#but commenting it with ZERO explanation as to how I could do better AND on a post that is heavy headcanon territory?

[jeonqkooks]

our beloved summer | jjk (7.5) (m.)

You made a vow to hate Jeon Jungkook ever since he packed up and left you without a single explanation, but when he shows up at your door after years of radio silence, it turns out that maybe your resolve isn’t as strong as you thought.

pairing: producer!jungkook x songwriter!reader rating: 18+ (minors dni) genres/warnings: exes au, fluff, Angst, smut; THE REASON™️, crying because obviously there's gonna be crying, mentions of hobi leaving :(, cursing, uhm she hits him; kissing (well, of course 😂), br*ast play, t*tty s*cking, oral s*x (f. receiving), f*ngering, unprotected s*x, r*ding, cr*ampie, uhm idk i think that's it word count: 6.9k (poetic, i know) note (1): holy fucking shit i am literally shaking like a chihuahua as i'm writing this a/n. what the hell it's finally here. we've been waiting for this for almost a year and a half. TREMENDOUS thanks to Jo @daechwitatamic, Ari @/wintaerbaer (edited 2024: crossed out but not removed bc even tho she plagiarized obs afterward, she did beta this for me so i guess i still gotta give her that lmfao), and Jazz @jeonwiixard for beta-ing this for me and for reassuring me that it's not a load of crap (probably) and especially Jo for telling me if i back out she'll come kick me. frick! gaaaah. okay i'm gonna let you read or i'll go out of my mind

series masterpost / playlist ; moodboards ; taglist

as always, i’d appreciate any thoughts or comments you may have, and please drop a like and/or reblog if you enjoy reading ♡

I want you to smile, to feel like enough 'Cause you deserve yellow and lions and love I hope you come back when you're doing well Forgive me for being the worst of myself

New Recording 28 - Chelsea Cutler

The second the door is closed, his mouth is on yours again. 

His hand on your waist, yours in his hair, it’s similar to how it was mere minutes ago, just the urgency has increased tenfold. You want his suit off as much as you want your dress on the floor.

Jungkook detaches from your lips to let you breathe as he cages you between his body and the door, but it’s not like you can focus very well on breathing when he starts kissing down your neck, sucking bruises into your skin. His hands travel south, one palm curving around your hips to grope your ass, the other settling on the back of your thigh to lift it up, opening your legs wider so he could better slot in between them. With your leg lifted, it makes the slit in your dress ride up, exposing your core to the cool air of the room. You can feel his growing bulge pressed against you, right over your panties. 

You whimper his name when he sucks on the sweet spot on your neck, his hips grinding against you slowly.

“Yeah?” You can hear the smirk in that one simple word and the honey that drips from his voice. “What is it?”

“Want you…”

“I’m right here,” Jungkook says. His slender fingers rub you over the pink lace that you’re wearing underneath your dress, teasing your opening through the fabric for a few beats before he pushes your panties aside. “Fuck, you’re so wet.”

His breath is hot on your neck. He presses his lips against your skin absentmindedly, the tip of his index circling you but not pushing inside just yet.

“Tell me you want me too,” you pant, your arm hooking around his neck to hold him close.

“I want you.”

Truth.

You pull him in for another bruising kiss before you blindly push him further into the room, your hands roaming the broad expanse of his clothed chest. He stops when the back of his knees hit the bed.

“Hey.” Jungkook breaks away from the kiss to look at you. “Are you sure?”

If Jimin knew what you’re doing right now, he’d say that you have zero self preservation instincts.

He’d be right, though. If you had any self preservation instincts, you wouldn’t be doing this.

Your stupid, battered heart has only ever wanted him.

“I’m sure,” comes your immediate reply. It’s desperate, but you don’t have it in yourself to even care. “I’m sure. I want this. Please.”

“You were drinking.”

“I’m not drunk. I promise.”

Maybe it’d be better if you were drunk. Then you could at least blame this lapse of judgment on a pathetic state of inebriation and not on your stupid self who’s always weak for him.

He stares at you for a minute, searching for any sign of your willingness being driven by alcohol. He seems relieved when he finds none, and it isn’t until then that he shrugs off his jacket, before helping you take off his dress shirt and trousers.

You haven’t seen him like this in so long.

Every defined line on his body, accentuating every detail that you could spend hours running your fingers over.

He looks different but at the same time, not really. A tad more muscular, but still the same lean frame. Hard chest and abs on full display for you. God, your fingers are fucking twitching with the need to touch him.

Once he’s been stripped down to his boxers, he leans down to kiss you before you stop him with a hand on his chest. The lone tiger lily on his arm catches your attention.

Your fingers reach out to trace the black ink on his body, the lines delicate, your touch feather light. You’re suddenly curious. When did he get it? You can’t remember if you two ever talked about getting tattoos.

“What does it mean?” you ask. It strikes you with the realization that this is just one of the thousands of things that you missed, a reminder of your lost time. 

“Please love me,” he says, bringing his hands up to cup your face. He looks at you, just for a few seconds, before clarifying, “It means ‘Please love me,’” then kissing you again.

Jungkook clumsily and blindly searches for the dress’ zipper on your back, giving it a few impatient tugs until it finally starts gliding down your body. Your lips never part from one another as the dress falls to the floor, pooling at your feet. But once you step out of it, he does pull back to look at you from head to toe. His eyes fall to your chest, clad in a lacy pink bra that matches your panties. The look he gives you is the same one that he did when he saw you in your dress earlier today. But there’s something else in his eyes - realization, pride, perhaps a question too.

His hands are back on your body instantly, throwing you onto the bed, crawling over you like a predator. He discards your bra with ease, flinging it to the floor with the rest of your clothes. You shiver when the chilly air meets your bare chest, but the sensation quickly goes away when he takes your breast into his warm mouth. You let out a delighted sigh, arching your back to push yourself further into him as his tongue flicks over your stiff nipple. One of his hands comes up to squeeze your other breast to make sure that it isn’t neglected, rolling your pebbled bud between his thumb and forefinger. He switches to sucking your other tit after a while, then pawing at the one he just had in his mouth.

“Jungkook,” you whine his name when he makes out with your tits for too long, because there’s somewhere else that desperately requires his immediate attention. “Need you…”

He releases your nipple with a wet pop, and he looks pleased with himself when he sees that they’re thoroughly glistening with his spit. “Sorry,” he says with a chuckle. “Didn’t mean to keep you waiting.” He starts making his way down your body, kissing every inch of your skin that’s on display for him, before you put a hand on his shoulder when his face gets close to your thighs.

“What are you doing?”

He looks up at you as his fingers ghost over the fabric of your panties. “Can I?”

You lick your lips, contemplating whether or not you have the patience to wait for him. But alas, you decide, “Okay.”

Jungkook makes quick work of sliding your underwear down your legs and letting it join the pile on the floor. Even in the dim light, he can see just how wet you are, practically glittering with arousal, looking so utterly inviting that it makes his mouth water. All of this, just for him.

He doesn’t waste another second, diving right into you to lick a stripe up your dripping folds. Swiftly burying two fingers into your heat, he doesn’t stop until he’s knuckles deep. Your lips part in a silent but delighted moan. You forgot how good he used to make you feel. Your fingers could never feel as good as his, not thick enough to stretch yourself open and not long enough to reach deep inside of you.

“Fuck,” you drawl, your eyes fluttering shut when the tip of his tongue meets your throbbing clit, teasing it until you’re practically grinding against his face. You thread a hand into his hair, gripping his dark locks until he’s groaning, sending blissful vibrations all throughout your body. The figure 8’s that his tongue draws on your clit sets you alight, sends you into a whole other dimension completely as pleasure courses through your veins. 

“So good,” he mumbles. To you? To himself? You can’t tell, but that doesn’t really matter. “Still so good.”

You hear it, just how soaked you are, as he begins thrusting his digits in and out of you. He strokes your walls delicately with each press of his fingers, scissoring you open for what you know is to come. 

His tongue dips into your entrance then, teases your dripping hole as you pant heavily, 

Your legs close in on his head as the orgasm nears, but he keeps your thighs apart, firmly holding them open as he makes you unravel.

This is fucking unreal - Jungkook with his whole face tucked between your legs, desperate to make you come with his talented mouth. You never would have anticipated this when you woke up this morning.

