#but as stated before that i’ve had no time to play recently that won’t be any time soon

[teamhawkeye]

Making lists to stay sane

[live-laugh-lenney]

need some angst so bad — maybe where reader lives with george, arthurtv, chris — arthur major fancies her, but has noticed chris or george has been taking a liking to her, flirting, etc. maybe him getting jealous and confessing his love??? and if you wanted to spice it up a little, throw some angry sex in there

a new arthurtv fic that is yours to devour! there is lots going on in my current drafts and over on my google docs and a lot going of 'work in progress's that has been started - including 'locked in' which i know a lot of you have been asking about - and i'm hoping most of it will be with you guys soon! thank you for being so patient with me - life has thrown a few curve balls at me and i haven't been online as much as i hoped to be recently so it means a lot that you guys are sending in stuff to keep this stuff going, ha. <33 word count; 6.8k ** TRIGGER WARNINGS; SMUT, FOUL LANGUAGE, ANGST **

"He's been such a grump tonight."

YN looked over her shoulder and in the direction of where Arthur was sat sporting an unhappy look on his face; his lips pouted and in a sunken manner that she hadn’t seen a smile on all day, slouched down on the sofa and barely interested in the party happening around him nor the music that was clinging to the atmosphere of the room, with his eyes glued to his phone screen and his thumb tapping away as he scrolled his socials to distract and distance himself from the rest of the room. Keeping away from the chaos of the house party, where the majority of their friends had gathered to celebrate YN’s decision in moving in, was going on.

"He’s been weird with me all day," YN admitted and Chris couldn’t help but give her a strange look, eyebrows furrowed on his forehead, "I don't know what I’ve done wrong, or whether I’ve said anything to upset him, but he's barely spoken a word to me all night. I could have sworn he was so excited for this to happen."

"That is weird."

"I honestly don't know what I’ve done so I don’t know how to make it up to him or how to apologise to get him to come over and enjoy himself," YN frowned, turning in her chair and tearing her attention away from Arthur and looking back to Chris, clasping tighter to the red solo cup that held her drink in her hand, taking a sip from the straw that was peeking over the rim, the top completely sodden and chewed upon yet she couldn't be bothered to get up and grab a brand new one from the cupboard, "we're all having fun over here. Playing games, having a good time, singing and dancing, drinking all the booze. And there he is, grumpy and antisocial, sitting by himself and barely involving himself with anyone."

Chris leaned over the small gap between their stools and squeezed YN’s knee reassuringly, acting as a silent 'don't worry about it for now’, before retracting his hand after a brief moment so he could finish off the dribble of his vodka and soda left behind in his cup. Standing to his feet, he held his hand out and pulled YN from the stool she was sitting upon, with his intentions being to get her another drink because it seemed like she needed it. He could read Arthur like a book, having known him since they were school kids, and he didn’t want YN to get upset over the man having a moment of uncertainty in his own mind… a moment where Chris could tell Arthur was suffocating in a room full of those he was closest to.

"Let’s get a refill and join in with George’s game of 'ring of fire'. Take your mind off of him being grumpy. Everyone else is here for you tonight, yeah? Let’s enjoy that."

"I’m not sure I want to. Look at the state of that pint glass," YN frowned and looked at the glass in the middle of the dining table, filled with a concoction of god-knows-what. No doubt a mix of lagers and ciders as well as the spirits that everyone seemed to be on, "if I drink whatever they’ve mixed there, then I will definitely spew everywhere and christen the toilet in a way that won’t be pretty."

Chris couldn’t help but roll his eyes - there was no way she would turn down a drinking game and it made him feel internally frustrated knowing she was doubting her enjoyment because of Arthur feeling sorry for himself. It wasn’t like her to not get involved, to turn down an offer of shots, to stay away from the excitement of the party happening around her. He stood beside her at the kitchen counter, where there were bottles of half-filled Smirnoff and Gordons as well as Southern Comfort and Sourz littered around, and he topped up his drink with a lot more than a double vodka, simply eyeballing the amount of alcohol he wanted in his drink and YN couldn’t help but laugh at how his glass was practically more than half mixer and half booze. Following suit, without a care in the world on how much Southern Comfort she tipped into her used cup because she felt she’d gotten to that point of the night where the taste of alcohol had disappeared, pouring lemonade on top and watching as the bubbles almost fountained down the side.

And yet she couldn’t help herself, once she grasped her drink in her hand, from looking over her shoulder to see if Arthur wanted another beer opened. A peace offering, if you will, to clear the air between them and start fresh. She hadn’t seen him get up all night, nursing the same bottle of Peroni for over an hour and a half, and she was certain it was probably warm and very flat and not so pleasant to enjoy. Except her eyes landed on an empty sofa cushion, where he once sat, with his unfinished Peroni bottle forgotten about on the coffee table.

"Where did he go?"

Chris shrugged, "forget about him for the moment. Can we, at least, go and have a dance or something then? if you won't play a drinking game, at least have a boogie? This is so unlike you, YN. You’re usually the life of the party."

"I might go and see if I can find Arthur first," she stated and she turned back to look at him, a pang of guilt bouncing around in her chest when she saw Chris’ face drop with sadness, "I’m only going to see what's wrong with him. Maybe I can coax a smile off of him, get him to come out and have some fun. It doesn’t feel the same without him here. He needs to be here."

She turned away from the counter and stepped in the direction of the fridge, which was once filled with beer and chilled ciders as opposed to its usual job of chilling their day-to-day food, and pulled out a fresh, cold bottle of beer in her free hand, uncapping it with a bottle opener before worming her way through her friends, insisting she'd be back in a moment when they asked her to join in with them. With Sabina trying her hardest to pull her in the direction of the excitement, and George looking at her with a pleading look because he needed help in the game he suggested they play, and she could feel Chris following her until he took the empty seat beside Arthur Hill and tried his best to fit in to the game that must have been near completion. 

Her feet took her towards the small hallway that led to the bedrooms of the flat, stepping foot in front of the door that was opposite to hers and tapping her knuckle against the wood softly, tentatively calling out his name at a volume he should have been able to hear her.

"Arthur?"

She used her elbow to push on the handle so the door would open and, to no surprise, she found him sitting on the edge of his bed. His phone had been chucked in a frustrated throw, by the looks of how and where it had landed on the mattress beside him, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands with his fingers digging deep into his eyes as the silence of his room was broken by her voice. 

"Arthur, are you okay? You’ve been-"

"I’m fine."

It wasn't said maliciously but it had been said with a tone that felt harsh, snapping at her suddenly and it took her aback, the look on his face stern and unhappy and it dawned on her that she must have done something to upset him for him to speak in such a way. And she wanted to find out what so she could live with him (as well as George, Chris and Arthur Hill) with no animosity in the air to bring the mood down.

She stepped further inside his bedroom with a plan on breaking the barrier he had built to keep her away because she wanted to work things out, right then and there, kicking the door shut with her heel and hearing it click closed at the door frame.

"Something is wrong with you, Arthur. You’re bringing the enjoyment of the night down."

"Then go back out there and leave me alone. I didn’t ask for you to come and find me, YN."

His words hung heavy in the air and YN took a deep inhale of breath, trying not to let his mood and his words derail her on her plan to get him to come out and enjoy the celebrations happening on the other side of his bedroom door. Because she wanted him to come back out to enjoy everything with everyone, she wanted him to partake in celebrating this new venture for her and for the friends she was moving in with, she wanted Arthur back to his usual self. The anger in his words, the tone that wasn’t his usual tone, struck her inside and she could feel her heart beating heavy and fast behind her ribs, yet she held her ground.

"I don't want to go back out there whilst you’re so upset," she insisted, holding out the beer for him to take, "I brought you a Peroni in, a fresh one, because George is necking them like there's no tomorrow and they’ll-"

"I don't want it."

"At least-"

"YN, I said no," he grumbled lowly and looked at her properly, brown eyes dark and his jaw was tense, her eyes widening ever so slightly at his attitude, "go back out there with Chris. I’m sure he's wondering where you are."

YN scoffed heavily and shook her head in disbelief, setting the opened beer bottle down on the desk before placing her own cup next to it, stepping towards him and he stood up from the bed to move away from her. Shaking her head at how his assumptions - his silly and stupid guesses - had brought out a side that no one had ever seen come from Arthur.

"Is that why you're angry with me?"

"What?"

"You’re angry with me because I’ve spent more time with Chris tonight than you? Because I'm having a good time with him at my own moving-in party?" She questioned him and his eyes sporadically darted around his bedroom so he didn't have to look in her direction, chewing on the inside of his cheek because she could see right through him and he didn’t want her to know that… because, of course, she was right. "I’m right, aren't I? You’re jealous?"

"I’m not," he hissed, "I just don't feel like I’m in the partying mood."

"Rubbish, Arthur. That is total bollocks," YN cried out, "you were raving on and on and on about this party the other day. You went out and brought all the booze for us. The food. You were the most excited out of all of us to welcome me into this flat."

"Yeah, well… I guess things change, YN."

"Not as drastically as you’ve just changed over your stupid assumptions," she fired back at him in a tone that almost matched his, yet she couldn’t bring herself to speak to him so harshly, placing her hands on her hips and popping a hip, "Arthur, come on. what's the matter?"

The silence of the bedroom was thick with tension. Suffocating. Thick enough to be cut with a butcher's knife. And she could feel it as she stood and waited for an answer to roll off of his tongue. An answer that would come out sounding like an excuse as to why he wanted to hide away from everyone, with a frown pinching the features together on his face to accompany how he felt, instead of enjoying the party with all his friends as they celebrated this new venture they were about to embark on.

His heart was pumping behind his ribs, his hands turning into fists on either side of his body, and it took everything within him not to grab her face and project his feelings through the form of physicality rather than verbally, a desire to cover ravenous kisses along the expanse of her neck, showing her just what the problem was.

Because she was the problem.

He hated the way she had taken Chris up on his offer on going out for dinner before they joined in with the party later on that evening and he hated the way she was so excited to go out with him and how it was all she went on about for most of that day. He hated the way he had to help her choose an outfit to wear because she couldn't decide what looked better on her and he hated how she'd been around his friend all evening as opposed to hanging around with him. He hated how she made no effort to keep him included, how he wasn’t a priority during the night, how she seemed to be much happier talking to Chris than she had ever been with him. 

Which, if you asked YN, she would retort because of how ridiculous he sounded.

She didn’t think of it as a date and Chris had made it clear that it was just “lunch with a friend” to welcome her into the flat and explain how it was going to be the craziest path she’d gone down, and nothing but that. 

"Fine, you want to know?"

She nodded with no hesitation.

"You."

"Me?"

She pressed a hand to her chest and he could see the hurt in her eyes as she looked at him, her lips parted and her cheeks bright pink once she managed to look at him, her eyes beginning to water at each of the corners yet she refused to let any of her tears fall down her cheeks because he didn’t deserve them. In that moment, he was acting like an ass and she hated the man that was standing before her, glum and in a mood that had ruined what had been a good day. 

He didn’t deserve the attention was giving him… yet she couldn’t bring herself to turn on her heels and walk out the door.

"Yes," he said, "you. You've been the problem the whole night. In fact, all day. You've been a problem all day."

"What did I do?"

Her voice was shaky and she didn’t think she could trust herself to say anything in fear she let her true feelings come clear for him. Keeping her words short, to the point and brief, because she could feel the lump in her throat beginning to burn, making it hard to swallow and making her head ache. The tears built up more and more as it became tougher to hold them back and he could see them glistening underneath the bedroom lighting. He could see the upset he was causing yet he couldn’t stop himself from carrying on.

"Is Chris the reason you moved in with us? Because you just want to be near him all the time? You crave the male attention so much that you took us up on our offer so you could be closer to him?" Arthur questioned her intensely and she gasps, breath catching in her throat and she gulps back what she wanted to say, "I get the feeling, after today, that you love the attention he's given you."

"Arthur-"

"No, it’s my turn to speak since you wanted to know what the problem was," he held up his arm and lifted his finger to his lips for her to keep quiet, "all night, you've been hanging off of him. Standing with him, barely leaving his side, letting him get you drinks. You have other guests here and you choose to stand with him all night."

"He's my friend-"

"That’s total bollocks," he mocked her and she frowned heavily at him, "friends don't go out for romantic dinners. Friends don't touch each other's knees. Friends don't go to a party and pretend to be the only ones in the room."

"I-"

"You’re oblivious to everything, YN.”

He paused, and he really wanted to stop himself from talking because he couldn’t bear to look in her teary eyes for any longer and shout at her as he tried to navigate through his thoughts and his feelings and the emotions that came with it. And it dawned on him, in that moment, that he’d definitely taken it too far… 

“YN, you’re oblivious to me."

He swallowed thickly and, in that moment, he took in the look on her face that he really wished he hadn't seen. The way her eyes glistened under the gentle light of his room, the way she picked at her fingers as she tried to busy her mind, the way she stared at the ground once she saw him looking at her and not in the direction of his face.

"YN-"

"No, Arthur, please carry on," she whispered, "tell me how much of a slag I am for the male attention. Specifically from a man I have no interest in."

"I never called you a slag, for god sake," he said, rolling his head back and digging the heels of his hands into his eyes, groaning heavily in annoyance, "YN-"

"I wasn't trying to be a problem for you, Arthur. I didn’t think anything of it. Me and Chris, it was nothing. We never went on a date and nothing happened tonight. Whatever you think happened, it didn’t," she looked up from the carpet and took a look at his features, his eyes softer than they were before and he looked almost apologetic, "I don't like him like that."

"You really could have fooled me," Arthur grumbled and she rolled her eyes at him, "seriously."

"He’s fresh out of a relationship, Arthur. I don't think he's looking for anything," YN said, "I wouldn't do that to Shannon anyway. It’s girl-code not to go for a friend's ex-boyfriend. It’s not right and I’m not going to ruin a friendship for a man who has been my friend for years."

He perched himself back down on the edge of the bed, just inches from where he had sat before, and let his back fall against the mattress with a heavy groan releasing from deep within his gut. Almost sounding embarrassed for jumping the gun, for assuming, for not being a grown man and, instead, acting like a schoolboy who had just had his heart broken by his first crush. And as much as she wanted to sit beside him, to calm the atmosphere down and to give him an understanding explanation that was a lot more chilled out now they’d taken a moment to breathe, YN couldn't help but stand and watch him as he covered his face with his hands. She felt nervous just standing in the middle of his bedroom, unsure of whether she should leave him to wallow in self-pity or stay and work things through with him, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

"If you weren't so anti-social tonight and kept yourself away from the party, you would have realised that me and Chris were talking about you," YN broke the silence, taking slow steps towards to where he was sprawled out on his bed and sitting herself down beside him, her thigh connecting with his, "I was talking about you, Arthur. Because I care about you, you’re probably my best friend out of the four of you living here, and me and you… we were so excited to finally be living under the same roof. I wanted you out there, I wanted you next to me and in the conversation so I could talk to you."

He refused to look at her, burying his head further into the palms of his hands because the more she spoke, the worse he felt. She wrapped both her hands around his wrists to pry them both from his face, revealing the guilty look that pinched his features together once he’d realised he’d overreacted over something that he’d created in his mind. His eyes stayed trained upon his ceiling, as much as he wanted to look at her and take in her appearance, because he knew he’d cave once he made eye contact with her. She let go of his wrists and he clasped his hands together and rested them on his chest.

"Why?"

"Because it felt weird that you weren't involving yourself like you normally do. I wanted you to come and enjoy the party with us," YN admitted, "with me."

"You could have invited me over," he grumbled and, eventually, he shifted his vision and looked at her, his eyes no longer looking dark and were filled with a little more emotion, soft and sweet and like his usual self, "I’m sorry. I guess I got a little jealous."

"A little?"

"Okay," he puffed out a breath and laughed softly and she smiled, watching as he sat himself up and twisted his body around so he could look at her face-on rather than with a craned neck to the side, "a lot. I got jealous and let it come between us."

"I don't like Chris like that. He's my friend. Now my roommate. I don’t want him. But, you," she took both of his hands in her own and squeezed them tightly with her fingers, letting her thumb brush over the skin just below his knuckles, "you're just something special, Arthur Frederick. You have me intrigued."

The way his full name rolled off of her tongue erupted something inside of him that felt volcanic hot and he longed to hear it again.

"How so?"

"I want to explore you," she brought her bottom lip between her teeth and she chewed on the soft and pink flesh and he could have sworn his cock twitched in his trousers at the momentary look she gave him as she gave her lip a nibble, "all of you, Arthur. I want you. I don't want anyone out there. I don’t want Chris. I want you. I’ve always wanted you."

"Then have me," he whispered, low and raspy and the way his breath fanned across her face made her feel weak at the knees and she knew she would have fallen to the floor if she was standing so she was thankful for the soft material beneath her that kept her a little more stable in the situation, "I'm all yours, YN."

And that’s all it took.

The party outside the door faded away and the space between them became minimal and, as their breaths mixed together, he brought his hands up to cup her cheeks perfectly in his palms, bringing her closer in hopes to close off the gap between their bodies and not just their lips, hastily and quickly in a kiss that the two of them had longed to endure for a while. His lips tasted like beer whilst hers tasted like lemonade and a hint of whiskey from the Southern Comfort liquor she’d been sipping on all night, his favourite taste on someone who’d become his favourite person, and it only enticed him to deepen their kiss. Her arms hung around his neck, fingers clasping around the hairs at the nape of his neck, to encourage the encounter happening between them to become more lust-filled, more deeper.

“Are you sure about this?”

She felt her back hit the mattress as they shuffled into a more comfortable position on the bed, her head sinking into the pillow that cradled from her neck and up, and it wasn’t long before the view of the ceiling was intercepted by his face and her breath hitched in her throat. His hair fell over his forehead, eyes drunk on the sight of the girl he’d been longing for beneath him, forearms placed either side of her head and he used his upper body strength to prop himself up above her. 

“I’m sure,” she whispered, her resolve staying calm and steady and unwavering as the moment presented itself perfectly, “so sure.”

She brought his head down to her level using the grip she had clasped into his hair and their lips joined together in yet another devouring kiss, his tongue on a mission for entry into her mouth, which made her stomach tingle and her fingers tighten around his hair. His tongue collided with hers, muscle fighting muscle, and she could see why he was so proud in telling the world that it was his strong muscle in his body. The atmosphere had changed from a suffocating and tense feeling where neither of them could bear to look at the other to a slightly more unbearable and suffocating sexual tension that felt like a scratch both of them needed to itch. His lips worked their way down her jawline, peppering wet and open-mouthed kisses across her skin, before his face disappeared into the crook of her neck. Slowly lowering his body upon hers, one knee keeping her legs from closing fully and one keeping him stable and holding some of his weight so he wasn’t squashing her. Nibbling at her flesh, sucking and leaving marks behind that he wanted everyone to see once they walked out of his bedroom, and deep down, he wanted Chris to see. In hopes that he’d get the hint that she was his and no one else’s. That she wanted him and had eyes for no one else. That their date, that she said wasn’t a date but was definitely a date in Chris’ eyes, meant nothing but lunch with a friend. That he was one of the reasons why she was now living across the hallway and not across the city.

The feeling of his stubble scratching at the skin of her neck brought goosebumps up on the surface of her arms, the way his weight situated upon her and the way his hands roamed her body sent a shiver down her spine, and the way she felt his breath fan across the skin of her exposed collarbone made her sink deeper into the mattress beneath her. Certain that she had melted into a puddle, much like a snowman melting on a warm winter’s afternoon. The noise of the party just outside his bedroom door went completely forgotten about. The muffled bass of the music pounding the walls, yet neither of them cared for the people out in the living room because they were too sucked in with being with each other.

It wasn’t long before she found her fingers undoing the buttons of his shirt, shoving the material off of his shoulders to reveal the sleeper build he kept from the internet, his body sitting up for a moment so he could shrug it off and throw it aimlessly in the room, going completely forgotten about for the moment, and landing in a place in his room that he didn’t really obsess over because he was desperate to get back to the taste of her. His hands repaying the favour as he slid his hands underneath the hem of her t-shirt and he used his wrists to slide it over her head, revealing the plump swells of her breasts decorated with a lavender laced bra that cupped them perfectly. 

“I’d like to think you wore this for me.”

“How do you know I didn’t?” She whispered in response, unknowing of the ache in his belly that had started to form, “how do you know I didn’t anticipate this?”

She felt exposed as she lay beneath him, her chest on full show, as he looked like a hungry schoolboy drinking in her appearance in a fantasy he dreamt about too frequently. The only piece of clothing still attached to her body being the ripped jeans that gave less to the imagination; hanging loose around her hips with a slight rip at one knee and a gaping hole on her opposite thigh that ran down to her other knee. 

“You drive me crazy,” he admitted, leaning back as his fingers worked on undoing the button of his trousers and it enticed her to do the same, toying with the button of her jeans so she could give him the opportunity to pull them free from her legs, “I’d have made a move sooner if I wasn’t so stupid in my feelings.”

“You weren’t stupid, you idiot,” she rolled her eyes at his dramatics and watched as he pushed away from her body and back onto his knees, awkwardly shuffling out of his trousers and kicking them off the edge of the bed, letting them fall in a heap at his bedside and revealing the hardening bulge that stretched his boxers to accommodate his throbbing and pulsing cock. She felt herself tingle between her legs at just how he was feeling in the moment and she was glad he was eager for this to happen as much as she was, “we don’t need to dwell on that now, right? Don’t ruin the moment, Arthur. Not now.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he murmured, digging his fingers into the waistband of her jeans and giving them a tug to reveal the matching, lavender-laced pair of knickers that matched her bra, “christ.”

“Come on, silly boy, what are you waiting for?” 

She lifted her legs and watched as he pulled the denim from over her ankles, tossing them behind his head and she watched as the material nearly wiped his desk clean, knocking over his pen pot that spilled over his desktop. Something he could worry about once the morning came along. He didn’t seem to care, though, as he pressed his face into the flesh of her stomach and let his mouth drag across her skin. Skin that was so soft and so smooth against his stubble-dusted cheeks and, with a deep inhale, she smelt like the coconut shower gel that lingered in the steam of the bathroom after she was finished with her shower. Her fingers combed his hair as his curled into the elastic of her knickers, pulling them free from his skin having left tiny indentations upon her hips, as she couldn’t have anticipated the moment more.

