ache with every mention.

“I don’t really feel like going anywhere though.” Jimmy caught as he zoned back in. It was Joel who had spoken.

“We can get it delivered then.” Grian answered and then it was silent for a moment. At this angle, Jimmy could only see their legs and feet, so he was unsure what they were doing. “Okay…you want the bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich?” Grian asked and Jimmy realized they must be ordering on their phone. He had seen a lot of college students do that before.

Food delivered right to your door, whenever you wanted, sounded like a dream if Jimmy was being honest.

“Yeah, but add avocado and ham. Extra toasted.” Joel listed and Jimmy could just barely hear Grian typing on his phone now that he knew what was happening.

“Got it…” There was another second of silence. “Okay, it’s all ordered. Should be here in 25 minutes.”

“Cool. Wanna look for another movie to watch while we wait?” Joel suggested and Jimmy could already see him going over to his desk to grab his laptop. The typing on the laptop was a lot louder than the phone had been.

“Sure, I’m down for a movie day.” Grian said and then met Joel over by his desk. Both humans were hunched over, talking back and forth over what movies they wanted to watch that day. Jimmy barely paid attention to what they were saying, not really understanding it anyway.

25 minutes later, at least, Jimmy assumed it was around then considering what Grian had said before, there was a knock at the door. Jimmy jumped, startled by the sudden loud thud and his eyes honed in on the door. Grian went to answer it, opening the door to grab the food.

“Thanks.” Grian said, food in hand and then shut the door as the delivery driver started to walk away. Grian turned back around and placed the bag on Joel’s desk.

The aroma hit Jimmy all at once. It smelled so good.

Another ache in his stomach made him wince.

“Here, you can grab yours. We can watch the movie on my bed.” Grian said and then picked up his sandwich and the laptop, heading closer to Jimmy. Jimmy tensed slightly but of course Grian was coming this way, he was underneath his bed after all.

“Sounds good to me!” Joel said. “That just means I get a crumb free bed tonight.”

“You better not be leaving crumbs in my bed.” Grian said and despite Jimmy not being able to see him, he could picture the glare on his face clear as day.

“What happens, happens.” Joel said and then chuckled. He grabbed his sandwich, unwrapping it and taking a bite as he headed over toward Grian and his bed. Jimmy watched with increased interest as a piece of bacon dropped from his sandwich and onto the floor.

Joel paused. “Whoops.”

“Joel.” Grian said, disappointment clear in his tone. “Could you not?”

“Oh come on, it wasn’t even that much.” Joel continued walking, getting into the bed on the opposite side Grian did.

“You’re not even gonna pick it up?” Grian asked, incredulously.

“Eh, I’ll do it later.” Joel said, muffled from a bite of food.

“Unbelievable.” Grian said but didn’t get up himself to go pick it up either. Instead, Jimmy heard the start of the movie going as the two humans got comfortable and ate their food.

Jimmy was barely paying any attention to them though, all his focus was on that small sliver of bacon that had fallen from Joel’s sandwich. He licked at his dry lips, wanting nothing more than to run out there and grab it.

But he couldn’t. Not yet at least. Grian and Joel had just barely started their movie, they could still not be fully engrossed into it yet.

But also, he couldn’t wait until they went to bed either. He was sure the bacon piece would be picked up and thrown away as soon as they were done. Jimmy couldn’t let that happen though. He needed to eat. He also needed water but that was something he would have to try for later on. Maybe he could try and get into the bathroom and up to the sink later tonight?

He shook his head. He needed to focus on what was in front of him first. And that was a piece of food that was threatening to disappear if Jimmy didn’t act fast enough.

If Jimmy waited just a bit longer, he could run out quickly and grab it before either human had a chance to look up. And hopefully, if they tried to look for it and saw that it was missing, they would only assume they had accidentally kicked it away.

It was his best option and his only one at this point. He really needed to eat, so he would have to take the risk.

He waited until Grian and Joel were halfway into their second movie. The humans had already finished eating and had tossed their trash onto Grian’s side table, not wanting to get up to throw it away yet. They seemed completely engrossed into the movie, at least as far as Jimmy could tell. If he was going to do this, now would be the time.

Jimmy took a deep breath and got closer to the edge of the bed, but not quite going out into the open yet. He heard the movie playing in the background, the humans themselves quiet as they watched. He eyed the bacon halfway across the room and then, without any more hesitation, Jimmy quickly and as quietly as he could, took off.

He darted across the room, making it in less than a minute. He quickly picked up the piece of bacon, holding his prize close to his chest. He was about to turn around and head back to under the bed, when suddenly, he heard one of the human’s gasp.

Jimmy tensed but tried to keep his nerves calm. The humans were watching a movie after all, they could just be reacting to that. Hopefully.

Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to be the case.

“What…is that?” One of them spoke, Jimmy didn’t care to distinguish who it was, too busy feeling his nerves spike as he realized they had seen him.

Jimmy dropped the bacon and ran toward Joel’s bed, not wanting to risk trying to get back underneath Grian’s. As soon as he had moved, he heard the humans’ shout something and jump off the bed, their movie paused and all but forgotten.

Jimmy could feel the thuds of the humans’ feet as they followed after him but thankfully Jimmy had a head start. He was able to reach underneath the bed before either human could catch up to him. Jimmy went all the way to the back wall, pressing himself against it as he looked at the legs and feet of the humans only a few feet away from him. His breaths were rapid and his eyes were blown wide as he realized just how dire of a situation he was in.

He might have managed to get under the bed in time but he was far from safe.

The humans had appeared to pause for a second as soon as Jimmy disappeared underneath the bed. “Was that some sort of mouse?” Joel asked, though his unsure tone was enough to tell that he already knew the answer to that question was a resounding no. Still, Grian answered.

“That was definitely not a mouse.” Grian said, breaths slightly heavy at the sudden excitement. “It…It looked like a tiny person.”

“Okay, so I wasn’t just seeing things then. Good to know.” Joel said. “A tiny person…”

Suddenly, without warning, Grian’s knees hit the floor and he twisted his body so he could peer underneath the bed. His eyes scanned the area and Jimmy felt himself freeze, a shiver running down his spine as he met eyes with the human.

The human’s eyes widened, filled with shock and awe. “There it is.” Grian practically whispered, the shock also clear in his tone. “It…It really is a tiny person.”

“Really?” Jimmy heard Joel say but he tried his best to block it all out.

Jimmy wanted nothing more than to just not be here. He was trapped, not just underneath the bed, between a wall and a pair of humans, but in the entire room itself. Even if he managed to hide again, which was looking close to impossible now, he was sure the two humans would tear the entire room apart looking for him.

And they would find him. Because he was trapped.

Jimmy was suddenly finding it very hard to breathe. His worst fear was coming true and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He pressed further into the wall, trying to ground himself, trying to forget for just a moment that there were a pair of human eyes on him, just long enough to try and catch his breath.

Unfortunately, this meant he wasn’t paying attention to what the humans were doing. He suddenly heard a noise of strain and foolishly looked back toward the human only to nearly jump out of his own skin as a hand started to reach for him. Jimmy yelped, wishing for all the world that he could just melt into the wall. But, thankfully, it seemed Jimmy was safe for now, as the hand only got about halfway underneath the bed before it stopped.

They couldn’t reach him.

Small victories.

“I can’t reach it.” Grian said with a grunt and then the hand retreated after a moment, once again leaving a clear view of Grian’s face. The human bit his lip. “Hey, it’s okay. You can come out.” Grian said, speaking to Jimmy for the first time. “Come on little guy.”

Jimmy didn’t so much as move a muscle, let alone answer. Like he would just walk right up to the human. They must think he was an idiot or something.

Jimmy realized, as soon as the thought entered his mind, that they probably did. Maybe not in those simple terms but…were they even aware he could understand them? Humans always looked down on his kind, not quite seeing them as people. And based on the condescending tone Grian used, it wasn’t hard to see that that’s what was happening here.

Grian tried reaching for him again and Jimmy couldn’t help the small whimper that escaped him. He knew Grian couldn’t reach him from here but he couldn’t help but keep his eyes on the hand trying, afraid that if he were to tear them away that, somehow, the hand would grab him.

Unfortunately, he was so focused on Grian, he had forgotten about Joel.

Jimmy’s attention jumped to the legs of the bed, which were suddenly moving forward. Jimmy frowned, his scrambled, fear-filled brain trying to make sense of what was happening. The darkness let up as the bed moved, revealing the lights above. Jimmy looked up in confused fear, his eyes darting back and forth between the new opening and Grian.

And then there was a hand descending down, heading right toward him. Jimmy had no time to even try to run, the only thing he could do was duck down, trying to make himself even smaller. It didn’t help though, in fact, it made it worse. The hand engulfed his entire body in less time than Jimmy could comprehend and he found himself completely enveloped in the fist, his body scrunched up even tighter at the lack of room. He then felt the hand shoot back up, bringing Jimmy with it.

As he was brought up, another hand joined the one he was trapped in. He now found himself held in between two hands, which, while offering him more room, was no less terrifying.

Jimmy struggled within the hands confines, kicking away at the fingers that were larger than his entire body. They didn’t so much as budge though, his efforts and struggles all for nothing. His breathing came out in short pants as he realized this. As he realized he had been well and truly caught.

“I got it!” He heard Joel exclaim, much too close and far too loud. Jimmy flinched away but there really was no point when he was literally in the human’s hands. He was already much closer than he had ever wanted to be to a human.

“Nice work, Joel.” Grian said and Jimmy heard some shuffling. He could only assume Grian was standing back up.

Jimmy closed his eyes. He could imagine the two humans, both surrounding him and staring down at where he was still hidden from view within Joel’s cupped hands. Looks of awe and curiosity, faces full of smirks and grins. He wouldn’t have to imagine for long though.

He opened his eyes back up just in time to see a small gap start to open up in Joel’s hands. Jimmy tensed up even more and couldn’t help the yelp as the fingers parted away to reveal a giant eye. Jimmy backed away as much as he could in the cramped space, but while it but distance between him and the eye, it only put him closer to the curve of Joel’s hand. He froze, doing his best to stay in the center of the hand, to avoid the most contact.

The eye was wide as it took him in before it left and the gap quickly closed back up. “This is so weird…” Joel said, trailing off. “I can’t believe this is real.”

“It doesn’t even look like there could be anything in your hands.” Grian said, his voice in awe.

“Oh, it’s-he’s? Definitely in there.” Joel said with a slight unbelieving chuckle. Jimmy weakly tried to kick at the walls of flesh again, despite knowing it wouldn’t do anything. “This is so weird. I can feel his tiny legs kicking me.”

“Okay, well come on. Open up, I want to see it.” Grian said.

“Okay, okay.” Joel said and that was all the warning Jimmy got as Joel’s hands opened up. Jimmy shut his eyes tight, not unfurling himself from his curled up position. He didn’t want to see them. He didn’t want this to be real.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t given a choice, as suddenly, the human’s thumb slid itself underneath his curled up body. It managed to easily break apart his curled up position and ended up pressing gently against his chest before maneuvering him into a seated position in the hand. He was manhandled so easily, so casually. His struggles didn’t even compare.

The thumb didn’t move. It stayed pressed against his chest and Jimmy felt constricted, like he could barely breathe. Even though he knew the pressure wasn’t enough to block any air, the panic was doing a good enough job of that anyway.

“Wow, his heartbeat is going crazy.” Joel commented, able to feel Jimmy’s pulse under the pad of his thumb. The human’s voice pulled Jimmy’s eyes up in that direction and…well, it was exactly like how he had imagined it. But worse. The humans were so close, their eyes looking him up and down, full of that awe and curiosity he had guessed but that still had Jimmy’s heart racing even faster at actually seeing it. He cowered further back into the hand, though the thumb still pressed against his chest kept him from being able to move too much.

“He’s probably scared.” Grian noted. “Or maybe it’s because of how small he is. Don’t small creatures have faster heart rates?” He looked toward Joel, eyebrow raised.

Joel blinked at him. “I don’t know, why are you asking me? You’re the biology major here.”

Grian chose to ignore that and looked back down at Jimmy. “It’s probably a bit of both, honestly.” Grian said, and then leaned down a bit more, his face coming closer to Jimmy. Jimmy let out a small whine, trying to lean back as far as he could away from the human. “It’s okay little guy, we’re not going to hurt you.”

Jimmy swallowed the lump that had been forming in his throat. They were speaking to him again and of course it was with that same condescending tone. But even without the tone, could Jimmy really even believe them? The words were empty, something to be said in the hopes that they could get their little catch to calm down and be easier to control. Jimmy knew perfectly well how humans worked.

“Can he even understand us?” Joel asked, his awe turning more toward curiosity as he looked right at Jimmy’s face for any signs of recognition.

“I mean…he’s very human-like. I’d be a bit surprised if he couldn’t.” Still, Jimmy saw the look of doubt on Grian’s face. Grian turned to look back down at Jimmy and titled his head. “Can you understand us?”

Jimmy froze, not knowing what he should reveal. Would it be better to answer? Worse? Jimmy didn’t know. He didn’t know what these humans wanted from him. He blinked back some tears, refusing to cry. And then, with a lot of hesitation, Jimmy nodded. Better that they ran with him being more human-like than turning to him being more animal-like, he supposed.

Despite Grian’s earlier words, both humans looked very surprised that Jimmy could indeed understand the two of them.

“Did…he just nod?” Joel asked, looking to Grian to see if he saw the same thing.

“He…did. Wow, okay, so he really can understand us.” Grian said, his eyes wide. “That’s amazing.” He breathed out, his awe returning tenfold.

“Wait, if you can understand us,” Joel started, turning back toward Jimmy, who flinched. “Then does that mean you can also talk?”

Despite the fact Jimmy didn’t think he could talk right now, at this moment, due to the panic still invading his chest, he gave another little nod. Might as well tell them that too, while he found himself revealing things. Wasn’t like it was a huge leap anyway, from being able to understand them to also being able to talk.

He watched as Joel grinned at his nod, an excitement in his eyes that had Jimmy’s nerves feel like they were on fire. “Well, you have to say something now. Don’t leave us in suspense.”

Again, Jimmy didn’t think he could even if he wanted to. The pressure on his chest was starting to become uncomfortable now and if he opened his mouth to even try, he feared no words would come out. He shook his head and looked away, not knowing how they would react to him denying them something.

Turns out, the reaction was a pout from Joel. “Oh come on, you can’t tell us you can talk and then not.” Joel reached out with his free hand and poked Jimmy in the side. Jimmy flinched back, his eyes wide as he watched as the hand stayed close. As if ready to attack again. “Might think you’re lying to us.” Joel’s eyes glint with mischief, his tone teasing.

That scared Jimmy more than anything, though. And suddenly things were becoming just too much. His focus zeroed in on his chest, the pressure on it was overwhelming now and Jimmy couldn’t help but want it off. He braced his hands against the thumb and pushed. He knew it wouldn’t budge, he knew he was too weak to move it but he had to try.