No, just a while ago you were crying by yourself down at the beach. Now you’re crying out his name as he smothers himself in you.

Once he starts curling them inside of you, it’s embarrassing how fast you come. You clench hard around his fingers as the orgasm washes over you, dripping down his fingers and he uses the added wetness to carry you through the high.

“Jungkook…” you whimper, sounding completely fucked out even though it’s only just beginning. After a while, the heightened pleasure fades into the background, and he presses soft kisses against your inner thigh.

He crawls his way up your body until he’s facing you again. You watch his fingers and the way they’re coated in your juices, wondering what he’ll do with them next. Jungkook languidly smears the wetness all over your lips like he’s carefully painting them, only to kiss you afterward. When you moan against him, he takes the opportunity to slip his tongue into your mouth. Your hand finds its way into his boxers then, wrapping your fingers around his hardened length, pumping him in your fist until he’s shallowly rutting against you.

The kiss gets broken when he suddenly pulls away, realization dawning on him. “Shit,” he exclaims. “I don’t have a condom.”

“Oh.” You blink at him, then you both just look at each other for a while. This isn’t a problem with no solution, even if the solution is a disastrous one in hindsight. You just want him, so badly that you can’t think of anything else.

He waits for you, doesn’t dare say anything else until you do.

Yet again, the opportunity presents itself for you to stop.

But you’ve already gone this far, and though it’s damn near impossible, you want him even more than you did before.

“Are you clean?” you ask.

It’s evident that he’s surprised by the way his eyes widen, and his silence that follows for the next half a minute. “Yeah,” he tells you.

“Okay. Then we don’t need a condom.”

He says your name once, his fingers brushing your hair away from your face sweetly. You always did like your name best when it used to fall from his lips so softly. “Are you sure?” he asks.

“I’m sure. I promise.”

Jungkook sucks in a breath, like he’s steadying himself, before he rids himself of the remaining piece of clothing on his body, then settles between your legs again. This time, his cock rests directly on your bare pussy. The anticipation makes it harder for you to breathe, makes you squeeze your thighs around his waist to not let him leave.

“How long has it been?”

Your answer is vague. “Too long,” you say. You don’t want to tell him that there’s been no one else since him, but you have a feeling that he understands it anyway. You think that he’d be pleased with your answer, that maybe it would boost his ego in a way, but there’s only a certain sadness that settles in his eyes. 

“Okay.” Regardless, he pushes past the sudden gloom that befalls his features, blinking away the disheartenment swimming in his irises, to align himself with your entrance. He rubs his cock against your pussy to coat you in his precum, even though you yourself are certainly more than wet enough for him to slide home easily. “Ready?”

“Yes,” you confirm, bracing your hands on his shoulders as he eases the tip into you, making the both of you moan at the contact. You feel him, all of him.

For a second, you wonder if he has ever forgone protection with anyone else, or if it’s only ever been just you.

Jungkook takes one of your hands off his shoulder to lay it flat on the bed next to your head, lacing your fingers together, giving your hand a slight squeeze. “Breathe. You can do it.”

“Give me a minute.”

“We’ve got time,” he says, his voice smooth like velvet.

“Can you kiss me?” you ask, almost like you’re shy even though he’s balls deep inside of you.

He chuckles lightly, so endeared by you and your silly question.

His lips meet yours sweetly, like doing so would help make the stretch less painful. Maybe it does, at least a little bit. 

You can feel his cock throbbing inside of you, and he’s probably trying so hard to hold back, but he keeps kissing you nonetheless.

“You can move,” you say after a while.

“I’ll go slow, okay?”

“Okay.”

He rears his hips back, slowly, then thrusts forward again. You whimper from the slight burn, but it’s nothing you can’t handle. His movements are gentle for the next couple of minutes or so, and it isn’t until you start opening up more that he sets a steadier pace. Even when he starts to fuck you faster, one of his hands is still on your hips, rubbing your skin soothingly. 

“Fuck,” Jungkook grunts out, followed by a sigh of your name as he pumps into your cunt, every ridge and vein of his cock dragging deliciously in and out of your walls. “You feel so good.”

He gazes down at you as he moves, and there’s just something so intimate about it that it makes you want to cry again.

You know what it’s like to have him fuck you, and this isn’t it.

No, this is something else entirely.

I love you, you think. I love you so fucking much.

“Missed you.” His words come out hushed, caught in half a moan, half a whimper. “Missed you so fucking much.”

“Did you think about me?”

“Always,” he says, without even missing a beat.

“No,” you clarify. “When you were sleeping with other people, did you think about me?”

“I only thought about you.” His hips stutter as he tells you this, like he’s confessing to something that he shouldn’t. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”

You never admitted this to anyone, not even Taehyung even though he probably sensed it, but you used to feel like you could be physically sick just looking at the photos on his feed every time you’d lurk on a drunken night. They were never flashy, just subtle enough for you to know that there was someone. It made you nauseous, because the place next to him was always supposed to be yours.

You just stare at him, not knowing how to process this bit of information. Sure, it’s an ego boost. There’s some pride in knowing that you were the one on his mind even if you weren’t together.

He’s so utterly gorgeous like this that you can’t form a single coherent thought, too lost in the way his eyes bore into yours and in the blossoming warmth that spreads all over your chest from hearing his words.

How did he manage to get even more beautiful? Sculpted by the gods. The standard for all men.

“What is it?” he asks when you stare at him for too long.

“I…” You blink away the daze. “I wanna be on top.”

“Okay.”

Jungkook slips out of you just long enough to get seated with his back against the headboard and pull you into his lap. You hover over him, letting his tip rub against your dripping hole for a moment before you sink onto him. You tip your head back and sigh as you envelope him fully again, the only difference is that you can feel him so much deeper like this.

He grabs your ass with both hands, kneading your skin as he helps you ride him. The sounds that you make together are downright obscene, bouncing off the walls, ringing in your ears.

“Harder,” you tell him shakily. “Don’t wanna hurt you.”

“I want it to hurt,” you say, holding onto him like you’re bracing for impact, because you know he’ll give you what you want. “Make it hurt.”

Jungkook sighs once, then digs his heels into the mattress to steady himself before his hips go wild, thrusting into you with such force that it nearly has you sobbing, your head falling onto his shoulder. It makes you burn with pleasure, like a star before it becomes a supernova. When the tension starts building quickly, you can’t help but slam your hips down harder to meet his thrusts, to chase that high.

You press your lips against his skin, any spot you could find - his jaw, his neck, his shoulder. “Tell me you love me.”

The words are ready on the tip of his tongue, like he’s been waiting for an opportunity to say it. He doesn’t miss a single beat as he tells you, “I love you.”

“Mean it.”

“I do mean it. I love you.”

Truth.

For some sick and twisted reason, his words send you crashing over the edge, falling into that abyss of pleasure that you’ve been searching for. You say his name, over and over again, like you’re making up for all the years that he wasn’t around to hear it.

Your walls convulse wildly around him as you cry out, your toes curling, your thighs shaking. He holds you close, thrusting into you through your orgasm until you’re dizzy, like you could actually pass out from the overwhelming bliss.

“I’m close,” he tells you in a raspy voice.

You catch your breath long enough to say, “Come for me.”

“Where do you want it?”

“Inside,” you say without much thought. If you were in a clearer state of mind, you would know that it’s reckless and stupid. You’re not on birth control, and if anything were to happen, you would have no one to blame but yourself.

But you aren’t in a clear state of mind, and maybe this is even more dangerous than if you were fueled by alcohol. At least you can sober up from alcohol.

You just want him so badly that rationality seems like a luxury you can’t afford right now.

“Y/N,” he whispers shakily, though there’s a warning edge to his voice that you understand.

“I want you to come inside me. I want it. I want it so bad. Please.”

Jungkook groans at your answer. 

He doesn’t ask you to look at him, instead choosing to hide his face against your neck where you feel something wet glide down your skin as he grips your hips. It’s followed by a sniffle, and hands that hold onto you like you’re a lifeline. 

He’s crying, and that breaks your fucking heart.

You don’t know what to do. Part of you wants to tilt his chin up to look at you, because it feels strange without his tender gaze on you, but you decide against it even though the tips of your fingers tingle with the need to do so. 