“Fuck the foreplay, Arthur.”

“But-”

“I need you.”

It came out as a beg and she didn’t care how pathetic or needy she sounded to him. She was desperate to feel him slide between her dampened walls, that were calling out for him, screaming to feel satisfied by his touch. As much as she wanted to be devoured by his mouth, she just needed to feel something better. Arthur's eyes darkened with desire at her words and he paused for just a moment, searching her face to make sure she was certain. And, when she gave him an eager nod of encouragement and gave him the answer he was hoping for, he wasted no more time.

“Another time then,” he grumbled with a rasp in his throat, “trust me, I’ll have you on my tongue next time.”

That made her feel giddy.

Next time.

Oh, there was definitely going to be a next time.

There was no way she wanted this to be a one time, drunken night spent with him after a silly argument where they had finally confessed a tiny inkling of their feelings towards each other. She was obsessed with his touch, his stare, the way he focused his attention on her in a room and she was under a spell when he had her right where he wanted her. A spell cast upon her, and only her, when he spoke so eloquently and intriguingly.

The room was spinning and she felt even drunker; maybe the many Southern Comfort’s she’d necked prior to this moment, in the kitchen mixed with dribbles of lemonade, didn’t help but he definitely had a way with words that made her knees- no, her entire body, go weak.

“We’ll have to see how well you do here,” she grinned cheekily and he shook his head in amusement, “don’t make me wait any longer, Arthur. I need you.”

And he obeyed.

She watched him intently as he dug his hand beneath the elastic waistband of his boxers and pulled them down to the tops of his thighs, wrapping his fingers around the girth of his length and giving himself a couple of pumps with his wrist before he situated himself above her. He positioned himself between her legs, his eyes locked on hers as he slowly pushed inside her, wanting to watch every emotion that tore through her body, eliciting a soft gasp from between her lips as she welcomed him into her warmth. The feeling of him stretching her, filling her completely, had her insides burning with ecstasy. He paused for a moment, letting her adjust to his size, waiting for her to give him the go ahead to continue.

"You okay?" he whispered, his face inches from hers, “tell me if it hurts and I’ll stop.”

YN nodded, wrapping her legs around his waist to pull him closer, gulping back the moan that was bubbling to escape, knowing she wouldn’t be able to keep her volume at a level that kept their escapade a secret.

"Perfect," she breathed out slowly, “it feels perfect.”

Arthur started to move, setting a steady rhythm as he rocked his hips against hers, and YN clung to his shoulders tightly. Her nails digging into his skin as pleasure coursed through her body, leaving tiny crescent-shaped indents in his skin, decorating his shoulders with a mark of the satisfaction she was feeling. Their lips meeting, again, in a passionate kiss that muffled their moans as the party continued just outside the door.

"Fuck," Arthur groaned, dropping his forehead to rest against hers as he bottomed out and let the pleasure take over his entirety, "you feel amazing."

YN wrapped her legs around his waist, pulling him even closer as she adjusted to his size. After a moment, she rolled her hips experimentally, urging him to move and he took the hint and began to thrust, starting with slow, deep strokes that had YN arching her back in pleasure.

"More," she panted, digging her nails into his shoulders, "faster, Arthur."

He obliged, picking up the pace and angling his hips to hit that perfect spot inside her with each thrust. The room filled with an array of sounds; the sloppiness of his thrusts as he pleased her with his throbbing length, the heaviness of his breathing that escaped from his parted lips as he gave her exactly what she wanted with an amount of effort that he hoped was enough to show her how much he longed for what was happening, the sultry moans and appraisals that flowed off her tongue each time he managed to press at her internal buttons that had her squirming beneath him and gripping his skin tighter. The pounding of the bass music happening just outside the door getting even more muffled by how they weren’t holding back on keeping non-verbal.

He could feel the knot in his stomach unravelling every time she tightened her walls around him and, in his own clouded mind, he was hoping she was getting as close to a climax as he was. His thumb rubbing circles beneath her clitoral hood and her hands came up to hold either side of his face, keeping his eyes on hers.

“Please,” he whispered softly down to her, “do it with me, yeah?”

She nods in response and gulps back the thick lump in her throat, his thumb working harder on rubbing continuous circles on the small ball of nerves between her folds, her legs quivering around his hips and he could feel the way the hold on his face was loosening around his cheeks. Moan after moan after moan escaping her gaping mouth and her hands come down to cover her eyes, feeling the white hot and piercing knot in her stomach screaming out to loosen up, her toes curling as she allowed herself to lose control and release all the built up tension in her body that came with the pleasure he was applying to tiny bundle of nerves. His orgasm soon followed suit, painting her stomach with his release, his groans becoming slightly more guttural and raspy and she combed her fingers through his hair as he dribbled the last few drops onto her skin.

He fell on the bed beside her, adjusting his boxers so he maintained a slight amount of modesty, gulping back the dryness in his throat that made him crave that Peroni she had entered his bedroom with. Her heavy breathing made her chest rise and fall, his own chest falling rapidly rhythmically, and their elongated heavy exhales were the only thing that kept the room from complete silence - that and the music coming from the speakers in the living room… and oh boy, were they glad of that because it saved an awkward conversation once they left the room to join the rest of their friends.

“What do we do now?”

“I think,” he paused for a moment…

… and YN thought it was to add some effect to the words he wanted to say yet in his own mind, that was still clouded and fuzzy from the post-orgasm feeling, he wasn’t entirely sure what their next move was. He was still trying to find the words to explain how he had longed for the moment where he got to kiss her, how he wanted to hold her, how he had thought about the kind of intimacy they brought to the bedroom.

“I think we get you cleaned up first and then we go from there,” he laughed and she suddenly felt a little dirty. Not that it was a dirty act or anything but it was made more apparent to her that what had happened had actually happened and it wasn’t a dream or a daydream, “yeah?”

She hid her face in the crook of his neck and nodded gently, a slight wash of embarrassment wavering over her as she tried to ignore how she was covered in the ending of his arousal, and felt his lips press against her hairline.

“But I think we figure out the next move together,” he suggested, craning his neck so he could look down at her, her forehead glistening with a thin sheen of sweat and her eyes were glossed over, yet they held a form of passion that had his tummy tingling and had him unable to look away, “there’s no denying what just happened. We might as well see what happens next.”

“But what does it mean for us?” She wondered curiously, a hint of hope in her words that his next sentence was going to be something she wanted to hear, “what do we figure out together?”

“I think we give it a shot,” he said, “I’m not letting you go. Not now, not ever. And I’m game to try us out if you are.”

There’s a silence that falls around the room, broken ever so slightly by a brief cheer of appraisal at the change of song happening out in the living room area, and he doesn’t need to hear her verbal answer to his question. The gentle squeeze she gave him, from the arm draped over his hip, was all he needed to know she was game for whatever life threw at them next.

There’s a silence that falls around the room, broken ever so slightly by a brief cheer of appraisal at the change of song happening out in the living room area, and he doesn’t need to hear her verbal answer to his question. The gentle squeeze she gave him, from the arm draped over his hip, was all he needed to know she was game for whatever life threw at them next. 

“I’m glad you didn’t stay mad at me,” she whispered softly, looking up at him as he looked down at her, sweat covering his skin and his fringe sticking to his forehead, “you’re the last person I want to upset, Arthur. Ever.”

“You didn’t upset me,” he responded, a lopsided smile on his lips that was full of tiredness but complete euphoria, “it was me that upset me. My own fault for being jealous and blinded by my own assumptions, I guess. I never actually bothered to know the truth and I should have just grown up and told you how I felt from the beginning.”

“I might have to make you jealous a bit more often,” she giggled softly, placing her hand flat against his stomach, “I think that was the best sex I’ve ever had. With anyone.”

“Don’t flatter me,” he snorted out a laugh and stretched an arm out around her shoulders and pulled her closer into his side, “do you think we can enjoy this moment a bit longer or should we go and show our faces out there?”

“Soon,” she closes her eyes in content and lets out a heavy, happy and satisfied sigh, “let's just enjoy this moment for a little bit longer. Let them wonder.”

if you got this far then thank you for reading! i hope you enjoyed this one as much as i enjoyed writing it... it's definitely one i'm proud of! my inbox is always open, too, so feel free to send in some ideas and flood my messages with stuff you guys wanna talk about! x

[hvlplvss]

| welcome to the moulin rouge

summary: in which colby’s girlfriend stars in the hit broadway musical, moulin rouge. with little knowledge on the musical, he’s surprised when he first watches it.

warnings: smut, dirty talk, fingering, shower sex, praise, slight degradation, cream pie, hair pulling, slight edging. lmk if i missed anything !!

authors note: for those who haven’t watched moulin rouge, i recommend searching ‘welcome to moulin rouge-west end cast’ to get an idea about it. but if you don’t want to, it’s a musical based on a cabaret club and y/n plays one of the main girls from the club. i highly recommend it if you have never watched it!

y/n had recently been casted as ‘nini’ in one of her top three musicals of all time. moulin rouge. ever since the musical had come out, she’d adored it. knowing that she would love to be in it herself one day.

and that day was here. it was the opening night for the new cast of moulin rouge. she was also performing amongst some of her most favourite broadway performers.

her boyfriend colby and his best friend sam, who she were also really good friends with, had bought tickets for the first public opening show. they decided they might as well buy the most expensive tickets, which were the ones right at the front of the stage, where you got your own little table for two.

in true honesty, y/n had barely spent any time with colby recently. she’d been so busy at rehearsals and taking promotional pictures. so the only time she saw him, was once she arrived home, which was usually later than 11pm.

the boys sat at their table at 7:28pm, waiting for the show to begin. sam turns to colby, “so you have no idea, what this show is about?” sam asked.

colby shook his head in response, “nope. i’ve watched loads of other shows with y/n, but she won’t let me watch this, cause she wants me to see her in the show first,” he explained. “have you seen it?”

sam nodded, “yeah. y/n told me to watch it before we came to see this,” he answered. colby rolled his eyes, but a small smile stuck on his face. but he was slightly confused. how come sam could watch the movie, but he couldn’t?

the lights slightly dimmed, taking colby out of his confused state. aaron tveit, who y/n had spoke about, walked out onto stage and past the two boys, where he stood to the left of them.

aaron looked around the audience, then he looked back to the bright glowing red ‘moulin rouge’ sign. aaron lifted his hands slightly and the sign lifted up, clearing the view of the stage. the music began, a low thudding noise, with a drum every few beats.

aaron disappears off of stage, and a spotlight flashes on the back wall, where there is a silhouette of four girls. colby could recognise one of them immediately.

‘hey sister, soul sister, flow sister’

the curtain they were standing behind lifted, revealing his girlfriend. colby’s eyes widened in shock at what his girlfriend was wearing.

y/n stood there in barely any clothing. it was all lingerie. black to be specific. her hands and arms adorned red velvet gloves which stopped at her bicep. she wore black stockings, which were connected to the black corset like bodysuit by a thin piece of fabric. the corset revealed a great deal of cleavage, and left little to the imagination.

as the four stepped forward beginning to dance, colby didn’t know what to do with himself. his girlfriend dancing half naked on stage in front of hundreds of people.

the dance was as sexual as you could get, grabbing onto your own waist, dropping to the floor. doing anything that was vaguely provocative. and colby still didn’t know how to react.

what really riled him up though was when another character came on stage, someone called ‘the duke’ something like that anyway, colby wasn’t in the right mind set to even focus on that.

y/n had gone over to said character, and in simple words, had to rub herself against him. colby’s eyes stared dead at y/n. he wasn’t mad or annoyed. but he was so jealous.

the interval had just begun and colby still couldn’t stop thinking about you. sam spoke up, “you good there, colby?” he asked.

colby nodded, looking over to his bestfriend, “did you know all about that?” colby questioned.

“what your girlfriend being half naked on stage?” he answered, colby nodded, “well yeah, she’s been showing me behind the scenes things for ages. she wanted all of it to be a surprise for you,” sam added. colby hummed in response, turning back to look at the stage as the show resumed.

colby and sam walked out of the theatre and round to stage door, to meet y/n after the show. when they arrived there was a slight crowd stood there, asking for photos and signatures and what not.

y/n was amongst them, signing playbills and taking photos with fans of the show. colby and sam stood back from the crowd, allowing y/n to take her time. but colby didn’t want to wait. he was desperate for his girlfriend.

after what seemed like forever, the crowd had dispersed, meaning y/n could make her way over to the boys.

“there she is!” sam smiled, hugging y/n and telling her congratulations. she thanked him and then turned to her boyfriend.

y/n reached to kiss colby on the lips. and just from that, she could tell. she knew colby was riled up. y/n grabbed onto colby’s hand, as sam led the way to the car.

the three arrived home not much later, as they opened the door, y/n spoke up, “i’m gonna go shower real quick,” the boys nodded and y/n ran off upstairs.

“i’m probably gonna go to bed now,” colby stated, “it’s already pretty late,”

sam nodded, with a slight eyebrow raise of disbelief. he knew his friend wasn’t going to sleep, he knew exactly what was going on with the boy. but he wished him a goodnight and walked off into the kitchen.

colby walked up the stairs and into his room. he could hear the shower running from the en-suite, which was connected to their room. he could also hear y/n’s light humming of some of the songs from the show.

colby began undressing himself and walked into the shower with y/n. “you know, what you did to me, y/n?” colby suddenly asked.

y/n jumped in shock at the boys voice, “shit colby, you scared me,” y/n smiled, turning to face her boyfriend, taking him all in.

“you know, how i felt? when i was sat there watching you,” he repeated, “seeing you dance against everyone,”

y/n bit her lip, trying to hide her smile. but colby could tell. it was a habit she always had.

“you think it’s funny? that your boyfriend was sat in the audience with a hard on?” he asked seductively, “it won’t be funny soon,” he said lowly.

colby grabbed his girlfriends cheeks and brought his lips to hers roughly. he held her face with one hand and her lower back with the other.

colby wasn’t playing nice at all. the rough yet passionate kiss was clear enough to say how frustrated he was.

colby’s mouth left hers and began making it’s way down her neck, biting harshly, causing y/n to let out a whimper. “come on, let me hear you,” colby said.

y/n had only seen her boyfriend like this a couple of times. usually when he’s jealous or wound up by something.

“don’t tease, baby,” y/n pleaded.

colby hushed her, “i’m taking my time. just like how i had to sit there for two whole hours, watching you dance about with barely anything on,”

colby grabbed her tit, going back to roughly kissing his girlfriend. y/n let out a moan, but it was sealed by colby, who’s mouth covered hers.

colby let go of her tit and reached down, letting his fingers cascade down y/n’s sides. she arched into his touch, “so needy,” colby spoke against her lips.

his fingers finally reached where she needed him the most. his thumb pressed firmly on her clit, rubbing in circles.

y/n moaned out, leaning her head on colby’s chest, letting the water from the shower run down her back. colby removed his fingers, causing y/n to let out a small whine.

“you’re such a desperate whore, aren’t you?”

“only for you,” y/n answered.

“only for me, huh?” colby smirked, “you’re mine, aren’t you.” y/n nodded, “say it, y/n. say you’re mine,”

y/n removed her head from colby’s chest and looked him directly in his eyes, “i’m yours, colby,”

colby nodded in approval, “good girl,” y/n’s head went back onto colby’s shoulder, as two of his fingers pressed inside her cunt, stretching her out.

y/n stifled a moan. as her boyfriend worked his fingers inside of her, she latched her mouth onto his lower neck, causing colby to groan.

she littered dark purple bruises across his neck and chest, admiring her work after each one. she knew he’d eventually get her back for the mess across his neck as he couldn’t show it all over social media, or else people would talk.

colby could feel y/n approaching her orgasm, so he removed his hand. causing y/n to remove his mouth off of colby, “what-”

colby hushed his girlfriend, “want you to cum at the same time, baby,” he answered.

he aligned his cock with her pussy, letting it glide against her folds, teasing her.

“please colby,” she begged.

“awh, you’re begging now? that’s cute,” he answered.

colby slid his cock in slowly. y/n moaned out and colby let out a low groan, watching the pleasure that washed over his girlfriends face.

he wrapped one arm around her waist and placed his other arm on the back wall of the shower.

after a few seconds, colby began moving his hips. snapping up into y/n, causing her to moan out loudly. her arms clung onto colby’s shoulders, staring directly at him.

she grabbed onto colby’s wet hair, and slightly tugged, causing the boys head to loll back.

“you getting close?” colby asked. y/n nodded, her bottom lip coming between her teeth, “thought so. feel so tight, baby,”

y/n pulled colby in by his hair to kiss him roughly, which made him speed up his hips. colby mumbled against her lips, “cum for me,” he looked at his girlfriend, who stared directly back at him.

colby felt y/n release around him. he wouldn’t last much longer himself. his hips stilled, realising himself inside of y/n.

after a few moments, he removed his cock from her. placing a kiss on her forehead and then a soft one on her lips.

“you okay?” he asked.

she nodded, “are you?”

“i’m more than okay. and i’m so proud. so incredibly proud of you,”

“well, if when you come and watch me perform and it ends up like this, you might have to come watch me a few more times,”

[meazalykov]

Good Game, Sal

Salma Paralluelo x Barca!Reader

summary: are they enemies, or lovers?

Salma Paralluelo and I, both rising stars of Barcelona's Femeni team, shared more than just a common jersey; we shared a rivalry that burned hotter than the Catalan sun on a July afternoon.

Salma, with her quick footwork and innate goal-scoring abilities, was a product of La Masia, Barcelona's renowned youth academy. Her journey to the top seemed paved with gold, crowned by her recent triumph in the World Cup with the Spanish national team. Me, on the other hand, hailed from a humbled path, I considered my talent raw and untamed, molded through sheer determination and grit.

Growing up in the United States, I’ve played through many unknown summer leagues, clubs mainly filled with boys, school teams, and futsal in the winter months before I put the pen on paper with Washington Spirit at the age of 15. 

After four great years with building my talent, creating new friendships, and enjoying my life in the United States Capital, my contract was expiring. 

Washington Spirit offered me a renewal, but Barcelona contacted my agent with a proposal that sent my jaw dropping to the floor. The Catalan Club was my dream club while growing up. I’ve admired Alexia Putellas, Ronaldinho, Messi, and Xavi for years. So I followed my heart and denied another four years in Washington DC, so I can accomplish my dream. 

However, I had to put in hard work when I arrived in Barcelona. This challenge was needed, since the challenge to score on the pitch fuels my passion. However, I didn’t expect a rivalry to happen WITHIN the club rather than the opponents I’ve played against.

First, it was a constant competition for playing time. Overtime, I’ve thought that I harbored a deep-seated resentment towards Salma, envying her success, her effortless grace on the pitch. 

Against Madrid CFF, my debut game in September, I scored a brace that drove the club to win 4-0. Afterwards, I’ve held a record for scoring at least once in a game I’ve had minutes in. 

However, Salma seemed to have the upper hand when it came to having a start. I had to swallow my pride every time I had to be her 67th minute substitute. She always hugged me when she would come off, but my body would tense up everytime. Nobody noticed the small resentment for her, except for Salma herself. She started to piece small things together. 

“You did great today Niña, I'm impressed by your dribbling and speed in training.” Alexia, or my captain Ale, patted me on the back as we headed into the locker rooms after training. A few days ago, we won the Champions League semi-final against Chelsea. Thanks to a goal from Aitana, Fridolina, and I. 

Alexia was a huge advocate for me which made my heart melt. I’ve admired her as a fan but now I am her teammate, so I express my gratitude to her whenever its possible. 

“Thank you. I learn from the best people surrounding me.” I smirked and Alexia breathed out a chuckle. Something the girls noticed when I came to the club is how much I’ll compliment or support people on their skills. Aitana said that I've been a light in the dressing room when it comes to boosting morale. This is a reason why people don’t notice a small resentment I held for a-certain-someone on the team. 

“Well, Don’t get your hopes up when I say this— but Jona might consider you as a starter for the final— Don’t take that as a guarantee, but your speed will be needed against Lyon's defense” Alexia’s Spanish accent poked through as she held onto my shoulder. The Spanish are very affectionate. 

“I won’t get my hopes up— I do take that as a compliment though.” I said. 

“Good. We’ve been looking between you and Salma as the third forward in the finale. Since Frido and Caro will have the left and right wing.” Alexia spoke. I felt my stomach turn at her name. Aware that I will have to work harder in training to start in the final, I know Salma will do the same thing. 

A week later, my “animosity” towards Salma only intensified when I discovered that Salma will start in the final over me as a striker. Back at my apartment, I’ve cried myself to sleep. I’ve worked hard in training. My tears represented the fear that nobody is seeing the skills and potential I have. 

“Hey Y/n” As I walked out the locker room after training one morning, I turned around and saw Salma approaching me. My eyes widened and I turned to walk away in a hurry. 

“Hi.” I said quickly as Salma continued to walk beside me. What did she want? 

“We should go watch The Challengers movie with Esmee on our day off Sunday. I know you both used to play tennis and such, it looks like a great movie.” Salma hesitantly spoke. My eyebrows knitted together at what she said. I did play tennis for a few years in middle school back in America, but as a hobby not a sport. Esmee told me that she could’ve gone professional at tennis in the Netherlands but chose football instead. The Dutch girl is the only person that knew about my old tennis hobby, so she had to have told Salma about it. 

“Um–” I say as we both pushed the glass doors outside into the parking lot. As much as I wanted to say no, express to Salma how much I've resented her, and drive home.. I couldn’t. I felt my heart ache as I looked at the girl who had a shy smile. Wait– huh? Why am I doing that?

“I–I can go with you guys–Just have Esmee text me the details when you guys decide the time.” I said before walking away to my black SUV, my emotions not handling what Salma might’ve said or reacted to my acceptance. 

The last few days before Sunday came along. I’ve talked to my best friend, Isla, about everything. She doesn’t live in Spain, since she plays football for Gotham FC, but she had a clear understanding about the community.

After my rant which lasted an hour, Isla said something which made my heart stop for a quick second. 