But surprisingly, the thumb did budge. In fact, it moved off his chest entirely. Jimmy sat there with his arms outstretched, blinking in confusion. That brief confusion soon turned into another bout of fear though, as Joel’s other hand came close once more, invading his space to snag one of his outstretched arms in between his thumb and forefinger. Jimmy’s breath hitched and he froze, scared that one wrong move would have his arm torn in two.

“Look at his little hand. It’s so small.” Joel said, his tone turning to one of child-like awe. Grian’s face came into view once more, trying to get a better look.

“All of him is small, Joel.” Grian said but he was smiling, also staring at Jimmy’s trapped arm in awe. They seemed to have moved past him being able to talk, at least for now. “Okay, my turn.” Grian suddenly said.

Jimmy was still trying to process what that meant when Grian’s hand suddenly descended upon him. His arm was dropped as Joel’s hand moved out of the way, making room for Grian to pinch Jimmy on his sides with two fingers, lifting him up and away from Joel’s palm. Jimmy kicked his feet, panic overtaking him as he looked down at the size of the drop. He had never had any problem with heights before but now, held so carelessly between pinched fingers, he was scared he would slip from the hold and drop below. A drop that would surely kill him.

Fortunately, he was not in that pinched hold for long. Instead, transferred over and placed down on Grian’s palm. There was not much difference between either hand, though Jimmy noted Grian’s hand was slightly colder than Joel’s had been.

“Hey! I wasn’t done holding him!” Joel exclaimed as Grian had forcefully taken Jimmy from his hands. Grian tutted at him, holding Jimmy close to his chest as Joel tried to reach back for him.

“You gotta learn to share.” Grian said, a smirk on his face. “And you’ve held him for long enough.” Grian said, chuckling as Joel huffed and pouted, his arms crossed.

“Fine.” Joel grumbled, but his demeanor quickly changed, coming up next to Grian in order to still see Jimmy clearly. He grinned. “It feels cool holding him though, right?”

Grian hummed and Jimmy felt a shiver go down his spine at how Grian was scrutinizing him. Grian’s thumb came over to his side and started rubbing along his arm. Jimmy tried to flinch away but, of course, he was trapped on the hand. “It’s definitely weird.” Grian said after a moment. “Having an entire person in your hand…” He trailed off, the thumb lifting slightly to move some of his hair out of his face. Again, Jimmy flinched.

This was painful, agonizingly so. Not knowing what was going to happen. Not knowing what these humans had planned for him. They were still in the awe and curiosity stages, still content with simply looking and touching him. Which was already terrifying enough. But soon, soon that would pass and something would actually be done to him. The thought left him shaking.

Grian frowned. “I think he’s still scared.” Grian said, noticing the slight tremors coming from the little person in his hand.

“Oh, you’re right.” Joel said, also noticing. “It’s okay, little guy, we’re not going to hurt you. Promise.” Joel said, repeated Grian’s words from earlier. “I mean, come on, we haven’t hurt you so far, right?”

They hadn’t hurt him yet. That much was true. But again, words didn’t mean anything. Besides…there were worse things they could do to him, if they truly weren’t planning on hurting him. Worse things…like being trapped, or kept…or…

Jimmy was shaking even harder now, his mind going to the worst possible things.

Joel frowned and turned to Grian. “He wasn’t shaking like that in my hands. You should give him back.”

Grian glared at him, holding Jimmy a bit closer. “He’s fine, I can handle it.” Grian was not giving up his turn with the tiny person so easily. Grian turned his attention back to him, once again moving his thumb, this time to rub against the little person’s back. “See? You’re okay.” Grian said to the guy.

Jimmy was certainly not okay. The furthest thing from okay, actually.

“Okay, my turn again.” Joel said, not letting anyone process his words before diving in and grabbing Jimmy from Grian’s hand. Joel’s fingers curled around his body, just a little too tight and Jimmy gasped.

Instead of putting him back on Joel’s open palm though, he was kept like that. And Jimmy squirmed within the grasp, his chest tight with panic and the pressure.

“Joel!” Grian exclaimed, so loud that Jimmy winced, unable to block his ears because his arms were trapped in Joel’s grip. “Give him back!”

“Nope. Gotta learn to share.” Joel said, repeating Grian’s own words with a smirk of his own. “Besides, I think it’s time we got some answers.” At those words, Jimmy froze. He glanced up, meeting Joel’s eyes on accident. He knew them knowing he could talk would come back up.

Grian’s frustration at Joel taking the tiny person from him ebbed away as his own curiosity got the better of him. It seemed both humans had forgotten about his fear.

Or, more realistically, they were just ignoring it now.

“So…what are you?” Joel asked, bringing Jimmy closer to eye level. Both humans were looking at him again. Not that they had ever stopped but now they were really looking. Like despite asking the question, they were still trying to figure it out for themselves.

Jimmy shifted, at least, as much as he could in the grip. What would they do if he didn’t answer? Would the grip around him grow tighter? Would they take back their words of not hurting him? Jimmy didn’t want to find out but his throat still felt blocked from fear. “I-I…I…” He tried, his voice shaky and his words stuttering.

Grian and Joel leaned in even closer, eyes wide with awe. “He really can speak.” Grian muttered, despite the fact Jimmy had only managed to say the same one word three times.

The hand finally opened up around him, and he all but fell into Joel’s open palm. There was no sense of relief for Jimmy, though. “Come on, what are you?” Joel asked once more, pressing him to try and speak again. Jimmy tried his best to swallow the lump in his throat.

“I’m…I’m a borrower.” He finally forced out, not meeting their eyes. Joel blinked, having gotten his answer but not knowing what that meant.

“A what?” Joel asked, feeling confused. He wasn’t sure what he had expected, but it definitely wasn’t that.

Grian hummed, looking like he was in deep thought for a moment, the name triggering something deep in his mind. “Why does that sound familiar…?” He muttered to himself. Joel turned to look at him, raising an eyebrow.

“Huh?” He asked Grian but Grian just shook his head.

“Nothing. Not important.” Grian turned his attention back to, what was apparently, a borrower. “So, what does that mean? What’s a borrower?” Grian asked.

Jimmy winced, but he had known simply saying what he was wouldn’t be enough for them. “I’m like you…just smaller. We, um, borrow things from humans…in order to survive.” Though it was easier to talk now, his panic had not lessened at all. He refused to look up at them as he spoke, afraid the words would catch in his throat again if he did.

“I’ve never heard of anything like that before.” Joel commented and looked to Grian who only gave a shrug in response. Joel grinned as he turned back towards the borrower, poking him in the side again. “Although, based on what you described, it sounds more like you’re a little thief instead.”

Jimmy tensed, Joel unknowingly hitting a sore spot for Jimmy and his kind. Before he could stop himself, the words flowed. “We don’t steal, we-we just take what you wouldn’t miss.” Jimmy bit back and then shot a hand over his mouth when he realized what he had said. But instead of being angry, Joel let out a surprised laugh.

“Oh, so the borrower can also talk back, huh?” Joel grinned and Jimmy felt a deep fear settle in his gut. “That’s so cute.” Shame rose up and showed on Jimmy’s cheeks. The condescending tone was starting to grate on his nerves.

“I think that still counts as stealing.” Grian also chimed in and then reached over and once again plucked Jimmy off of Joel’s hands. Jimmy yelped and Joel startled, turning to glare at Grian.

“Okay, no, that was definitely still my turn that time.” Joel said, his tone frustrated. Before Jimmy could even fully sit down on Grian’s palm, Joel was grabbing him again.

“Joel! Seriously, I want to hold him too.” Grian said, eyes narrowed and then reached his hand to grab for Jimmy again. Joel pulled his hands back, jostling Jimmy and making him feel dizzy. “You’re actually going to hurt him if you keep grabbing him and moving him around like that!”

“Hey! You’re the one who grabbed him first!” Joel yelled and Jimmy placed his hands over his ears, their voices too loud, too much.

Everything was too much. Their voices, their touches, their anger. They didn’t see him as a person, just an object, something to argue over, something to keep and look at and-and-and--

“Stop!” He yelled and both humans froze. Jimmy was currently in Grian’s hands again, but Joel’s hand was close by, having reached out to grab him once again. They looked down at him, eyes wide and Jimmy had to quickly look away as tears began to form. They fell as he closed his eyes tight, hugging himself. “Please stop…please…please just let me go…”

It was silent for a long, long moment. Jimmy could feel his heart beat in his head, pounding as he waited for what the humans would do to him. He shook as he let himself finally cry, it being long overdue.

“Oh…blummin’ hell…” He heard Joel mutter and Jimmy flinched. The hand he was on started to move then and Jimmy gasped and held himself tighter, waiting for the grip to close around him and squeeze, or for him to be put in some sort of-of cage or jar or something…

Jimmy’s eyes flew open as he was placed on a hard surface and looked just in time to see Grian’s hands leave. He looked around, expecting to see glass or bars but…he had simply been placed on the nightstand. Joel’s nightstand, if he wasn’t mistaken.

“Hey…” Grian’s voice cut through his thoughts and he flinched, eyes snapping up to look at the two humans towering over him. They looked…sad. Maybe even upset. That only terrified Jimmy more, his fear outweighing his confusion. Grian, when he noticed Jimmy’s attention was on him, continued. “We’re…we’re really sorry. We didn’t…we didn’t realize how much we were scaring you.”

Jimmy blinked, his mind going blank as the confusion came back. They were…sorry? What? What was going on?

“We were just…curious.” Joel chimed in, his words falling a bit flat. He rubbed the back of his neck and looked away from Jimmy. “I guess that’s really not an excuse though, huh?”

Jimmy didn’t know what was happening. One minute they were fighting over him, treating him like a toy they had found, and now…now they were apologizing to him? “What…What are you doing?” Jimmy’s voice was still shaky, his cheeks still wet with tears, but he had to know.

Grian winced. “We’re apologizing. Because…we messed up.” Grian and Joel exchanged a glance with each other, before Grian turned back to Jimmy. “And, well…you told us to stop. So we did.”

Jimmy took in a shaky breath, unbelieving. “I really wasn’t expecting you to actually listen.” At his words, both humans winced once again.

“Yeah…” Joel said with a sigh. “That’s definitely on us.”

There was a pause, all three of them not knowing what to do. Jimmy could still feel himself trembling but now the fear was joined by something else. Something unknown. After a moment, Grian lowered himself to be more eye level with Jimmy. Jimmy flinched at the sudden movement and eye contact and Grian bit his lip at the reaction.

“I know it’s not much, but we really are sorry. We’re not going to hurt you and we’re not…going to grab you again.” Grian said, his voice far softer than Jimmy had ever heard it. “We definitely went about this all wrong.” Grian said with a slight self-deprecating laugh.

“Really wrong. We’re idiots.” Joel said, his tone also self-deprecating. “Grabbing you, fighting over you. We were treating you like a blummin’...I don’t know. But we weren’t treating you like a person.”

Grian nodded in agreement and Jimmy’s eyes widened at their words. Could they really be…but that didn’t make any sense. Humans weren’t like that. Right? They acted like Grian and Joel had before, not…not like this.

“Hey.” Grian said again, getting Jimmy’s attention. His smile was small, not quite meeting his eyes, and his voice low. “We should have asked this first but…what’s your name?”

Jimmy felt his throat close up at how much he wanted to cry again. No one had asked him his name in…years. Of course, this was also his first time talking to anyone in just as long. But the sentiment was still there. Especially to be asked his name by a human…things really had taken a 180 here.

“...J-Jimmy.” He managed to get out. It felt weird to say his name out loud.

“It’s good to meet you Jimmy.” Grian said and if it was weird to hear his own voice say his name, it was definitely weird hearing it come out of a human’s mouth. “I’m Grian. And this is Joel.”

“I know.” Jimmy said and then hunched in on himself when he realized what he had said. But the humans didn’t appear angry, just…confused.

“You know?” Joel asked, uncrossing his arms and tilting his head.

“I-I mean, I didn’t, I…well…” Jimmy tried to come up with something, waving his hands in front of him as he did so.

“You must have overheard it, right?” Grian chimed in, interrupting Jimmy’s stuttering. Jimmy tensed, looking at Grian.

“I…yeah. You’ve…you’ve said it a few times. To each other.” Jimmy answered, his eyes glancing away as he lowered his hands.

“Oh, yeah I guess that makes sense.” Joel said and then paused for a moment, thinking something over. “If you don’t mind me asking…where did you come from?”

Jimmy didn’t know why he felt inclined to answer. Maybe because the humans were acting so different from before, maybe because he still felt fear at them going back to that if he didn’t, but either way, Jimmy found himself answering. “I live in the uh…the walls. Of this building.”

Joel hummed. “I guess that…makes sense?” He didn’t sound too sure of that though. “But then, what were you doing in our room?”

Jimmy bit his lip. They already thought he was some sort of thief, what would they think if he told them he was trying to borrow from them. Would they be mad?

Grian frowned at Joel’s question, wondering the same thing. But as Jimmy didn’t seem keen on answering, Grian decided to go back and walk through everything that had happened. They first saw Jimmy in the middle of the room and when he ran, Grian swears he remembers him dropping something…

Grian stood back up and looked behind him toward the floor. Something small caught his eyes and he went over to it, bending down and picking it up, bringing it with him as he went back to his full height. His eyes widened with realization when he saw the object Jimmy had dropped was the piece of bacon from Joel’s sandwich. The one that he had dropped on the floor earlier that day.

“Were you…trying to find food?” Grian asked, turning back around to look at Jimmy. Jimmy’s eyes were wide, his shaking growing once again.

“I…” Jimmy started but quickly trailed off, his arms reaching to hug himself. At the piece of food, he was suddenly reminded of just how hungry he was. The fear had dulled the ache in his stomach but now it felt like it was eating itself. The empty gnawing feeling making him curl around himself even more.

Not to mention, his dry throat. The tears had been a bad idea. He was so thirsty. The mix of fear, hunger, and dehydration was quite the messy combination.

Both Grian and Joel looked at each other and then at Jimmy and then at the piece of cold, stale bacon in Grian’s hands. It was nothing more than a crumb, trash as far as the humans were concerned but Jimmy had risked his life for it. “Oh for goodness sake…” Joel muttered to himself.

Jimmy bit his lip, eyes not leaving the piece of bacon pinched between Grian’s fingers. His stomach pains were becoming too much. And with everything else boiling over and being too much, he needed his stomach aches to lessen. He needed something to lessen and his hunger looked to be his best option right now. He swallowed thickly and glanced back up at the humans, hoping they wouldn’t be mad. “Can…can I have it? Please?” He forced himself to ask, trying to ignore the shame he felt creeping in again.

Something in Grian and Joel broke at that. To be so hungry that you would take trash left on the floor was…awful. Not to mention how scared Jimmy still was of them. To ask them despite his fear was telling, that was for sure. The two humans looked at each other for a long moment, an understanding passing over them. They nodded, knowing what they had to do. Grian turned back to Jimmy, keeping his tone as soft as possible.

“No.”