Your walls clench with purpose, squeezing around him, trying to help you get there. It’s not that long before you hear your name falling from his lips in a choked out moan, so needy and beautiful and makes you nostalgic. He empties himself inside of you, making you shudder from the sudden warmth that he paints along your walls.

You stay in the same position for a few more minutes until your chest is no longer heaving with exhaustion and euphoria. He gently pulls you off his lap to lay you down on the bed, pressing an apologetic kiss against your bare shoulder when you wince from the oversensitivity, from any kind of movement at all. 

When he moves to throw on his boxers and goes to stand up, you reach for him. “Where are you going?” You instantly feel pathetic for asking.

He pauses, then squeezes your hand as that sadness from before makes an appearance in his eyes again. “I’m just going to the bathroom,” he tells you, his voice quiet.

The relief on your face must be visible. “Okay,” you say. Rationally, you know he probably wouldn’t fuck you and leave you the second the deed is done. But again, rationality is a luxury at the moment.

Jungkook returns a couple of minutes later with a warm cloth, and dabs it between your legs to clean you up. You grimace when he touches you there, evidently sore already from the activities you just engaged in.

“Sorry,” he’s quick to say, though it isn’t really his fault. Or maybe it is his fault. You’re not sure if that even matters.

When he’s done, he gets under the covers with you. “Come here,” he says, then shuffles your body closer to his until he’s holding you with his hands on your bare waist. He leans down to kiss you, and you let him. God, you feel like you’re fucking melting.

It’s different from the kiss down at the beach, and it’s different from the needy ones you shared in the past hour. It’s soft and slow and easy, like there’s nothing for you to worry your pretty little head about.

Jungkook breaks away eventually, and rests his forehead against yours then. One of his hands on your waist slides up to your ribs, until his thumb could brush the underside of your breast. The touch is gentle, sweet, completely innocent.

“You’re so beautiful,” he whispers. He means everything he tells you. “You’re perfect.”

You even blush, like you’re a stupid lovesick teenager. “Tell me,” you say.

“Anything.”

You reckon it’s self-indulgent at this point. You’re only asking to feel better about your place in his life, or rather, the place that used to be yours.

“Tell me you can’t live without me.”

He nudges his nose against yours. No hesitation. “I can’t live without you.”

Truth. You know it’s the truth.

Nonetheless… “Liar.” Your tone is soft. There’s no bite at all. You touch his face, trying to commit to memory every detail, how his soft skin feels under your touch as if it’s the last time you’ll ever get to see him like this. Maybe it is. You never got to have a last time with him, never got to know that it was ending before it already ended. You’re not thinking about the morning because you don’t want to, but the seed of anxiety is there in your belly. Your fingers trace his jawline as you say, “You lived without me. You were doing fine without me.”

His lips ghost over your cheek. “It wasn’t much of a life,” he says. “I couldn’t bear it without you.”

The thing is, you know that he’s being honest. And it should make you feel good that you affected him as much as he affected you.

But then… it keeps leading you back to that question. The question that you thought you could go the rest of your life without knowing the answer to. But for that to be possible, you needed him to stay gone, stay out of your world forever.

He shouldn’t be here, tangled up in the sheets with you and kissing you like his life depends on it. 

He shouldn’t tell you that he misses you, that he loves you. Shouldn’t tell you to please, love him too.

It’s contradictory, isn’t it? You needed to never see him again if you stood a chance of moving on with your life. You needed it and yet, all you wanted was to have him back by your side.

The tattoo catches your attention again. It feels like it’s laughing at you, mocking you.

You clench your teeth once, your eyes beginning to turn glassy. Jungkook sees it, and he’s quick to break up your train of thought. He presses his mouth to yours, shushing you with a deep kiss that makes your head spin, despite it all.

“Don’t think about it,” he mumbles against your lips, so desperate to get you to stop. As if he can sense where this could lead.

“How could I not? I don’t know who you are anymore.”

“You know me.” He holds onto your wrist, to keep your hand on his face before you can pull it away. “I’m still the same.”

“No, you’re not,” you say quietly, absentmindedly.

“Yes,” he insists. “Yes, I am.”

Maybe that’s true. Maybe you do see the person you used to know. But you only ever see him in glimpses and it always leaves you with a terrible, nauseous feeling afterward.

He doesn’t understand how much it hurts you to catch glimpses of the boy you used to love - the boy you still love - only to realize that maybe that isn’t the person he wants to be anymore. It feels like he keeps trying to kill that version of himself, like he despises the person who meant the world to you.

Are you gone forever?

Come back quietly.

“How old are you?” you ask after a moment.

The question makes him pause, his soft features twisting in confusion. He leans back a bit, so his eyes could focus on your face better.

“What?”

“How old are you?” you repeat.

It takes him another while to answer as he tries to see where you’re going with this. But when his search comes up empty, he just answers, “29.”

"I don't know who you are at 29. The last time I knew you was 24. No. You hadn't even turned 24 yet. Where was 25? 26? 27? 28? It’s unfair that you still know who I am when I don't know who you are. I feel like I never aged a day past 24. You carried on living but I'm still here."

His eyes well up once again, but this time, you can see it. The first tear spills over, lands somewhere on your collarbone. This is what you used to want, right? To see him hurting, just like how you were hurting? Well, be careful what you wish for.

No part of you feels victorious that you’re making him cry, that the score is finally being settled, because none of this undoes all of the shit you had to go through. If anything, it makes you feel even worse, like you’re still losing.

“I never moved on from us. I couldn’t move on from you,” he says, voice cracking toward the end. Your heart is doing the same thing in your chest, but you’re glad that he can’t see it. “I swear I miss you every day. I wanted you with me every day. You have no idea how much I wanted to come back to you.”

Jungkook looks so dejected, like a reflection of you these past few years. You recognize that look in his eyes. You know that sadness all too well. He was in as much pain as you were.

He loved you when he left you. He still loves you even after all this time. 

You inhale shakily. For the first time, you feel infinitely selfish for only focusing on your own misery without even stopping to give him the benefit of the doubt, to consider the possibility that maybe letting you go wasn’t something he wanted. Maybe he isn’t the antagonist that you spent years making him out to be.

There’s more to it, and you need to know.

“Then why did you leave me?”

Graduation was just shy of a month ago, and two weeks before that was Hoseok’s flight when he left you all behind.

You and Jungkook, along with Taehyung and Jimin had gone to see him off at the airport. Of course you did, you were his best of friends after all. The goodbye was full of jokes accompanied by sniffles, and tears that overflowed without permission because you all agreed that you would hold yourself together for Hoseok. Jimin was probably the one who cried the most, even though inside, you were equally sad to see your friend leave.

A part of your life was ending, and that in and of itself was depressing enough already, but you thought at least the whole group would still be together and start the next chapter by each other’s side.

Nonetheless, it wasn’t the end of the world. All of you could still make it work, even if it wasn’t the most ideal of situations. You promised to keep in touch, promised to message the group chat every day and have video calls every weekend. You were still kids, and kids tend to be optimistic like that.

What none of you could see coming was how everything would fall apart in a matter of mere weeks.

Jungkook thinks that decades from now, when he’s old and gray and helpless, he still won’t be able to forget that day.

He should’ve been more concerned when your mother contacted him out of nowhere, asking him to meet with her, asking him not to let you know where he was going.

He’d shown up half an hour early to the cafe where they were supposed to meet, just because he didn’t want to risk being late and have your mother disapprove of him even more. Not once had she expressed anything other than disdain toward your relationship, but you’d always told him it didn’t matter, that you were the only person who could decide what to do with your life, not anyone else, let alone your mother. He always believed you back then, even if deep down, he still wanted her to see that he was enough for you. Her unattainable approval still mattered to him.

Jungkook spent thirty whole minutes running on nothing but anxiety and caffeine. That was probably his first mistake, ordering a cup of coffee which only made him more nervous than he already was.

When your mother arrived, it barely took her any time at all to get right into what she came here to say. She hadn’t even bothered with a drink.

Was that how it was always going to end? Should he have seen it coming from the beginning? Was he the only one who thought it would be you and him all the way until the very end?

Maybe he was more of a hopeless romantic than he thought.

It was the way she had called him a phase that she hoped you’d grow out of. That she had let you keep this relationship for long enough, but now that you’d graduated - now that you’d be starting a life for yourself - she couldn’t sit back and watch you throw it all away for a boy who could never give you what you deserved.