“Are you sure that you hate Salma?” Isla asked over the facetime call. 

“Well-No! I don’t hate anybody, I just hate how big of an advantage she has over me.” 

“Oh– because it sounds like you’re in love with her–” 

“Excuse me?” 

“Well the way you’ve talked about Salma reminds me of how I started off with Esther here at Gotham. However it was the other way around. She was in love with me but refused to accept it– so she found reasons to try and hate me instead before she was forced to confront the truth.” 

That part of the conversation replayed in my mind for the last few days. Throughout training, throughout the game against Granada that won us the league, it replayed non-stop. It didn’t distract me but I couldn’t look at Salma without questioning if I am in love with her. A subtle shift began to take place within my heart, even if I didn’t want it to happen.

Salma started noticing the small things too. After the Granada game which granted us Liga F champions, she noticed when I wrapped my arm around her and Esmee as we jumped around in the red-colored locker rooms. I’ve noticed that as I started to slowly accept my possible feelings for her, my “resentment” faded away with it. 

“Good game, Sal.” I whispered in her ear as everyone posed for a group picture in our “Liga F Champions” shirts. She looked at me with widened eyes before smiling softly.

I found herself drawn to the challenge Salma posed as the Champions League final was coming up. Salma always craved the intensity of their encounters, the adrenaline rush of chasing victory side by side with her rival, just like I did.

By Sunday, the day where Salma Esmee and I will go to the movie theaters, I've accepted it—I finally realized the truth that had been staring me in the face all along. Due to past heartbreak, I didn’t want to fall in love again but here I am in Spain. As I stood in the mirror, looking at the nice casual outfit I've put on (imagine what outfit you want, reader <3) I knew with absolute certainty that what I’ve felt went beyond rivalry with Salma, beyond competition.

It was love.

In that moment of clarity, my resentment melted away. I knew that I couldn't keep denying her feelings any longer, but a fear started to grow inside of my heart. What if it's too late? 

Salma did notice my resentment towards her. There were times where I’ve blown her off because of that. I couldn’t blame her if she started to hate me for what I've done to her. 

Four hours later, The Challengers movie ended. I’ve sat in-between Esmee (on my left) and Salma (on my right) in the movie theater. The movie was good but I had the urge to look at Salma at times. Once, I looked down at her hand that wasn’t too far from mine. As much as I wanted to reach to hold her soft hands, I couldn’t do it. What if she pulled away? What if things would’ve been awkward between us? I didn’t risk it. 

When we hugged Esmee as she left the theater, it was Salma and I in the parking lot. I could’ve said bye and left too, but Salma wanted to say something to me. Esmee and her gave each other an unknowing glance, so I believe Esmee might know what Salma is feeling. 

“Y/n, Why do you hate me?” Salma frowned. My heart broke as I bit my lip in nervousness.

“I don’t.” I said I looked at her with a sad smile. 

“Yes you do. Every time I wanted to talk to you at practice, you always ran away to talk to someone else. I’ve noticed that you’re the only person that never congratulated me separately after a goal. I’ve seen the way you’ve brightened up people’s days with your compliments, love, and hugs. Why can I not have that Y/n? Did I do something to you for you to hate me? Just tell me because I don’t want to start off next season knowing that you might hate me for something I might’ve done.” Salma took my left hand and held it with both of her soft, moisturized hands as she looked me in the eyes.

A tear fell out of my left eye as I felt guilty. I’ve fucked up. I’ve hurt Salma and she doesn’t know why— I need to tell her how I feel. 

“Salma, I don’t hate you at all. I am so sorry for what I've done to you. All you did—really—was be great on the pitch. When I came to Spain, I noticed how loved you were by everyone. You had the minutes, skills, awards, and recognition that I could dream of having. However— I’ve admired you more than everyone else at the same time. I know that's hard to accept due to what I've done to you, but I felt like you were too good for me. I look at you more than everyone else. I wanted to hug you and congratulate your success with you but the vulnerability scared me. I’ve been hurt before so in order to protect my feelings, I’ve covered it up with resentment— Salma, I am in love with you.” By the time I told her that I love her, tears poured down my cheeks and Salma held me in a hug, tightly, as she cried too. 

“Y/n, I am in love with you too. That's why it hurt me when I believed that you might’ve hated me.” Salma said through her tears.

“I am so sorry–seriously. I don't hate you. I love you. I will never hurt you like that again, I swear.”  I said. 

After that night, we started over and became lovers. Our undeniable bond blossomed between us. The team adored our relationship and were happy for us. I did keep my promise, I never hurt her again. I’ve found love in giving my love to her without the fear of getting hurt. After the debut game in the 24/25 season, we walked off the pitch hand in hand, my heart fluttered as I know this is the beginning of our longtime relationship. 

<3

[harlowsbby]

Pranks & Spooks 👻🧡

“I can’t believe you’re actually going to prank him this bad he’s going to absolutely hate us.” Urban stated as you placed a few pieces of furniture on the floor.

“I mean he can never hate me besides it’s just a fun little prank it won’t cause much harm.” You paused. “At least I won’t think it will.” Urban groaned.

“What do you want me to do with this?” He asked as he held up the bottle of fake blood. “Just pour some on the floor and make foot prints out of it, I need this prank to seem believable.” You smirked.

“You’re evil you know that?” You shrugged your shoulders.” “I’ve been told that a few times.”

The minute it hit October you were already planning out and thinking of ways to prank Jack. You’ve pranked him before in the past but your current prank was going to top all of the rest.

You had this idea to stage a fake home invasion prank on Jack. You were going to make it seem as if someone broke in and knocked everything over, you even bought fake glass to scatter across the floor.

Urban came over to help set up but to also make footsteps upstairs to make it seem like the intruder was still in the house when Jack arrived home.

“When is he leaving the studio?” Urban asked as the two of you finished setting up everything. You checked your phone seeing a recent message from Jack.

Jack

- on the way home 💘

“He told me was on the way home and this was sent ten minutes ago which means he’ll be pulling up any minute now.” Urban’s eyes widened.

“Do you think everything looks believable? Like he’d actually believe someone broke in.” You did one more look around.

Everything honestly did look real down to the shattered glass and the fake blood footprints it actually looked like a home invasion, the pieces of furniture laying on the ground really brought it together as well.

“I definitely think he will, I’m gonna open the back porch to make it seem like one of the robbers left and we can both go upstairs I’ll hide in the closet and you just start stomping when he comes in.” Urban sighed.

“You owe me Y/N.” You rolled your eyes. “Let’s go he’s about to be here.” The two of you quickly made your way upstairs, you hid in the closest while Urban waited near the bedroom door to be able to hear Jack come in the house.

After a few minutes of waiting you heard the front door open followed by Jack calling out for you. “Baby, I’m hom-.” Jack paused upon seeing all the broken ‘glass’ and ‘blood’ everywhere and the back porch door being wide open.

“What? Babe what’s going on?” Jack set his keys on the couch and carefully walked over the shattered glass.

“Is this some type of prank Y/N? You know Halloween isn’t for a few more days right?” He laughed. Jack knew at some point you were going to try and prank him this month and he assumed today was the day.

“Babe, I’m not playing anymore come on.” He stated again he was about to call you but when he noticed the bloody foot prints and the door to the back porch being wide open he started panicking, maybe your prank really wasn’t a prank.

“Shit.” He muttered and went to get his phone to call 911 but the sound off footsteps stopped him from calling.

He froze when he heard loud and heavy footsteps coming towards your shared bedroom. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He whispered to himself.

“What am I gonna do.” He panicked and mentally cursed for not having some sort of weapon in the house.

He looked around and couldn’t find anything to defend himself with, the closes thing to a weapon was a vase so he took it and slowly creeped upstairs.

“Where’s the money!” Urban yelled and tried his best to disguise his voice. “I have no money! Just take the necklace and go.” You pleaded and cried out.

“You leave me no choice!” Urban yelled. “Please don’t do this I’m sure I can call my boyfriend and he’ll give you anything.” You faked cried.

It was very last minute that you decided to trick Jack into thinking you were getting robbed upstairs.

Jack’s eyes widened and without a second thought he quickly opened your bedroom door with the vase held high, ready to hit Urban with it till you stopped him.

“Get the hell away from my girlfriend, you chose the wrong house today buddy.” Urban’s back was to Jack so Jack still had no idea who the person was.

“Jack, no don’t do that.” You laughed as you approached him and took the vase from his hands. “What? He was about to attack you? Are you insane?” He yelled.

“No he wasn’t.” His eyebrows furrowed together. “Wha-.” He stopped talking when Urban turned around revealing his face.

“What’s good?” Urban laughed.

Jack’s facial expressions went from panicked to confused to irritated while you stood next to him doubling over in laugher.

“Another fucking prank? And a home invasion prank at that.” He muttered as he rolled his eyes. “It was her idea.” Urban tried defending himself.

“I’m not talking to either till the end of the year.” Your mouth flew open. “What! It was just a silly prank I know I can think of a few ways that’ll make you forgive me.” You stated as you rubbed his arms.

“I mean I suppose I can think of a few way as well.” He smirked making Urban gag.

“That’s my que to leave.” Urban quickly left while you spent the entire night apologizing to Jack in many ways.

(Requested by @harlowcomehome 💘 I hope you guys enjoy it.)

[music-viber]

Summary: Luke and his girlfriend get into the last fight of their relationship.

Warnings: Manipulation,angst,smut,language

18+

Luke had done it again. He found a way to play his his girlfriends feelings

Luke castellan x daughter of hades

She had caught him with another councilor again.

He watched as the stranger flirted with him, pushing up on him,touching his hair, as she batted her long eyelashes her little button nose crinkled at every joke he told her “your so good with your sword Luke” she heard the brunette say “I mean I try, I’m good at other things too if you’d ever wanna see that” he laughed.

She listened in she wasn’t surprised at her boyfriends behavior he was a popular Demi god. She knew how they could be and she knew guys would also kill to be with her and he treated her like a one trick pony. She knew he was tired of just kissing and going on meaningless dates because they just fought the whole time.

But she would never pay any mind to random guys just because she’s mad and because they gave her attention and trust they gave her attention. But she had always reminded them she was with Luke.

They would always be angry at each other but this was the last straw for the the girl.

She watched was the other woman now felt him up while giving him puppy dog eyes and biting her lip. He looked around to make sure nobody would see them as he threw his head back.

He obviously did see me because then he pushed her off of him. “Babe.” He said acting as if I didn’t see what was happening. “I thought you were on kitchen duty?” He asked in her face.

“I was on duty but then I wanted to come find you. See what you were up to love bug!” But it seems like you have lots of love to go around so I’ll be on my way.”

He chased after her “Odessa I swear it’s not what it looked like, she was helping me fix a broken button on my shorts. You know how it is” I just smiled and nodded. “She’s not the first girl I’ve seen fix a button castellan.” She scoffed “your so quick to let girls touch you.” He looked mad “as if you don’t let guys touch you when I’m not around?” She looked mad now “I DONT!” as she said this the grass caught fire.

She stormed away to her dorm. She got over heated her pants caught fire she stood there. I won’t let him do this bullshit again.

(Later that night)

Luke knocks her window, she was the only one in the cabin because the other campers were at the campfire celebrating the week. She looked towards her window and walks to open it. “Need something dick?” She flashed a fake smile. Luke “yeah actually. I wanted to apologize but somewhere away from the noise?” He proposed. Looking at the campers at the campfire.

She didn’t forgive him but wanted to Atleast hear him out. Okay. Let me change? *she closed her window to change into a dark red mini dress, it was hot that night. She hopped out of her window to hear him out. “I still don’t forgive you if you’re wondering Luke castellan.” She states. “I know”

They finally make it far enough in the woods. She looked at her “this is where we had our first ever date.” “It was a picnic right near that tree.” She smiled at her. It was too and she hated his smiles now because she knew there was always something behind it. It was no secret their relationship was rocky

Luke basically flirted in or out of the public eye people even thought we’ve broken up before. Why did I put up with it? Because he was the best swordsman at camp. I needed to get the gods attention somehow. And it worked, Percy Jackson had recently came to camp and got claimed by Poseidon she had already weaseled her way into being his friend because Luke was his counselor

She didn’t need to put up with this man baby for any longer and she was grateful to use the girl from this morning as her excuse.

“So what?” She stared at him blankly“It’s just a spot” she looked at him with unreadable eyes.

He scoffed “you make it so fucking difficult to be sorry for you.”

“Sorry for me? You’re a stupid son of a bitch!” I yell

Luke’s eyes widened “don’t talk about my mother”

I laughed “if I was talking about your mother I would’ve said ya mama.”

“You’re such a man whore.” I say

Luke opened his mouth to yell “I thought you were an equal rights kinda girl considering you make a whole big deal about guys calling girls bitches.”

“Oh which you’re being right now by the way.” He finished

“Did you just call me a bitch castellan?” She puts her hand on her hips after removing her earrings and tossing them.” There was a small spark of flames when she tossed the metal into a pile of leafs.

Luke didn’t wanna upset her too much because she could obviously lit his ass on fire. He couldn’t help but to look at how beautiful his girlfriend was when she was mad. “I just get jealous when guys come and talk to you all the time. I thought it was about time before you left me for one of them.”

She rolled her eyes at his sorry ass excuse

She wanted to break him

[krysalla]

this is a request for how our creepy darling dr crane would realize and deal with Feelings towards the reader please 👉👈 i feel like he’d have trouble reconciling the mental/psychological attraction with more baser, sexual feelings and would end up either being too restrained or too uninhibited

warnings: ummm crane being a creep with no boundaries and a little freak

f!reader

Dealing with Ivy is never a pleasant experience. Her lair is a thick, humid jungle of plants that always change, teasing him as they shift the path to confuse him and lead him astray. She refuses to meet him outside of her hideaway. So, he trudges along the shifting roots and vines to get what he wants. He huffs and he puffs and he curses the bits of leaves and dirt and debris that get on his suit and into the burlap fabric of his mask.

He bats at a plant, pushing it out of his way, only for the damned thing to hit him back.

The compound better be ready.

Finally, the plants give way, done with their game, and reveal Ivy’s lab to him. And, of course, Ivy is nowhere in sight. So he huffs and puffs some more, crosses his arms over his chest as he looks over the lab. It looks untouched, even with an experiment running in the back. Another trick. He won’t be so easily turned away after all he had to walk through to get here. Jonathan digs his feet into the dirt floor. He refuses to leave without Ivy’s samples. He has spent months planning and researching for this new toxin. A new way to descend Gotham City into complete and utter chaos. The streets will be filled with people overwhelmed by their own fear and arousal. He wants them reduced to nothing but animals, to watch them burn their beloved city to the ground with their brains in overdrive from the conflict of the two heightened states. This will be his magnum opus. 

Minutes go by before he hears a noise coming from behind a curtain towards the back wall. The fabric flicks up and you duck beneath it quickly, scrubbing at the front of your denim overalls.

“Oh!” you startle when you notice him. Perhaps this venture won’t be a waste if he can get such an easy fright from you. He always carries a small case of syringes with him, just on the off chance he finds himself bored. It would be so easy, just a small pinprick.

He clears his throat, “Where is Ivy?”

“She’s busy. Something about a pesticide company, I think?” you buckle the left straps of your overalls back into place and smile, “But she told me you’d be here. I’ve got everything ready for you.”

You beckon him with a wave of the hand and he follows you, some nameless nobody, to the room you’d just come out of. You pull back the curtain and reveal rows and rows of samples and plants, all lined up neatly on the shelves. Ivy’s been up to no good recently judging by the various substances.

He reaches into his front pocket and feels the rigid line of cool metal.

“Let’s see… compound 34A…” you wander the aisles, snaking through them while occasionally checking over a few plants along the way with a thoughtful hum.

If only you would hurry up. Ivy could be back any moment and he would like to witness your fear himself for as long as possible. And it would be more beneficial to him if he got Ivy’s pheromone before he injects you. Ivy might not take well to his playing with you, if you really mean anything to her, her revenge would be swift. He taps his foot when you spend a little longer on an out of control plant. You don’t even acknowledge him or his impatience, you just pull out a little notepad from your pocket and start taking notes.

He can’t help the sharp tone in his voice, he doesn’t want to spend a second longer here than he has to. He has big plans and so little time to fulfill them. “Do you enjoy wasting my time?”

“Hmm?” you don’t even spare him a look, focused on examining the wilted leaves of a plant that looks like it's on the verge of dying.

“Who are you? I thought Ivy worked alone.”

“Well, you can’t let plants run amok like that. Fungi will spread, infect other plants, poison the fruit. Diseases run rampant. Ivy believes in the green but it still needs to be maintained and cared for. That’s why I’m here. I care for the green.” You put your notepad in the front pocket of your overalls, “You know, I was very impressed by your work on that last release of fear toxin. It was incredible.”

“Of course it was.” He doesn’t need praise. Doesn’t want it from someone as low as you on the food chain. Jonathan knows how well it went, how seamless his plans went. Even the Batman himself couldn’t stop him and that there is a badge of honor around this city. So, no, he will glaze over the compliment from the girl playing farmer’s daughter, as pretty as you might be.

He presses the latch on the case to open it.

“Self assured, huh? I like that.” You take the compound from the test tube rack and turn to him. You step into his space, close enough for him to feel your breath against the sliver of skin that shows on his neck. He’s glad for the mask, you won’t be able to see the blood rush to his cheeks and ears. Your hand slides up his chest, test tube caught between your index and middle finger, and back down to his front pocket to carefully slip the test tube there, right next to his case of syringes. “I hope this works for you, Mr. Scarecrow.”

He hopes you don't notice the shiver that runs through him.

---

As with most nights, he works late, scribbling notes on his subjects. His current ones are a man and a woman, a couple he'd picked up somewhere in the East End, are a particularly good pair of subjects. He wrote down five pages worth of notes in the three hours he had them naked and writing around on the floor. The man had beaten the woman to death in the throes of ecstasy and then slammed his head against the wall.

Cockroaches, he screamed out, had been crawling over the woman's body and his own.

They expired quicker than he thought they would. He will have to adjust the ratio of Ivy's pheromone to fear toxin.

He places his notepad down and reaches for one of the dozen others that he keeps on his desk. He needs a clean slate. Jonathan works dutifully on correcting the dosage, the chemical makeup of the sample. And his mind can't help but wander. He thinks of the gardener.

The pure pheromone sits still on the rack.

You would make a wonderful test subject.

---

He stands in a familiar corn field. Yes, he remembers it well-- the grueling summer afternoons spent tending to the field under his great grandmother's eye while he swung the scythe to cut down the dead corn stalks. Even during autumn and winter he was not granted reprieve from punishment out in the fields. Yes, this corn field is familiar.

He stands above the field, watching carefully over his crop. He cannot move. His limbs made of straw and sticks. He is wearing his burlap sack. Jonathan has become a real scarecrow.

It's peaceful.

Content with the sounds of birds and the soft beating of the sun against him, he relaxes into his post. Even if his body is strung up like he's Christ on the cross.

The stalks before him rustle. The breeze stops and the birds quiet. Not a dream then, but a nightmare, some terror just on the horizon. It’s safer than a dream. He waits, tied up on his post, and watches the slithering path of the creature in the field. It waits at the edge of the clearing.

It’s no creature full of teeth and venom ready to consume him, just you, the gardener. You emerge from between the green stalks, wearing your silly overalls and a big smile like you're happy to see him. You do not falter. You step to his post and climb up the ladder. Face to face, you stare at him curiously as your hand hovers along the side of his masked face, and he waits with bated breath for your next move.

"Hello, Mr. Scarecrow," you whisper, leaning close to his ear, "won't you join me?"

You untie the ropes around his ankles and wrists, catching him against your chest when he falls forward. It's an awkward dance down his post, your hand gripping onto the tattered burlap of his shirt and your stilted steps as you stop on each rung of the ladder, checking that he is still safe in your grasp.

A crow caws.

Finally, he is down on the ground, placed gently on his back by you.

He wants to feel you on him, even the press of your hand against the burlap would be enough. Never in his life had he wanted so badly to feel the skin of another against his. Jonathan is used to it, but it's all he thinks about, your hands, your lips, your teeth on him, anywhere so long as you touch him. All you do is hover over him, straddling his waist and watching with a gentle stare.

The sky behind you has turned dark and the crows flock to his post. A thousand eyes stare down at him.

You lean closer to his face. He wishes to hold your shoulders and drag you down to him but his body is made of straw. Your hands wander over burlap and straw and rough plaid. If he had a heart, it would be stuttering in his chest.

Mercifully, you kiss him.

When you pull back, your face falls. No longer is the kind, warm gleam in your eyes and a smile of a love-struck fool. There's no burlap. He can feel the air on his skin. His face revealed to you. No longer is he Scarecrow, but plain old lanky Jonathan Crane. He reaches for you, limbs again made of skin and bone and tissue.

You wrench yourself from him in disgust and run back towards the corn.

The crows caw in unison.

---

If he didn't have to, he wouldn't be back here. He wouldn't be storming through Ivy's lair where you play gardener in your overalls and gloves, with your little trowel and watering can. But he needs more of Ivy's compound. Weeks he spent fantasizing and dreaming that same dream of you and now, confronted with the idea that he will see you in the flesh once more makes his stomach turn with fear and embarrassment and that infuriates him. He, the master of fear, should not be so scared of a silly, little girl who wears overalls embroidered with bright flowers. He pushes at the branches a little harder, digs his feet in a little deeper into the mushrooms he steps on, tears the flowers from the bushes as he shoulders his way through the thicket.

As he inflicts his damage, the forest grows crueler, springing thicker walls of branches and makes the mud thicker to trap him. Ivy's children go to work on making it harder for him and it only angers him more and makes him more violent to the green. A vicious cycle, all because of you.

You barrel out from the bushes and shoulder him down onto the ground. He lands hard, knocks the breath right out of him, while you land softly on him, legs splayed around his waist with that same look of disgust he dreamed up.

"What are you doing!"

You hit his chest with the sides of your fists and it hurts, but it feels good, makes him feel alive, and he knows this is not just another dream. His heart beats and his lungs suck in air, and his limbs are flesh and bone. And he grabs you with one hand, just the way he wanted to in his dream, and with the other hand, he rips off his mask. He is the master of fear and he will not let some lackey scare him into submission.