Jimmy’s breath hitched and the arms around his midsection tightened. Of course it was going to be a no, of course. He shouldn’t have asked, now they knew how desperate he was. They could take advantage of that now.

“Hey.” Grian’s voice cut him out of those thoughts and Jimmy looked at him. “It’s not what you think. It’s just…” Grian looked to Joel, who nodded.

“We think we have a better idea.”

#giant/tiny #g/t #borrowers #au #mcyt g/t #hermitcraft #hermitcraft g/t #hermitfic #bbbcau #first meetings #part 2 #borrower jimmy #bad boys borrower college au

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proqhetic · 10 months ago

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could you write about reader comforting shauna (or the other way around) after the plane crashes, and they're snuggled up next to the campfire while everyone else has gone to sleep?

wc: 515 a/n: first longer drabble ? fic ?? i don’t know the terminology.. pleaz don’t bully me (i’m so worried i wrote shauna ooc so feedback appreciated tbh!!)

staring dazedly at the dying fire in front of you, you buried yourself deeper in the blanket from the airplane. sounds of insects chirping in the woods and the crackling campfire have been long drowned out by the unrelenting thoughts flooding your mind.

how the hell was everyone else sleeping in these conditions? your brain just refuses to stop coming up with new worst-case scenarios. folding your legs up, you rested your chin on your knees.

snap.

you jumped at the sudden sound. your head shot up and looked around wildly in search of the source, stopping at the shadowy figure standing behind you. your eyes trailed up the familiar silhouette, and you were met with brown doe eyes looking back down at you.

“sorry. didn’t mean to scare you,” shauna muttered out, almost shy. you nod your head in acknowledgment and shift over to make space for her as she sits down next to you.

“can’t sleep?” you ask the brunette. both your eyes remained trained on the fire. “i was actually about to just try again but, i saw you still very much wide awake.��

her eyes catch your fingers fidgeting with the hem of the blanket. “do you, maybe, wanna talk?”

you scoff callously. “about what, the fact that we’re probably all going to fucking die out here?” you spat out with a low chuckle, much harsher than intended.

a beat passes and the silence grows tense. “sorry. i’m… a bit on edge,” you manage out, eyes glancing over at your teammate.

she laughs lightly, “i don’t blame you in the slightest.” her eyes meet yours and you can’t help but get lost in her deep brown eyes for a moment. the way they reflected the warm glows of the fire.

she awkwardly tries to wrap an arm around your bundled up figure, as if unsure whether this was okay. you instantly leaned into her touch and buried your face in her shoulder, a muffled shaky exhale escaping you.

“oh, y/n…” shauna coos as she adjusts her arm properly, lifting her other hand to soothingly stroke your hair. you can feel the tears welling up in your eyes as she shushes you.

“i’m… so scared, shauna.” her head weighs down on yours, holdng you securely in place. “i know. i am too.” the two of you continue cuddling there in silence for a while, and the stress that’s been weighing on you finally starts to dissipate.

you lift your head up to face her and find her already staring back down at you. with one hand, she cups your cheek and wipes away a stray tear with her thumb.

“we’ll get through this. together. trust me, we’ll be okay.” something about the way shauna said that made it seem as if she actually knew that you’d be okay.

and you couldn’t help it as the corners of your lips quirk up.

“okay,” you respond softly. you lean back into her and she starts stroking your arm, helping you relax as you feel your eyelids finally start to grow heavy.

right before you feel yourself drift off for the night, you feel a pair of soft lips gently press against your skull.

your smile grows as you fall fast asleep there in shauna’s arms.

#danisbrainrot #shauna things 💭#shauna shipman #shauna shipman x reader #yellowjackets #yellowjackets x reader #sophie nelisse

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jellypopjoo · 1 year ago

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wanna be love. (myung jaehyun 명재현)

synopsis : thinking about if you’re putting enough into your relationship with jaehyun keeps you from sleep. luckily, your boyfriend was always good at reassurance.

genre : fluff, established relationship

warnings : relationship insecurity, there is a single curse word

wc : 0.8k

you tossed and turned for what felt like hours, not able to return to your slumber. stupid, so stupid… you’re beyond exhausted, so why can’t you go back to sleep? you turned back around to your boyfriend jaehyun, who’s eyes just fluttered open.

“y/n?” your eyes widened once you noticed him waking up.

“oh, jaehyun…” and you felt terrible, did you disturb his sleep? “I’m so sorry, did I wake you up?”

“no of course not, it’s okay,” the sigh you released was a big one. “just woke up is all.”

“ah, that’s a relief…” the last thing you want is to bother him while he’s sleeping.

“but is something wrong? why are you awake?” you found it hard to reach the right words to explain to him.

“can’t…” you struggled, until you decided on your words. “I can’t go back to sleep.”

“awe, y/n,” jaehyun frowns.

he reaches his hand up to set on your arm, pausing the minute he reaches contact with you. nonetheless, he continues and rubs your arm.

“well it’s no wonder you can’t go back to sleep, you’re an ice cube,” he says in a chuckle, which explains his pause.

“ha… yeah it is kind of cold,” honestly, you hadn’t even realized your low body temperature.

“no matter,” he smiles. “I’ll warm you, come here,” he wraps the hand he had on your arm around you fully, pulling you extra close to him.

“thank you, jaehyun,” you reply, settling into his sudden embrace.

“of course, babe,” he speaks softly, you breathing in his scent.

“jaehyun,” a few moments had passed, but you had words you wanted to share with him.

“hm?” he hums lightly.

“I love you,” you finally speak it out, needing to get it off your mind.

“…I love you too, y/n,” jaehyun is silent for a moment, focusing on your sudden love confession before he shares the same ones back.

“no, like…” but it wasn’t like that. “I really do love you.”

“I know you do,” he chuckles as he speaks.

“but I can’t…” you shut your eyes tight, stuck on your words. all you can do is continuously state the obvious. “jaehyun, I love you so much.”

“y/n…” and he notices, your tone easy to hear.

“and it’s so frustrating,” you want to be honest with him, share how you feel.

“what is?” and he listens, hanging on to your every word as you begin to explain.

“I love you so much, but I can’t express it,” you hate it… hate it so much. “it’s like telling you I love you isn’t enough, but I can’t do any more to tell you.”

“y/n, it’s okay,” and even though you explain, he still doesn’t seem to get it.

“it’s not, jaehyun,” you say firmly. “you do all these things to tell me you love me and all I can do is say it.”

“y/n, that is enough. I know you love me, it’s okay,” you know he means it and he means well… but your frustration won’t leave.

“it’s just hard for me…” you tell him in a whisper.

“it doesn’t need to be, I promise,” you take your head out of of his chest and meet his eyes. “you may think you’re only saying it, but I feel it from you every day.”

“you do?” you’re in disbelief.

“I do. the little things you do to put care into me… of course I notice,” and you… you didn’t even realize. “maybe you do things subconsciously, but I always feel it.”

“jaehyun…” you’re stuck staring into him.

“plus you let me be physical,” now you’re the one hanging on to his every word. “you let me hold your hands, play with your hair, pull you into me.”

“…I know,” you say, finally looking away from him. “but I can’t help but worry if I’m doing enough.”

“you are,” you feel thankful of his reassurance. “and I completely understand being frustrated and worrisome, but shouldn’t all that matter is that I know how you feel?”

“yes…” you know he’s right. “of course.”

“then don’t overthink it, y/n,” if only your brain could shut up… but it’ll definitely be better now. “you’ll always be enough.”

“jaehyun, I’m just really fucking in love you,” you sigh greatly, burying yourself in his chest again as you melt into a puddle.

“you are,” he giggles, grinning widely as he hugs you tighter. “and good thing, because I’m completely in love with you, too.”

“stop,” you laugh a muffled laugh into him.

“now enough overthinking my poor little ice cube, go back to sleep,” he brings his hand up to your head, petting you lightly.

“…okay,” you agree. and you try, but your overwhelming feelings start to get the best of you.

your feelings about jaehyun… are so large. you don’t know what you’d do without him. you know he’s the best thing you could’ve possibly found, and you still can’t believe it. you love him… god, you love him so much. and thinking about it brings you to tears.

“y/n…” jaehyun can hear your sounds, worry filling him.

but he doesn’t need to worry. after all, it’s just love.

“it’s okay… I’m okay.”

#boynextdoor #myung jaehyun #boynextdoor jaehyun #kpop #kpop imagines #boynextdoor imagines #kpop x reader #boynextdoor x reader

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deadguywalkin · 3 months ago

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MORE sebsamalex hcs because i am GAY and EVIL + music taste and bodies hcs

in a relationship together

sam bursts into song at any trigger word. alex joins in. sebastian gets annoyed. (affectionately)

sebastian likes his personal space. sam also likes sebastian’s personal space.

sam shoves his hands up their shirts while they’re just talking. about anything. he’s clingy and needs skin contact

‘i don’t feel like talking to anyone right now, but i guess i’m not opposed to silently being held.’

sebalex always do ‘the hand thing tm’ for sam when he’s overwhelmed or nervous.

“Alex save me alex” “WHO NEEDS SAVING?????!!!!!!!!🗣️🗣️🗣️‼️🔥🔥‼️‼️‼️‼️”

“i’m out of facepaint! gimme your eyeliner” “..no?”

tucking seb’s hair behind his ear before they kiss him

hands definitely go through sams hair when they kiss him

hands go to alex’s neck, shoulders, chest,… this guy gets violated compared to the cute hair touching honestly.

kidding they also just hold his face gently. alex my love grbrbrgrnrbbrbfnf

alex has to take everything verryyy very slowly to adjust to actually dating a guy for the first time.

he’s also very very surprised to be actually loved and known for the first time, ‘what do you mean you recorded the game for me because i forgot to…? bro, i’ll cry’

sambastian just constantly making out. any time. any where. gay emo boys who don’t care about their reputation sighs

sambastian also love giving each other a shit ton of prominent and visible hickeys to the neck, collar, shoulders and jaws.

general stuff

seb unintentionally has very flirty body language. he’s just naturally a man whore. the way he moves physically is stiff but he still looks up at taller guys with half-lidded eyes while talking in a low voice. looking down at shorter girls with a soft smirk with his dimples.

samalex are unintentionally flirty vocally. “i wouldn’t want you to go hungry. i care about you. you should be eating well. we could grab some breakfast. you and me. alone.” “why don’t you come to my next gig..? i’ll save you a special spot. just for you.” which they mean as friends but they just don’t hear the underlying tones.

alex would have a good voice if he wasn’t constantly straining it, unfortunately he loves belting passionately and straining his voice for whatever reason

sam is actually GOOD at singing. he’s also a natural when it comes to anything that’s artistic (painting, sketching, music, etc)

alex snores LOUDLY sometimes

sam drools in his sleep also sometimes

sebastian does not sleep. or is never awake. what the fuck is going on with him

all 3 of them got something going on. autism+dyslexia, depression+some sleep disorder, adhd. soorgy :( i don’t make the rules it’s canon :(

sam has a little nose bump like this :3

——

sam: [insert sam talking way too much]

seb: *throws a ball* go fetch, boy

sam: *does it no questions asked, happily*

alternately he would also just feed him any chewy candy he has on hand.

——

sam: i can’t wait to see you again. i love you, alex.

alex: dued 😆 like in a bro way? 😆 i bro you too bro 😆

sam: alex, please be my boyfriend.

alex: boyfreind? like a boy and a friend? i already am! 😆

sam: alex, i want to make out with you.

alex: dude? takeout with me?! one step ahead of you, foods on the way! 😆

——

seb: i wanna grab a midnight snack

alex: you’re the midnight snack.

seb: …?ew

alex: sorry. i mean. um. sorry. i mean. dude. you are. um.

music:

alex: listens to ‘whatever comes on the radio while i’m working out’. hype songs that get him in the mood. also kebby implanted abba into my brain. he just doesn’t listen to music that much.

he’s also somewhat into the strokes, the only band he likes/is consistent with. (reptilia, someday, ode to the mets)

sam: high energy rock, experimental rock, and pretty much anything honestly. 2000s/2010s rock mostly. he listens to everything. anything that sounds good no matter what genre immediately goes into his playlist. he just has an ear for good music.

weezer

blink 182

sublime

the white stripes

wheatus

the frights

and probably every single music artist to ever exist

also sambastian listen to csh together. you’ll have to fight me on this and lose if you disagree

sebastian: grunge, rock, nu metal, general metal, emo, and punk. dabbles in some goth. mostly stuff from the 80s/2000s. he listens to ‘that one time your dad’s friend picked you up from school and played music in the car’

the smashing pumpkins

green day

siouxsie and the banshees

soundgarden

alice in chains

pearl jam

and probably a shit ton of underground stuff i can’t think of

bodys /ref

alex: not much to imagine here since he’s very confirmed LOL god bless that 6’1 beefcake. dude’s a statue

sam: pretty tall. good looking legs because he was a skater boy (she said see you later, boy) perfect ass. some scars from skating incidents because he’s clumsy

not too much muscle but has that little vertical line down his stomach that indicates he’s growing some abs (not sure what the english word for it is)

his arms are also pretty thick ? big ? idk

broad shoulders, nice legs and okay arms. he has some bandaids on him aswell because this guy cannot catch a break. he’s not boney nor meaty, a good inbetween.

a few stick and pokes ? i think thats what people call them like a diy tattoo

also his hips don’t lie 🤫

sebastian: lanky, slightly visible ribcage. he’d have broad shoulders if they weren’t slightly curved inwards from having shit posture all his life. upsidown triangle build. contrary to popular belief, he has some muscle in his arms. to work under a motorcycle on your back has to give you some strength. maybe a sleeper build.

cis seb has a very very defined addam’s apple

i can also see a different version of him where he could be stubby looking and have some chub to him.

i also think he’d have some tattoos on him. t-scars and a more defined waist if we’re also mixing in the trans hc. maybe bat tattoos or some kind of fantasy themed tattoos covering over his t scars?

bonus:

them as kitty breeds

alex: bengal

sam: classic orange cat

sebastian: one of those rustic black cats with the orange patches

+ this image of soogyu is engraved into my head i think this is very them with seb.. the jacket sharing and sleepy head drooping sobs it’s them

shorter dump today aswell bleg

#sdv hcs #stardew valley #headcanons #sambastian #samalex #sebalex

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annabelinlove · 1 year ago

Text

“How long has it been since you’ve slept?”

I turn my face from the fire and look at the person who just sat next to me. Sirius Black looks at me with tired eyes, cigarette that’s waiting to be lit in his hand. I blink a few times to focus before answering.

“What are you talking about?” I ask, trying to sound awake, but judging from his face, I know I’m not doing a good job.

“You know what I’m talking about, pet. I am with you the whole day, if not me then Prongs or Moony, right until we’re tired and go to our room. When I can’t sleep, or wake up feeling restless, I come here to have a smoke and guess what. You’re here. Every single time. Reading, or writing or just staring at nothing like you were doing just now. We talk and then I go back to my dorm to go back to sleep, but I never see you leave. And every morning before class, you’re already here, prepared and everything. So tell me, darling. When was the last time you’ve slept?”