It was the way she told him she didn’t want history to repeat itself. How she didn’t want to subject you to the same fate that she and your father had to suffer through. How she had left your dad because in the end, he wasn’t enough for her and you, even though you were a child and you deserved to grow up with a father and with love.

She said the same thing would happen to you and Jungkook, because you were meant for greater things and he was not meant to deserve you. She made it clear that he would always hold you back, that he would never amount to even a fraction of what you should receive in life.

“If you love her, you would let her go.”

Cliché, right? Like the kind of stuff you only ever see in movies? Well, movies have to take inspiration from somewhere.

He thought about his own mother then, and about how people could have such different ways of showing love. He believed that your mother loved you, and he still believes that. She wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of seeing him if she didn’t care about you. She wanted the best for you, and that wasn’t him.

She didn’t have to tell him to keep it a secret from you, because he wouldn’t have told you regardless. He was well aware of how strained your relationship with your mother was, and letting you know would only drive it closer to the edge. She knew he wouldn’t tell you. He loved you, and that was the one thing that she could count on.

Just sitting there in that café, Jungkook felt like all of the air had been sucked out of the room, even though he was surrounded by the other patrons and their lively laughter as they chatted away. The pitiful way that your mother kept looking at him forced him to learn what it was like to feel truly worthless.

The pity in her eyes only intensified when he couldn’t even say a single word in response, couldn’t think of anything to defend himself.

Silence meant agreement, and that was what he chose. Jungkook - the naive boy that he was - stopped believing in you. He’d believed her instead.

He was just a kid, what else was he supposed to do? 

She was your own flesh and blood, and he knew nothing could ever replace that. He would rather let you hate him, resent him for the rest of your life, than let you lose your family.

That day, he lied to you for the first time ever, saying he couldn’t come over because he was tired. The sunflowers he bought for you just hours prior ended up dying on his windowsill.

He wouldn’t see you again for a few more days, then for months afterward.

July was supposed to represent a blossoming summer, but all he could remember was the dreadful promise of a winter that would inevitably come.

You call his name when he takes too long to answer. “Tell me.”

“I love you,” he merely says. His hand brushes your cheek.

You frown, despite the way the three words make your chest tingle.

“I love you,” he says it again, trying to ease the furrow between your brows.

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I’m sorry.”

His voice is soft, barely even audible, but it’s this gentleness that makes his words ricochet, ringing in your ears loudly like a gun going off in the quiet of your room.

Again with the apologies.

Fuck this.

It’s hard to take it to heart when you don’t even know what he’s apologizing for.

You gave Jungkook the chance to explain himself, but if he doesn’t take it, then that’s not on you. There isn’t much else that you can do.

You swallow hard, then shove him off of you so you could get out of the bed. Your legs instantly tremble as you attempt to stand, but you soldier on as you put on your bra and underwear, then grab your dress from where it lays abandoned on the floor. You’re shaking, but it’s difficult to determine if it’s because you’re angry, or cold without his warmth nearby.

He’s quick to his feet too, rushing toward you before you could leave.

“Don’t touch me,” you hiss when he reaches for your arm. He doesn’t listen, because when has Jeon Jungkook ever fucking listened?

“Y/N, wait-”

“Wait for what?! I asked you a simple question and you can’t even answer me.”

He runs a hand over his face frustratedly, clearly torn over something. He holds your angered gaze, but the way he looks at you is much milder, gentler even if it’s equally frustrated. “I’m trying to protect you.”

You don’t know if it’s the wrong answer or not. You just know that in this moment, it irritates you to no end.

“Oh my god,” you gasp mockingly. “Someone is trying to kill me.”

“What?”

“Someone is trying to kill me. Someone is waiting outside that door right now, waiting for me to come out so they can kill me. Holy fucking shit, I’m about to be assassinated.”

“Y/N, I’m serious.”

There’s that burning sensation behind your eyes again. “And you think I’m not? What do you mean you’re trying to protect me? Protect me from what? Do you think this is a fucking k-drama? Jesus Christ,” you scoff harshly. “What do you want from me? What the actual fuck do you want?”

Jungkook aims for you again, and in an attempt to ward him off, your swinging fist inadvertently collides with his chest. The dress falls to the floor again, laying next to your feet, that useless piece of fabric.

It probably doesn’t do much damage to him, but he’s a bit startled regardless. So are you, if you’re being honest. But you do it again, and surprisingly, he lets you.

“You coward.” You shove hard at his chest, making him stumble backward. “You unbelievable asshole. You fucked me, you said you loved me, and you still can’t tell me why you left me.” 

He allows you to push him until his back is pressed against the wall. And even then, you don’t relent. Your fists continue beating against his chest as you start sobbing, spilling ‘I hate you’s in between so many expletives it could make his grandmother faint.

He might bruise in the morning.

You hope he bruises in the morning.

The least Jungkook could do is bruise for you.

You want him to curse him out for so many things - for loving you, for leaving you, for not even having the balls to tell you why he broke your heart. For coming back to remind you that you still love him. For proving that he still has you in the palm of his hands, and every twitch of his finger can make you feel like the walls are crumbling down on you.

But even as you tell him how much you hate him, you’re still thinking: Come back. I don’t want to keep losing you. Come back to me.

Because he’s the only person who can hurt you like this. When you think about him, it used to make you so depressed that you could hardly function. There’s no other way to put it to make it sound less pathetic. That’s just how it is.

You shouldn’t have agreed to this weekend, shouldn’t have been nice to him, shouldn’t have let him convince you not to think about it. You shouldn’t have opened the door for him in the first place, because there was always a part of you that knew he could get under your skin so easily just like that.

This wasn’t your second chance at holding onto him. It wasn’t a do-over. It was a re-enactment.

The years haven’t made you wiser, that much is clear.

You don’t know how long this goes on for, but at some point, you begin to wear yourself out. Your movements start to slow and the energy to violently sob leaves your body until you’re nearly collapsing. Jungkook catches you when you don’t have the strength to hold yourself up anymore. Why are you always so fucking helpless?

“You just…” Your voice gets caught at the end of a sob. This is rock bottom all over again. “You make me so sad.”

You grasp his arm weakly, feeling like your own lungs are failing you. You can’t breathe. It’s too much, too infinitely humiliating. He’s doing this to you again, and this time you have to shoulder most of the blame, because you are the one that enabled your own heartbreak for the second time.

You’re still crying, and you hate that this is the first time he’s ever seen you cry like this.

“I’m trying to protect you,” he says firmly, looking at you like he’s trying so hard not to break down alongside you. “Please, I’m so sorry.” The words come out as a whisper now. You can feel the tremble in his voice and the shake of his hands where they hold you. His big bambi eyes - the usual home of constellations - now house tears that threaten to spill onto his supple cheeks. “Please. What can I do to make you believe me?”

It’s those stupid fucking eyes. It’s your stupid fucking self.

“You need to tell me.” Your tears keep on falling no matter how much he tries to wipe them away. “I can’t take it anymore.”

“It’ll make things worse,” he tells you, his voice cracking as he does. He sounds like he means it, and maybe he does believe that whatever he’s hiding from you will only hurt you more. It almost has you caving, but you can’t do this a second time. You’re exhausted, both physically and emotionally. In the morning, you’ll think about how this is all so dramatic, the way you’re acting right now. The most k-drama-esque thing that has ever happened to you. But in the moment, you just feel like someone plunged a knife in your chest, and they keep twisting it, twisting and twisting,...

In the end, you decide that it’s a risk you’ll have to take, because nothing can be more painful than the absolute hell he’s putting you through. He’ll never understand how utterly excruciating it is to experience this kind of heartbreak.

“If you don’t tell me now, I won’t be able to survive you again.”

up next...

our beloved summer (08) ⏤ aka the JK centric chapter

all rights reserved © jeonqkooks. reposting, translating and/or modifying is not permitted by any means. [posted september 30, 2023]

[gojhoes]

Cold Ass Hands

A snippet from my Gojo x reader enemies to lovers slowburn fic on AO3! Somewhat canon-compliant, I'm just here for the tension and drama. - context: Reader(you) is Nanami’s twin sister, a jujutsu sorcerer who has been practicing reverse cursed technique. Gojo gets injured (fic is somewhat canon-compliant) and asks you to heal him. - wc: 3.8k

November 2011

[…] you decided to do what you normally did when you had a free moment; bother Shoko.