The both of you are covered in mud, and his hands smear it across your face as he brings you down to a kiss.

You shake in his hold and beat your fists along his sides and his chest. He savors each second of blazing contact. In the struggle, you wrap your hands around his throat, pressing down on his windpipe. Who will be the first to break?

His lungs burn and wreak havoc in his chest as they try to pull in as much air through his nose. He holds you tighter to him and you bite his lip hard and draw blood. He lets you go. You whip away from him, leaning back on your haunches. You lick his blood from your lips and spit it back at him.

“Don’t ever touch the green like that again.”

You push his face down into the mud and clamber off of him and wander back into the wood. He follows after, his hand in his pocket, fingers circling over the latch.

[beelsnack]

Back in the Saddle - Obey Me! Boys and an MC Who is Overcoming a Depressive Episode

Hyper-specific coping mechanisms? On my blog? It's more likely than you think.

(Just kidding that's like the whole reason I started the blog in the first place lol)

I'll be honest, I'm not caught up on the games at all. I got like 2 chapters into Nightbringer before the rhythm games gave me sensory overload. But they're still my emotional support demons and I'm still going to write about them on my silly little blog. Enjoy!

May make a part 2 with the other characters, this one was getting kind of long.

-----

Lucifer: The music room had always been one of the few places that Lucifer could seek solace from the chaos that seemed to follow him. Most of his brothers had no desire to practice an instrument, and those who did tended to want to do it on their own, so if he was there, they tended to avoid the area. He had come to expect the room to be empty when he arrived there.

So seeing the human hunched over the grand piano threw him off a bit.

He knew they played the piano - it had been in their paperwork when they first came to the Devildom. They played quite frequently before, taking comfort in the familiar feeling of the ivory keys when the strangeness of their new home got to be too much. But something in recent months stopped them, and he didn’t have the faintest idea what. They hadn’t been very forthcoming about their mental state, and Lucifer didn’t want to pry. 

Well, actually, he did want to pry, but each time he asked, they got more and more irritated and withdrawn from him, and that stung just as much as not being able to help.

They were making considerably more mistakes than they had before, likely due to a lack of practice, but Lucifer could see a bit of their old spark returning to their eyes as muscle memory took over. They were playing an ost from a human world show, something slow and soothing that they played often. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but Lucifer thought he could see the beginnings of a smile on their face.

Before he quite knew what he was doing, he had silently made his way over to them. His shadow fell over the keys, and they jumped in shock. They whipped around so fast he was worried that they would twist something. “Lucifer?!”

“Don’t stop on my account, my dear,” he smiled gently at them, perching himself on the bench next to them. “It’s been so long since I’ve heard you play, won’t you indulge me a little?”

Mammon: It was just a little doodle.

Borrowing the human's notes was a pretty common occurrence for Mammon. If he even remembered to take notes, they were sparse at best and incomprehensible at worst. He had just wanted to take a picture of them at first but the human insisted he write them himself. 

"We don't need to make it too easy for Lucifer to tell you don't pay attention," had been there reasoning, but Mammon wasn't going to turn down some alone time with them. Even if it was in the library.

When the human had presented their notebook to him, his eyes had immediately gone to the little drawing in the corner. It wasn't very detailed, more like random scribbles that eventually morphed into a flower and some stars. When they had first come to the Devildom, their notebooks had been absolutely filled with doodles and drawings, ranging from rudimentary shapes and shading to full-on sketches in the margins. They claimed it helped them focus, so Mammon had been a little concerned when the drawings had dwindled to nothing.

"What are you smiling at?"

Mammon jumped, heat creeping up his neck as he realized he had been caught. "Nothin'!"

He glanced back at the drawings, wishing he had his shades to hide behind. "...I missed the doodles, is all."

Leviathan: Right.

Left.

…Alright, the coast was clear. Sighing softly in relief, Levi emerged fully from his room and made his way downstairs. Most of the residents went their separate ways after dinner, and he knew for a fact Beel had his Fangol game so the kitchen should be free.

Levi stuck his hand in his pants pocket to make sure the folded square of paper was still there. One of his favorite Deviltubers are done a video recreating various dishes from different anime, but Levi just had to try them as well. But any sort of attempt at baking was doomed to fail if Beelzebub was in the house, so as much as Levi had wanted to jump right in as soon as he had seen the video, this excursion needed careful planning.

He was feeling rather hopeful until he got to the kitchen and saw the light on.

Defeated, he was about to turn around and head back into his inner sanctum to await his next opportunity before he realized that the shadow moving along the wall was far too small to be Beel.

Quietly, carefully, he poked his head around the corner and peered into the kitchen. There, in an old t-shirt with an apron tied around their waist, was the human scooping flour out of a bag.

Either he made some sort of noise or they just felt his presence. They turned around, looking startled for a moment before regaining their composure and grinning sheepishly at him. “Hey, Levi, what’s up?”

Levi blinked owlishly at them for a second. “Uh, well…”

The human’s baked goods had quickly become treasure in the House of Lamentation when they first arrived for the exchange program. It had been their passion, but something happened somewhere to tamp out the gleeful little spark they had whenever they were trying out a new recipe. But, like a storm passing, that light was beginning to peek through the dark clouds.

“Levi?” they asked, cocking their head at him like a confused puppy. “You alright?”

“I-I’m fine!” Levi had to physically shake himself out of his train of thought. “You-you’re baking something?”

“Mm-hm,” they hummed, turning back to the counter to glance at the recipe on their phone. “I was really in the mood for some chocolate cake.”

Chocolate cake wasn’t one of the recipes on his list, but seeing them passionate about something again made him forget about his whole mission. “Do you…want some help?”

Satan: Someone was humming.

Satan had thought he was alone in RAD’s library. Very rarely did students venture here at this hour, and his brothers were causing suck a ruckus back at the house that he hadn’t been able to focus on his book even shut within his room. And now someone was being annoying here.

His already short fuse was slowly but surely reaching the end, and he slammed his book shut with a bit more force than necessary. He would get his quiet time or there would be blood.

The perpetrator was somewhere in the fiction section, it sounded like, and Satan rounded the corner of the shelves like a predator sniffing out its prey. Finally, after a few moments of following the sound, he caught sight of another person. He stopped at the beginning of the aisle, mouth already open in a snarl to scold whoever had the balls to - 

“Oh, Satan, hi!”

He deflated like someone had poked a hole in him. Of all of the people he thought he would encounter, the human had been very low on the list. Recently, they barely left their room except to go to class or eat. Usually if he wanted to spend time with them he had to gently coax them out into the open like one would entice a cat with treats.

Satan cleared his throat. “Well, this is unexpected.”

The human had their arms full of books. Quite the assortment, too. A thriller, a book about previous kings on the Devildom, what appeared to be some sort of romance manga and an autobiography of a well-known witch.

“I ran out of things to read,” they shrugged, looking away. “Went through everything I had at least twice.”

“You know,” Satan walked over and took two of the books out of their arms - they always got irritated when he took everything, like a stubborn kitten, so letting them hold on to something would preserve their dignity. “You can always come to me if you want recommendations.”

Asmodeus: “Hey, Asmo?”

There were only a few people who were brave and/or stupid enough to go into Asmo’s room without knocking. Not because he would be angry or anything, but one never knew what kind of salacious activities would be going on in there and it was better for all involved if there was some warning before opening the door to Asmo’s den of debauchery.

“Hello, darling!” Asmo chirped, beckoning the human inside. They were lucky, he had just gotten out of the bath and was in the middle of his skin care routine. “What’s up?”

“Do you have anything for eye bags?” they asked, poking idly at the puffy skin beneath their eyes. It was clear that their mental health hadn’t been in top condition lately, their stress written in the dullness of their skin and drawn across the acne that dotted their face. But Asmo knew better than anyone that pointing out someone’s physical flaws did nothing for self-esteem, so he hadn’t said anything.

“Of course!” he grinned, scooting over a bit to give them some room on his vanity stool. “Skin care is self-care, darling, glad to see you treating yourself.”

The human sat down next to him, and now that they were closer Asmo could tell just how drained they were. They sat with their shoulders slumped, and they had an air of exhaustion about them.

“Oh, dear, haven’t you been sleeping well?” he asked, reaching over to pick up a small tub of cream. “Sleep is extremely important, you know. I’m a hot mess without my beauty sleep.”

“Really?” they quirked an eyebrow at him.

“Emphasis on hot,” he giggled, dabbing his fingertip into the cream. “Now, hold still for me, darling, wouldn’t want to poke your eyes out~”

Beelzebub: Beel had grown to like the quietness of the gym in the morning.

He was one of the few demons who had the diligence to work out every morning, and the ones who did make it a daily habit tended to leave each other alone to work on their own things. Everyone knew each other there, to the point where they each had their own spot where they left their stuff and there was an unspoken rule that nobody touched anyone else’s belongings.

It was also an unspoken rule that anyone who tried would get eaten by Beelzebub but he tried not to think too hard about that one. He still felt kind of guilty about it.

Muscle memory took him over to the bench by the weights where he usually set his things down, and he was in the process of sliding his gym bag off of his shoulder when he realized that there was another bag there that he didn’t immediately recognize. He stared at it for a moment, trying to see if he could figure out who the owner was until he got close enough to smell it.

Usually gym-bag-smell wasn’t something he would actively seek out, let alone find enticing, but he would recognize that scent anywhere. It was the human’s.

Sure enough, when he turned around, there they were, stretching in front of the weight bench. It had been…Beel didn’t even know how long it had been since he had seen them in the gym. They used to go quite frequently. Not enough to call themself a gym rat, but they kept up with their fitness pretty well. Until they didn’t.

Beel hadn’t wanted to pry, but he had been worried about them when they stopped working out. He could tell they were suffering physically from it as well - whatever had stopped them from exercising had also stopped them from taking care of their body in general, and he could tell by the weakness in their arms and the dragging of their feet that they weren’t at the top of their game.

He called out their name as he approached them. “You’re here.”

They jumped, eyes wild before they realized who was talking to them, and they shot him a sheepish grin. “Oh, hey, Beel.”

“You haven’t worked out in a while,” Beel stated matter-of-factly before smiling warmly at them. “It’s good to see you here again.”

“Ah, yeah,” they mumbled, looking away. “Kind of…lost my momentum for a bit, I guess. But!” they perked up. “I’m back at it!”

“Good. That’s good.” Beel dropped his bag next to theirs on the bench. “Want me to spot you?”

Belphegor: He was trying to stay awake this time, honest.

Belphie didn’t exactly have the best track record for showing up to class, much less managing to remain conscious for it. Lucifer had been nagging him lately about his attendance, but he was always nagging him about something. No, the real winner of the annoying yet effective big brother olympics was Mammon, who had looked Belphie dead in the eye and said “I bet you couldn’t show up to class for a whole week if you tried.”

And Belphegor was nothing if not a stubborn asshole.

Although, the dare was about going to class, not staying awake, so technically he could snag a nap and Mammon couldn’t say any - 

Belphie’s eyelids snapped open - he hadn’t even realized he had closed them - when something small and bright blue landed on the desk in front of him. It took a moment for him to refocus, but when he did he noticed that a small folded paper star had bounced in front of him.

He raised an eyebrow before turning to look at the human, who was sitting a few seats away from him looking too innocent for them not to be the culprit.

“Can I help you?” he muttered.

“Wakey-wakey, Belphie,” they grinned back at him. They had surrounded themself with a myriad of different-colored paper stars, something Belphie hadn’t seen them do in quite a long time. They had claimed that keeping their hands busy helped them focus during class, and even outside of class they were usually doing some sort of origami project. But at some point, they had stopped. Maybe someone had pointed it out to them, maybe something happened to make them depressed, he didn’t know. But he had kind of missed seeing their little army of paper animals.

“Can you make a fox?”

[zenonaa]

30, ikuzono 👉👈

Too quick, mumbled into your scarf

When Mukuro Ikusaba was fourteen-years-old, a freak snowstorm struck her squad’s camp on a mountain in the Sinai Peninsula. The Fenrir Mercenary Group’s search team didn’t discover them until three weeks later, by which time Mukuro was the only one who hadn’t frozen to death. 

Upon being questioned by her rescuers about how she survived, she stated, “I’ve trained heavily in this sort of environment.”

Growing up, she spent many winter evenings outside various bars and izakayas. She would stand and wait while Junko flocked between different establishments. The twins started doing this in elementary school and continued even after enrolling at Hope’s Peak. Even though they didn’t have to anymore. They no longer had to beg or steal or flirt to survive. They didn’t live on the streets.

Yet Junko still regularly drags Mukuro to alleyways fleeced with izakayas and bars.

“Stay here,” says Junko, bundled up in a white leopard coat that looks far warmer than Mukuro’s school blazer. Just seeing Junko’s Monobear earmuffs, commissioned from the Super High School Level Cosplayer, makes Mukuro’s ears burn with desire. Or it could be the onset of hypothermia.

Though the evening has only recently started sinking its teeth in, snow has been gushing down for hours. When Mukuro survived that snowstorm all those years ago, she fashioned herself appropriate wear from the camp’s supplies and growing pile of corpses. Here, she wears her school uniform. Short skirt. Shoes with thin soles. Shirt that becomes dangerously translucent when wet. She’ll endure this storm, like she has all the others, but it won’t be comfortable. At all.

“Please can I come in with you?” asks Mukuro as snow whips her face.

A scowl flits onto Junko.

“Don’t you remember?” Junko wags a gloved finger. 

At the same time, they say, “Mukuro-chan can’t accompany Junko-chan because she is far too ugly and smelly and has the charm of a slug.”

“That’s right,” says Junko, beaming. She pats Mukuro’s frigid cheek before strutting away, bathed in neon signs and red lanterns’ glows until she disappears inside a bar.

A sigh escapes Mukuro. Each time she asks, the outcome is always the same. Junko often says Mukuro isn’t as stubborn as a mule, but as stupid as one. Mukuro parks her butt against a wall and pulls her phone out of her blazer pocket. When she was with Fenrir, one of her comrades introduced her to a trademarked lettered tile game. The mobile app helped her improve her English, and whenever she saw a word tile with a letter and number on it, she remembered him fondly. Shame a landmine blew him to tiny pieces.

It’s a decent pastime, and the texture on her gloves allows for Mukuro to touch her phone screen without taking them off. However, as more snow falls, the screen starts playing up. Apps open and close without her doing the appropriate touches. Letter tiles ricochet off the sides of the screen. Grimacing, she puts her phone away and tucks her hands under her armpits, and she waits for her sister to return.

And she waits.

And she waits.

And she wai-

“Ikusaba-san?”

Mukuro turns her head an inch, working against the snow piled all over her. Sayaka Maizono blinks, dressed nice and cosy in a red winter dress with fake fur trim and a matching shoulder shawl. Her blue hair writhes in the wind, yet her wool beret perches firmly on her head. The pink scarf around her neck flutters elegantly. She looks like she’s from a brochure, while Mukuro resembles a snowman. Only instead of a carrot, Mukuro looks like she has a tomato wedged on her face with twin icicles sticking out the bottom.

It’s a wonder Sayaka recognised her. Or wanted to associate with her.

“Are you all right?” asks Sayaka, brow crinkling. Mukuro tries to open her mouth, but her lips have frozen shut. She licks at the join until they come apart.

Then she says, “Ick ine.”

Sayaka’s frown deepens as she steps up to Mukuro. When she raises her hand, Mukuro tenses. But Sayaka doesn’t hit her. Instead, she brushes snow from Mukuro’s shoulders and face. She sweeps it out of her short dark hair too.

Each touch feels like the caress of a blade. Mukuro’s nerves light up, and blood pounds between her ears. At any moment, Sayaka could dig a finger into her flesh, or try to sink her teeth into Mukuro’s pale neck. If she did, at least Mukuro would know what to do. She knows every counter to every attack, but when it comes to Sayaka’s soft hands, her mind draws a blank.

“There. Much better,” says Sayaka, smiling. “I can see your face now.”

If it had been Junko, she would have put a paper bag over Mukuro’s head instead. Mukuro’s heart thunders. Though Sayaka has taken her hands off Mukuro, they’re still standing close together. Too close. Snowflakes dust Sayaka’s eyelashes. Perfume, jasmine and earthy, weaves through the flurry of snow and stabs up Mukuro’s nose. The smart thing to do would be to shove Sayaka away, because if Junko discovered them, discovered how Sayaka could immobilise Mukuro just by stroking her cheek, then Mukuro would be deemed faulty. Useless. Disposable.

“Enoshima-san must be so happy to have a sister as dependable as you,” says Sayaka.

Mukuro stiffens. “How’d...?”

Sayaka cocks her head, lips curtseyed in a grin. “I read your mind.” 

When Mukuro touches her hands to her temples, as if checking whether her thoughts are leaking out from there, Sayaka giggles. It’s a small, delicate sound that Mukuro wants to grab out of the air and bottle.

“I’m joking. I have good intuition. You are funny, Ikusaba-san.” Sayaka gets her phone out of her coat pocket and frowns. “Ah, I have a meeting with my agent soon. I would love to keep you company, but I can’t be late. He told me off pretty badly last time.”

Her lips twist in thought. Mukuro’s gaze gets sucked into them.

“I hate to leave you... so this will suffice.” Sayaka unwraps her scarf and layers it around Mukuro’s neck. “There. It’ll almost be like I’m still with you.”

Mukuro strokes it gently, her face aflame. It’s almost like... an embrace. A hug. Junko would kill her if she knew. Sayaka may as well have laid a noose on her, yet she doesn’t want to remove it. Not yet. Stupid as a mule.

“I love you,” whispers Mukuro into the scarf.

“What did you say?” asks Sayaka, squinting. Mukuro twitches.

“I um... said... I... love... stew!”

She tosses her head back and barks out some laughter. In front of her, Sayaka stares, but then a grin eases onto her face.

“Another time, I’ll cook you up some nikujaga,” she promises Mukuro. “I’ll see you later.”

Sayaka wiggles her fingers then walks away. It takes only a few paces for the warmth in Mukuro to start fading. She fidgets with the scarf, staring after Sayaka. No one has ever given her something so soft, so pretty before. Then she realises that Sayaka probably only meant to lend it to her.

“W-When do you want it back?” Mukuro calls after her.

“Give it to me tomorrow,” Sayaka says before winking. “Over hot chocolate. Yuri Café, seven o’clock.”

The snowstorm consumes Sayaka. Her blue hair gives another flutter before vanishing along with the rest of her. Wind whistles in Mukuro’s ears as she takes off the scarf and tucks it under her blazer, holds it against her chest. Over her heart.

“You are so gay,” says Junko in her ear, her voice shooting razorsharp chills through Mukuro.

“I... I...” Mukuro stammers.

Junko laughs and rests an arm on Mukuro’s shoulder. “Relax, Muku-chan. I’m not mad. I’m ecstatic, in fact.”

“You are?”

“Yeah! I can’t wait to see how this blows up in your face. Seeing you awkwardly bumble and crash and burn is much funnier than me intervening. If I was to ruin things, it’d be like, totally unfulfilling and cheap. It’d be like if instead of my intellect and cunning, I used some nerd’s video to hypnotise people into despair. Cheap! Lame!”

Mukuro doesn’t understand the allegory, but she understands that Junko has let her keep the scarf. Junko leads Mukuro to the next street and dumps her outside another bar. As Mukuro hugs herself, she finds herself plenty warm enough without wearing the scarf on her neck.

Or it’s the onset of hypothermia.

[mymoodwriting]

4.2k, yandere, torture, manipulation, experimentation, assault, shock collars, drugs (@xcharlottemikaelsonx @starillusion13)                                

“It’s been months.”

“Not surprising. I told you they’d hold on tight.”

     When Taemin had told them it would be a while before they’d see you again, they kinda hoped he was lying. Half a year later, they could finally see that he was right.

“Still… I can’t help but wonder if she’s even alive…”

“If you think she’s dead, you’re an idiot.” Taemin stated. “She is everything the Organization wanted. They are going to be careful, and they are going to take their time training her until she’s what they really want. We weren’t lucky enough to be that special.”

“Your training wasn’t easy.” Ten said. “So I doubt she has it easy either.”

“They won’t let her die if that’s what you’re worried about… no matter what…”

“I’m not so sure that’s reassuring.”

“Be patient. We’ll see her again. I don’t doubt that.”

❤

    Without you around they didn’t have much to fight over, so it forced cooperation. All they really had now was each other, and their goal to find you. They had ways to pass the time, training, yelling at each other, beating each other up, and sometimes they’d go out as a team. Even if they were waiting on your reappearance, the Organization was still operating. Taemin kept a close eye on them, and when he found a chance to get information he’d always jump on it. Now there wasn’t any arguing on who was in charge.

    It wasn’t just them being submissive, but more a proper partnership. Taemin knew the most about the Organization and how they operated, so he was better suited in the role of leader anyway. As time went on, as they went out together, they learned to work more harmoniously. They’d always look for clues about you as well. Hoping to find any information on you, hoping to find your location and rescue you. That was rarely the case, and it was hard to keep holding out for hope. Although when they finally got something like that, it wasn’t really what they wanted to find.

“Test Subject 0046, trial number 394-”

    Taemin had been searching through some files when he came across a familiar name. He found videos and clicked on one, immediately seeing you on screen. You were collared, dressed in white, and you looked so exhausted. When he realized Mark was peeking over his shoulder he immediately stopped the video and deleted everything.

“That… that was y/n!” Mark yelled. “That was her! Play the video.”

“No.”

“What was-”

“I said no!” Taemin hissed. “I know what those videos are, and she wouldn’t want you to see her like that.”

“Like what?” Taeyong questioned. “What was that video?”

“It’s just… records… of her training… they did that for us too, so they could look back and see what we did, what we responded too.”

“Is she alright?”

“She didn’t look so good, but she’s alive. The date on it was rather recent, so there’s the evidence you’ve been waiting for.”

“Do we know where she is?” Ten questioned. “Or is that too much to hope for?”

“No location I’m afraid.” 