I stare at him with open mouth. I never knew he noticed these things, or actually thought about them. He’s looking at me with concern written all over his beautiful face. His frown forms wrinkles between his eyebrows and I wanna kiss them away. But you’re best friends, you can’t screams the voice in my head and I’m glad that my brain is working even without sleep. I want to open my mouth and answer him, but I have no idea what to say, so I just stare at him.

“C’mon, you know you can tell me anything. I’m your best friend, we’re supposed to tell each other when something is bothering us, so the other one can help. That’s what we’re here for.” he urges, desperation in his voice. His eyes are boring into mine, like he’s trying to read my mind, but I can’t help him do that.

“So that’s all I’m good for? Am I just a problem solver for you?” I tease him, trying to avert his attention from the topic. One side of his mouth twists, and I’m glad it amused him at least a little bit.

“You’re so much more than that to me, love.” Sirius promises, his features softening. He grabs my hand and his warmth seeps into me. “You are everything to me, so please, please tell me what’s bothering you. Why don’t you ever sleep?”

“Nothing, I’m just not tired.” I say nonchalantly, hoping that I sound convincing. He lifts one of his eyebrows and gives me an unimpressed look.

“Yeah, right. The circle under your eyes are so dark, I’d think you were a raccoon if I didn’t know any better, pet.” he jokes, but his eyes don’t hold any amusement, just pure concern. I sigh and look at our joined hands, my fingers toying with his rings. I open my mouth to say something but he interrupts me.

“I swear, if you’re gonna ask me why I’m wearing my rings now, I’m gonna strangle you.” he threatens, and I smile for the first time tonight, because it warms my heart that he knew I was gonna ask that. He knows me too well, it’s scary sometimes.

“I don’t wanna sleep.” I murmur, hoping he can’t hear me, but from the way he squeezes my hand, I know he did.

“Why don’t you wanna sleep, darling?” he asks gently. I shrug my shoulders, but he’s patiently waiting for my answer.

“Because I think a lot. And my mind goes to places I dont want it to go. I think about everything, the school, the future, us. And once I start, I can’t stop, until I fall asleep. But when I do, the nightmares begin. They’re horrible Siri.” my voice breaks and I try to take a deep breath, but fail. “I’m always alone in the dark, but I can feel I’m not alone, you know? Like the feeling you get when someone is watching you. And then, out of nowhere, someone just appears right in front of me. It’s either you, Jamie, Remmy, Marls or just anyone I like, but..B-but they’re dead, they’re always dead and staring at me with huge, lifeless eyes. And I try to move, to help them or run away, just to do something, but I can’t. It’s like I’m frozen in place. And then I hear voices, yelling at me that it’s my fault they’re dead or asking me to help or just telling me how worthless I am. And I can never wake up. No matter how much I try, to just wake up, I can’t. I keep telling myself that it’s not real, you are all okay and its just my imagination, but the longer it lasts, the realer it is and I can’t wake up and it’s terrible and it’s killing me and I don’t wanna sleep ever again because..” Sirius hugs me close to his body shushing me softly, stopping my rumbling. I didn’t even realize I was crying until I can feel the wet patch I formed on Sirius’ shoulder. I hiccup loudly, trying to keep my breathing calm, but failing once again.

“Shh, it’s okay love. Try to breathe. I’m here darling, don’t worry. I’m here with you and I’m not going anywhere. Just beathe, my love.” He murmurs into my ear, rocking us lightly. One of his hand if tightly wrapped around my back, drawing small circles, while the other one is in my head, protectively holding my head to his shoulder. I listen to his soft words, breathing in his cologne and trying to stop shaking. We stay like this for Merlin know how long, but he doesn’t stop whispering sweet nothings and rocking us lightly even after my breathing is regular and I’m no longer shaking. He squeezes me one last time, before slowly pulling away, yet his hands never leave my body. I’m basically sitting in his lap, but neither of us seem to mind.

“I’m so sorry, darling, I had no idea. I’m so fucking sorry..” he apologizes, but I interrupt him before he can say more.

“It’s not your fault, Siri. You couldn’t have known, because I never told you. I didn’t want you to worry.” I try to reassure him, hating that desperate look on his face, but he just shakes his head, and places his hands on my cheeks, his cold rings soothing my hot skin.

“I should have asked sooner, I knew something was wrong, but I decided to let it be and that’s on me, but I promise I’m never gonna do it again. I’m so sorry I’ve let you suffer alone for so long, my love. It’s never gonna happen again, I promise. You’re never leaving my side again. You’ll sleep in our dorm from now on. Company could help you, and you’re gonna try some of Remus’ tea, he hides under his bed and even if that’s not gonna work, we’ll go to Madam Pomfreys. You’re not in this alone okay? You have me and you always will, I’m not going anywhere and I won’t stop, until you get the rest you need and deserve okay?” he promises and I believe him. The look in his eyes is determined and I know that when he sets his mind on something, he doesn’t stop, until he achieves whatever it is he wants. I smile at him and nod, not being able to say anything. But Sirius doesn’t mind, he closes the distance between us, and gently kisses my forehead, the kiss lingering longer than usual and butterflies inside me are awakened. He leans back with me still in his arms and lays comfortably on the sofa. I set my head on his chest, and close my eyes listening to his heartbeat.

“You’re gonna get through this, I promise. I love so fucking much, more that you know, my love.” These are the last words I hear before drifting into sleep for the fist time in what feels like millennia.

And who knows, maybe one day I’ll share my secret about how I feel about him. And something about the way he holds me right now and his words tell me, that he will be glad I share another secret with him.

#sirius orion black #sirius black x reader #Sirius black fluff #Sirius black angst #sirius x reader #sirius x you #Sirius black x you #Sirius being sweet #I dont know how to tag #marauders era #the marauders #harry potter #marauders #marauders fluff

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grimreaperschild · 1 year ago

Text

bones 2

summary: the group starts to adjust to life, you run into a familiar face on a supply run.

warnings: violence, gore, language if i’ve missed anything lmk

a/n: pls im kinda falling in love w this series 😭 but im exited for what’s to come, hope you guys like the new addition to the group ;) happy reading-🦷

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the first few seconds of waking up are always so blissful, your head tucked into the crook of tara’s neck nuzzling yourself impossibly closer as she raked her hands up your back lovingly, but as soon as you blink the sleep out of your eyes the weight of the say settles itself on your shoulders, digging it’s claws in like some oversized evil bird “good morning sleepyhead” tara’s lips press to the shell of your ear and you snuggle closer, she giggles “you slept in a little today baby everyone’s already awake” you stretch “well everyone’s gonna have to wait for me to brush my teeth” you shuffle around and throw some marvel pj pants on to match your spider-man t when you open the door to your and tara’s room your met with ethan fist raised, he jumped back at the sight of you and opened his mouth to talk you hold your finger up “im brushing my teeth first” he follows you like a lost puppy to the bathroom tara appearing beside you shoving a toothbrush in her mouth and promptly disappearing again.

as soon as your spit hits the basin ethan voice reaches your ears “so i was thinking and there has to be others hauled up in houses i mean if we survived so should other people” you turned the tap, no water great. things are going just great. you push past ethan and into the kitchen in search of your girlfriend she’s stood with sam and mindy, you pick up a pan and spoon and knock them together a couple times “family meeting everyone to there seats” you call thorough the house chuckling as you watch everyone scurry to the living room, it’s been a couple days since the outbreak, a couple days since quin. yesterday you and sam had taken the boards down from her room and thrown her body out the window and you’d all spent the rest of the day cleaning the carpet and making her room as nice as possible, you’d closed the door and boarded it up again out of respect.

you stand in the middle of the room, the coffee table having long been pushed out of the way the only person your missing was anika and you eye the stairs through the door you mentally count to 5 smiling as she rushes down the stairs right on cue “sorry im late sorry guys im here, here” she holds her hands up stepping between people to claim her spot bedside mindy “the waters out sooner than we thought” a collective groan could be heard from the group and you held a hand up to silence them “yes i know, not ideal but we planned for this remember? me chad and sam go scout outside see what it’s like” “im still mad i pulled the short straw if we were measuring dick sizes i wouldn’t have to go out there” “that’s only because me and y/n don’t have dicks, bird brain” you snort and cover your mouth pretending to cough when chad shoots daggers your way “i guess i can’t put this off any longer anyone have any weapon ideas? i atleast wanna be iconic” tara gives you an unimpressed look but you continue on anyway “i was thinking we could hit up the wilderness shop down the way they have guns and stuff good place to loot” sam nods her head “yeah and for the way there i’ve got some climbing gear like picks and stuff” you cock your head to the side “how do i literally live with you and not know we both climb?” her head shoots up “your my sister in law and i don’t know you climb?” excitement lacing her tone “whoa hold your horses im not your sister in law yet” tara gives you another unamused look as sam goes to grab her gear “what do you wanna get married” anika pipes up “i can officiate, chad can be the flower girl” mindy laughs at the statement elbowing her brother in the side “why cant i be a flower girl” liv frowns “because your gonna be the ring bearer” “ethan’s definitely gonna be my best man” ethan’s head shoots up at your words a grin on his face “minds your my maid of honour and sam you can walk me down the isle” “deal” sam agrees having only heard the last end of the conversation.

you grab 2 picks from sam and throw one to chad “let me get out of my pjs and we can go” the light atmosphere turns thick the weight of what’s about to happen, you lean against the door and rest your hands on your knees in out, in, out everything’s ok it’s all gonna be ok you take a shaky breath standing tall, your ashamed to say you jump when you hear 3 soft knocks on the door tara’s head peers in “baby” she breathes and it’s unnaturally soft, it makes you crumble tears cascade down your cheeks “oh, baby” she takes you in her arms “i’ll be waiting for you right here when you get back” she rubs your back softly “when did i become leader” you choke out voice muffled by her neck “i cant do it, why do they all look to me, im not enough” you let yourself cry on her shoulder till there’s nothing left to cry tara whispering sweet nothings in your ear until you pull yourself away turning to get dressed.

when you walk back into the living room dressed in black cargos white t and a light brown knitted jumper tying your hair up in a ponytail chad and sam are waiting shoes already on, you flop onto the sofa as tara brings you your combat boots you tug them off tying the laces tight. “you guys ready?” you look at the faces of the people around you “as i’ll ever be” chad mutters sam nods solemnly in acknowledgement, you stand and make your way to the front door slowly “ethan, liv i want you on door duty, tara mindy i want you on watch” you strain as you move the dresser from the front door you step back and grab your pick as sam unbolts and swings the door open slowly surveying our surroundings “y/n” you turn at the sound of her voice and she presses a soft kiss to your lips your heart flutters at the action “come home, be safe” you allow chad and liv to have there moment before slinging your bag over your shoulders and taking the first steps out the door.

your hands are griping the pick so tight your knuckles are white as the 3 of you make your way down the street towards the hunting store, you’d never seen woodsbrough so deserted some bodys were laying on corners or in the street but you tried not to focus on them as you push on forward, you stifle a laugh as chad bumps into a lamppost while trying to look behind him “good job superman” he rubs his head and shoots you a glare “i don’t see you trying to watch our 6” sam bumps his shoulder “what is this? cod zombies? roger roger” you snort “that’s actually from starwars cod zombies kinda just screech like metal heads” you shudder at the thought “bookie” before anyone can call you a nerd for your starwars comment someone barrels into you knocking you to the floor, you let out a grunt as the person lands an elbow into your stomach effectively winding you “SHIT y/n, fuck i didn’t know it was you im so sorry” the girl stands quickly pulling you to your feet with her.

you stumble into the wall hands falling to your knees pick long forgotten as you suck air in threw your teeth winded for the second time this week it feels like there’s a running theme here. then you look up at your assailant and any air you’d managed to scrape into your lungs was knocked out of you again, amber. my amber, our amber. you blink up at her eyes wild, she was your and tara’s ex of a few months her parents had forced her hand as it “wasn’t normal” or whatever, your thoughts are interrupted as she throws herself into you “tara?” it’s a question you wrap your arms around her “safe, you hurt” you pull away quickly inspecting her “n-“ she’s cut off by chad letting out a yell, you see the brute before she does and you shove her aside diving for your pick in the road, he’s big. easily 6’4 and built he used to be in the biker gang but his leather jacket hangs off him in tatters sam swings her arm back and gets him right in the chest definitely breaking a few ribs by the sound of it she tries to pull her weapon out but it’s stuck he lets out a groan and swings her to the side following quickly as she tumbles to the floor, you make your move while he’s distracted hitting him in the back of the skull, he goes down but you don’t stop 1, 2, 3 hit after hit to his head, brains are smushed onto the pavement and your sprayed with blood as you feel hands on your waist pulling you back “he’s done he’s gone it’s ok” you breath again looking for sam thankfully she’s ok.

the 4 of you make it to the hunters shop with no further incidents sam opens the door for you nodding as you pass by her ok definitely not shaking the title of leader anytime soon better embrace it your eyes land on a hunting knife 7 inches long, Damascus steel with a leather bound hilt you pick it up and it fits your hand like it’s made for you, you smile as you clip it to your belt turning to the pistol rack to choose your gun, gotta pick something iconic you see a revolver not too dissimilar to the one rick in the walking dead has bingo. you silently thank your dad for the shooting lessons he gave you as a young teen clipping the holster to your belt you chuck all the guns and amo in your bag as you can then the gleam of metal catches your eye.

oh, now that, that is iconic overkill? sure but who’s gonna miss out on the chance to carry round a fucking sword you grin as you pick up the roman style sword “really?” you look up to see amber stood with a familiar glint of adoration in her eyes “you telling me i don’t look badass right now freeman?” you smirk as you situate the sword on your hip “im from the fucking roman times, unkillable if you will” she chuckles to herself “you dork” “yeah yeah whatever” she’s armed with a baseball bat and a shotgun good decision. you take a look at everyone, chad is playing with nunchucks and sam is stuffing knifes into her bag “it’s getting dark out, we need to head back ambs you coming with” you wince at the hopefulness in your voice “tar won’t want you out here alone” sam shoots you a knowing look and your eyes fall to the floor “yes. i’ve been in my house alone i was terrified” a pang of sympathy shoots threw you “your safe now, i promise” she holds out her pinky and you interlock it with yours “always?” “always”

oh fuck me. this is going to be the death of me.

#jenna ortega x reader #jenna ortega #tara carpenter #tara carpenter x reader #tara carpenter x yn #tara x reader x amber #amber freeman #amber freeman x reader #scream #zombie #zombie apocolypse au #amber x tara

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theemporium · 2 years ago

Note

Number 42 for the random number!

42. “stay quiet”

The decision to go camping was impulsively brought up by Pansy at dinner one night, and now they were also suffering the consequences.

Ever since Draco Malfoy finally got off his ass and made a move on Hermione Granger, the witch had become integrated into your little group and you truly couldn’t be happier. You had always gotten along with the witch, despite what the house and class statuses of you two may say.