You were disappointed to find that she wasn’t in her office when you’d reached the basement, which was odd. You hardly ever saw her above ground. In fact, it seemed that you were completely alone down there, until-

“Nanamiiiis,” Gojo called out. “I need your help with something.”

You started at the sudden timbre of his voice. How did he even know it was you? The primary explanation that came to mind was that he was fucking with you. Gojo didn’t need help, ever. But you had never been one to leave well enough alone. Fueled by a tickle of intrigue, you found yourself taking off down the hall until you found him.

You walked into one of the many small rooms in the school’s infirmary to see Gojo perched on a tissue-papered exam table. He held a blood-soaked cloth to his bare chest, just above his heart. The sight of his shirtless torso sent your pulse jumping and your face aflame with the blush you’d never seemed to grow out of. You couldn’t help but stare. The broad nature of his shoulders was more marked without a shirt to cover them. You drank in the slight curve of his waist, glimpsing the dark waistband of his briefs just barely peeking out above his pants.

And then he glanced up at you, bright blue eyes completely exposed and boring into your own.

Fuck, he could be intense when he wanted to be.

“Come here,” he said, curling the index finger of his free hand. “Don’t be shy.”

Normally, a comment like that would’ve earned him one of your signature scowls, but you were too busy trying to stop the melodramatic pounding in your chest. An attempt was made to tear your eyes away from his body. There was now absolutely zero doubt in your mind that he’d grown into his stature since you’d left Tokyo two years ago. He’d always been handsome, a fact that used to be overshadowed by your blatant dislike of his person. But it was in a different way now that he was older and had become a young man. You felt yourself swallow upon directing you gaze to the delicate curve of his clavicle. As for the rest of him… well, they didn’t call him “the strongest” for nothing.

You gathered every drop of courage you could muster and forced yourself to calmly stride over to him. It was likely that he could sense your anxiety and even more so that he was aware of what he was doing. But you were determined to hold your ground, even if your instincts were screaming at you to run out of the room until you were up into the mountains that surrounded the school.

Never before had you seen Gojo injured. As far as you knew, it was impossible given the Infinity that prevented anything to come in contact with him. Questions plagued your mind: what had happened? What or who was powerful enough to break through his shield? And most importantly, what did he need you for?

You stopped about three foot to his left, not wanting to close the space any further. There was a lot of blood saturating the cloth in his hand and even more smeared on his alabaster skin. Had you not known better, the delicate appearance of his complexion would’ve given the impression of vulnerability. But you could always feel the hum of his power and the intensity of his cursed energy. Where you had a well of it, Gojo held oceans. Nothing about him was weak, or delicate.

“How has your reversed technique training been going?” He asked, cocking his head to the side.

You were taken aback, completely surprised by the inquiry. Given past interactions regarding your venture with reversal technique, you were under the impression that he couldn’t give less of a shit about it. You also hadn’t yet ruled out the possibility that he was toying with you, so you kept your guard up.

“It- um,” you stammered. “Fine. Why?”

That wasn’t necessarily true, but you figured the less he knew the better. In truth, your successes had been far and few. The first year spent in New York City, you’d studied reversed technique almost exclusively. But, just as Shoko had told you several years before, your success had been limited to shallow wounds. Even then, you could count on one hand the number of times it had worked since you’d embarked on that quest.

“Show me,” Gojo instructed with uncharacteristic gentleness.

You sent him an incredulous glance. Were you hearing him right, or was his lack of clothing hindering your cognitive function?

“Y-you want me to..?”

He nodded, already reaching out for your hand to place it on the cloth he held. You pulled back quickly, as though you’d touched an open flame.

Gojo raised his free hand in question, clearly stunned and annoyed by your flinching. “What?”

“Um, I need gloves!” You exclaimed. “Are you out of your mind?”

“What?” He repeated. “I don’t have anything.”

You let out a sharp sigh through your nose. “It’s literally basic medical practice, you nasty bitch.”

There was a small sink attached to the wall on the other side of the room. You took your time washing and drying your hands, trying to relax despite your growing anxiety. Boxes of gloves sat in wall-mounted holders that just so happened to be on the other side of where Gojo was situated. The head of the exam table was flush against the wall, which gave you about a foot of room to squeeze through to get to them. You maneuvered around his long legs, waiting for him to move so you could reach past without touching him, but he remained planted in the same spot.

“Um, I just gotta..” You trailed off, trying to ignore the sweat that was beginning to gather on your palms despite just having dried them.

He said nothing, only watching you with intent and likely enjoying how flustered you were clearly becoming. You raised up on the tips of your toes to reach for a set of blue nitrile gloves, hauntingly aware of how the hem of your shirt lifted when you did so. You also felt your hip brush against his leg and had to stop yourself from jolting out of your skin right there.

To your embarrassment, tugging the gloves on proved to be slightly difficult due to the clamminess of your hands. Each second that passed was painstakingly long beneath Gojo’s scrutiny, but you eventually managed to get them on and retook your position on the other side of him.

He dropped the hand holding the makeshift gauze as you took it from his grasp. You carefully pulled the blood-soaked fabric away from his skin to reveal the shredded flesh underneath. Your heart lurched at the sight of it, sending a small wave of nausea through your head. The smell of his blood filled your nose, mixed with something darker, something foul. A memory tickled at the back of your mind, until it surfaced with full-fledged alarm.

“Poison.” You blurted out.

Gojo hummed in confirmation. “It shouldn’t have happened, but it did.”

His voice held no ounce of shame, stating it as a matter of fact, but he also gave no indication that was going to elaborate. How long had he been like this? Didn’t it hurt? Why didn’t he just heal it himself? You had so many questions lately, and despite your endless patience, it appeared that none of them were ever going to receive an answer.

You discarded the ruined cloth onto a small metal table by the bed. You drenched a clean pad of sterile gauze in antiseptic to scrub the blood from his chest. He was watching you closely as you worked, giving no indication that you might’ve been hurting him. You tried to be as gentle as you could until most of his skin was clean.

You paused. What would he say if it didn’t work? A small part of you weighed more heavily than the dominant logical one. One that pleaded with you to stop, because you were going to disappoint him and embarrass yourself. You didn’t want to disappoint him. You so desperately wanted Gojo’s approval, but the roots of your self-doubt were even more inviolable.

“Gojo, I don’t know if I- “

“Try.”

You swallowed. The gash on Gojo’s chest was deep, oozing fresh blood and the black fluid of poison. It was a wound that he easily could’ve healed himself, but he was looking to you expectantly and with unbridled trust. It was more severe a wound than any you’d attempted to mend before. There was no guarantee that you’d even be able to do it, given that the only times you’d practiced were on your own body.

You were so afraid to fail, but even more so to hesitate in front of Gojo, especially when he gazed up at you with such certainty. You laid your palms flat against the space just below either of his collarbones and closed your eyes.

His skin was warm beneath your touch. The necessary proximity made it so the outside of your thigh pressed against his. Even through the layers of clothing, the contact sent a shiver through your whole being. Had you ever been this close to him before? Under the domineering metallic scent of his blood was something softer and clean, reminiscent of his apartment you’d been in just weeks ago. You resisted the urge to breathe it in.

He let out a sharp hiss between his teeth and you flinched backward, afraid that you might have hurt him.

“What?!”

“You have some cold ass hands,” He whined.

“Oh my g- shut up.”

You focused on the feeling of his pain. It became a tangible thing, a red, stabbing mass you could see in your mind’s eye. The blood was leaking from your chest, the cut was just above your heart. Picture the energy, gold and blue dust spilling from an endless cup. Pour it out. Breathe, pour, pain, erase. His pain became yours as you absorbed it, and you shifted your focus to crushing it beneath a figurative fist.

It was different from the times you’d tried to heal yourself. You wanted to take his pain away, to make it disappear and never let it happen again. It was downright emotional at that point. Your cursed energy flared all around you, building as you absorbed more of the hot, stabbing sensation from his body. Tears welled up in your eyes, but you kept them shut as tight as you could. You heard him suck in a breath and his muscles went rigid under your touch.