“The training facilities are numerous.” Kai reminded. “And it’s likely she gets moved whenever we attack a location.”

“We’re also prone to trashing them.” Baekhyun added. “They don’t mind as long as we’re progressing. I’ve completely fried a whole building’s electrical system once or twice.”

“The hell?” Mark stated. “You can do that.”

“I can control it now.”

“You’ve also improved with your abilities.” Taemin mentioned. “So progress is made all around. I’m impressed, but we’re not done yet.”

“Speaking of our training.” Kai cut in. “ I found something you’re not gonna like.”

“What?”

“It seems the Organization is ready to start up the experiment again.”

“Of course, they have what they want, and with the rest of us missing, they’d want a whole new batch of test subjects.”

❤

“Again!”

    It was always the training with each other that complicated matters. Kai and Baekhyun still had their cocky attitudes, and the others really were not at their level. For the most part Mark could better keep up with Kai, the fights more based on being able to locate the other before they appear and avoid a hit. Despite his best efforts and improvement, Kai always landed a hit, and after the one Mark gets thrown off his game and loses. It annoyed and frustrated him to no end, not getting how the other managed.

“Can we take a break?”

“Five minutes.”

“Seriously. You wanna kick my ass that bad?”

“You’ve gotten better.” Kai admitted. “So don’t be so hard on yourself.”

“All this time, and how many hits have I landed on you?”

“None.”

“I don’t really think I’m improving.”

“It takes me longer to hit you now than it did at first.”

“That’s not really motivational.”

“You’re improving, even if you don’t think so. I train with you, I know how you think, the enemy doesn’t.”

“I guess…”

“Come on, let’s go again.”

“Ugh, fine.”

    Besides Mark, Kai also tended to train with Taeyong. The multiple enemies didn’t seem to bother him. Although just like with Mark, he remains untouched. For Taeyong it was about control, being able to duplicate and get his doubles into action fast, while also protecting himself. There was improvement there as well, even if the boy didn’t think so. When it came to Ten, his training involved a lot more focus. Baekhyun knew about being patient and figuring things out, although his student didn’t.

“What more do you expect from me?” Ten questioned. “I think I’m at my limit. I can heal living objects, and fix inanimate things. What’s possibly next?”

“You have to go beyond what you think is possible.” Baekhyun responded. “All I thought I could do was turn the light on and off, not create hallucinations, or fire.”

“Then where do you see my powers going?”

“Look at what you can do, the basics of it, and go further.”

“But like what? You had a whole team of scientists dissect your powers and figure out things for you to try. I don’t have that.”

    The doors to the garden opened and Taemin walked in. Baekhyun looked over and waved, informing Taemin of Ten’s recent accomplishments.

“How is he doing?”

“Good.” Baekhyun said. “Just a little stuck.”

“Why are we still even training?” Ten asked. “We’re far more capable with our powers now than before.”

“Perhaps, but I need you to be better.”

“Why?”

“Cause you’re the only hope.”

“What?”

“Even if we get lucky and come across y/n, she won’t be alone. The Organization has the means to block my powers, as well as Baekhyun’s and Kai’s, but not yours. I need you all to be capable of handling yourselves in that situation. Everything will most likely come down to you.”

“But what more do you expect of us?” Ten wondered. “I feel like I’ve reached my limit.”

“I’ve been there too, but trust me, you are capable of more.”

“Like what? You keep saying that but I can’t even picture it.”

“You have to open your eyes.”

    Taemin used his powers to pick an apple off one of the trees, and bring it to him. He broke it in half, tossing a piece over to Ten.

“I know I can fix this apple, make it whole again, heal it, but what else is there?”

“The apple, where does it come from?”

“Huh?”

“What’s the origin of the apple?”

“Uh… it comes from a seed? From a tree?”

“The seed, that’s the origin isn’t it? A little seed you could plant and grow into a tree that would then become an apple.”

“Right… but…”

“You heal, you fix what is broken. Or more accurately you return something to its original state. Why not go further and return it to its original form? Why not take the apple,” Taemin tossed Ten the other half. “And turn it back into a seed.”

“I… I can’t possibly do that.”

“You’d be healing the apple, all the way back into its original form. Imagine a door, placing your hand on it and separating the materials, healing them individually, and returning them back to their original form too. Your ability to heal can be a form of destruction, don’t you think?”

“… is that even possible for me to do?”

“You won’t know unless you try.” Taemin cleared his throat. “Baekhyun, how are we doing on the decryption?”

“The program is still running, but nothing yet. Even if the surface data suggests info on the experiment restarting, there’s no guarantee we’d get anything from breaking the code.”

“The information we got alone is enough to put us on alert. I’ll keep looking for connections on my end.”

    Taemin hadn’t really been cautious before but now was the time for it. He’d have everyone wear bracelets going forward when they went out, just in case they’d happen to run into you. If the Organization was about ready to restart such a horrible thing, then you must be in a position they’re happy with. He didn’t know what to expect, but he wanted to make sure they were all prepared for anything. Taemin didn’t have any expectations over the data they had stolen, so when it gave them a location he was grateful, but also displeased.

“A club?” Taeyong stated. “Their target is another club?”

“It worked for them once.” Kai said. “So not a bad idea to bet on it again.”

“Things would be different this time too.” Baekhyun added. “Y/n will most likely be there.”

“How can you tell?” Mark questioned.

“Did you forget how you got away? You just left, but with someone capable of mind control, they could easily lock down the building and make sure everyone in there cooperated. Their test pool this time would be about three times bigger.”

“Which means more casualties.” Taemin mentioned. “Going in there means the only people we can trust is each other, but even then that won’t last long. We’ll wind up on our own.”

“This is dangerous.” Kai added. “That whole building, everyone inside will basically be our enemy. Trying to get y/n out, if she really does end up there, could get us all captured.”

“We have to take that chance.” Ten stated. “If there’s a chance, a good chance, y/n will be there, we have to take it.”

“Did you forget the part where the whole building becomes a cage for us?”

“You rather we pass this up?”

“Ten’s right.” Taemin cut in. “Regardless of the danger we have to go in. The number of people who will be affected, taken, the Organization could easily go off radar after pulling off something like this. Which means y/n would be off radar too. This could be the only chance we get to rescue her after all these months. After this, the chances get lower and the risks get higher.”

❤

    They all hated being back in a club. A reminder for them about the night their lives changed forever. Since they got in without much problem, things had probably only just begun. Whether you were there or not, this was more about stopping this whole thing from starting again. The atmosphere seemed normal, so it meant they’d need to get into VIP. The bouncer wasn’t letting anyone in, which wasn’t exactly a good, but ultimately not a problem for Taemin. Usually one would think the VIP area would be lively, but besides the music the place seemed oddly quiet.

“Spread out.” Taemin ordered. “Check the rooms. If they’re doing things like before, there’s probably a certain drink being offered.”

    They split off, checking the rooms. Some seemed empty, and others had guests that were passed out. Ten went into the room to investigate, seeing that the people were still alive. He looked around, finding some empty glasses with a few drops of a blue liquid at the bottom. It was a familiar look, but given the results, the formula had been changed. He wouldn’t be the only one to discover this, but it made him wonder if they were too late.

    As Taemin exited a room he saw what appeared to be a waiter exit another. She wore a black lace blindfold to hide her eyes, and a matching choker. Dressed in a similar outfit meant to entice, and was probably the one handing out tainted drinks. He had questions, even if they couldn’t answer. As the girl walked by he grabbed their arm, and upon being closer he realized something. Taemin reached up and ripped the blindfold off, seeing your face. Your eyes were devoid of individuality, and when he ripped off the choker he could see the collar it had been hiding.

“They found a way to tame you…”

    Taemin reached up to take the collar off, only to see you come to life and attack him. You got a hit on him before he started to defend himself. Soon enough the commotion got the attention of the others. They were glad to see you, but were confused by the circumstances.

“Get the collar off her.” Taemin yelled.

    No one really acted, not wanting to hurt you, but also getting the collar off wouldn’t be easy. Everyone thought maybe Kai would deal with this, but he didn’t.

“Mark, use your powers and get the collar off.” Kai said.

“Why me? You’re better at this.”

“You think I haven’t been trying? My powers aren’t working.”

“Neither are mine.” Baekhyun added. “So you guys need to do something!”

    Even if you weren’t all there, you were listening and processing things. So when you had the chance you bolted, intending to escape from them. It wouldn’t be easy though, so you actually ran into a room you hadn’t been to yet, easily getting the people there on your side. So when the boys came in, they were met with a surprise attack. They didn’t want to hurt innocent people, but the longer you avoided them, the easier it was to get yourself a little army.

“Taemin.”

“I know.” Taemin spat. “This is impressive, but we can’t kill anyone. Mark, get her!”

    When Mark got himself free he chased after you, portaling to your side and then taking hold of your arm, portaling you somewhere else. He was exhausted, and in a bit of a panic, so only took you somewhere quieter, outside in the alleyway. That didn’t work out since as soon as you were on solid ground you punched him in the face, not giving him a chance to recover. Mark couldn’t bring himself to hit you no matter how hard you hit him. The only thing he had was his words.

“Y/n! Snap out of it! It’s me, Mark! Come on, you know me!”

    He was practically begging you to return to him, and it didn’t seem to be working, but he’d keep trying. He was spouting out nonsense, recalling old memories hoping something goes deep enough to reach you.

“Please, y/n, I won’t hurt you!”

    The sudden stop in hits was nice, but Mark was more worried about you. When he looked over you were holding your head and stumbling around.

“Y/n.”

    Mark quickly got up, but was still recovering. You were also moving away from him, going out towards the streets. Soon enough the others made their way out to the alley. Some helped Mark, and others went after you. Although once you were out on the streets you had the cars swerving to avoid you, but going straight for the others.

“We have to go.” Taemin ordered. “Mark, get us out.”

“What?” Taeyong yelled. “What about y/n?”

“We are putting people in danger like this! Mark!”

    Even if he didn’t want to, he knew Taemin was right, and took everyone back home. After a moment Kai and Baekhyun tested their powers again, but Taemin ended up pinning Mark against the wall with his powers, choking him out.

“What happened!”

“Let him go!” Ten yelled.

“Answer me! I told you to get her out, why didn’t you bring her here!”

“I… I panicked…”

“Is that seriously your excuse! Even when you had her outside?”

“I can’t… hurt… her…”

“She’s not herself right now, we don’t have the luxury of hesitation.”

“Put him down!” Ten repeated. “I thought we were done fighting among ourselves!”

“You realize we blew our chance, right?” Baekhyun reminded. “Now that we got close once, the Organization won’t let it happen again. If we ever get close to her again, rescuing her is gonna be practically impossible!”

“None of us want to hurt y/n!” Taeyong stated.

“I can make you.” Taemin spat back.

“No!” Ten hissed. “We are not fucken doing that again! You aren’t breaking us down and turning us into your puppets! We’re a team now, with one goal! Rescue y/n, and destroy this organization.”

“He’s right, you know.” Taeyong mumbled. “Taemin… y/n isn’t herself right now, we can’t act like it. We’ll end up captured or killed. We could even get her killed.”

“And they’ll be taking advantage of that.” Kai added. “Tonight is proof of that. We didn’t want to lay a finger on her, so even if we had her outnumbered she still beat us.”

    Taemin dropped Mark, storming out of the room. None of them were happy with the outcome from the night, but all they could do was train and keep up their usual work. You’d cross paths again, they just had to be patient some more.

❤

“Just cause we got punished for our mistakes, doesn’t mean you need to do the same.” Kai said. “Don’t you think you crossed a line with Mark?”

“I know… we were so close though.”

“Her collar dampened our powers.” Baekhyun stated. “And it has a range, so we can’t get close to her and use our powers.”

“It’s really up to them…”

    Things returned to what they considered normal. Going out to gather intel and work with that to find you and stop the Organization. They didn’t see you again, bringing them all down. No one lost hope. They had confirmation you were alive, so now it was about finding you and getting you out. Nothing really seemed to change, although keeping tabs on the club they went to did yield some important information.

“This place, it seems to be a major headquarters for the Organization.” Taemin explained. “So don’t blow it. The intel we can get on them and y/n, this could be what we’ve been working towards this whole time.”

    Recon took a bit longer with this target, but they found their way in. It seemed like their usual job, get the intel and get out, but while keeping a lookout Ten saw something interesting on the monitors.

“Guys… I think she’s here…”

“What?”

“Y/n… she’s in the building.” 

“Where?”

    Getting you was important, but so was the information, so Taemin decided to split up. Mark was the one who could get to you fastest as long as he knew where to go, so he and Ten, and Taeyong, went off to go find you, and the rest would stay behind. Those three would still have their powers even when they got close, and Taemin told them not to fuck it up. Ten took the lead, all of them keeping a low profile and eventually finding you. Although you weren’t alone. Mark didn’t just want to portal you off, knowing he might accidentally bring someone else, so they had to strike first. Taeyong volunteered, duplicating himself and charging in.

    They had been going for a low profile, but they threw that out the window now. Taeyong put up a good fight, but you did too. Despite landing a few hits, you suddenly bolted to one of the duplicates, which was the real Taeyong. Without hesitation you broke his arm, startling everyone. Mark and Ten rushed over, Mark finding a way to distract you while Ten healed up his teammate. They were all in shock though, but that seemed to finally get it through their heads. You weren’t the girl they knew. To get her back they needed to deal with the one pretending to be you, which meant no holding back.

    Once healed up Taeyong made more duplicates, pushing himself to his own limits. Ten had figured out how to make his touch poisonous, practically destroying anything he touched, including flesh. Mark was being decent by not really hurting anyone, and keeping others out of the fight. They managed to get the obstacles out of the way, which left you greatly outnumbered. By then you had a busted lip, but still ready to fight. You tried spitting out orders, but they had their bracelets to block you, so they had the advantage. Taeyong and his copies wrestled with you, pinning you down and Mark managed to get the collar off.

    You struggled under Taeyong for a moment after it was removed, then froze. You blinked a few times, your vision starting to regain clarity. Seeing Taeyong’s face didn’t feel real, but that feeling only lasted a moment. Suddenly the quiet was filled with noises and you screamed, covering your ears as if that would help. There were too many voices, and the boys took that as a sign to leave. Although they had to check in with the others, and you certainly wouldn’t be able to help, so Mark took you with him, going somewhere truly quiet.

“Hey, hey it’s okay, take a deep breath.”

    The loud noises ceased so fast you needed a moment to make sure you didn’t go deaf. You took in the emptiness of the room, getting a sense of familiarity, but things were still a blur. Mark wasn’t, at least you hoped.

“Mark… is that you?”

“Yeah, I’m right here.”

    Now the tears were blurring your vision, and you hugged him tighter, needing to know if he was real. Feeling his body made you weep even harder, and you don’t know how long you stayed like that. You only stopped as you ran out of tears, everything else finally weighing you down.

“You’re alright… you’re alright…”

“It hurts…”

“I know.” Mark reached up to your lip and made you flinch. “Sorry. When Ten gets back he can fix you up.”

    Right on cue the door to the room opened, the rest of the boys piling in. You found new tears to shed upon seeing them, apologizing for hurting them. You immediately grabbed Taeyong’s arm, making sure he was alright.

“I’m okay, I promise. Ten healed me up.”

“I’m sorry…”

“I’m fine, but… how did you know which one was actually me?”

“You have a different frequency compared to your doubles… more similar to the other individuals than your clones.”

“You really got stronger.” Taemin commented. “Very impressive.”

“Yeah…”

“I do owe you an apology as well, for that day. What happened was my fault.”

“That’s in the past… besides I wouldn’t really get any better otherwise…”

“Still.”

“What happens now?” 

“Well, we got somethings.” Baekhyun explained. “It’s gonna take a bit to crack, but it’s the type of information we need to take the Organization down.”

“So it’s over?”

“Not quite yet.”

❤

    You needed time to heal, to recover, in every way. Ten took care of physical injuries, but everything else was on you. The collar had always helped with your powers, but you still needed to gain proper control of yourself. It still felt like a dream at times, being back with them. You’d also wonder if you had just finally broken and were hiding in your own head. Either way, you’d stay here with them, where you were happy.

“So this is it?” Taeyong questioned. “We got what we wanted.”

“Not quite.”

“But if we go public with this, we’ll be hunted.” Ten said. “We’d have to live on the run forever.”

“That’s a problem we can deal with together.” Kai assured. “Besides, you really think anyone is gonna be able to stop us?’

“We expose the Organization, and they get shut down.” Taemin added. “Even if they got some more subjects from that other night, they won’t be running their experiment any longer. We’re the only real survivors here.”

“It wouldn’t be fun to live in hiding anyway.” Mark said. “So how are we doing this?”

“Nothing like gathering media sources and just letting them have it all at once.” Baekhyun explained. “We get the story out and pull the rug from underneath them. They won’t have time to hide anything, and will get shut down fast. After that, not really our problem.”

“Can we really just expose them and run off?” Taeyong questioned. “Shouldn’t we do more?”

“If it comes down to it, I suppose.”

“Let’s just do this one step at a time.” You said. “We’ll figure things out as we get to them, together, right?”

“Yeah, together.”

    You took the hand of those nearest to you. This nightmare wasn’t over, but you were going in the right direction so you could wake up and be free. No matter what happened next, you were with the people you wanted to be. Together you could get through anything, and no one was going to get in your way. Never again.

(// Previous)

[dballzposting]

I’m watching a subbed dragon ball and I DO NOT KNOW how to word this eloquently / I have no screenshots of proof so I’m just wondering if anyone else has seen dragon ball and has noticed this?

In the Piccolo Daimao arch Goku straight-up has some shit to say. Before he was all young and childish and goofy, and when it came to words he STRAIGHTFORWARD in a fight - when serious, he would state outright that he doesn’t have the patience for his opponents boasts + hedges + insults + general repartee.

But at the turn of the arch it seemed like the shock and grief of Kuririn’s death affected Goku immediately, and he suddenly had words to say. He began acting more like what we see in the BAD GUYS - the attitude that denotes their weakness and is assurance of their later defeat.

Of course the memories are fuzzy by now but off of the top of my head: He called Yajirobe a bastard, to which Yajirobe responded with his debut of “Hey, that’s my line!” He also was rash to assume that Yajirobe was his enemy, but that’s because well, he just got his shit thrashed by Cymbal, and he’s not thinking straight through the grief and pain and all.

I just kept seeing little things like that throughout the arch - like the grief had loosened his tongue, or matured him, or he’s just ageing naturally - Goku engages in repartee now all of a sudden. I feel dumb because I have no solid memories now but just believe me. When he was fighting Piccolo he said some shit that had me clutch my pearls to see coming from him. Altogether, Goku is exhibiting a newfound WIT WITH and FAVOR FOR words, and a confidence that when laced with his anger and impatience almost comes across as arrogance. 

My most recent (and therefore, extant) example is when Goku is facing Mr Popo. Just in the little I’ve seen thus far, he’s sort of acting like a classic dragon ball villain E.G. loser. When Mr Popo is able to land the first hit on him, Goku actually blames it on dumb luck, and assures himself that it won’t happen again. Yknow, like all the villains do when Goku is able to land a hit on them.

And then he actually starts to insult his opponent. Yknow, the type of behavior that Goku used to not have patience for, and used to be too virtuous/mature/honorable for, and he would at times ask his opponent to cease with the hot talk and to get on with the fight.

Goku is straight up sloppy, arrogant, and IMPATIENT in this fight thus far, and the shit he lets himself think is too close to the shit that always ends up costing some villain a victory.

I know this wasn’t eloquent, and I know that I failed to offer sufficient proof, but I’m wondering if anyone else noticed this as well and has some thoughts on it. It feels like a lot of things.

Goku is still caught up in the grief and pain of the ARDUOUS ORDEALS he just went through. It’s more to ask of anyone ever, and now he’s gotta do one more fucking thing. And we can understand his impatience, then. Furthermore, it does just feel like he’s gotten older. Maybe his brain is hardening, and all of his victories are catching up to his ego. He’s not his usual self of awe and admiration for a strong opponent - he’s seen life and death too INTIMATELY these past days and he’s TENSE. In all of this he’s found his words and is playing along with the warrior’s repartee that he’s been exposed to by battle after battle.

Did anyone else notice anything similar and take start by it?