It was during one of the many dinners you shared together where Hermione had shared a few stories about her family annual muggle camping trips across the country. And it was less than five minutes later when Pansy insisted they give it a shot—a weekend without magic and only muggle tools to survive—because it surely couldn’t be that hard.

Spoiler alert: it was pretty fucking difficult.

There was a variety of hardships the group had grown to discover, starting somewhere from the lack of toilets to the fact it was fucking freezing at night, and they were barely able to start a fire. However, Theo’s biggest issue was the fact they had no silencing charms.

Not a single one.

“Theo,” you whispered, the birds chirping outside telling you it was pretty early for all things considered. You knew your watch was somewhere near the bottom of the tent, but you didn’t have the heart to leave your warm sleeping bag just yet. Especially not with your boyfriend pressed against your back, warm hands gliding along your stomach.

“Morning, love,” he grumbled, his voice low and rough as he nuzzled his face into the crook of your neck. His leg slid between yours, entangling and trapping your body further against his.

You sighed happily in his arms, content enough to stay exactly where you were before dealing whatever chaos the rest of the day would lead into. Your boyfriend, however, had other plans.

It was subtle at first, the way his pinky stroked along your stomach. It was something you didn’t even bat an eye at until his hand slid down a little, until his pinky was skimming the waistband of your leggings and the bulge pressing into your ass was more noticeable to your sleepy brain.

“Theo,” you murmured in a warning voice, knowing very well what he wanted. “We can’t.”

“Yes, we can,” he replied simply, pressing a kiss to the spot just below your ear. Smiling a little when he heard you let out a small sigh. “You know you want to.”

“We can’t,” you repeated as his fingers passed the barrier of the waistband. “We don’t even have silencing charms.”

“We are far away enough,” he assured you.

“The others are literally less than two meters away.”

“They probably aren’t even awake.”

You opened your mouth, ready to list off other reasons just why this was a bad idea but Theo’s hand cupped your clothed cunt before you could even say a word. A choked gasp left your lips, hips instinctively grinding against his palm and the boy grinned victoriously against your neck.

“That’s it, baby,” he hummed as his fingers slid along the material, already feeling how wet you were when he had barely touched you. “Stay quiet like a good girl and I’ll let you come.”

You bit your lip. “Theo—”

“Shhh, love,” he cooed as his palm brushed against your clit, your face nuzzled against your pillow to muffle the whine you let out. “I wanna fuck my pretty girl, but I can’t do that if you get us caught, huh?”

“Okay,” you breathed out, all resolve leaving your body the second you felt him push his hips against your ass and his hard cock pressing against your back. “Fuck me, Theo. Please.”

“That’s the plan, love. Now keep that pretty mouth shut.”

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stariikis · 11 months ago

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𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧 | 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 005

synopsis ; based on the Chinese Drama, 'When I Fly Towards You', in which you, a going-on-high-school English genius named Huang Yuting meets the Mathematics genius of the 10th grade, Nishimura Riki, underneath the rain.

Another C for English. Riki is hardly surprised. He sighs heavily and tosses his half-crumpled paper aside, wishing the language never existed. Why learn it when it’s not like he’s going to England to ride scooters around? And even if he does, why would he need to know a thousand different types of sentence structures and spelling rules? As long as the point is carried, right?

He never has been a language boy, anyway.

Suddenly, a familiar voice sounds from outside their classroom, and Riki has no idea why it sounds sweet as honey to him.

“You wanna bet on that?” Huang Yuting whips her head towards Moka challengingly.

In return, her best friend sticks out her tongue and teases, “Yeah, I bet you he won’t wanna. He’s too smart for that!”

Yuting lets out a betrayed grumble, two hands reaching out to mock-strangle her, and that’s all Riki’s able to catch from their conversation. A few steps and they’re already out of earshot. He doesn’t know why his eyes continue to follow her down the hall; his head turns to aid his view; a dreamy smile begins to lift the corners of his lips…

“Riki-ya!”

Jungwon smacks the back of his head with his rolled up English paper. From beside him, right next to the corridor window, he looks absolutely befuddled. “Is it just me, or have I never seen you smile like that before?”

“Maybe I just don’t like being around you,” Riki mutters back, and it’s got to be the longest sentence he’s uttered today. Turning back his attention to the class, even though he hardly understands a thing, he tells himself he has to. Perhaps he’s recently been distracted so he can’t perform as well as he would like.

His mind unconsciously flashes back to Yuting squatting under the rain, and he has to scold himself for his brain to properly get the memo. Anyway, it can’t be her fault. He has never gotten anything higher than a low B for English, no matter how late he stays up to study and down cup after cup of coffee. He absolutely does not get distracted by her presence.

“No but I think I’m going to fail Maths this time.” When Yuting’s voice rolls around once again, Riki has to physically restrain himself from staring out the window. He forces his ears to concentrate on the lesson, and locks his eyes on his exam paper. Smoothing out the crumples, he takes a while to process all the red markings on just the first page. Of course, in sloppy Japanese characters, his teacher asks to see him in the staff room after lesson. He’s used to this, after every single English test is returned.

He’s used to being known as the smart kid, who cannot for the life of him get a good grade for second language. The pretty face with a pretty report card — if you cover up the English grade. He’s also known for being pretty well-rounded; he’s a good mixture of academically inclined and sporty, has been attending a dance academy since age five, and knows how to play a handful of musical instruments. And he draws and paints for fun.

But being good at something doesn’t mean you excel at it, he has learned that the hard way, and he will continue to, over and over again.

When the bell finally goes off to signal the end of class, he gathers his papers and makes his way to the staff room. Jungwon calls out behind him, but he doesn’t bother to respond. Much less stop to listen to what nonsense he has to say this time.

“You’re joking.”

A big fat F stares back into your face the moment you receive your Maths paper. There isn’t even a moment for you to compose your thoughts and slowly unveil your result. It’s just a huge symbol of failure, a handwritten bold letter that digs into your skin and rattles your sleeping brain cells awake.

Why do you even bother flipping through the pages when all you’re greeted with are red crosses to match the F on the cover? You may not be the brightest student in the room, but you’ve never tasted this kind of failure before, and you can’t even speak because there’s a sour taste lingering on your tongue.

Diagonal from you, Moka taps your shoulder in concern, seeing your bitterly disappointed expression. But you don’t bother to answer. You always knew you were bad, but when did bad turn into terrible?

Even though you know you should be paying close attention to the lesson after messing up this badly, you can’t seem to get your head out of a daze. It feels too fogged up, too hazy. All you can think about are red strokes striking out your incorrect answers, a short but terrifying message from your Maths teacher, and Riki.

He’s going to think you’re so pathetic, considering he’s never gotten anything below a ninety for Maths in his entire academic journey. You can already imagine the shock on his face morphing into utter disgust… and a hint of scorn crossing his features…

You tilt your head to the side as if emptying your brain of these thoughts; they’re not helping you in any way. However, the action doesn’t work, and these thoughts plague you even until the end of class, even when you take a step towards the staff room door and give it a little rap with your knuckles to seek permission to enter.

However, the curious pair of eyes that meet yours as the door is opened for you… they are definitely not one of a teacher’s. Riki blinks slowly at you from the other side of the doorway, a crumpled paper clutched close to his chest. Upon realising it’s you, he folds the paper once more and hides it behind his back.

“It’s you,” you mutter, in no mood for his usual silent antics. Breaking the highly eye contact, you brush past him coldly and head towards where you see your Maths teacher’s nameplate. For some reason, Riki follows close behind, and you can hear him playing with the creases on his papers.

You whip around accusingly. “You’re being weird. Why are you here anyway? You can’t be here to see a teacher, your grades are so good.” You then gasp and cover your mouth, realisation striking. “Or did you do something wrong? Are you in trouble?”

He frowns and rolls his eyes in response, before tossing the paper onto the teacher’s table. His English paper looks pretty similar to your Maths one, only that his C is significantly better than your F. By a large margin, in fact. Shame then swamps over you because you know your previous words must have stung, to someone who usually tops in everything.

“Sorry…” and shit, you can’t meet his eyes again. Why do your interactions with him always turn out like this?

In return, he throws you a mere shrug, and it just makes you feel worse. So you present your own Maths paper to him, letting him flip through it. His eyes widen slowly, as if he can’t believe you could ever score this low. And he probably does think that, and refuses to say it. As he refuses to say anything.

Then, once again, he proves you wrong. “Your problems are conceptual. If someone could help you understand, I’m sure you’d do pretty well.”

The way you feel completely and utterly stunned by his words is off-putting. Every time Riki opens his mouth, he never fails to make a lasting impact on you. No wonder he is one of the smartest boys in the whole school, despite being in the lowest level.

“Maybe you should help me,” you jab teasingly, and not to mention, jokingly. You would never have expected him to actually agree with this proposition, even when he turns his head and smiles gently.

“Maybe I should.”

taglist (open)

@laylasmother @seunnimg @natalunae @roumajuli @tomomorin

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pantoneyoongi · 1 year ago

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neon signs | let's talk about it

title ; let’s talk about it pairing ; campus crush!yoongi x campus crush!you

notes ;

this is part of the neon signs drabble series, where drabbles are released in random order (but listed chronologically in the masterlist!)

series description ;

namjoon doesn’t think it can get any clearer outside of yoongi building a giant neon sign saying i have the absolute biggest crush on you but apparently, book smarts don’t exactly translate when it comes to you and your massive crush on min yoongi. (alternatively: namjoon and hoseok try for three years straight to get you and yoongi together.)

word count ; 1k

tags ; yoongi gets a little violent (no hoseoks were harmed in this chapter), probably (definitely) excessive cursing, fluff, pls go to masterlist for more / general tags

yoongi is not a violent man by any means. he’s rather patient, actually, and generally tolerant of a good many things.

but he is going to kill hoseok.

yoongi glares up at his ceiling, resisting the urge to scream. hoseok, you fucking - fuck. fucking fucker fuck.

he’s so frustrated he’s run out of creative insults.

yoongi thrashes around on his bed, rolling onto his stomach and slamming his face into his pillow. his roommate isn’t here today, so he can be as odd as he wants without earning questioning stares.

with a huff, yoongi twists around to lay on his back again. why would hoseok leave him with this information and nothing else? did yoongi do something to piss off his best friend and now hoseok is being petty? how else is he supposed to explain why hoseok ever so casually passed on the information that someone flirted with you today and maybe asked you out, too?

yoongi knows. yoongi knows even without hoseok adding fuel to the fire by shrugging his shoulders and saying, “well, she is popular around campus, yoongi. did you really think no one would ask her out eventually?” he knows. you’re everybody’s favorite and it was bound to happen eventually. it probably happens all the time, actually. but ignorance is bliss and now yoongi can’t stop thinking about what your response might’ve been because hoseok - the worst friend on the planet - pretended to knock the fuck out immediately after delivering this information.

“hoseok,” yoongi had hissed. “hoseok, wake the fuck- i know you are not sleeping right now-”

hoseok even had the audacity to let his lips twitch in amusement, proving to yoongi he was awake. but if anybody asked hoseok, he’d swear up and down that it’s not his fault yoongi is so painfully obvious and simultaneously impressively stupid, and therefore the easiest target to tease.

yoongi ‘accidentally’ slammed the door on the way out (and then peeked back into the room just in case that ‘woke’ hoseok up) then shut the door again and grumbled the entire way back to his own dorm.

and now here he is. laying in his own bed, devastated.

he’s gonna murder hoseok.

yoongi taps his foot against the ground repeatedly. for someone who can fall asleep at the drop of a hat, yoongi is unusually restless today, and namjoon eyes him suspiciously. yoongi’s arms are crossed, staring at a spot just past namjoon’s head, but when his eyes dart to namjoon for the third time since they sat down, namjoon straightens, expression flattening.

“what do you wanna know, yoongi,” namjoon’s voice comes out more like a sigh, like he’s the most exhausted person on the planet. yoongi clears his throat. yoongi generally has the blank-eyed stare down pat, but his friends are quick studies and can tell the difference by now between when he’s actually not paying attention vs when he’s just pretending not to.

considering yoongi’s spent the past ten minutes trying to find the most casual way to ask namjoon if his best friend is now taken, it’s safe to say yoongi’s brain definitely has the on switch flipped up.

“nothing, i just-”

“yoongs!” you slide into the seat next to him at the student center, then spot namjoon across from him. “joonie!” namjoon hums his response.

there’s no way yoongi can ask now. not when you start off on a tangent before either of the boys have a chance to get a word in otherwise, complete with animated hand motions and dramatic narration that have you leaning in real close to yoongi (and namjoon, but yoongi cares more about his personal space being taken up by you and how he’d let you do this literally anytime you want) - and yoongi can only watch with helpless affection until you finish telling your story.

“so that’s how my day is going,” you drawl, then twist to yoongi. “what are you up to?”

he shrugs, because he really only came out here in an attempt to interrogate namjoon before you spotted them and inserted yourself into the conversation yoongi didn’t even manage to actually start. he hesitates, then as subtly as he can, tilts his head slightly and says, “i heard you have a boyfriend now?”

your brows furrow. namjoon coughs into his drink, squinting at yoongi like he’s sprouted a second head. you frown down at the table, unaware of the silent exchange between namjoon and yoongi that goes something like:

namjoon: this is a joke right yoongi: i’m so serious rn namjoon: for someone so smart you are so dumb

both boys clear their expression when you raise your head and purse your lips at yoongi. “who did you hear that from?”

yoongi fumbles. “just. someone,” he scratches the tip of his nose. “or maybe it was that someone asked you out?”

you light up in recognition. “oh! yeah, that did happen. that was really weird.”

yoongi can’t stop himself when he leans towards you in exasperated confusion. “weird?” it’s weird someone asked out the most popular girl on campus?

but you don’t expand on it, instead opting to spend your time bothering namjoon, while yoongi wages an entire two minute war in his head because while you’d looked confused about it all, there was definitely no clear answer on whether or not you actually said yes to the weird person who asked you out. yoongi is going to lose it if he doesn’t get some goddamn answers.

“so what’d you say?” he tries to go for casual, though the judgmental look on namjoon’s face right now suggests it’s anything but. it flies right over your head though, and you drop the pencil that you were using to doodle on namjoon’s papers to turn back to yoongi.

“hm?” you fiddle with the pencil. “no, of course. i didn’t really know him like that. i wasn’t interested.” you laugh, and the sound fills yoongi with relief, and he lets out a quiet, half-amused huff in return.

“no,” he repeats after you. “of course.” no, of course.

“yoongi, let’s talk about it,” hoseok walks backwards with his hands up, as yoongi heads towards him. “come on, buddy. you know i’d tell you if she actually said yes-! dude!”

series masterlist ; neon signs

taglist ; @thelilbutifulthings @bbsantc @chickentenderx @taegijns @princxssly82 @manuosorioh @sugaluvmyg @medicinemybish

#yoongi x you #yoongi fluff #yoongi x reader #yoongi x yn #yoongi x y/n #yoongi #did u miss them bc i sure did #sugaluvmyg #medicinemybish #sorry the @ wasn't working so hopefully the tags do #series: nsyg

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idiopath-fic-smile · 7 days ago

Note

adding on to the previous ask: the zombies run prequel from the same post if you're so inspired!!

ooh okay!