At first, nothing changed. You were hyperaware of Gojo’s sticky blood covering your glove-clad fingers, thick and tangy. Your teeth grinded together from how tightly you were clenching your jaw. Breathe. Erase. You convinced yourself that the gash was a curse you wanted to exorcise. Absorb it, pour, pain, crush it-

And then the pain vanished. The tension in his body subsided, replaced by the warmth of release and a rush of excitement. You gasped and your eyes flew open to glimpse Gojo’s face just a few inches from yours. Blue eyes filling your vision, as brilliant and free as the sky, uncovered, and full of energy.

“I’ll be damned,” He breathed.

You glanced down at your blood-slicked fingers. Some remained on him, but the gash no longer looked at you angry and agape. Instead, it appeared as a thin, white scar, barely visible against his pale complexion. You smiled, wide and toothy, as a rush of euphoria tingled throughout your whole body. You wiped at the tears that had escaped when you opened your eyes, but you felt invincible.

Gojo was so close to you. Your hands still laid on his chest, his warmth wrapping around you like a safety blanket. Somehow, your leg had hooked itself between his thighs, suddenly all too aware of the intimacy of the situation. Had you moved forward just an inch, your leg would’ve been pressing into his groin. Blood roared in your ears. Could he feel how fast your heart was beating? Under your palm, his own was slow and steady. Unbreakable.

“Better?” You asked, suddenly breathless.

And then his half-lidded eyes darted downward from yours to your lips, sending a horde of butterflies afloat within your stomach. Don’t look at me like that, you wanted to say. You stood frozen, too afraid to lean in, but not wanting to pull away even more. You felt like you had been set on fire. Surely, he wasn’t trying to do what you thought he was. But you were so close to him, and the feeling was so intoxicating, and the way he looked at you was so alluring.

Then you remembered the night of Halloween, when he’d traced a long, teasing finger along your skin. Remembered the fire that burned within you just from his touch. You glanced down at his parted lips, pink and wet with his saliva. You pictured yourself tasting him, wondering what it might feel like if you just leaned forward and stopped being a coward-

“How did it go?”

Shoko’s voice rang throughout the room, piercing your ears and sending your soul out of your body.

You jumped away from Gojo, crashing into the metal table you’d set just a foot away. The supplies went flying, clattering loudly onto the floor as you tried to maintain both your balance and your composure. You felt an urge to bolt out of the room as fast as you possibly could, suddenly feeling ashamed.

And then that half-lidded expression was gone, just as if you’d imagined it. He stretched his long legs and rose to his full height, still bare-chested and pale under the fluorescent lighting. You didn’t dare look at him now, not after he’d looked so deeply into your soul with such allure.

“All better now,” Gojo chirped, giving no sign that he’d felt even slightly affected in the way that you did.

Shoko smiled at you approvingly. You just hoped she didn’t notice the rapid rise and fall of your chest as you struggled to catch your breath. Although she hadn’t been in the room, it appeared that she’d known about the healing session. She always knew so much of your personal happenings without you telling her. It was still a mystery you’d yet to solve.

“I’m assuming this was your idea?” You queried.

The two of them exchanged glances, which was enough of an answer in itself. Gojo was conveniently busy with responding to a text on his phone, avoiding your inquisitive expression. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d gone behind your back to pull strings.

“I thought you might want to practice,” Shoko confessed. “Though I wasn’t ever expecting it to be on him.”

Well, that made two of you.

“Yeah, to be honest, I didn’t believe that you could do it.” Gojo added unnecessarily, looking up from his phone.

You decided then that those few seconds of longing had been a figment of your imagination.

You glared at him. “Has it ever occurred to you that you can keep those comments to yourself?”

“Sure, but it’s so worth seeing the look on your face when I don’t.”

You sighed, suddenly realizing how exhausted you were. That euphoric feeling had diminished completely, and you could tell just how much of your energy it had taken to heal him. But you’d done it!

“What’s the prognosis, Doctor?” Gojo asked.

Shoko turned to you, her posture straightening and her manner turning business-like.

“What did you feel?” She asked vaguely.

Both of them were staring at you expectantly. You suddenly felt small and all too aware of the disconnect between your skill level and theirs. Gojo’s proximity had distracted you and truthfully, you didn’t have much of an answer.

“Um… I can’t really explain it, but the poison felt evil somehow. It smelled like shit, and it kinda looked like motor oil.”

Your answer sounded stupid to you once you’d said it out loud, but Shoko nodded thoughtfully, diminishing your anxiety by a measure.

“Since we’re seeing it again, we’ve got a problem.” She spoke.

You agreed. It had taken weeks to recover from your own encounter with the poison. You’d been able to tap into only a fraction of your cursed energy after, slowly returning to its peak with an exorbitant amount of rehabilitative training. It had been a difficult and painful endeavor. Gojo likely wouldn’t have much of a problem, given the caliber of his strength, but it was still alarming, nonetheless. And what if one of the students got hit with it?

It was different for you. You still weighed in as a Grade 2 with no indication that you’d be promoted anytime soon, where Gojo was the strongest sorcerer in four-hundred years. Jealousy wasn’t the right word to describe what you were feeling. Disconnected, perhaps, knowing that you would never be able to understand exactly what he experienced or felt.

God. Since when did you care about how Gojo felt? Your head had begun to pound with the beginnings of a headache.

“I’m going to start researching the poison,” Shoko announced. “I suggest that you-”

The shrill tone of a phone ringing interrupted her mid-sentence. The sound sent a stabbing pain through your skull, but you held in your complaints judging from the look on her face.

Shoko pulled her phone from the pocket on her white jacket, sighing. Her dark eyes slipped shut as she cursed under breath.

“I leave for five minutes...” She muttered, before stepping out of the room and answering the call.

You truly felt bad for her at times. She was the hardest worker that you knew of, and it seemed that the load of it was endless.

Gojo was scrubbing the small amount of remaining blood from his chest. You glanced down at the floor, remembering the mess you’d made after Shoko had startled you. You reached down to clean up the spilled supplies, first discarding any contaminated materials before peeling off your gloves.

An awkward silence had settled over the room. Your mind was still reeling from the brief intimacy and the intense emotion that had come over you. Gojo being half-naked wasn’t helping either, and you were finding it difficult to maintain your composure.

“How do you feel?” You asked, mainly out of obligation, but partly to relieve the ever-increasing tension in the too-small room.

Gojo shrugged, lifting his arms over his head to stretch casually. You quickly averted your eyes, silently wishing he would put on a shirt because it was fucking distracting, and you were tired of blushing like a teenaged girl. If you’d voiced that thought, though, you knew you would be falling right into a trap.

“Never better, Nanamis,” He replied, insistent upon using the annoying nickname he’d given you during your first year.

His hair had fallen into his face again. What would he do if you just went over there and brushed it-

Stop, you told yourself. Stop stop stop stop stop.

“I’m surprised it worked, too,” you admitted. “I haven’t ever tried on anyone else.”

“Maybe you just needed the right motivation,” Gojo mused, winking playfully.

You rolled your eyes, and though you’d never admit it, you had an inkling that he might be right. But the question remained, and you had to know, because rarely did Gojo do anything without a reason.

So, you asked. “Why did you want me to do it?”

“I was curious.” He offered curtly.

“As you so often are with me.”

He chuckled at your quick remark. You weren’t satisfied, sensing that he wasn’t quite telling the truth, so you pressed on.

“You could’ve asked Shoko,” you stated. “Or done it yourself.”

“I knew if she was in here, you wouldn’t have agreed,” He answered with a shrug. “Maybe we wanted to do you a favor, yeah?”

You narrowed your eyes at him only slightly menacingly to demonstrate your persisting suspicion. Gojo had always doubted you in the past, and up until recently, he never did you any favors. It just didn’t make sense.

He scoffed at your expression. “Always so ungrateful.”

And with that, you felt resigned to let it go. Besides, it’s not like you were unacquainted with disappointment. The exhaustion was really starting to hit you, too. Almost all of your cursed energy had been sapped and the unexpected emotionality had been a feat in itself. You wondered if Gojo had felt it, too. That is, if he felt anything at all.

You took it upon yourself to turn the room over to save Shoko the trouble. Gojo still remained, leaning casually back against the counter on his palms, watching your every movement.

“You know, Gojo,” you said without looking at him. “You could always offer to help.”