[sleeptowns]

a year (or so) of fics, in retrospect

once every handful of years i remember to look back at the collection of projects i’ve finished recently and to simulate a critique as if i’m an art school student — and also as if i’m the haunted teacher’s assistant who wants to be gentle on the prof’s behalf but actually hates your work and also i am the other students who have been sitting there for seven hours straight and can’t offer much more except say, “it’s fine.” a one-man critique day, all parts played by me. 

sometimes i do this and the last period of writing has been drier than a pizza slice left in the winter sun, but this time i’m lucky that these last couple of years have been the closest i’ve had to a writing pax romana.

with that said, i’m not entirely sure how valid i am whenever i think these days that my writing has gone through some drastic changes in the last year; i’m not even sure if it’s accurate to call any of it growth, though i’m aware it’s the sort of thing i won’t have a clear perspective on until a few years after the fact. but i do know that i’m lucky to have so many works to act as markers for different periods of my writing, and while it’s far from a sure method of evaluation, there are parts there that i’m able to at least assess, if not outright measure. in the last year or so, my fics have started mutating towards — not really a separate sort of output than my previous ones, but definitely older somehow. older and quite different because of it: stylistic choices i would have steered clear of before, failed and/or lacklustre genre explorations, even relationship dynamics that were previously unfamiliar territory. my most recent fic feels like a culmination of all my attempts at wrestling with my writing in the ring, and now that it’s a few weeks behind me and i get to look at it with fresh(er) eyes and accept that it’s my favourite child (i’m sorry flls... you’re not too far behind), it’s also reminded me that i have a now overdue fic roundup to write. 

tangentially speaking, it’s interesting that you never really hear about self-taught writers. self-taught artists, yes, and self-taught musicians, but never quite self-taught writers. i don’t exactly purport to have taught myself everything i know about writing, and i know you can’t really be self-anything as a writer; what i lack in technique and finesse learned from proper writing classes, teachers, and/or workshops, i owe to the media i’ve consumed, good and bad, as well as to the creators i love and to all the thoughtful readers i’ve had over the years. if i’m self-taught in any way, then the self as a teacher was reared by countless others who have honed in me a limitless capacity to be an observer to stories, mine and all else. 

this post is just a roundup of all my fics from december 2020 to january 2023, including only the ones with enough substantial content to write about, which disqualifies a lot of the fics i left at one or five scenes max but qualifies the ones i abandoned at one chapter. just a little something for me to reference as i figure out where to take my writing next and hopefully move towards some kind of ✨ growth ✨ lol 

・・・・・・

FIRST LOVE, LATE SPRING december 2020 to march 2021, jujutsu kaisen trial element | dual pov romance, multimedia (?)

i covered a bit of the early chapters and conceptualization for flls in a separate post, but as i was reflecting on how to write a continuation, it occurred to me that if there’s a clear before and after to the current state of my writing, then the first portion of flls chapter five is where i’ll find it. 

when i was drafting my 58393th version of that chapter — nothing was working, none of it was the right vibe i needed, most of them too detached or too on-the-nose but never the perfect middle — i happened upon trying second person pov by accident. i’m not the biggest fan of second person (though to be fair, i don’t think anyone is) but by that point i was so sick of writing and rewriting this one section and not getting anywhere that i wondered if i should just lean all the way into that disgust. why not do something i hated entirely? and act of desperation as that was, the moment i started writing in curt, nauseating second person, i knew it was the right choice. 

the thing about writing flls!yuuji is that he felt both alive and unfamiliar. flls!megumi was easier to understand, even if he was trickier to write — but yuuji, i had to really work to get to know. one thing about him that i knew to be careful about from the very beginning of jjk is that it would be too surface level to think this boy is an extrovert. yuuji is usually painted as an energetic, sunny person, and i don’t think he’s not that, but there’s something about yuuji that’s also very internal and almost innately… isolated? i don’t know if that’s necessarily the right word, but there’s a lot about him as a character that’s out of view or grasp, which ironically i find people taking at face value. in flls, he required a lot more balance than megumi, who was a dam waiting to be relieved of its duties. flls!yuuji knows who or what he is — how could he not, when he’s never had a choice but to be this person, this kid who lost his grandpa, this kid who needs love but doesn’t know how to ask for it because he doesn’t even know there are forms of it he can ask for? 

how to write a character like that? how to nudge someone who doesn’t reveal even at his most revealing towards the christmas eve fight i had set up in the beginning of flls chapter one? back before chapter six of flls came out, i saw a lot of people argue that megumi and yuuji just needed to communicate, and yes, of course they do, but i was also very adamant as i started chapter five that the real tragedy about them is that communication will do nothing in the end. even if they magically became master communicators about their needs and wants and insecurities, none of it will change the fact that neither of them are ready to love and be loved by the other person. at least not in any way that constitutes a relationship that feels like love. 

i think that’s the key to writing the relationship in flls. it was never a question that they loved each other, and how much. never. this is probably the first piece of ~growth i appreciated about flls. it would be easy to write a romance where the main conflict is them not knowing the other loved them back, but flls got rid of that quite early. i left no room for doubt — or at least this is the hope — that flls!itfs loved each other in a way no one else would be able to compare to. they’re it for each other. but if it had been as simple as portraying that, then i never would have finished flls at all, and it definitely wouldn’t have been my longest fic at the time. 

instead — what if it was a given that they loved each other, and it still wasn’t enough? what kind of story can we spin about that? what kind of questions and answers can we find?

that’s actually such a pretentious way to frame that, but the fact of the matter is that i needed to not waste space now that we’re five chapters in. this is the beginning of the end. how do we shift gears and take the tone of the entire story along with it? i don’t know if there’s something about second person pov that’s just inherently full of dread, but it did quite a bit of work in chapter five. it felt disembodying for me as a writer, and i could only hope the same for readers. i was really, really worried some people will give up reading altogether thinking all of chapter five will be in second person, but i didn’t want to compromise. it was going to be second person for most of their real relationship or nothing: vaguely dissociative, intensely drained, with no room to actually enjoy being each other’s boyfriend. the main challenge was to not go from zero to a hundred in a snap. i had the room to do so in only one chapter, but i had to find a way to keep a tight rein on the pace or else the whole fic will fail. 

there also had to be love. and longing. and a desperation to make it work. i think that was yuuji in a nutshell — someone desperate to make it work, whatever this thing is. that’s what constitutes his strengths and his weaknesses, in canon and in flls. i wanted to find a way to make that palpable to a reader the way it was palpable to me while writing yuuji in second person. somewhere along making sure to tether myself to him by knowing what pieces of media he’d reference (high school musical and fullmetal alchemist) and his life outside of megumi (work, basketball, tea with nanami, skateboarding), i had to also drown with yuuji in the hope that the reader would follow. chapter three afforded me the luxury of only examining yuuji from the omniscience of a writer writing in third person — i could dismantle him through the therapy scene, could show myself and the reader a way to understand him, but i could not take us there to where he is. 

i don’t know how successful the second person pov was, ultimately, though i’d be lying if i said it wasn’t what i thought was truly best at the time. it probably wasn’t that creative to anyone but me, but it gave me a nudge towards different ways to explore… vibes. atmosphere, maybe, is the more formal word for it. if not for the second person pov choice in flls, i wouldn’t have been nudged towards kamo’s newsletter to act as the midway point of the story, the last palate cleanser i’ll allow myself and the reader, and i never would have written please let me love you forever and days of brutalism and hairpin turns the way i did. i owe a lot to that tiny but crucial choice, as does flls as a whole. everything that followed that section — the fight, the aftermath of the fight, the breakup — relied on it to make themselves work, and it’s funny (and valuable to note) how it’s something as seemingly inconsequential as a pov choice that set the tone. 

especially because there’s nothing special, really, about those following scenes. the christmas eve fight, megumi’s conversation in the car with geto, the break-up itself — all of it followed my standard flow of dialogue. sure, there’s more tension when you’re writing an argument, let alone when writing scenes that will inevitably lead to a break-up, but all scenes, particularly dialogue, have to feel fraught with some kind of energy and inevitable anyway. for the remainder of chapter five and six, i just coasted on the tone set up by the beginning of chapter five, and that’s knowledge that has served me quite well since. atmosphere goes a long, long way, and with my writing style, a healthy balance between dialogue and introspection will take me the rest of the way to the finish line. the part of flls that i’ve heard people find the most heartbreaking were also its simplest. all of chapter six is dedicated to one wedding, and chapter seven to one evening. i wish i could say there was a trick there, that i agonized over how to write such important scenes, but my personal takeaway is that there is no trick. the point is that you get the story to a point where those scenes write themselves; there’s nowhere else for the flow to go, and geto’s gentle unpacking of megumi, the last few scenes before megumi and yuuji break up, and the bittersweet reunion after two necessary years — i can only hope they carried a sense of “this is the only way it could have gone” the way they did for me. geto doesn’t tell megumi anything we don’t already know from earlier chapters, if only just now put into words. megumi and yuuji also don’t tell each other anything, in the breakup scene and the getting back together sections, that we haven’t already gleaned from them. from the moment kamo’s newsletter ended and we headed into act two — everything was just wrapping up what i left for myself.  

it’s worth noting that i did try to complicate the final chapter a bit. i tried a split pov between yuuji and megumi at first, as a way to finally reconcile their two perspectives, but that felt too cheesy. i tried an outing to nagoya for nobara’s birthday, tried to divide the pov amongst the people in their lives (junpei, nanami, nobara, etc), and even to do my usual cyclical structure of starting with the same image we did in chapter two, this time in yuuji’s funabashi apartment — but those all felt too on the nose. i trusted my flls readers. maybe that’s what all it came down to. i trusted them to know these people, and this story, and i didn’t want to do too much and compromise that trust. and in the end, i would argue, returning to simplicity made the story what it was. 

something i love to think about is how to explain my fics to others. i know it’s been said a lot that the ao3 tagging system has convinced a mini generation of writers that tags and names of tropes are all you need to pitch/be pitched a story, and i wholeheartedly agree. or i might just be terrible at advertising my work, with an obnoxious aversion to learning how to do it better to boot, but to be fair, i think my premises are all just as boring as they are ridiculous. flls is a college au with two friends with benefits turned fake boyfriends turned real boyfriends turned exes. that’s it. there’s nothing else in the plot but that. yet it’s a lot more to me than that, and sometimes that’s all you have when you send a story out into the world. the knowledge that it was briefly yours, and now it isn’t, but that doesn’t at all devalue what you’ve taken away from spending time with it. 

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

US april 2021, jujutsu kaisen trial element | short form, childhood friends

this is one of a handful of attempts at writing a trope i don’t love all that much, inspired largely by the atmosphere in “horatio” by t.j klune. i was very conflicted about this fic when i first published it, primarily because it was so short and written in a sparse style i didn’t know how to evaluate, and partly because it didn’t feel substantial. in a post i’ve put on private since, i’d written: 

what if i repeat the same themes in another context? that doesn’t make the theme carry any less weight as long as i put heart and sincerity and compassion into how i’m writing about it. there’s something that is equally as much self-deprecation as it is borderline vanity in me placing these rules upon myself. i’ve always known i wrote first and foremost out of love, out of what makes me excited to write — and that still applies here. i was thrilled to be able to experiment with a short, snappy fic. and that’s far more important, isn’t it, than whether i’m writing a different dissertation angle on love or friendship or family or career? it doesn’t feel like it, no, but it should, because i know it is. i know that what matters to me is that writing is fun and compassionate, and i know that as long as one person finds comfort in a world i’ve built, it’s enough.

i don’t sound very convinced there, and i wasn’t. i still don’t know what to make about us. i like that it’s short, and i endeavour to write more short fics with nothing specific or significant about them — but it’s hard to stomach its existence, let alone see it as something to love. it just feels so… not empty, but definitely less than what i’m used to asking from myself. it’s short, it’s sweet, it’s snappy. it’s also formulaic in its own sparse way, and i think it works because of the sweetness, but the truth is that if i hadn’t written it for itafushi week, i would never have greenlit it for publishing. i still wrestle nowadays with wanting to delete it, but it matters so little to me that i can’t even justify that much. it’s a weird limbo of a story, though i still hope to explore this kind of writing more in the future. 

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

SOME KIND OF WE june 2021, jujutsu kaisen trial element | sequel to existing complete story

broke my own rules here by revisiting a story past its run, but to be very fair, it was less out of sentiment (though there was also that) so much as me startling at my first proper reread of the latter half of flls and realizing there are still unresolved arcs for megumi because the final chapter set two years later only had yuuji’s pov. not many of them, and none especially urgent, but i thought it would be a good opportunity to reorient the story to something quieter and more mature than what the central conflicts in flls left room for. i’m not convinced the back-and-forth between pieces of their recent few months being together and the present evening worked as seamlessly as i wanted it to, but it was still a nice opportunity to use a non-linear narrative to explore the growth and development of a relationship that i left at quite the bittersweet open-endedness. what was only delicately certain by the end of flls was made concretely certain through some kind of we, even if it did run a bit too sentimental and saccharine. but i think it can be forgiven, considering what yuuji and megumi went through in flls proper. 

the main challenge of this fic was figuring out which portions of their life post-flls were worth including, and the first draft had five potential sections:

tokyo, for megumi’s first visit back after moving to chiba, mostly dedicated to him realizing that home — after being rooted for so long to this city, this one apartment with his dad, the same neighborhood and transit lines, to the gojo-geto household — now finally belongs somewhere else, with someone else. 

funabashi, most of which was preserved in the version that was published. 

sendai, to visit grandpa itadori’s grave, which i decided to streamline into a single scene at the end of the final some kind of we draft to cut away the excess and break it down to the core of why i wanted them to make this visit — which is to hammer home for yuuji that he isn’t alone anymore, that he has someone taking care of him and loving him without fail and with care, and to give megumi the agency to solidify, for his own sake, that he’s someone who means the whole universe to yuuji. enough that what place is his will always and solely be his, and enough that megumi will be allowed to love and take care of another person in a way that’s both eternal and an ever-evolving work in progress. 

okinawa, for a trip that was only referenced as a backdrop in the final version but that i still like to think a lot about even now. a cc anon said once that the gojo-geto household must be so lonely with all the kids grown up, but as i talked about in another reply once (it’s too far back for me to have time to dig out at this point), i do love to imagine yuuji and megumi being uncles to the next generation, even if not outright parents themselves. sometimes you don’t know what you’re capable of giving as someone who was denied so much as a kid until you see someone so young, a stranger to the world, and know what to give them precisely because you didn’t have it once. and between yuuji not having much family and megumi’s life being complicated by the fact that he has too much family, i think they’re well-equipped to be uncles to tsumiki’s kids and beyond. and i was tempted for a bit to show this in the annual okinawa trips i mentioned in the final version of skow, but there just isn’t enough space without becoming superfluous. 

kuantan, to visit nanami, mostly to reconsolidate the rather serious interaction megumi and nanami had in flls into something gentler, considering he’s still family to yuuji and while nanami might say yuuji doesn’t need his blessing, yuuji will want it anyway. i never did end up writing this part, so it’s not exactly canon to the au and i’m hesitant to make it so, but the idea was to end with megumi asking for both nanami’s blessing and help to propose to yuuji on that malaysia trip.

the end result for this fic was a little lesson for me in cutting and cutting and keeping my hand light on the source, until i’m left with what i consider necessary. the final version of some kind of we is more a collection of vignettes than a straightforward account of megumi and yuuji’s life together post-flls, which i found much more strangely fitting. i feel like i spent so much of flls trying to get them to a point where they’re ready to be with each other, and i just wanted to dedicate skow to them not just making it work but building love on top of the foundations they secure. it’s one thing to portray that through a whole fic dedicated to each milestone; it’s another to write ordinary moments that are made extraordinary because they have chosen that for and with each other. neither of them say i love you out loud in the entire fic, but i wanted there to be no doubt that they do say it. that they do love each other, and that this part isn’t the obstacle it used to be. they’re just some kind of them, together, and this time it doesn’t feel bittersweet for me to send them off to the world for good knowing there’s love falling out of the spaces between each vignette i wrote. 

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

HAND IN UNLOVABLE HAND october 2021, jujutsu kaisen trial element | fantasy au

yikes. one of two fics in this round-up that i abandoned at chapter one. started this because an idea occurred to me while reading the atlas six, wrote until i had to stop, then didn’t look back once even when it would have served me to. 

i flew too eagerly close to the sun with this one, truly, but as far as intentions go, i think both my mind and heart were in the right place. it’s quite clear where this one went wrong: i had neither time nor the energy to dedicate to it; i started it on the same whim i start most other things but this time didn’t have the passion for it — and i confess i just didn’t have the patience required to work on writing the story i wanted to write.

it was also one of those lessons in how often big ideas — or an attempt at them — cannot sustain a story. i had what i thought were clear ideas and intentions about the themes i wanted to cover in this one (the downfall of religious devotion, reconstruction, academic institutions versus personal/individual responsibility, all of which just look like buzzwords now that i’m typing them out, omg), but it just didn’t leave room for the kind of story i like to write. i guess my main takeaway here is that the pitfall of high(er) concept genre stories is that you have to make space for the world at the cost of room for character writing; it’s just the nature of how much space in the narrative you can allot for each individual aspect of the story, and with stuff like fantasy and sci-fi, the worldbuilding takes up a significant amount more than your run-of-the-mill slice of life story where the only world i have to worry about sketching is where someone lives and works. 

i do like some parts? it’s kind of crude, how i tried to reconcile my writing style with genre-specific bits, but it’s not all terrible. this sequence is alright:

Megumi was seven the first time he restored something. 

Every part of it had been an accident, and he remembers it now only in fragments. The wet rag in his hand as he wiped down the dining hall tables, having to climb the chairs to get to each corner. The horrible echo of something shattering in the kitchen, where Tsumiki had been tasked to do all the dishwashing for the evening. The panic on her face when Megumi got to her, both of them crowding around the shards of ceramic left by what was once a plate. The spill of harsh candlelight from above the sink, the harsher shadows it sent dancing around the broken glass. 

But he does remember the remembering. The knowing of what the plate had looked like once, the image behind his eyes anchoring him in place as he latched onto the curl of the shadows on the floor. It would be more intuitive, more rudimentary, than anything he’d learn to do later in life, propelled by the worry on Tsumiki’s face and the footsteps he swore he could hear coming towards them from the other end of the servants’ quarters they called home back then—but it had taken only a single blink for the shadows to cover the plate, tighten around it into darkness, and then retreat to where they were, leaving a clean, untouched plate in the middle of the kitchen floor. 

it could be better, but it still could be worse. and i do like the overall architectural imagery and how i managed to scrounge up some standard fare coziness somewhere in the cold, almost-medieval setting. 

as far as disastrously failed ventures go, this one could be a lot more embarrassing than it is. i’m not mad at it. it’s far from good enough, and if i didn’t write it in such a frenzy, i probably never would have allowed it to be published. but. it’s a useful failure. 

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

PLEASE LET ME LOVE YOU FOREVER march to june 2022, blue period trial element | five-character gen dynamic, multimedia

what a... headache of a project. bit off more than i could chew without choking and decided to take even more bites each new chapter because why the hell not, apparently. i do appreciate how un-edited this fic is, despite it all. it feels the most bleeding-heart of all my fics from this past year or so, and it’s nice to look back at this and know exactly when i shifted my approach to it altogether because, again, why not. it’s such a valuable “why not?” to have. it’s nice when i don’t feel quite as… under surveillance? when writing a story. and i get to just go off the rails a bit. a lot, actually, with this one. it’s nothing crazy because i don’t think i can write anything crazy (though i think hairpin turns had blinks of it), but there’s definitely plenty of choices that i’m surprised i decided on with a sober mind. 

to be fair, they weren’t exactly mindblowingly successful. if i were to rate this fic out of five, despite all my fondness for it, i’d maybe give it a 2.75. it’s a well-earned mark, and i have a special soft spot for people who have read it, but i’m not mentally proud of it. emotionally so, maybe, in whatever way i can be, but if this fic didn’t feel so intimate with a much cozier readership and comment section, i’d be a lot crueler to it than i am, i think. as it is, it makes for wonderful conversation and reflection for me, and it’s always fun to consider how a story about a disbanded idol group became a metaphor for childhoods lost to growing up too fast and also involved alternate universes. 

but cycling through five povs really is too much, i think, and if it was exhausting for me to write then i imagine it was just as exhausting to read. a nicer alternative would have been to stick to one pov for each chapter, but even that was a lot to juggle considering there were also smaller dynamics going on in the background with each character. within the core group of five alone, there were thirty-one variations of scenes to write, including individual introspection and pairs — and that’s not to take into consideration trios, or groups of four or the whole five plus a secondary character, for example. i don’t know how i pulled off my usual character study here. i don’t know if i did. 

another thing about this fic is that i’m still not sure why a time loop didn’t work. i wanted it so badly to work. i thought it would be fun, but i guess time loops aren’t necessarily compatible with prose. there’s something about repetition and looping that’s best visually, but even if i had been able to stick to imagery and vibes, it would have gotten tedious at some point for me and a reader considering the quantity/length i tend to need. just something to keep in mind if i get the urge to keep trying time loops in future works and wonder why it’s not sticking seamlessly. as with a lot of things in life, if you have to force it then maybe it’s not meant to be there. or maybe you have to go shortform, narrow down the playing field?

one thing i’d commend this fic for is how it managed to unpack so much between dynamics that barely exist in canon. that, and how it managed to pack so many formats into one story — song lyrics, album reviews, tweets, a play, nonfiction, a profile, wikipedia pages, messages, i don’t even know how many more — while maintaining a semi-cohesive tone throughout. there was a lot of fun there, in figuring out how to adapt your typical characterizing to a format you haven’t tried before: how would kuwana write a preface to hashida’s book? would this particular character include rhymes in their song lyrics, or are they more of a diaristic stream of consciousness kind of lyricist? what medium best translates this character’s personality? what medium best conveys this dynamic’s under-the-skin knowing of each other? who sees more than the others, and how can i show that without using the same structure of two or three characters talking in a setting that doesn’t change? 

my favourite part is probably the fake album review at the top of chapter four? there’s something giddying about the research-like quality of figuring out how to perfect the tone that music reviewers tend to default to, but also sobering about how easily adapted this fake idol group’s history is from real life. the easiest part of the entire fic was making this group feel real to me, situated in the real life history of j-idols and beyond, even if i admit to shying away from being explicit about the worst things that would still have been grounded in reality. some references to real life idol incidents worked a little too well, but there was also how clean it felt to spin fictional lore for this group in that fake album review. from their individual songwriting styles to tobi’s own background in-story to the kind of themes and concepts a faux pretentious pitchfork reviewer might like to talk about — it was just incredibly fun. i don’t know when else i’d get the chance to write something like that. everything else paled in comparison to it soon after, though i do also tolerate whatever my writing was doing at the end of chapter five, even if some parts of that chapter also feel lacklustre through a hypercritical lens. it doesn’t hold up under extremely rigorous scrutiny, even if i consider the fact that i’d just wanted the fic wrapped up as soon as i could at the time. it could be better, more so than all the other fics in this post could be better. but i don’t mind too much that it isn’t better. i mind it a little. just a little. but its flawedness is also what forced the multimedia format to happen in the first place, and that, i like a lot.

there’s a fair amount that this fic did quite more than alright, i think. if nothing else, it was useful as a playground that i didn’t have to be too finicky about. it will be one of those projects i’ll look back at someday and laugh deliriously over because how did i think that was the only way to make it work, but with the facilities i had at the time, it’s definitely not a shitshow. it has a lot of heart — which doesn’t necessarily redeem awful works, but in passable ones, those parts of the writing meet each other halfway. please let me love you forever holds its own weight, which is plenty more than i can say for most of my other experiments. plus it contains a background relationship that is not at all the focus of the story yet will probably haunt me forever. it’s always the ones you least expect to matter that will ripple further down the line, etc.