(for reference, we're talking about this post.)

the zombies run prequel was abandoned specifically because it was going to need to be extremely long, so i'll need to post quite a bit in order to get to new writing.

“Arse,” says Jack.

“Bastard,” says Eugene.

“Creep.”

“Dolt.”

“Eh—um. Uh.” Jack puffs out a frustrated breath. “Egg…face?”

Eugene rolls his eyes. “Eggface? Seriously?”

“E’s hard,” says Jack. “I’d like to see you try it.” He sighs.

“Aggravating,” says Eugene.

“Well that’s just uncalled f—” Jack starts, and Eugene makes a face Jack can’t possibly see, but the message must come across anyway, because a second later, he adds, “oh. Starting over. Yeah. Berk.”

“Clod.”

“Dickhead.”

“Easy.”

“Easy doesn’t count,” Jack cuts in. “That’s not an insult.”

“I meant, in the sense of—“

“Yeah,” says Jack, “I know how you meant it, I, too, speak the English language.” His voice raises, almost to a normal pitch, and then he catches himself and resumes in a whisper, “Just—don’t you think it’s a bit, uh, slut-shamey to—“

“You just don’t want to give me the point.”

“Listen, mate, clearly I do wanna give you the point, otherwise we start over and I’m stuck with E again—”

“Egghead, then,” says Eugene.

“You give me shit about eggface, and then you turn right around and—?”

“The difference,” Eugene interrupts, “is that egghead is an actual insult, in, you know, the English language?”

“Prove it.”

Eugene scrubs one hand over his face. His hair feels gritty. So does his skin. It’s so dark out that his eyes hurt, trying to keep focused on the narrow flashlight beam before them. The pipe he’d been using as a weapon cracked in half two days ago, and now he’s got a long-handled shovel instead, gripped too tightly in both hands.

“Where, exactly, are you expecting me to pull a dictionary from?” says Eugene, and Jack lets out a dry, rattling laugh like a burst of static, quickly swallowed back. Eugene can’t really judge him for the immaturity. Nerves. Adrenaline. A dangerous degree of sleep deprivation. All of the above.

“D’you hear something?” Jack whispers, and it’s Eugene’s turn to force down ill-advised hysterical laughter because yes, he heard something, he’s been hearing something for the last hour, ever since they realized the valley where they’d tried to set up camp was overrun with the biggest swarm of crawlers they’ve ever had the misfortune of not being able to see in the failing light.

“Nothing new,” says Eugene, in the calmest undertone he can force out of his mouth.

Jack had knocked them away in all directions, swinging W.G. with a savagery that was no longer surprising but very welcome, and Eugene had done his part with the shovel, but there had never been any hope of cleaning out the area, not with the two of them and only one flashlight. All they could do was clear a retreat.

There must have been an explosion out here at some point. An explosion or a giant fire, because Eugene can’t think of any other explanation why—there’s just so many, it’s like a tide coming in…

They’re crawlers, he keeps reminding himself. You don’t need to kill them all. Crawlers are slow. They’re low to the ground. Running is a waste of energy right now, and dangerous in the darkness. All Jack and Eugene need to do is keep walking until the sun rises again and it’s possible to get a sense of their bearings, find high ground, make a stand or make sure they’ve shaken the last of the horde. If they can keep at a brisk pace all night, they should be fine.

They just need to keep walking. They just need to stay awake.

They were already so tired that they didn’t notice they were unrolling the sleeping bag in a nest of the undead until it was almost too late.

The forest floor behind them is a seething, biting, scratching tide that wants to kill them, but even with every twig snap signaling that they are not safe, Eugene can feel his brain trying to shut off.

But. It’s fine. He just needs to—they just need to—

“Arrogant,” says Jack.

“What are you—” Eugene figures it out a long, stupid second later. “Yeah. Sorry. Uh, brigand.”

“Cranky.”

“Not an insult.”

A stray crawler drags itself into view of the flashlight beam, and Jack drives W.G. into its head. “Well, it’s not a compliment,” he counters. “Fine. Crazy.”

“If you object to ‘easy’, then I’m gonna have to object to—”

“How about ‘Canadian’, then.”

“Annoying,” Eugene fires back, and Jack makes a quiet sound of protest that breaks off into a quiet sound of resignation.

“Boring.”

“C—” Eugene feels a tug on his shoe and he whirls around, slamming the shovel into something that has a little too much give. Whoever it used to be, they must’ve died a while ago.

The tug stops. His skin prickles. His hands are shaking. He’s done this a thousand times before but it’s so, so much worse in the dark.

Jack swings the flashlight around. “Nothing else gaining,” he observes. “That one must’ve come out of the bushes or something. You alright?”

Eugene nods, pointless since Jack won’t see, and takes a deep breath. He can still feel his heart beating in his ears. “Cowardly,” he says at last.

“No,” Jack’s voice is soft, almost pleading, “hey, it’s okay to be scared, this is more than anyone would—oh. Yeah. Uh, Dim.”

“Ersatz,” says Eugene.

“Okay, you can’t just—string sounds together and invent new words—”

“Ersatz,” Eugene repeats. “It means fake.”

“Fine,” says Jack. “What’s—oh, F. Uh, fake!” Eugene imagines a flicker of smugness on his face.

“Greasy.”

“Oi!”

With every step, Eugene’s fighting to keep his head up. Part of him thinks, what’s the point? He’s so goddamn tired. He just wants to curl up and—what an ignoble way to die, to survive three weeks on the road and come to an end just handing the zombies their dinner. (Ignoble. He makes a mental note, in case they ever make it up to I. Unlikely: this is the first time they’ve gotten as far as G.)

“Shit,” Jack mumbles, “what’s next, H. Huh. Hah. Herpes.”

Case in point.

“Not an insult,” says Eugene with infinite weariness.

“Again, not a compliment,” and thank God for Jack’s bone-headed objections, thank God for his inability to play the game right for more than thirty seconds because at this point, Eugene’s frustration is the main force keeping his eyes open.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t make it an insult. You wouldn’t say, ‘well, that’s herpes.’ You wouldn’t call someone ‘herpes’—”

“Just watch me,” says Jack. “Just watch me, you…herpes.”

Eugene rolls his eyes. “I’m gonna punch you on the arm right now,” he says. “On your left side. Just telling you so you don’t startle and try to hit me with the bat.”

“Okay,” Jack says, and Eugene taps one fist against his left bicep.“Ow!”

“Keep it down,” Eugene whispers.

“You punched me!”

“You said ‘okay!’”

Foliage crashes maybe twenty meters ahead of them, loud enough that it can’t be a crawler, must be something that can stagger upright. ‘Great, you scared up a zombie,’ Eugene doesn’t actually say, because he’s not that petty. The flashlight is weak, which means they have to keep heading forward, waiting for the thing to come into view.

“Har…bing…ing,” says Jack.

A shape emerges in the thin streak of light. It slouches towards them, one foot rhythmically sweeping the ground. Most of the flesh has sloughed off the lower half of its face, so its mouth is all jagged teeth, hanging open too wide—

Eugene darts forward, strikes out hard with the edge of the shovel, knocking the creature onto its side so that Jack can deliver the killing blow. The thing stills. They keep walking.

“Harbinging,” Jack says again. His voice wavers at the edges.

Eugene didn’t get a good look, but he thinks it was wearing a uniform. A cop, maybe. A security guard. A paramedic. He tries to sigh but it’s half a shudder.

“Not an insult,” he gets out. “Also, not a word.”

“Anal retentive,” says Jack.

“Brainless.”

“Not yet,” mutters Jack, and they both giggle like five-year-olds.

“Oh shit, what, uh—what’s next?”

“The letter E,” says Eugene.

Jack yawns. His footsteps are slowing. They’ve been slowing for a while. Jack hasn’t slept well lately, even by their current lax standards. Eugene keeps trying to push the thought to the back of his mind but it won’t stay: however bad he feels right now, Jack must somehow feel worse.

“Come on,” says Eugene.

“Do we—d’we really need to keep walking,” Jack slurs out. He yawns again. “If we just—rested, for fifteen minutes, I would have so much more energy to—”

In a way, Eugene’s glad that Jack’s said the words out loud. Now he can argue with it, instead of letting it gnaw at him. (Gnaw: a poor choice of words, under the circumstances.)

“If we stop walking,” Eugene reminds him, “we both fall asleep.”

“Mmmm,” says Jack, low, deep in his throat. Because he’s exhausted, obviously, not because—well, actually, Eugene’s statement doesn’t even work in a dirtier context.

Eugene does something he almost never does then, which is to really zero in on the confused thread of nerves and arousal that runs through his dealings with Jack.

It would be so much easier, so much safer, to write the whole thing off as a lost cause—the least of many, now. But without sounding conceited, well. Sometimes Jack will smile at him for no reason, or joke-flirt with only the flimsiest of punchlines. More than once, Eugene’s caught him guiltily jerking his eyes away from the lines of a tattoo in a way that felt downright promising.

Of course, Jack could simply be that friendly. Jack could be that oblivious, that clumsy at picking up on his own innuendos. Jack doesn’t seem like the kind of guy with incredible impulse control, and in three weeks, he hasn’t made a move. Neither has Eugene, but.

But. If Eugene’s wrong, that’s a surefire way to make everything excruciatingly awkward for the rest of their lives. However much longer that winds up being.

The uncertainty of it jangles, like a chord that won’t resolve. A month ago, Eugene would’ve been climbing the walls to avoid these kinds of thoughts, but now it’s like his annoyance with the alphabet game: focusing on the raw edges drags his brain back to something like wakefulness.

“Shit!” A step behind him, Jack stumbles wildly, falls. The flashlight hits the ground and Eugene scrambles blind for it, drops it twice, and swivels the shaky beam onto Jack’s face. Jack’s breathing hard. He’s not fighting anything Eugene can see, but he could be in shock, could be too late already, could be—

“Crawler?” Eugene asks, shovel heavy and urgent in his hand.

“..tree branch.” Jack sounds maybe a little too tired to be sheepish.

“You okay?”

“Stubbed my toe,” Jack says pitiably.

Eugene’s not sure if he wants to laugh or scream. “I meant,” he hisses, “any broken skin or—” Zombie infection, he doesn’t need to finish. If a branch brought Jack down, it could’ve tripped something else, something that left part of itself behind.

“Uh,” says Jack, “I don’t—I don’t think so, but—” They’re both wearing boots and jeans, for exactly this reason. Long sleeves, but Jack had pushed his up. Eugene rakes the light over his elbows, his forearms, his hands. Clear.

He lets out a breath, less steady than he’d like. “You’re good,” says Eugene. “Okay, c’mon, up.”

Jack doesn’t move. He laughs, hiccupy. “Don’t you think at some point, it gets—diminishing returns?” he says. “Walking all night. It’s just.”

“Get up,” Eugene says again, more urgently. Staying crawler-height in the dark in an unsecured area is so stupid he doesn’t have words for it.

“Do you—” Jack yawns. “Even hear anything behind us. D’you see anything. Anything but, but fucking trees?”

Looking would mean moving the flashlight beam away from Jack, who is unharmed and whole and patting the ground next to him with a sleepy smile and—definitely about to get them both killed.

Adrenaline itches in Eugene’s bloodstream. “Get up, dummy.”

“So tired.”

“Do you think I’m not? Get up.” Fear rises in his throat like bile. Jack blinks up at him, distant. “Jack. Are you really gonna let me win the game?”

Jack’s eyes are slipping shut. “Let’s be honest with ourselves,” he mumbles, “like I was ever gonna think of something for E.”

Eugene looks down at Jack, curling up on the ground, and feels something bleak and desperate overtake him, like jumping headfirst into icy water. He can’t stay here, he can’t leave Jack, he can’t—

“Get. Up.” He can’t recognize his own voice.

“Can’t.”

“No,” says Eugene. “No. You don’t get that option.” Jack’s lying on his side, eyes closed, shadows lurching all around him although maybe that’s because the flashlight won’t stop trembling. Eugene nudges him in the ribs with one foot. “Get up,” he says. “Get up, Jack.” Another nudge. “I can keep going. Jack. Get up.” Nudge. “I’m not stopping until you get up. Come on.” Nudge. “Jack. Swear to god, I can stay here all night, I am not leaving until—”

Jack lifts his head. “Wanker,” he grumbles, but he takes the flashlight when it’s offered, lets Eugene grab an elbow and haul him to his feet.

Something unclenches in Eugene’s chest. He laughs softly. “Oh buddy,” he says as they start forward again, “we’re not nearly to W yet.”

“Can we play a different game,” Jack pleads a few minutes later. “Alphabet’s not so much holding my attention.”

‘We can do anything you want, just stay awake,’ Eugene thinks. “Tell me a story,” he says.

There’s a pause. There’s such a long pause he starts to worry Jack’s somehow fallen asleep while walking.

“You’re asking me to talk,” Jack says slowly.

“Yeah?”

“You don’t like when I talk.”

“It’s fine,” says Eugene.

“You—complain about it, all the—”

Even with a full night’s sleep, Eugene wouldn’t have the energy for this conversation. “If it really bothered me,” he says, reasonable, “how would I have managed to put up with you all this time?”

Jack starts to list to the side. Eugene pulls him back.

“Flatterer,” says Jack.

“A story,” says Eugene. “Talk.”

“About what?”

“Anything. The—the worst date you ever went on.”

“Already told you that.”

This is true, Eugene remembers. It had started with the other guy showing up at the bar already drunk out of his mind, and ended with Jack’s would-be suitor vomiting on a stranger’s jacket and starting an actual bar brawl. (“Yeah, so I just—left. Silver lining, he never noticed me slipping out through the kitchen. Too busy menacing someone with a snooker cue.”)

“I don’t know,” Eugene says. “Think outside the box.”

“And then, ah, everyone else leaves—Innkeeper Lady, Mr. Innkeeper Lady, Messy-Hair, Colonel Mustard, Wacky Russian Guy, and In-Retrospect-Probably-a-Lesbian. It’s just Dour Older Lady. And she turns on the radio, and Three Blind Mice starts playing. No, wait, that doesn’t make sense, why would that be on the radio?”

“Why indeed,” says Eugene. His grasp of time is hopelessly turned around but with any luck it’s been at least an hour. Feels more like four.

“Anyway,” says Jack, “Point being, she’s alone. Mood is set, it’s very creepy, and then—I think she—sees someone the audience can’t see, and she says, uh, something that’s probably about the plot, and then she gets murdered.”

“Go figure.” They still don’t seem to be walking uphill yet, which is worrying; how much longer is this valley?