“Uh huh.”

You paused, holding the crumpled tissue paper mid-air over the trash can to send him a disappointed glare. Despite the decrease of hostility and dislike in your relationship, you still found him irritating.

“You just gonna stand there, then?”

“Do you want me to leave?”

You sighed, defeated, and went back to cleaning. He stood straight from his spot against the counter and tossed the pink-stained gauze into the trash. In your periphery, you saw him walk toward the hall, stopping short just before he crossed the threshold.

“Nanami?”

You perked up at the mention of your name, glancing over at him by the doorway. “Hm?”

He looked down at you with that half-lidded expression he’d given you earlier when you’d found yourself nearly sitting on his thigh. In a low voice that sparked a stirring in the pit of your stomach, he said, “I’m really tired of hearing my surname come out of your mouth.”

What the fuck.

You blinked at him once, then again, as you processed the chill that slithered down your spine at his words. Why did he have to say it like that, so… debonair? To your chagrin, you could feel sweat beginning to gather on your hands once again. You had to physically gather every bit of determination to will yourself not to glance down below his face.

“Okay,” you said weakly, unsure of how else to respond.

He hummed, seemingly pleased with your reaction. And then any trace of that sensuality evaporated with a cheeky grin. He gave an exaggerated wave, letting himself out of the exam room and leaving you feeling confused and somehow frustrated.

[glitterrosesnzz]

new snz oc fic cause why not

~

"Emberlyn... you can't go."

"Why not? I've been invited."

"It's a harvest festival."

"Yeah, and?"

Ci fixed Emberlyn with a disappointed stare- one that Emberlyn didn't think was physically possible for a cat to produce, even if said cat could talk. Emberlyn paused in the middle of placing another box of dog treats on the shelf he'd been stocking in order to stare back, determined.

The staredown in between them lasted for another few seconds before Emberlyn let out a sigh.

"C'mon, my hay allergy isn't that bad..." He said, "It'll be fine."

"Your identity will be outed within 15 seconds." Ci deadpanned, hopping down from the shelf they'd been perched on to the floor in order to circle around Emberlyn's feet. "Maybe even less than that."

"I have better control of myself than that. And why would you care about it?" Emberlyn crossed his arms, "In case you've forgotten, you've actively tried to compromise my identity before."

Ci muttered something that sounded suspiciously like 'it wouldn't be any fun if people knew'. Emberlyn didn't get the chance to comment on it though, as Ci was already padding off around a corner, the cat vanishing out of sight.

Figuring the conversation was basically over, Emberlyn went back to stocking the shelves.

Only, six minutes later, the shelf above his head shook, and Emberlyn looked up to see Ci sitting there, a small amount of hay held in their mouth.

"...How did you get that?" As far as Emberlyn could recall, the door to the room where the hay for the rabbits in the pet store was kept was left closed. There should not have been any feasible way for a cat to get in there. Unfortunately, in thinking about how in the hell Ci had gotten in there, it did not occur to Emberlyn to actually move. Something Ci took advantage of as they let the hay drop from their mouth directly over top of him.

"Magic." They said, with zero other explanation. They watched with some mixture of boredom and anticipation as Emberlyn tried ineffectively to swat the hay away from his face.

"Hh...hEH-" Emberlyn's breath hitched, his body not even giving him the chance to try and hold back- "H'NTtshiew!! Hihh- hEH'SChh! Hih'NGxtu!!"

Emberlyn sniffled, rubbing at his nose. Ci layed down on the shelf, their tail swishing lazily.

"Your hair's still purple." They 'helpfully' informed him.

"I knohH- know, I'm k-keeping couhH'ESChhiew!!"

"Blonde."

"Hh'NTCHhiew!!"

"Purple."

"Hihh- hH'ESHhii!"

"Blonde again."

"HhEH'SHhiew!!"

"Purp- oh, the lights flickered with that one-"

"ShhH-shut up! HihH'TShhiew! Hh... hH-HIhH-" Emberlyn kept his hands cupped over his nose and mouth as he doubled over in another fit. "H'Ttshiew! HihH'SChhiew!! 'NTshh! Hh'EShh! HhEH'SHhiew! Hehh- hH'ESChhiew!!"

"...You done?" Ci asked, waiting until Emberlyn hesitantly nodded before they continued, "Well, you ended on blonde, at least. Do you get why you shouldn't go, now?"

Emberlyn silently nodded again, his hands still covering the lower half of his face. Ci tilted their head to the side a little, snickering as they noticed the faint sparks of electricity now appearing in short bursts around Emberlyn.

"What's wrong?" Ci asked, "...Cat got your tongue?"

"Stop tea--sing me, you kn--know exactly what's wro-hic!" Emberlyn visibly winced at the audible hiccup that escaped him, shrinking in on himself a bit as he tried to ignore the way Ci started outright laughing at him. "....I'm- I'm gonna go get some w--water before I electroc-hnk!... electrocute someo-hic!"

[meraki-yao]

RWRB: The Awardist Podcast Interview Thoughts

Alright after listening to the podcast giddily while aggressively stomping on the cross-ramp machine to work out my extreme happiness and excitement to the point that I burnt through twice as many calories than usual and soaked through my shirt, I'm here with thoughts

Pippin @pippin-katz, who sent me a voice message at 3 am my time to tell me to brace myself and be prepared for what's happening and what I'm going to wake up it, did their own version of a summary+thoughts with timestamps here, go check that one out

So my list of thoughts is gonna be a little more all over the place

Immediately burst out laughing with the "mouthful" joke, even more so when the boys both caught it lmao

"I am not happy to see Taylor's face" and "I have a Post-it I'll stick it over your face now" that is peak bestie behaviour

Nick honey I love you but I... do not believe you don't look through online stuff lmao we literally caught you likely fan content and edits you posted two Henry edits and referenced another one

I love how unintentionally in sync they are??? For the first question they started talking at the same time, and for the second they both started nodding and stayed silent forgetting this was an audio interview

"mate, mate, mate, MATE" and the last one being said in sync oh my god this is so much fun

The whole comment on the signing wars: what Pippin said, we were literally calling Taylor "that little fucker" yesterday when he started taunting us with more BTS (EVERYONE KEEP VOTING PLEASE)

"What possessed you? What have you got against me?", the same energy as "Why do you dislike me?"

Taylor's explanation of signing on Nick's face and how it started made me laugh and scoff a little because I translated that fucking moment: the first time it happened, Taylor was in China, it was the firstprince PR photo not the GQ magazine, he was on a boat, and he was the one to ask for the photos to sign lmao

Again, need to see them sign stuff in the same time and space: FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!!! :D

"Take it Nick" Nick's little snicker in response

A little heavy and personal but I wish I could talk to them and tell them how much the book, the movie, the characters and the boys mean to me and how it kept me somewhat afloat last October when I was drowning every single day, and how this story made me want to change myself and break out of my status quo

I know I've been saying Taylor knows Casey's pronouns and he gets them wrong when he's nervous, and I stand by that, but God the sigh of relief I let out when he used they/them

"Right Nick?" is so oddly comforting?

Oh my fucking God the "Top to Bottom" joke was a low-hanging fruit but it made me laugh

Also even the order was right! "Top to Bottom", "Taylor and I" (jkjk lmao) 😜

I really fucking hope that the "that's what I'm known for now, doing intimacy work on screen" is an offhand joke and that people don't genuinely label Nick as that

"Why don't you speak for this, Taylor" again, unexplainably comforting

"Seeing my mate at all these awards shows" made me remember a Chinese phrase "頂峰相見·", literally "meeting again at the peak", meaning "I'll see you when we're both at our best"

Nick's burst of laughter at the "who's a better kisser" comment

Taylor I swear to God 🤣 he combined the "is nick a good kisser" and the "who has your heart joey or Nick" questions together and said "I don't know, I don't know how to answer that question, I have no idea" DUDE YOU LITERALLY ANSWERED THE GOOD KISSER QUESTION WITH "YOU KNOW WHAT HE IS A GOOD KISSER WE HAD TO PRACTICE A LOT PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT" WITH ZERO HESITATION (that answer, on that day, was first thing in the morning for me, and I lost my sanity for the next two hours)

I'm so fucking happy and Matthew comes from a theatre too, speaking as a theatre person and someone who has been dissecting this film since its release

I really think there's gotta be more improvised scenes? Or at the very least stuff like the morning after V&A that was a last-minute decision to add in and wasn't in the script, or maybe scenes where there wasn't specific lines written and they just reacted and spoke based on the scenario? Or even little moments, the shoulder kiss or something?