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

LOSER TAKES ALL july 2022, tomodachi game trial element | soulmates, mystery au

another unpublished little guy left to rot at one complete chapter. i don’t really have any huge problems with this one, just that i tired of its demands very quickly and didn’t have enough attachment to the dynamics in it to muster up any motivation for. but tomodachi game, and especially yuuichi and kei, are so uniquely positioned for a fic like this, and i don’t resent past me for approaching it this way at all. is a soulmate bond that fosters a telepathic link between people who come back from a brush with death kind of an unhinged premise for a mystery au? yes. but so is remodeling a breakfast restaurant with my mom and the guy i didn’t know confessed to me in high school and who is now literally displaced in more ways than one by said remodeling, and even also acting is all i know so here i am trying to find the love of my life by dating anyone for an entire month on a first come first serve basis only to be shocked when that doesn’t work. 

again. boring yet equally ridiculous elevator pitches. if i cemented anything for a fact from this abandoned wip, it’s that my premises have always been questionable, and that time and time again, the only path forward is to lean all the way into it — which i did with hairpin turns, thankfully. hand in unlovable hand and loser takes all are apart by about a year, and there’s palpable change here in my approach to worldbuilding even if i abandoned each for unrelated reasons. granted, i might just be better suited to one side of speculative fiction than the other, but that’s such a copout. when it comes to trying new things in writing, the “if he wanted to, he would” logic applies, even if the he in question ultimately finds that it doesn’t work the way he wants it to (like in hand in unlovable hand). 

loser takes all worked fine for me, and i loved the inherent intimacy in having two incredibly smart and perceptive characters in each other’s minds while trapped in this soulmate bond that isn’t necessarily romantic. not to mention yuuichi is a deeply unwell person, and his ways of showing attachment to kei range from drastically protective, such as offering to fire the receptionist that was rude to kei, to:

Sometimes, watching Kei asleep right against him, Yuuichi wants to press his lips against Kei’s pulse. To feel it warm and alive under his mouth, to hear that little sigh of ticklish laughter Kei does if someone so much as runs a soft cloth against his neck. 

And sometimes—sometimes Yuuichi is also seized by a strong thought, a strong urge, to sink something sharp into that pulse. His teeth, a fork, a shard of broken glass. Sink it in hard, deep enough to leave a bloody bruise, a scar, a puncture. Hard enough to maybe even sever that heartbeat, to tear it, slit it into silence somehow. Hard enough that it feels almost the kinder choice to imagine himself wrapping his hands around Kei’s neck—tightening them without hesitation, itself a mercy of a kind as the blood quickly drains out of Kei’s cheeks. Yuuichi imagines then how Kei will struggle, whether he’ll kick or bite Yuuichi, if he’ll reverse their positions with one twist of a martial arts trained body, or if he’ll just accept it, resign himself to it knowing that not even this, if it’s Yuuichi, could possibly be meaningless.

But it would be. It would be meaningless to kill Kei. Meaningless because Kei is singular in his position within Yuuichi’s life, loyal and intelligent and a force to be reckoned with like no one else is, not even Yuuichi’s sister, not even the only friend he trusts most. Meaningless because every time Yuuichi pictures it, every time he wonders if he’ll have it in him to press two killer’s hands around Kei’s neck, it doesn’t take long for the accompanying sting to come like a splash of boiling water on exposed skin. A kind of scolding, a kind of reminder, that just as much as it would be difficult for anyone to kill Kei—so impervious to physical harm, whose broken bones and bleeding wounds will always heal even if he jumps off a twenty-story building—it would be just as difficult for Yuuichi to do him harm and survive it without any damage done to his own heart at his own hands. 

the temptation to keep writing this is not entirely absent, to be honest. but a mystery takes care and attention, and i just don’t have that in me the way this story deserves. but this fic was delicious to write, and i think it gave me a hunger to write more dynamics that feel just as juicy. dynamics that aren’t necessarily geared towards healthy love, but ones that ooze if poked anyway. 

i definitely want to revisit the telepathy plot device i explored here someday, but for now, this fic, abandoned wip as it is, is kind of the goldilocks midpoint between failed venture (hand in unlovable hand), almost-passable venture (please let me love you forever), and basically there if being there counts taking your literal first baby step into a new frontier (days of brutalism and hairpin turns).

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

HONORARY MENTIONS

i don’t mean to ignore the canonverse fics (here and where you are, i’ll give you something so real, detour, and the two manhwa fics, that is) out of favouritism, but i’m afraid there’s nothing much to say…? not that these weren’t lessons in themselves, but canonverse takes a quarter of the energy and brainpower to write, and i’ll be lying if i don’t go about them essentially all no thoughts, head empty. i talked a bit about here and where you are here, while the logic for detour, which i was happy to write for and based on exchanges with a friend, is pretty self-explanatory. i did love getting to write a character like loid (and i’m relieved that the chapters that follow the ones i took into consideration for that fic hold up the characterization i imagined for him) + it was interesting to give sexual content and the philosophy of desire or whatever a shot in i’ll give you something so real. they were effective at what i needed them to do — which is, really, just to check the temperature of the water. i always feel so rusty when any amount of time passes without me writing, and these small, low-maintenance fics work as a burst of ice cold water before jumping in. i don’t value these fics any less for their place in The Process, and i might even be extra happy when someone likes them, but as far as Advancing The Craft 🤢 goes, all of these are simply necessary bridges to get to the next checkpoint. sometimes you gotta scratch the tip of the pen before the ink starts bleeding like it’s supposed to. words are the same. it takes a while each time to get my writing to a place i recognize, and sometimes a while is an entire fic before i can write the next chapter for an ongoing multi-chaptered story.

(that said: shoutout to the particular flavour of introspection in detour, within which my favourite line was written the literal minute before i sent it off, and a big heart emoji for the fact that i’ll give you something so real unfolds in a span of barely half a day. both are very interesting to think about moving forward.)

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

DAYS OF BRUTALISM AND HAIRPIN TURNS january 2023, blue lock trial element | a romantic triad, sci-fi, memory loss (finally!) 

my angel. my darling. my love. who is far from being perfect but is the closest i’ve had to at least being sure i won’t just wake up one day loathing the soul out of it. i’ll laugh at it, probably. i’ll think it’s hilarious and cringy someday soon. but it’s a work i can’t not appreciate wholeheartedly. 

my cc tells me that the first time i put it on record that i won’t mind doing a blue lock fic is may 16, 2022, and the fact that i didn’t even make it a year and did so in the most Hard To Pitch If This Was An Actual Novel And Not Just A Fic For Fun way possible is worth at least a salute of disbelief, i think. my journal from my writing hiatus also tells me i’ve been trying to make memory loss work since 2020 and managed to scratch the itch minutely with here and where you are (which is… a pretty janky piece of work, looking back now) — but i’m just really, really content, even proud, of how i managed to weave it into a fic adapted from a story about football battle royale. 

it’s almost kind of unnerving how satisfied i am with the premise of hairpin turns, even if the execution leaves quite a bit to be desired — as it always will, really, and therein is the joy of finding the next writing project. i laughed a lot at myself while writing hairpin turns, and of all the inside jokes that my works started as, this one is by far the fic to feel most like it — a fun little joke that got funnier and funnier the more of it i wrote, and so i wrote more, chasing that laughter until it was time to catch my breath. and i think with how much i require writing to feel urgent and single-minded to be fun, there’s a part of me that’s easily... bored, for lack of a better word, when something doesn’t give me that. without this fast-paced almost-violence, i get bored and restless, the way i was around all the projects i had lined up after please let me love you forever. i’m making a face as i type that but maybe i just mean to say that there were a good few months there where nothing scratched the itch in need of stimulation. i’d write scenes and they wouldn’t be awful, wouldn’t even be bad, but they weren’t exciting to me. they weren’t thrilling. they didn’t feel like i was dissecting anything, just poking at skin with a scalpel and rolling my eyes when i didn’t draw blood from a dead body — you know? 

but projects have an uncanny way of arriving in your life when you most need it, and just when i have peeled and replaced my wallpaper and assembled and reassembled my keyboards and poked at this manuscript i refuse to rewrite until i did a warm-up that felt substantial enough, the blue lock anime started airing. i knew vaguely what dynamics i wanted to write even back when i had only the manga, but i know i could not have tortured this fic out of me then. not before please let me love you forever, not before loser takes all, not even before all my failed attempts at pitching speculative fiction stories to myself at 3 AM and gritting my teeth at my own disgust. the best aus fall into your lap fully formed and fully realized before you even know what you’ll be shaping it into; they’re a little predestined that way, and aus might be why i owe fanfiction my certainty that the author is just as possessed by the narrative if the narrative has its own pace and direction. i think that’s logic that should be applicable to original projects as well. 

i did hesitate in the very beginning of hairpin turns because sci-fi was such a huge deviation from my comfort zone and i have the misfortune of being both a taurus sun and an enneagram type five. i’ve never tried writing proper sci-fi, not even a little, let alone enough to be comfortable with knowing where to start something that wasn’t merely regular slice of life with a slight sprinkling of specfic. i was sure my writing style wouldn’t be a good match for it. i still don’t think it’s a match, necessarily. my prose is a bit too sentimental for some of the demands sci-fi asked of me — and that’s fine. i wouldn’t know the precise nature of that incompatibility if i hadn’t jumped into the pool of sharks and came out of the tank somehow, disbelievingly, friends with them. i began wary of relying too much on technobabble since i’m not exactly the most stem-oriented person around, but even the background of this au wrote itself, half because blue lock was a shockingly perfect match for the world i had in my mind and half because i found that the technology i imagined for the plot was both possible and easy to break down into the narrative. even now i’m still shocked at how scientifically sound the core pitch of the story is, and the fact that it married itself well to both the overarching plot and the character dynamics i wanted to highlight was just icing on a cake i would have tried to politely finish anyway. 

it could very well be that hairpin turns is just a fluke, its parts too seamlessly glued to each other that i’m not sure it could have been anything else except luck doing the work there, but i think there’s also credit to be found in how nothing is sacred in blue lock. these are characters who have done ridiculous things and said ridiculous things, and it was a matter of matching their energy. therein is the same lesson from loser takes all: if i’ve always known that characters decide the pace, tone and atmosphere of the story and everything else in it, then doesn’t it also go to say that in order to write a story far out of my comfort zone, i need only start with characters far outside of my comfort zone?

i think with au fics in particular, a lot of the work begins with justifying why certain things are in character for them in this universe based on what we know from canon. but because those boundaries are expanded by what blue lock innately is, it doesn’t feel as weird to posit something like, what if you and your android bf get tasked with rescuing his older brother’s android bf and find out along the way that you might also both be in love with your childhood best friend? as with most other of my initial ideas, this quickly spiraled into something significantly different — which luckily for me included the memory loss idea that i’ve been wanting to explore for forever now. proper sci-fi was the perfect backdrop for it, and bachira the perfect person to willingly do it, and isagi and rin the perfect people to be left in the aftermath of that loss. stars aligned, truly. i’m incredibly grateful for it. 

whatever challenges i encountered writing this fic had nothing to do with writing it. it was as smooth to write as it was an absolute pain to edit, because the three povs are so vastly different from each other, and with no outline to mentally check each time i add a new scene, i was reliant on going back and forth again and again to make sure the worldbuilding is cohesive and the plot is coherent. at some point i couldn’t look at it anymore, and it might even be a testament to how much i appreciate the fic that i still can’t look at it now yet cannot deny how fond i am of the final result. 

with sci-fi in particular, it really is a case of faking it till you make it, and whatever lies don’t feed into each other, you can always revisit and adjust later. that’s the common sense magic of fiction, i suppose. there’s a degree of patience i held onto writing hairpin turns that i wouldn’t have had with any other previous work, and i think it benefited me more to have all three chapters written in varying increments, out of my usual linear order, than publishing it chapter by chapter. i had all the room to experiment — what does the world look like in 2070? is 2070 even the right year to set this in? is there anything big happening around that time period? how does the lingo change in the time between present and this potential future? when i run into things that feel too out of my depth to write, like isagi’s pov for instance, do i actually have a justification for saying no other than how it will be easier than trying? are there benefits to giving bachira the final chapter that i’m being biased against because i think it would be a challenge? and between all of these choices, how do i adapt existing blue lock canon, from their playstyles to the favourites listed in the egoist bible, to worldbuilding in other forms of media that i’ve always wanted to try a different approach to? 

i used to think it was unnecessary and superfluous to go into writing something while getting bogged down by stray facts about characters, in both fic and original projects, but at the same time, it’s truly the tiny details that will humanize more than knowing a character’s birthday or what traumatic events lie in their backstory. tiny details that breed more tiny details, until it’s about the fact that bachira and isagi are childhood friends in this au yet when we meet bachira again he’s calling isagi by last name, or how rin understandably questions the validity of his own humanness because we can only assume sae had recreated him in grief or defiance against mortality or whatever other emotion that we’ll never know for sure because we only ever see sae in this fic through rin, and that matters a lot more than if i gave sae a pov — and yet rin manages to love through the small things, in how the warehouse is in an eternal sunset waiting for bachira to return to him and isagi. it’s about how first love, late spring was about learning how to love someone else the way they need you to when you weren’t loved the way you needed to be, but hairpin turns is about how spending your whole life never questioning if you were loved can rob you of the facilities to put a name and shape to what you feel for someone who’s always been in your life. the things you don’t take for granted, necessarily, but you do love for granted by not calling it love.

hairpin turns is about the pieces obscured from view and all the more present because of it. it’s about lost memories, the phantom outline of a person like a haunting. it’s about how sae never once appears in a direct scene yet he looms over rin’s existence. it’s about how rin’s chapter represents the past, isagi’s the present and bachira’s the future, but time matters little in the end — how could it weigh any more, in a story about memory? it’s about the uneasy momentary peace that’s the only scene we can count on as a happy ending. it’s about the lengths you’ll go to get the chance to be ordinary about your love, even if all else about it is unconventional. 

and yet above all, what i like best about this fic is that it works towards questions that feel like being given answers. some of my other fics try to provide answers to its characters and the readers they resonate with, to give them a way to be well-equipped to move forward, while a few other fics settle on non-answers because uncertainty is the only ending there is. but hairpin turns moves outward only to ask more questions, questions that are the answers and the thesis, yet in a way that isn’t strictly open-ended. and i have no fucking clue how i managed it, but this feels like the target i’ve been itching to catch sight of this entire time. this is the kind of story and process i would like to aspire to this year, and even though it had taken me 80k to glean what i needed from it, i’m glad i stayed with this fic as a warm-up. 

anyway. this got a bit away from me, and who knows, maybe this level of pretentiousness is only because i’m still riding the high of affection for my most recent brainchild to make it to college — but i’m not totally blind to the flaws in hairpin turns. the execution of the ending itself is clunky, not because it doesn’t resolve anything but because it does, and by then, the post-rescue section has gone on for long enough that even an ending feels like an epilogue. the story overall lacks complete confidence in what it is, with some parts shadowed by a slight hovering hesitation and others weighed down by a heavy hand showing too much kindness to my non-confidence. it’s never too heavy-handed, and definitely not so much that i’ll send it to the bin, but enough that if i want something to pick apart, there are stray choices hiding in places that i’d circle as an editor for feeling too sentimental, or the tone too dissonant with the pacing, or, ironically, not explored enough. in the genre i’m used to writing, the adrenaline rush is in finding the right balance within a new choreography for a dance style i know well, but in my first real foray into speculative fiction, i think i was just trying to find my footing the whole time. i’m still surprised i made it to the other end of the tightrope, honestly. i didn’t expect to applaud myself for the bare minimum, and i still don’t. 

but all of this is a lesson for me, too. what i do know is that it’s interesting to tell a story about what’s missing, about the unsaid and the unseen, and if that’s what it will take for me to rediscover excitement in what i write so that i don’t have to sink back into the ennui of these last couple of months, then that’s a pretty darn fun goal to spend the rest of the year unpacking. 

[misfitsandmusings]

⭐️ Half-hearted “theory”/wishful thinking and musing on Law, Doflamingo, Rosinante, and the “man marked by flames”. ⭐️

POTENTIAL SPOILER WARNING for the end of Wano (but not really bc my Wano knowledge as a whole is lacking. But I mention one scene at the end of it and give a vibe nod to Egghead/current events without any details. Read more-ing it from here because it’s a longish post in general and somewhat crack in nature.

I’ve been screaming with @clownquixote and have screamed at @climatact about this before but since I’m feeling unapologetically myself in my ridiculousness today I’m going to share a far-fetched “it would never happen but I self indulgently WANT it to happen so let me find this little stretch of a thread to tug on” hope/theory. (On the AMAZINGLY UNLIKELY chance that this happens I’m putting it out there right now and if it defies all the odds and comes true I demand of the universe the equivalent of Law’s bounty in… idk, something dumb like chocolate mints or bread bc as much as I love Law this chick cannot relate to the bread hate.)

But anyway- after all Law has been through in his life and series as a whole, even though YES I know his death was important to his story and character growth, I think he deserves and I would not be mad to see a plot twist in which Rosinante lived. I feel like Sabo’s reappearance came out of left field when it happened and has been widely accepted so I don’t think it’s THAT much of a stretch and if it can happen once it can happen again. The stretch of a thread I’m picking at in my self-indulgent desire to see this happen? The tiny and (I think) thus far unexplained references to the man marked by flames? When Kid says something about that mystery figure being his objective there’s a single panel -that I of course do not have saved. Will find and rb later- where it shifts to Law and he has this vaguely interested/curious look on his face. And yes, Law is curious by nature and that could and probably doesn’t mean anything.

And you would think with a cool tagline like that it would be some really important, powerful, badass character in the making but. What if it’s actually just a clumsy clown of a character prone to setting himself on fire?

I’m thinking a lot on this today because I was revisiting Law & Rosinante backstory episodes in preparation for writing kid!Law for the first time (yay!) but I jumped to episode 700 and decided to watch the entire thing instead of jumping to the actual flashbacks of Law’s childhood. The first few minutes are Law vs. Doflamingo with the latter ranting about the hidden secret use of the Ope Ope no Mi and him stating that if he’d had access to its abilities then, he would have been able to get his hands on whatever he knows is hidden at Mariejois. I have long suspected we (the fandom and poor Law) aren’t done with Creepy Mingo yet, and I won’t really get into current arc stuff because I’ve mentally checked out on it in light of some of the recent events so I’m not well-informed enough to pick it apart just yet. But I do think that bit of info, Doflamingo, and Law are going to come into play again in regards to that conversation some 300+ episodes ago. Since I didn’t claim this would be a fully fleshed out theory I don’t have much more to offer plausibility/possibility-wise yet but I am JUST SAYING Law has been through so much, Doflamingo will end up back in the fray, and I could 100% see a Rosinante that survived and has been laying low on the sidelines for his own various reasons showing up to interfere with his brother and save Law or at least finally give him some much needed light/good news/happiness in his life.

So the tl;dr highlights that I noncommittally hope but don’t really expect will happen (I’m cashing in if I’m right though okay): Doflamingo essential to whatever’s going down, Law still has some stuff to go through and will get roped into this presumably against his will, Rosinante survived and is the “man marked by flames” and will show up to help and/or protect Law. I make no apologies for wishful thinking or for not coming with receipts/all the lore knowledge I need to further explore it yet. I just wanted to get it on the record and scream about how much I want good things for Law.

Okay thanks for reading my silly rambly nonsense that I hope will come true if you did. 🙃 you can pick it apart if you want but keep in mind I make no secret my overall lore knowledge is not the best, or you can scream about it with me if you like it too.

UPDATE: I FOUND IT. (Ch. 1056. I feel like I brought receipts now even though this really established nothing. But like, why that face, Law? It seems INTERESTING. Where’d your thoughts go? Foreshadowing? Does he know something? Do flames just make him think of someone setting their clumsy self on fire all the time? Sus enough for me.)

[andithiel]

Ten smut/dialogue scenes

I was tagged by the massively talented @thehoneybeet (check out some smutty goodness of them here), and at first I was excited and then I though "oh no, what do my smut say about me?" I was also convinced I haven't written that many smutty fics, but I had to actually pick between them, who knew?! Also had to trim what I picked out because it got close to 6k and no one has time for that while scrolling tumblr 🙈

Rules: pick any ten fics, select some smut or pre-smut dialogue, and tag ten people. If you have written less than ten, feel free to share anyway!

Tagging @tsundanire @drarryruinedme7 @getawayfox @rei382 @isamijoo @mystickitten42 @nv-md @thebooktopus @shealwaysreads @phdmama if you want to share your smutty dialogue (also no pressure to actually read this just because I tagged you, it’s 2,6k 👀) And if you’re reading this and want to share yours as well please do, and tag me so I can see!

I'm putting these under a cut because they're long and various states of explicit. I've tried to select different kind of dynamics and scenarios in these, but enthustiastic consent is one of my favourite things to write so most of them has that. I'll put content warnings/enticements next to the ones where I think it’s needed.

1. And the music plays bitter, plays sweet (CW: infidelity (not between Drarry)

Harry doesn’t know what to say. What are you supposed to say to your recently widowed lover who has just buried his wife?

”Do you want me to—?”

Draco stands up so abruptly that the glass falls to the floor and shatters, firewhiskey splashing everywhere, staining the expensive carpet; he crowds Harry against the mantelpiece.

”If you leave now, don’t bother coming back,” he growls.

Harry whimpers and then Draco’s lips are on his, insisting, demanding and Harry melts. Until he remembers.

”Fuck, Albus is here, we can’t— ”

”They’re sleeping, but if you’re worried…” Draco says and Apparates them to his bedroom.

”Is this—?”

”Don’t make this weirder than it has to be,” Draco snaps before he starts working on the buttons of Harry’s robes, making him dizzy with want.

”I’ve thought about you all day,” Harry says, fumbling with Draco’s tie. “It kills me that I couldn’t be there for you.”

Draco rips Harry’s robes off in one swift impatient movement.

“Shut up and fuck me.”

His voice is desperate, shaky and steely at the same time; It sounds more like a plea than a command, but Harry doesn’t even consider not obeying.

2. Constellation Prize 

“I—” Harry started. Draco looked up at him, eyes dark and wide, his flushed chest heaving. “It was worth waiting. For this. For you.”

Draco surged forward, kissing Harry messily, all teeth and tongue. “Do you have any idea the things you do to me?”