“I—uh. Just realized.” Jack sniffs, thoughtful. “Maybe not the best choice—nightmare forest, only one flashlight, a play about people getting picked off one by one—”

“Don’t worry,” Eugene assures him, “You removed any shred of suspense when you picked a story where you didn’t retain a single character’s name.”

“Hey,” says Jack, “I saw it a long time ago, you can’t—huh.”

“What.”

“Nothing,” says Jack.

“What.”

“I might’ve—only now realized, I don’t actually remember how it ends?”

“You don’t remember who the murderer was, in the murder mystery,” Eugene repeats blankly. “That’s—the whole point is how it ends.”

“Okay, yes. But: counter-argument, now it’s a sort of—choose your own adventure.” Jack spreads his arms wide, sending shadows swinging in all directions. “Who do you suspect?”

“Well,” says Eugene, “I think we can safely rule out the dead woman.”

“Barring a pretty mind-blowing twist,” Jack agrees.

“Okay, process of elimination. That only leaves: everyone else.”

Jack yawns. “Who do you want the murderer to be?”

This would be easier, Eugene thinks, if he’d managed to internalize Jack’s long list of not-names. “Colonel Mustard,” he says at last. “I’m a traditionalist.”

“Sure. Colonel Mustard in the study—”

“With a lead pipe,” Eugene throws in.

“With a lead pipe,” says Jack, agreeable. “Y’know, I always wondered about that, in Cluedo. Half the weapons make perfect sense. Revolver, sure. Dagger, okay. Rope, a bit nasty, but fine. But—lead pipe? What, is there a lot of loose piping just hanging around in old mansions?”

“They could’ve brought it from home.” Eugene’s feet are still in motion but they’re beginning to feel oddly disconnected from his body, as if his head is floating high above the ground, through a fog.

“But why, though,” Jack goes on. “If you could bring anything. Why—’oh, this murder-pipe has been in the family for ages’—”

“Not a bad weapon,” says Eugene. It comes out more pensive that he’d like. He feels ridiculous, mourning a broken piece of metal like an old pet. Jack pats him on the shoulder. Actually, Jack goes for Eugene’s shoulder but in the darkness winds up just kind of batting at a nipple. Eugene assumes it’s meant to be comforting, at any rate.

“There, there, it was a fine murder-pipe.” Jack’s voice is soothing, or maybe mocking, or maybe somehow both. ‘Fond’ is the word that slips into Eugene’s thoughts and won’t leave.

Eugene swallows. “Well,” he says, “it was no W.G.”

“Nothing else can be.”

“Colonel Mustard, in the study, with a cricket bat.”

“He can take W.G. over my dead body,” says Jack.

“There’s a time and a place,” Eugene says with a wince, and Jack lets out a bark of laughter.

“Fine, then,” says Jack. “Your turn. Storytime. What’ve you got?”

“So Lakshmana is badly injured, and there’s this herb that can save him, but it only grows on one mountain, very far away, and there’s no time. And if he dies, Rama will stop fighting, and Ravana will win. But then, Hanuman the monkey god—”

“Hang on,” Jack interjects. “When you say ‘monkey god,’ what d’you mean?”

“I mean a monkey god,” says Eugene patiently.

“No, but—is he a god of monkeys, or a god to monkeys? Do monkeys worship him? Or is it more like a sea-god, where it’s, y’know, his dominion is monkeys?”

Eugene considers this. As a child, he’d always taken it at face value. “A god who is also a monkey,” he decides at last. “There’s gods, there’s goddesses, and then there’s—”

“The monkey god.”

“Right,” says Eugene. “So, Hanuman, loyal friend that he is, steps forward and says—”

“He can talk,” says Jack. “A talking monkey.”

“A talking monkey god. So, he offers to fly over to the mountain and get the—”

“And he can fly. A flying, talking—”

“Monkey god,” Eugene finishes. “The ‘god’ part, that’s important. So he flies over to the mountain, and when he gets there, he realizes he’s not sure what the herb looks like.”

“Wait. He can talk, he can fly, he’s a god, but he didn’t think to—check a, a garden manual, or—”

“Well,” says Eugene, “I mean. He is a monkey.”

“…fair.”

“So instead, he lifts up the mountain, and he—carries the whole mountain back to the battlefield, herbs and all, and Lakshmana is saved.”

“Because a monkey god carried a mountain.”

“Yes.”

“Out of friendship.”

“Well, and there was a war against demons at stake.” Eugene rubs at his eyes. “But yeah, friendship was a factor.”

Jack seems to mull this over. “Gene?”

“Yeah?”

“Is it, uh, it’s not a problem, is it, that I sort of spent the last few minutes—”

“Mocking my religious and cultural heritage?” Eugene finishes for him, helpfully.

An awkward silence descends. When he speaks again, Jack sounds wretched. “Yeah,” he mumbles, “…that.”

Eugene blinks and remembers, too late, that sarcasm is much easier when the other person can see your face and read your body language and isn’t staggering, exhausted and dehydrated, through a post-apocalyptic hellscape. As a general rule of thumb.

“Oh,” says Eugene, “Don’t worry about it. My mom married a Lutheran named Ben, if that gives you a sense of how traditional we were. I grew up with the stories, but they were—more like fables, I guess.” Except ‘fables’ doesn’t really cover it. He thinks about staying home sick from school, his mom’s hand cool on his forehead as she recounted tales of gods and goddesses to distract from his sore throat. It had felt like a secret he’d had on the other kids, something he could hold over their ready-made place in the world, their unquestioning acceptance of each other, their Lunchables.

The sound of his mother’s voice murmuring the few words of Hindi he can still remember. She must have spoken it around him at other times but he can’t bring anything else to mind.

“Good story,” Jack says.

“I, uh. I always liked it.”

“The power of friendship.”

“I think I might’ve—underplayed the demon war angle,” says Eugene.

“Would you carry a mountain for me?”

The inside of Eugene’s brain feels like it’s been scraped out with a rusty spade. His eyelids burn with the need to close. But if he stops walking, then Jack stops. He forces back a yawn. ‘I already am,’ he thinks.

From the edges of his blurring vision, he can see W.G. swinging by Jack’s side. They’ll need to wipe it down in the morning. Neither of them keep track, but he knows that Jack’s kill count is considerably higher than his. Eugene hesitates sometimes, over thinks it, hates hitting anything too recognizably human. He’s getting better at it. (Part of him isn’t sure he wants to get better.) But it can really fuck with him afterwards. Jack does the fighting when possible, and doesn’t seem to begrudge it.

Deep down, Eugene knows that if they hadn’t met—if he hadn’t tripped over that unwashed, groggy, mud-encrusted bundle of humanity on the outskirts of a rave-turned-bloodbath three weeks ago and spouted off a really regrettable Terminator reference that somehow convinced said smelly hungover man to join forces with a pipe-wielding stranger—it’s likely neither of them would be alive right now.

You could argue they’ve been carrying each other’s mountains for a while.

A soothing thought, which is—not useful right now. “It’s a moot point, since your botany skills are somehow worse than a monkey’s,” says Eugene at last.

Jack makes an indignant sound. “I was gonna say I’d do it for you,” says Jack. “But after that—little comment, I wouldn’t carry you a small hill.”

‘Yes,’ thinks Eugene, ‘stay awake.’ “You couldn’t tell the difference between spinach and nettles.”

“One time,” Jack protests. “One time and it was dark out.”

“It was a memorable one time.”

“Okay,” says Jack. “But, counterpoint: shut up.”

The terrain has finally started shifting into a slight incline that, hopefully, is taking them out of the valley. In another few hours, it might be dawn, but the sky is still dark from end to end. Eugene’s feet are numb. His head is a lightbulb about to burn out, all fraying wires and singed glass. He thinks, ‘When did Jack start calling me Gene?’ He has no idea. Maybe it happened gradually, like the ground sloping uphill.

Daylight is in reach, but only if they can hold out.

Jack’s lagging. If he tries to lie down on the road again, Eugene might not have the energy left to pull him up. It’s a little unclear how they’re both still walking.

“Talk,” says Eugene.

“About what.”

“Whatever’s on your mind.” Eugene forces his voice level, wills himself not to panic. “Whatever you’re thinking, right now.”

“What if you don’t want to know what I’m thinking,” Jack says slowly.

“What,” says Eugene, “another murder mystery without any resolution, or—”

“Would we be friends?” says Jack. “I mean, if we’d—met in the real world.”

“This is the real world.��

Jack sighs, annoyed. “You know what I mean.”

He does. He’s stalling. He doesn’t want to say no, but he also doesn’t want to lie, and he can’t picture them moving in the same circles.

“How would we have met?” Eugene says at last.

“What does it—I dunno, at a party?” Jack offers. “I knew music people, you knew…restaurant people, it—could’ve happened.”

Eugene’s not sold on the overlap, but he dutifully tries to give it a shot. “Depends,” he says.

“On what?”

“Lots of things.” Eugene fails to completely swallow back a yawn. “Whether or not I was there for work, whether we had friends in common, the last time you’d taken a shower.”

“Off the clock, a bunch of friends and how are we not yet sick of the ‘Jack smells’ jokes?” says Jack.

“If I’d come with friends, I might not’ve tried that hard to meet new people,” says Eugene.

Jack snorts, although for once, Eugene has no idea why. “Assume I would’ve talked to you,” he says, which makes sense, because Jack is probably the kind of guy who flourished at parties, chatting with any nearby stranger, perfectly at ease in a crowd.

Eugene thinks of the last party he’d been to, some industry thing hosted by a friend of a friend: a bunch of painfully self-aware neurotic types all fighting to sound smarter and cooler and better informed than each other. He’d hated it, and he’d also hated hating it. The whole exercise made him feel like he was staring into a void. If Jack had shown up there, with his goofy jokes and his puppyish exuberance and his total lack of shame, if he’d looked up at Eugene and smiled and introduced himself, boldly asserted some idiotic stance on a movie they’d both seen, well.

“And let’s say I’d showered before I left,” Jack continues. “Because that is a thing I used to do, you know. Before the world ended.”

“In that case, I probably would’ve tried to go home with you,” thinks Eugene.

Actually, wait, no: he says it. Out loud.

He doesn’t realize this until a beat or two later, when Jack lets out a strained giggle and Eugene remembers what dire embarrassment is.

“It’s the hair, right?” says Jack. “You think you know a guy, and then you discover his secret fetish for gingers. It’s alright, I don’t blame you, everyone has their—”

Eugene shakes his head. It’s still completely dark out. Genius. “That’s not, it’s not,” he says. “I just—have a type.” Had a type? As a whole, the dating scene is paused indefinitely.

“Yes,” Jack says, mock-patiently. “You have a type. Karen Gillian. Scully from the X-Files. Paul Bettany, maybe? Robert Redford, except he’s ancient. And probably dead. Well, they’re all probably dead, but—Please don’t say The Little Mermaid, because—”

“Stop.” Eugene is almost smiling despite himself. “No. God. Not a creepy—redhead obsession. People have types. Like, ‘into music, shorter than me’—”

“That’s convenient, since everyone’s shorter than you,” Jack puts in. “Seeing as you’re freakishly tall.”

Eugene’s not that far above the national average. “Sense of humor,” he continues, before they can get on another tangent about what does and doesn’t count as freakish. “Likes beer and wine but isn’t pretentious about it. Appreciates a good bass riff. Properly—uh, properly disdainful of jam bands. Willing to overanalyze pop culture for hours. Good smile. Nice hands.” Too late, he realizes the list is verging on damningly specific. He clamps his mouth shut.

“Oh,” says Jack. He starts to stumble, and Eugene throws his free arm around Jack’s shoulders, steadying. Jack hums what might be a thanks, leans into it just a bit. “So what you’re. You’re telling me that if we’d met before all of this—you’re saying we would’ve shagged?”

Put that way, it sounds so presumptuous. Eugene winces. “I think I would’ve tried,” he says. “Who knows whether—”

“You’re saying we would’ve shagged,” Jack repeats. He doesn’t sound angry. He doesn’t sound offended. He sounds—confused? Confused and loopy. Fair enough; Eugene’s head still feels disconnected from the rest of his body and everything is surreal. They’re discussing this, like it’s any other conversation. “After—all that talk about easy.” There might be a hint of a smile in Jack’s voice. “Woods, you dog.”

“I would’ve—been respectful about it,” he counters. It’s such a ridiculous thing to say to someone who has saved his life more than once that he laughs a little.

Jack laughs too, thank god. “Oh sure. Gentlemen Gene. A gentleman until the clothes come off,” he says. “Bet you would’ve slunk off before sunrise, though. Tragic. I’d never even get the chance to laugh at your weird breakfast rituals—maple syrup, in your beans, like a madman. And then you wouldn’t have called,” he adds, reproachful.

This is almost terrifyingly astute. If the night had gone badly, Eugene would’ve wanted to forget all about it. If it had gone well, he would’ve woken up desperate to get out of there before the inevitable souring. He would’ve had some excuse. He would’ve found one.

It was, he thinks, easier to write people off when there were so many of them.

“Probably not,” he admits, and every muscle across Jack’s back goes tense, all at once.

“Oh,” says Jack again. This time, there’s something off about his voice, although it’s hard to say what. “Oh, um. You weren’t joking.”

‘Oh,’ thinks Eugene. ‘You were.’ Carefully, he removes his arm.

He’s seized by an urge to apologize, but he has the sense that getting it wrong would be worse than keeping quiet, and he can’t begin to guess what he’s supposed to say.

Jack is the first to break the silence, because that’s what Jack does. “Well, lucky we didn’t meet before all this, then,” he says, and it’s lighter now, still not back to normal, but maybe he’s just tired. Or maybe Eugene’s just tired, and hearing tension that isn’t there. “Imagine: the end of civilization, and there I am, stuck wandering the ruins of England for the rest of all time, just me and that douche who never returned my text.”

The frayed lightbulb feeling worsens. He can almost smell the burning filament. “It’s—you know, it’s nothing personal,” says Eugene.

“Yeah.” Jack sighs. “I know.”

When a pair of zombies comes crashing out of the underbrush, directly in their path, it’s almost a relief.

“That was close,” says Jack, after.

It was close. Closer than it should’ve been, really. Their reflexes are beyond shot. Jack had flat-out missed with the bat a couple of times, which never happens.

“Yeah,” says Eugene. He clenches his fists, trying to keep them steady.

“Are we walking uphill?” Jack sounds vaguely surprised.

“We have been, for about an hour.”

“Don’t you think we’ve shaken the crawlers by now?”

There’s an edge of pink to the bottom of the sky but sunrise is a long way away. “I’d just—feel a lot better if we could get someplace with a decent sightline,” Eugene says.

Jack doesn’t agree or disagree. He yawns.

“Come on,” Eugene says when Jack’s steps have slowed to a shuffle. “Come on.” With his free hand, he gives Jack a little push forward.

“Sorry,” Jack mumbles. “I shouldn’t—you’re tired, too.”

“Not as tired as you,” says Eugene.

“What?”

He hadn’t actually meant to say that, either. It’s been a banner night for inadvertently blurting things out.

“You haven’t been sleeping,” Eugene starts, but Jack cuts him off.

“Yeah, yeah. I get it. ‘Oh, stupid Jack, can’t even sleep right’—”

“No,” Eugene says, and then, nonsensically, “I didn’t.” He shakes his head, trying for something like clarity. “If we took longer shifts at night, we could each maybe get another hour.”

“Another hour,” echoes Jack. “Another—do you really think that’s the problem? Do you really think that’s what’s lying at the root of my—sleep issue?” It’s the most alert he’s sounded for some time. “Do you really think it’s not, oh you know, the fact that we are surrounded by fucking monsters, every second of our lives?”

There’s really nothing to say to that. “Still.” Eugene rubs at his eyes. “If an hour would help. We’re not making great time, but—”

“Oh, what is the bloody point,” says Jack suddenly. “Where are we going, Eugene? You said, ‘Let’s get away from London’ and I thought, ‘Makes sense, London’s a big streak of smoke in the sky.’ But what now? We’re just—walking. When was the last time we saw another living person? What are we doing, do we keep walking until we reach the ocean and then turn around, walk the other way? How is this worth it?” His voice cracks. Eugene is glad that the light is still too poor to see his face.

“We’re alive,” says Eugene.

“That’s not what I asked.”

Eugene breathes in and out through his nose. Calm. Be calm. “Something comes after this,” he says. “Remember when we had a working radio? We know there are other survivors. And even if those particular people aren’t—we’ve made it this far, right? So there must be others. England’s not that big. We’ll find them. They’ll cluster, it’s human nature. Three weeks is not that long in the scheme of things. We will find something.”

“Sorry,” says Jack, a little choked. “Sorry. That wasn’t—I’m just so tired.”

“We’ll find something,” Eugene tells him. “And by that time, I’ll have some hilarious jokes about your mystery-telling skills. And you’re the only person with the context to understand them, so.”

“You’re saying I need to make it so you have someone to laugh at your stupid punchlines?”

“Yes,” says Eugene. “Yes, that is literally what I’m saying.”

Jack’s laugh is quiet and shaky but it’s not a noise of pure despair, and so Eugene is counting it as a win. He thinks, that will keep us going for another few hundred steps.

“Jack?”

“Mm, what?”

“Jack, you’ve gotta keep walking.”

“I am walking.”

“No you’re not, you’re standing pretty still.”

“‘M trying.”

“Jack?”

“What?”

“Would it help if you leaned on me?”

“What? Uh, maybe?”

“Here.”

Eugene is vaguely aware that they must look idiotic right now, two grown men struggling to climb a hill, tipped towards each other like some sort of drunken three-legged race. Above them, the sky is fading into a full pink, lighting up the peak of the hill. The grass is wet and green. There’s a tree at the top. Walk to the tree, he thinks. Walk to the tree.

He has to keep telling his feet to make each step. Every one is a test of his willpower. The grass squeaks beneath them. It actually looks too green, too sharply delineated from the sky, from their muddy feet.

“Almost there,” he says.

“Whuh?” says Jack, who really is more or less asleep against his shoulder this time.

The last few meters to the tree are a blur in Eugene’s mind, but then there they are at the trunk, and then they are settling onto the ground, no longer on their feet. Eugene sits up, bracing his back against the bark.

“Give me your pack and I’ll unroll the sleeping bag,” he says, as Jack flops onto the ground.

“‘M fine,” Jack says. He lays his head on Eugene’s thigh, asleep almost before his eyes close. Eugene watches him snore and realizes then that one of them will need to keep a lookout. Which one of them will it be? A mystery all too easy to solve.

“Okay,” Eugene says, to nobody in particular. “Okay, great.”

They’re still resting at the base of the tree, Jack pillowed against Eugene’s leg, Eugene slapping himself in the face at odd intervals to stay awake, when he hears a woman’s voice from behind him, tentative.

“Is, um, everything okay?” she asks.

And that’s how they meet their first fellow survivors.

It turns out that the most embarrassing thing about meeting another person after days and days of living as a scavenger on the road is not realizing that she’d definitely caught him smacking his own face in a futile effort to stay alert, or that Jack is still snoring and lightly sleep-drooling against his thigh, or even that maybe just before she’d showed up, Eugene had been using his free hand to carefully brush the hair off Jack’s forehead, you know, so it wouldn’t be in his eyes. As he slept.

No, the single most humiliating aspect of the whole affair is that Eugene’s response to her wide-eyed, earnest question, a question which carries with it obvious undertones of “Are you dying?” or “Have the pressures of this new world chipped away enough of your sanity that I should be worried for my life?”—

Eugene’s response is to blurt out “Fine, thanks, how ‘bout you?” in one breath, a little too loud, in something close to the bland, polite tone he used to use on cashiers or waiters or co-workers he didn’t know especially well.

‘Jack must never find out about this,’ he thinks, halfway hysterical.

The woman blinks at him. She’s got dark brown skin, a thick-bordering-on-unintelligible accent that might be Welsh, an axe in one hand.

“Kelly!” she calls out in a low voice. “Kelly, I found some people.”

“Y’mean bodies,” says—Kelly, apparently, striding up behind her. “Really, dear, healthier in the long run if you can stop seeing them as—” She catches sight of Eugene. “Oh.” Her eyes narrow. She’s considerably smaller than her friend but older, and something in the set of her jaw suggests that she’s the one to watch out for. “Who’re you, what’re you doing here?”

“I, uh. I’m Eugene and this is Jack,” says Eugene. “Sorry if we’re—trespassing, or. We didn’t know that you—we were just passing through. Uh. You know how it is.” He gives an awkward laugh.

Kelly and not-Kelly exchange a look. Kelly jerks her chin down at Jack. “Is he bit?”

“No,” says Eugene.

“Are you bit?”

Annoyance flashes through whatever numbing survival instinct has kept him halfway calm. “If I’d been bitten, do you really think he’d be sleeping right here?”

“Could’ve lied,” Kelly tells him. “People lie, you know.”

Eugene can’t repress his shudder. He doesn’t have the energy for it. “Well, I wouldn’t do that to him,” he says.

“That’s very sweet,” says Kelly. “You gonna be offended if me and my friend Eira check you anyway?”

They’re armed, and at any rate, they have no real reason to trust him. “Go ahead.”

Kelly doesn’t try to touch either of them, which he appreciates. When she needs to, she asks Eugene to move, to lift up his shirt, to turn Jack’s arms over. It’s dispassionate, almost professional. It feels weirdly like a check-up at the doctor’s.

Eira hangs to the side with her arms crossed, looking bored. “Thanks,” she says at one point, ��Being a real sport about this, Jack.”

Eugene frowns. “No, I’m Eugene, he’s—”

“Right,” says Eira. She glances down at Jack, still asleep with his face scrunched up against the rising sun. “He’s cute.”

Eugene’s no less exhausted than he was before. His thoughts feel like they’re covered in a murky film. So he can’t be sure what possesses him to snap, “He’s gay.”

Unfortunately, he might be able to guess.

“Okay,” she says, laughing a little. She raises her hands in the air as if to telegraph I’m harmless, but she doesn’t put down the axe first so the effect is—mixed.

“You’re both clear,” Kelly declares at last. She crouches down to bring her face level with Eugene’s and holds out a slightly grimy water bottle. “Want some?”

“What?” says Eugene.

“Water,” says Kelly. “Since now we know you won’t repay the favor by going grey and eating our brains.”

He takes the bottle and sips cautiously. It’s warm but cleaner-tasting than anything he’s drank in—maybe weeks. He takes another sip and glances down at Jack, trying to figure out if it’s worth waking him up for a few mouthfuls of water, if the dehydration outweighs the sleep deprivation or the other way around.

When he looks up, the simple motion of his eyes makes him dizzy. It takes a few sluggish seconds to work out that the reason he can’t eavesdrop on Kelly and Eira’s conversation is that they’re not speaking any language he knows. He hunts for clues in their faces and gestures, but all he gets is that they seem basically in agreement about something. Hard to tell if that’s reassuring or not. They could be saying, ‘Yes, great, let’s bash their heads in and take all their possessions.’ Unlikely, he tries to convince himself. If they’re not wasting water on future zombies, they’re not wasting it on future murder victims either.

Kelly turns, catches him watching. “Gonna go check in with the others,” she tells him over her shoulder. She gives him something like a smirk. “You boys stay put.”

Eira lingers behind. Eugene can’t tell if she’s meant to keep him and Jack from leaving, or to keep them from getting eaten. He sags back against the tree.

“Is Eu—is Jack really gonna sleep through all this?” says Eira.

Eugene rubs at his forehead, which might as well weigh fifty pounds. Everything is getting a little dreamlike, but this is a question he knows the answer to.

“He slept through the first thirteen hours of the end of the world,” he tells her.

“Whoa,” she says, eyes wide. “That’s a bad wake-up.”

The first day or two, Jack was quiet, distant, agreeable verging on pliant in a way that, in retrospect, gets more upsetting the longer Eugene thinks about it. “Are you guys military?” he says instead, remembering Kelly’s cool detachment, how prepared they seem.

Eira’s response is a long, snorting laugh. “No,” she says. “No.” She sucks in a breath. “We were on vacation. Off-road mountain biking and camping. A kind of a—wilderness adventure thing.”

“Well,” he says, light, “guess you got at least fifty percent more adventure than you bargained for.”

Any trace of a smile drops off Eira’s face. “That’s—in very poor taste,” she says quietly.

“Yeah.” Eugene scrubs a hand over his eyes, yawns. “Sorry. Uh, so have you been in the area long?”

“Yesterday and the night before,” she says. “We’re holed up in an old cottage. Not a bad place. Just stay out of the valley down there.” She gestures back the way that Jack and Eugene came. “Packed with—”

“Crawlers,” says Eugene. “Yeah.”

“You heard?”

“We’ve been,” he says. “All last night.”

“Fuck,” says Eira, half-laughing again. “You two’re stupid.” She sounds almost impressed.

“Yeah,” Eugene says absently. “Maybe.” He yawns again.

“How’d you two meet, anyway?”

Eugene’s brain is starting to lurch in and out of full awareness. He knows that he knows the whole story but in that moment he can’t begin to see his way through all the steps of telling it.

“There was—a rave,” he manages. “Kind of.”

He wonders why he didn’t notice earlier how comfortable it is to sit like this, propped up with tree bark digging into his spine through his shirt, Jack’s head heavy on his thigh. He tips his own head back against the tree. Amazingly, the trunk bears its weight. “Do you mind if I’m falling asleep now,” he says. Thinks he says. Might say. At any rate, he’s not awake to hear the answer.

“—wake them up, d’you think? Doubt we can carry them,” someone says. Eugene blinks. When he opens his eyes again, the sky is brighter than he remembers, and Kelly has returned.

“How long was I out,” says Eugene, squinting.

“Under an hour,” says Kelly. She crosses her arms and gives a slight, ironic smile. “Long enough for a lively debate back at the house about whether to trust you two.”

The inside of Eugene’s mouth is dry and sticky. He finds the water bottle where he left it at the base of the tree. He takes a sip.

“What’s the verdict,” he croaks.

“If you’re raiders or bandits, you’re very bad at it,” Kelly tells him. She clears her throat. “So here’s the situation. We’ve got some errands that need doing. Nothing too dangerous, but we could use the help. If you two lend a hand, we can guarantee a safe place to stay for a day or two. You want to talk it over with y—with Jack, fine by us.”

He can’t imagine Jack turning down a chance to help some friendly survivors, any more than he can imagine Jack passing up the opportunity to eat something other than Spam. Still, it seems shitty to make the decision unilaterally. Come to think of it, the discovery of other living humans might’ve merited waking him up in the first place.

“Jack,” says Eugene loudly. Jack makes a vague, sleepy noise and rolls over without opening his eyes. “Jack.” Eugene pokes him in the back of the neck. “Hey. Jack.”

“N’ready yet,” Jack mumbles, blindly grabbing a fistful of Eugene’s shirt as if trying to burrow away into his stomach. The tip of his nose is cold, almost ticklish, which may be why Eugene is laughing as he says,

“Now, Jack, that’s no way to behave in front of company.”

“Mmh?” says Jack.

“Um, hello,” says Eira.

At the sound of an unfamiliar voice, Jack startles badly, limbs flopping in all directions as he flails around to face her. Eugene dodges a knee and then and elbow and thinks, ‘This is a man who regularly kills monsters.’

“—the hell,” breathes Jack, staring up at the strangers.

“And you must be Jack,” says Kelly. “Nice to meet you, kid. Shall we get a move on?”

Kelly quickly briefs Jack on the way back to the house. Some amount of spring has returned to Jack’s step. Either half a REM cycle did him good or he’s that excited to talk to new people.

“So,” he says, “mountain biking adventure-campers, huh?” From the sound of his voice, he’s smiling. “Wow, at least you got your money’s worth on the adventure front.”

The joke goes no better the second time. If anything, the silence feels more pointed. “Uh, tough room,” Jack mumbles.

“Jack,” says Eugene in a low voice, trying to shoot him a look that’s equal parts commiseration and ‘maybe we can try to remind each other that not everyone deals with intensive trauma by cracking jokes about the trauma.’ Jack just rubs his eyes and frowns, confused. ‘Later,’ Eugene mouths. “Kelly, you said you needed help with some chores?”

“Yeah.” She glances back over her shoulder at them. “Uh, what are the odds you lot know anything about bike repair?”

“Not unless your bicycle’s attached to an amp and a wah wah pedal,” says Jack.

“A what pedal?” Eira chips in from the back.

“It makes guitar effects,” Eugene tells her.

“Did some work as a sound technician,” Jack says. “Back, uh. Before.” Regret flickers across his face as soon as he’s said it. Funny how simple words used to be so harmless.

“Still not sure it counts as a job if the band only pays you in beer,” Eugene says, and if his voice comes out a bit brittle, it’s hopefully a bridge to something that could pass at a distance for ordinary conversation.

“Hey!” The impact of Jack’s mock-outrage is blunted by the way the back of his hair is sticking almost straight up. “I’ll have you know, the barter system is an ancient and noble tradition—”

Eira has been glancing back and forth between them for a long moment. “Do you—is that a streak of glitter behind your right ear?” she asks Jack at last.

It is. It’s been there since the day they met.

Still walking, Jack reaches up, rubs behind his right ear, and scrutinizes his hand. “Oh my god,” he says, rounding on Eugene, “have I had glitter on the back of my head since Hampshire?”

Regardless of the circumstances, Eugene has to bite the inside of his cheek before he can manage to say, calm, level, “Why, Jack? How would you have gotten glitter on you since then?”

“That was three weeks ago!” Jack hisses.

“It’s almost like you should wash your face more carefully, or—”

“This is not my face!” Jack says, gesturing at the back of his head. “No amount of face-washing was going to reach the behind-the-face area! You areshole, you knew this whole time, and you said nothing?”

“I thought it was maybe just your natural sparkle,” Eugene manages, and then he loses it.

#radio boyfriends #zombies run fanfic

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