Harry chuckled, a little embarrassed. “I thought I said ten minutes ago how I wanted you inside me five minutes ago, what is your cock still doing on the outside?”

“I also remember someone wanting my fingers instead of a preparation charm,” Draco murmured against his ear while tracing Harry’s rim with his cock. “Some things are worth the wait Harry,” he said, slowly pushing in.

3. I’ll never be your chosen one (CW: hate sex) This is long, but 🤷‍♀️

Draco closes his eyes, suppressing a moan at the thought of Potter fucking himself with his fingers.

“What if I told you I’ve used all the skills you’ve taught me to fuck others?” Potter continues, grabbing the buttplug and yanking it out with a little more force than strictly necessary. “That I’ve convinced more than one witch that taking it up the arse isn’t so bad, after all, if you know what you’re doing.”

Draco inhales sharply. Surely Potter is just trying to rile him up? He’s not been in a relationship as of late, he usually won’t see Draco when he is, because apparently he’s “not the cheating kind”. This must just be a way to make Draco jealous. Well, the joke’s on Potter, because if Draco’s not in love, he can’t be jealous.

“I was planning on opening you slowly this time, Malfoy, using my tongue and my fingers until you were begging for me to fuck you, but I guess you’re just an impatient little slag, aren’t you?” Potter grabs his hips roughly, and then the spongy head of his cock is circling Draco’s waiting hole. “Aren’t you, Malfoy? Aren’t you just aching for me to fuck you?”

Draco forces down a shiver of arousal, refusing to dignify Potter’s statement with an answer. He scoffs. “Well, aren’t you clever, Potter? Does it make it easier for you to fuck them if you do it up the arse? Is it easier to block out that they’re witches?” He presses back against Potter’s groin, undulating his hips to rub against Potter’s cock, smirking as a suppressed moan escapes Potter’s lips. “If you close your eyes, maybe you can almost forget that they’re not what you want. As long as you don’t try to reach around them to pull them off you can pretend that they’re someone else?”

There’s a low growl, and then Potter pushes in all the way in one stroke, and Draco almost loses his balance, the sting of it is so exquisite.

Potter’s voice is low in his ear, his chest flush against Draco’s back. “And you think I imagine them being you, don’t you, Malfoy?” He scoffs. “You think I have to pretend that they’re you to be able to come?” He sets up an agonisingly slow rhythm, making Draco bite his lip to keep from fucking himself faster on Potter’s cock.

“And don’t you? Can you honestly say you’re able to keep it up without some sort of fantasy playing in your head? Do you need them to be quiet to keep the illusion that you’re fucking someone you’re actually attracted to?”

Potter grabs his hair forcefully, yanking it so that Draco’s neck bends backwards, the awkward angle just below painful.

“Shut the fuck up, Malfoy.”

“Oh, but you like it when I’m mouthing off, don’t you?” Draco says to the ceiling. “Am I the only one who doesn’t fawn over you, Potter, doesn’t agree with everything you say? Yes, Harry, I’ll take it up the arse if that’s what you want. Yes, Harry, I’ll keep quiet if that’s what you need. No, Harry, I don’t find it odd that I always have to stimulate myself’,” he sneers. “Admit it, you’re sick of it.”

There’s another growl as Potter drags himself out and slams back in, still with his hand tightly fisted in Draco’s hair.

“I said: Shut. The fuck. Up,” he hisses through clenched teeth before he starts pounding into Draco in a steady rhythm, faster now.

Draco chuckles, knowing it will drive Potter absolutely mad with rage. And a mad Potter is a rough Potter, and rough is what Draco wants right now, rough is what they have together, what Potter is willing to give him, what Potter wants from him. “Am I too close to the truth?”

“I thought I told you to shut up,” Potter pants into his ear. He’s so close now, Draco can feel his thrusts becoming erratic.

“Make me,” he breathes.

4. Play me like a love song

“Harry, please.” It comes out as a whine, but he can’t be arsed to care about that.

“What?” Draco can feel Harry smiling against his skin.

“Please.”

“What do you need, Draco? You know I want to give it to you if you just ask me,” Harry says, so low that it’s barely audible, but Draco’s entire focus is on Harry and his mouth, and where he wants it to go.

“Harry, it’s —” he says, bucking his hips up. “Fuck, it’s right there!” And as if on cue, his cock twitches, as if it’s offended that it’s being neglected this way.

“What is?” Harry says, still feigning obliviousness, and Draco has a strong urge to slap him. Maybe that’s why Harry wanted to tie him up.

But he’s not ready to admit defeat yet, he won’t say that he desperately wants Harry’s mouth on his cock. “I thought you said you wanted to make me a babbling mess by just using your tongue and lips.”

Harry chuckles, low and guttural in his throat, the fucking bastard. “Isn’t that what I’m doing?”

Draco groans in frustration, but it comes out breathy, more like a moan, a desperate sound.

“Please, Harry,” he says again, pleading, begging.

“I’m glad you’re asking so nicely, but you still need to tell me what to do.”

“Please, Harry, please just suck my cock.”

5. When Buds Break (CW: Hanahaki disease, not depicted in the snippet)

“I was surprised to learn that you had any interest in her, though,” Draco says, as if he’s completely unaffected by Harry’s mouth on him.

Harry grunts in frustration, because obviously Draco is not letting this go. “What’s the problem? It was one time, weeks ago. I was horny and you were away at some charity event or whatever. And she was there. It didn’t mean anything.”

“It didn’t mean anything, and you still felt the need to do it?” Draco’s voice is a weird mixture of scornful and saccharinely sweet.

“I still don’t see what the problem is. You and I are having casual sex. In fact, you were the one who definitely wanted to keep it casual. I just happened to have some other casual sex with another person.”

Draco doesn’t answer, but his jaw is working silently as he’s staring at Harry, and it looks like he’s reluctantly admitting defeat. Tentatively, Harry starts to nose around Draco’s groin, inhaling the scent of him and kissing the tender skin on the inside of his thighs.

“I have to say that discussing my sexual habits was not what I thought you had in mind when you brought me here. And it was definitely not what I had in mind when I came with you,” Harry says and then licks a long stripe from the base of Draco’s cock to the tip, smiling when it twitches violently in response. Even if Draco seems collected, his body is severely betraying him.

Soft hands come to tangle in Harry’s hair again, and with a sigh Draco says, “I just didn’t know we were having sex with other people.”

“I wasn’t aware that we were exclusively casual, but I’m fine with that if you want us to be. I mean, Daphne is alright, but there are some things she lacks, anatomically speaking,” Harry says, swirling his tongue around Draco’s cock again. He deliberately leaves out how having sex with Daphne couldn’t compare to having sex with Draco in a million years, that she didn’t leave him entirely breathless like Draco does. He doesn’t need to be more smug than he already is.

“Daphne’s a fucking slut.”

Harry snorts. “Takes one to know one.” He ducks from Draco’s hand trying to slap him, and grabs Draco’s thighs to heave himself up so that their faces are level. “Now, do you want me to keep casually sucking you off, or would you be so kind as to casually put that gorgeous dick up my arse?”

6. Find your own heaven (CW: second person POV, written from the pov of Draco being very sexually repressed)

“Have you done this before?” you ask, because surely he must have some experience? This cannot feel this good if it’s his first time.

“I keep telling you, Draco, no, I haven’t. Not with another person.”

“With yourself then. You’ve done this to yourself?”

He kisses along the length of your spine as he slowly works you open with his fingers.

“I have. I have been pleasuring myself, imagining that you were with me, that it was your fingers inside me.”

His words make you moan, the internal image of him so arousing as instinct takes you over and you rock back to meet him.

He shifts behind you, grabbing the bottle of oil and pouring more of it into his hand.

“Can I?” he asks, low and husky.

You nod fervently, and then you gasp as the tip of him grazes your entrance.

7. Testing the waters (Jeddy)

James’ breath hitched, but he didn’t answer this time, his eyes closed in ecstasy as Teddy pounded into him as hard as he could.

“I’m going to make you scream so loudly, Jamie. The only name you’ll remember will be mine,” Teddy said, panting, grinding down while pistoning his hips, licking the side of James’ neck as he went. James’ head was tilted back against the black and white trunk, his bottom lip between his teeth, and he was so beautiful it stole Teddy’s breath away. Once again he was overcome with the desire to kiss James, to feel the warmth of his mouth against his, sharing the same air.

“Can I kiss you, Jamie?” he groaned, burying himself into the glorious wet heat that was the core of James. “I really— I really want to kiss you.”

James whimpered, squeezing his eyes further shut. “Only if you mean it,” he said, his voice breathy and broken. “Only if you want me.”

8. Take a trip into my garden

“Draco,” he whispers. “Draco, don’t make me wait any longer.”

Draco lifts his head to look at him, his lips swollen and shiny, eyes blown so wide with lust they’re almost black. He scoots up and lets his mouth glide along Harry’s lower lip, fingers grazing over his rapidly beating pulse.

“What, Harry? What do you want?”

His voice is low and cooing, and Harry relaxes, realising he’s been tensing up. He licks his lips. “Fuck me,” he whispers, sliding a hand into Draco’s silky hair to keep him close.

Draco exhales shakily, his bottom lip disappearing between his teeth. “You’re still sure then?”

Harry nods, and Draco mirrors his motion, eagerly but cautious.

“I’ll make you feel so good, Harry, you have no idea.”

“I know you will,” Harry says, licking his lips. “And also, I— I want to see you. I want to look at you while you fuck me.”

“Oh fuck,” Draco groans, and his cock gives a little twitch against Harry’s hip, noticable through the thin fabric of his designer pants. “Fuck, Harry, do you have any idea what you do to me?”

9. Sweet desire (Scorbus. CW: first person POV)

Scorpius sets himself with one leg on either side of my knees, crouching over me to look at my cock. I’m so hard, and my foreskin has already drawn back halfway to reveal the glans. Scorpius looks up at me, his hair falling over his now dark eyes, and he raises his eyebrows in a silent question. I nod, and he hooks his fingers inside the elastic of my underwear to pull them down all the way.

“Yours, too.”

It looks like he’s coming out of a trance when he glances up at me at my words.

“Take off yours, too,” I say, and Scorpius looks down at himself, as if he hadn’t noticed that he’s still wearing his pants.

“Oh! Right, yeah, I’ll—” he says, wriggling out of them and then resuming his studying of my aching erection with interest, not doing anything else.

I summon all my patience not to let my head fall back in frustration, and try to keep my voice calm. “Scorpius, love,” I say, “I don’t want to rush you or anything, but… are you just going to look at my cock until I come?”

“It’s just… It’s so pretty, Albus. I haven’t seen it this close before.”

“Um, thanks?” It twitches again at his words, which makes Scorpius chuckle, the sensation of his warm breath gusting over my sensitive skin almost too much. “Oh, fuck.”

Scorpius chuckles again, and then, finally, he leans forward to press his plump lips to my cock. I watch in awe at the action; it’s the best sensation I’ve ever had and my mouth falls open on a loud moan. Scorpius looks up at me, eyes bright and a smile playing on his lips.

“Good?”

“Oh, fuck, yes! So good.”

“I’ll do that again, then.”

10. Into you (CW: body swap)

“Do it again,” Malfoy whispered, his voice breathy.

“What?” Harry whispered back, and Malfoy showed him by slipping his hand underneath Harry’s waistband, cupping his arse and pressing Harry towards him. “Oh, fuck!”

“Bad?” Malfoy asked.

“No. Fuck. Good. So good,” Harry panted, and he realised that if they kept going like this, he would surely come, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that, or at least not how he would feel afterwards, because right now he felt fucking fantastic. His hips were moving of their own accord, desperately rutting against Malfoy, and they weren’t even kissing anymore but keeping their open mouths close to each other.

“Can I?” said Malfoy, and Harry didn’t even know what he was asking, but he knew that whatever it was, he’d like it, so he just nodded vigorously. And then Malfoy put his hand inside Harry's boxers, grabbing Harry’s cock that was straining against the fabric, pulling carefully at it so that it turned upwards, and Harry’s moan was almost a scream. Malfoy’s grip around him was firm but soft and he started working Harry off in sure, slow slides.

[jonkentdeservesbetter]

So, now that I’ve used 24 hours (+ a longfic from a completely different fandom) to calm down from the end of the last episode, #3, summoning all the child-abuse apologists of this fandom, I can share a theory. I actually posted about this one before, back when S2 had recently aired it’s finale, and Mannheim was name-dropped by John Diggle, to JHI.

(This is messier than I wanted, but tbh I’m still really fried from the fandom shittiness; it’s unsurprisingly not dissipated, so, yeah. Largely I just wanted to get this out before forgetting, since I like this theory quite a bit - mostly, I think, because it feels probable.)

While this show would not be described as comics-accurate by literally anyone, there’s a history of “totally unexpected” (read: out of fucking left-field; all misdirection and no foreshadowing groundwork) plot-twists, yet we are apparently not getting that with S3’s main villain; as was, iirc, stated in interviews.

That said, there’s always at least one thing put in that, because of how the show uses comics-canon, we can’t spot coming. It’d be pretty interesting if this time, instead of the writers playing with comic details to create a fake-out not comics-accurate, they made a plot-twist that is, plus actually well-received by most, as well as, shockingly, has gotten foreshadowing. Yep: Jon getting his powers.

I won’t go over every detail of foreshadowing Jon getting powers, because it’s a list, and I am…verbose. Instead, let’s look at ep. 3x03.

In episode 3, we not only actually get some real focus on Jon doing “hero stuff,” which we’d been ‘promised’ by the show-runners would be the case for Jon at last, but which many burnt out fans would not believe in, we also got something else. Kryptonian blood experiments, done on Mannheim’s orders.

How does this connect to Jon, specifically?

For those who aren’t aware, and for those who may have simply forgotten, in comics-canon, when Lois was investigating Bruno Mannheim and Intergang, they kidnapped her and Jon. Now, maybe they don’t know that Jon’s blood is special, or maybe, since nobody treats him as Kryptonian, Jon did the blood-drive without anyone even being aware, tipping Mannheim off to taking him.

I don’t need it to be one or the other, for my theory: it just matters if they’re kidnapped.

Because in the comics? When Jon is taken with Lois, and Superman can’t save them (not in-time, but also, Mannheim is able to hide them from Clark in the show, so), Jon’s powers awaken. He gets them out of there.

Things of course would be very different in the show, in other regards, like Mannheim possibly taking Jon to refill the blood supply he lost in the explosion, and also, that, like in the very similar Smallville plot, so long as one has access to continuous injections of Kryptonian blood - like medication - they’re able to survive diseases that would be fatal, Lois could also be experimented on with his blood while they’re captured, which helps her cancer. It isn’t a magically cure-all that would eliminate cancer, because it has to be a continuous supply, and there may also be the factor of blood compatibility - although, that likely wouldn’t be an issue for the two.

It would further Mannheim’s plans, would establish his goals more clearly to us, and yet, at the same time, it would show exactly how far he’s willing to go; what evil he does.

It would also, naturally, give Jon his powers. Plus, while we’ve had little things building up to this - the blood-drive flyer, finding bags of blood, the identification of the blood as from Clark (as Kryptonian) - in the show, we have also gotten interviews that’ve said Jon’s plot is something that’ll have him finally following in his father’s footsteps, and that Bishop is really excited for the fans to see this season - Bishop, who’s hoping for Jon to be Superboy in the show, and talked about wanting Jon to fly, and watched seasons 1 & 2 alongside us.

So is there hope? Will Jon’s powers finally awaken? Well…the poster quotes hint at it possibly being true. The question, however, with this show and Jon, is if follow-through will ever appear, or drop off a cliff suddenly.

Personally? I would LOVE if Mannheim not only came after Lois (because we all know she’s a threat, and she JUST destroyed his blood supply), but also took Jon, preferably because he found out about his blood (that would be a great time for SOMEONE to at last say “you’re Kryptonian” to him!! finally!).

Whether of not Mannheim discovers Jon’s got Kryptonian genetics or not - and think how much it would up the stakes if he did, because he would definitely put the pieces together, not to mention if he experiments with Jon’s blood with Lois she can believably recover without it being a terribly ableist magic one-and-done cure, instead creating a very unique ‘medication’ that really could only be used for her, as well as would have such a short supply it wouldn’t matter if it didn’t, and that it explains itself for why the Lane-Kents can’t risk anyone else knowing; because it would out their family and place the boys in immediate danger - either way, Jon gets his powers, and it would be both original enough for the show, and comics-accurate enough for the fans wanting that.

[can-of-pringles]

When I'm Alone with You - Chapter 3

Rating: Gen

Warnings: None

Word Count: 1k

Summary:  Silas returns home after his work day.

Note: A Silas-centric chapter

Also Read On AO3

Silas took a tired breath, pulling his keys out of his pocket to unlock his apartment door. Even though he was plenty used to the long work hours by now, it didn’t mean he didn’t feel exhausted afterward. At least his joints hadn’t flared up recently. Once he opened the door, loud barking and a fluffy wagging tail greeted him.

Blizzard jumped up and tried to lick him, continuing to whine happily and bark now that he was home.

“Alright, alright, get down. I missed you too, buddy.” Silas chuckled and rubbed the grey dog’s head. “Thank you so much for checking in on him throughout the day.” He focused his attention on the woman standing next to the couch, walking towards him.

“It’s not a problem, though he might need another walk soon.” She smiled and crossed her arms.

Silas began to take out his wallet, but she shook her head.

“Hanna. Come on, you deserve something, at least.” He gave her a slight frown.

“Nah, it’s fine. I really don’t mind looking after Blizzard a bit. And besides, we’re friends, aren’t we? If you really want to pay me, just save it for next time.” She shrugged.

Silas had known Hanna ever since he was a kid. They had become friends once during a summer Silas spent with his father in Sweden. After they bonded over both liking Moomins, they’d been best friends ever since; promising to keep in touch and write letters whenever he had gone back to the states. Though now he’d been living in Sweden since his late teens, the distance between them was gone.

“Alright, if you say so.” He held his hands up in mock defense. “Though I know you’ve been wanting to open your own dog grooming place, you could’ve saved the money for that partially.”

“If you just let me practice on Blizzard, then that’s good enough.” She joked.

Blizzard tilted his head in confusion and whined quietly, causing the two of them to laugh. Silas gave the dog a comforting pet, and he settled down again.

“Really, Silas, it’s fine. I’m getting it worked out. And I’ve been busy earning from work,” Hanna spoke genuinely, giving him a small smile.

He was silent until an idea popped into his head. “Well, if you won’t let me pay you, maybe I can treat you to supper?”

She hummed in consideration. “Okay, you win. I’m pretty hungry, and it’s already kind of late.”

“Perfect, now let me see what I have…” He went to look in his pantry.

---

They sat at the table eating and casually talking about their day. Blizzard lay curled up by his food bowl, already empty, leaving him with a full stomach.

“So, how was work?” Hanna asked before taking a bite.

Silas propped his head on the palm of his hand. He furrowed his brows as he thought. “You know it’s the typical quiet cleaning day, very occasionally having to talk to my boss or more like bosses…”

She nodded.

“Although today was a lot more interesting.”

Hanna raised an eyebrow. “What happened?”

“I had already finished my shift and was honestly kinda messing around with one of the pianos they have there…” He confessed, glancing down at his plate for a second.

“You’re gonna get caught one day, you know.” She teased.

He remained silent.

Hanna stared as she pieced it together. “You did get caught!”

“I thought I was the only person left, I swear!” He protested.

“Alright, so who was it? The main boss lady you talk about?”

Silas scoffed and shook his head. “No. I would’ve lost my job had it been her. It was actually the Cardinal they’d promoted recently for their music or worship…”

“Wait, the one you said looked pretty?”

Silas began to choke on his drink, coughing until it had settled. “I never said that!” He could feel the blush rising on his face.

“Oh, wait, I think you said ‘fancy’, my bad.” She took a drink, glancing away.

“Anyway…” He cleared his throat. “He found me playing the piano, and instead of getting mad, he was very calm about it, which was extremely surprising.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t get fired.”

“I know, I know… Then we talked about the music just for a bit until I had to leave. It was unexpected, but he seemed very nice, definitely nicer than my boss. Although, I think his job is ranked under hers. I think he's supposed to replace the Papa in charge below her soon.” He explained.

“It's the third one before him, right?” She asked.

He nodded. “Yes, um… Papa Emeritus the Third, I think. Oddly, the Cardinal is also Italian like he is… I guess the majority of them are. I don’t think they’re related, though; must’ve come from whatever ministry they have in Italy.”

“You got a bunch of eccentric Italian church people in Sweden… remind me how you got this job again?” She joked, getting a short chuckle from him.

Sure, it was a weird place to work, but he couldn’t deny the good pay.

“I don’t remember interacting with him as much or the other ones, except maybe once he might’ve pointed out a spot for me to clean… it’s been a while. But it’s odd… I guess he stepped down? But Cardinal Copia is taking his place as far as I know.”

“That’s a lot to remember.” Hanna sighed.

“Yeah, well, when you’re a janitor, you do a lot of observing and listening.” He glanced away for a second.

“But it sounds like that Cardinal is very nice.” She changed the subject.

“Oh, yeah, I think he might even try listening to the song I was playing. And whenever we see each other again, he said he wanted to tell me what he thinks.” He fought the urge to smile.

“Well, I’m all for you actually getting along with your coworkers.”

He frowned lightly. “It’s not that I don’t get along with any of them. I’m just staying busy working and I know how my boss feels about me ‘slacking’ as she puts it…”

Hanna gave him a sympathetic look. “I just sometimes worry about you being lonely. Maybe this could turn into a nice work friendship…?”

“I don’t mind having time to myself, but I get what you’re saying. And who knows? Maybe this will turn into something more than a one-off meeting…” He murmured. “Either way, I’m glad I still have my job. He told me to be careful next time.”

“And he’s right. I don’t know why you thought it was a good idea to play there.” She facepalmed.

“But if I hadn’t been playing it, we wouldn’t have had that talk.” He pointed out.

Hanna scoffed and rolled her eyes. “Well, all things considered, I hope he keeps running into you, for your sake.”

Silas silently hoped so as well.