"Tay" OH MY HEART

Ok I can make an argument on both how Nick is like and not like Henry, but Taylor is so ACD that he basically fell out of the book? How does he not see that? (personally think Taylor's very similar to Alex with a bit of Marco?)

Oh my god the whole segment of the DNC/getting caught scene and Taylor's ass

"I will take this one" "yeah"

"I love working with her, we both love working with her" That's sweet- hang on Nick you just have this one scene with her

I have so many more questions about this scene: Was Nick actually in the closet for that one shot? How many takes did it take?

Taylor referencing a detail in Bottoms from like a 30-second scene in the movie!!! Yes!!! We love seeing friends being supportive of each other (suddenly want to hear Taylor's opinions on M&G lmfao)

"And I'm not even going to get into M&G"

The text question is kind of the only question that made me think "Why would you ask that?" because that was definitely more of a directing/editing thing

Nick really freaking loves the cake scene, he mentioned that as his favourite scene three times at this point, all times on audio, twice on video

Aw Taylor's story about Jack... 🥺

But somehow everyone knowing it lmao, and Taylor's fucking awful British accent

And at this point Nick starts swearing lmao

Awww Nick's compliment to Taylor

Tangent: what the fuck is a fuel museum?

Oh I just love hearing them finishing each other's sentences when one of them forgets the word

Lmao imagine just recovering from Covid and then needing to make out for two hours

"Next to a witchcraft shop" What the fuck lmao

Tangent again but I could write a sociology essay on what Taylor said about architecture and history

I swear to God, Nick's "go on Taylor" somehow being softer, you can fucking hear that that little shit is smirking

Taylor saying that he wants a second book from Casey and me immediately going "BOTH OF YOU QUIT YOUR FUCKING JOBS" (I have complicated feelings about the bonus chapter)

"What-if world" exactly!

Taylor pulling out the stats about the queer population: did he fucking calculate that on the spot or he just casually have that information in his head?

the little wrap-up by the hosts was so sweet but somehow talking about Taylor's ass again oh my god (his body hair being digitally edited, it was minx right?)

"it's so sweet and nice and we need more of this in our lives right now" YES WE DO, WE FUCKING DO

"he's gonna be second-guessing his booty" is not a sentence I thought I'd ever hear but here we are

Culture shock moment: the number to call the podcast/American phone numbers is 3-3-4 which caught me off guard for a second cuz here it's 4-4

And that's it for now! God, I need so much more of this, like, if this is what we get out of a half-an-hour podcast interview what would press and promo be like?

Now that we're back for awards I really freaking hope these new RWRB content will be coming back, maybe like once a week or something

WE'RE BACK WE'RE FUCKING BACK WE'RE FUCKING WINNING

EVERYONE GO VOTE GO VOTE GO VOTE

[firestorm09890]

really unfortunate for Lexaeus's character that he ended up being the one assigned to teach Roxas about Limit Breaks because you have to be low health to access it so here's a ranking of how well I think everyone else in the group would do based on their behaviors when on a mission with Roxas in canon

1: Zexion. look. he only wins by default because everyone else would be worse at it. the thing about him is he’s only an asshole when Roxas acts like he doesn’t want to do “necessary” work, otherwise he’s the king of detailed explanations. he's going to explain everything about the mechanics of Limit Breaks and the situations in which they are useful to the point where Roxas is the one getting impatient and then Zexion goes "oh yeah" and casts a spell that instantly eats a ton of Roxas's health

2: Luxord. It’s a very close second, he also explains what's going to happen and is probably the most pleasant about it in the whole group, but he uses gambling metaphors that are too esoteric for Roxas to parse, and I feel like he views the Limit Break less as a tool to get you out of a dangerous low-health situation and more of a trade-off you would willingly take for temporary power, which is an… interesting mindset to teach someone extremely important to your cause. But at this point I’m just making stuff up. I’m not entirely sure how his time powers work but we can say he also instantly cuts Roxas down to critical hp by stealing some time

3: Lexaeus. We saw it canonically but I’ll describe why he’s third: he gives a very brief explanation, preferring to demonstrate through action, and the hit comes very suddenly with no room to think about it, which you could consider a small kindness. I’m not sure Roxas has existed long enough to actively worry about pain yet, though…

4: Marluxia. He probably says something really flowery that gives Roxas a vague sense of what’s going on and then makes Roxas fight with him to lower his health, making strangely ravenous comments about the power of the keyblade while he does it which is just sort of uncomfortable. at least Lexaeus didn’t look at the keyblade like a juicy ham steak

5. Xaldin. Very gruff, no nonsense, but he has a way of speaking that makes Roxas feel weak and small. Forces Roxas to spar in order to get his health down and makes Roxas feel even weaker

6: Xigbar. Zero hesitation he shoots Roxas as soon as they get out on the field, BEFORE explaining what they're doing (which is why he's down so far in the rankings) and then goes "okay kid we're learning about limit breaks today!" I guess Roxas comes away knowing what a Limit Break is at least

7: Vexen. Explains what's going to happen but in such an obnoxious condescending way that I think Roxas would prefer people just attacking him. Vexen also challenges Roxas to go get his health low on his own, saying “surely you have enough consciousness in that brain of yours to figure out what hurts and what doesn’t.” Thank you Vexen

8: Larxene. She throws knives at Roxas while laughing and shouting "come on! fight back!" with the “goal” of getting him to figure out limit breaks himself (she's actually just having fun throwing knives and doesn't care if he figures it out)

N/A: Xemnas and Saïx. They are not teaching the new baby member

Disqualified: Axel and Demyx. they both feel like they'd go "ehh... well... I'm sure you'll figure it out" which I guess is sort of nice because they're not hurting Roxas but also really bad because the point is to learn how to do it in a (relatively) safe place! not in an actual emergency! what if Roxas fucks up and just dies out there because you didn't teach him! Now either Roxas has to figure it out on his own or they’re just going to get one of the others to teach him instead. Axel is slightly better than Demyx because Axel is friendly and Demyx simply does not care enough to teach

[problematicbots]

Winged Sentinel Au:

Snippet 1: The Idea

It was one crash then the next so many failed attempts on the training ground and this consistent line of failures was getting on Sentinel's last nerves that he could explode from pure frustration.

He tried everything he knew from his days as a boot camp sergeant to teach Jetfire and Jetstrom all the basics of being a member of the elite guard. He even doubled down on his serious attitude since he had zero clue how to train two jets yet so far nothing had worked sure when the two were out of vehicle mode it was pretty simple but when they were in vehicle mode it was somehow more difficult teaching these jets how to fly than driving in the stupid earth liquid falling from the sky.

He was so tired of all of this that he went inside Fort Maximus to sit down and grab some energy to clear his hard drive while muttering angrily to himself under his breath. Jazz who was nearby overhead his tiny mutters, so he went over to Sentinel to see what was up with the grumbling prime.

"Still struggling to get them in the air SP?" asked Jazz crossing his arms as he leaned against a nearby wall.

Sentinel didn't appreciate Jazz's comment and quickly went on the defensive, raising his voice to complain as smoke billowed from his pipes creating a layer of smoke above his helm that almost looked like one of those earth rain clouds.

"Well, jazz, how exactly I am supposed to TEACH two jets how to Fly when I am Grounded?!" complained Sentinel rolling his optics in annoyance " I mean seriously What does Ultra Mangus expect me to do weld wings to my back?"

With that one-off comment that wasn't even supposed to be that serious, Sentinel paused his complaining as an idea popped into his hard drive "Wait a Second.".

Sentinel's optics widened as he pondered the idea that popped into his hard drive just now, which surprised Jazz a bit since he had never seen Sentinel so deep in thought before. It was a bit unsettling.

"Huh, you okay there, Sp?" asked Jazz, concerned, as he watched the Prime put one of his servos under his chin, rubbing it lightly.

Sentinel was strangely quiet for a full minute before getting up and tossing his energon into an open garbage chute door. Then he ran off, saying, "Huh, I'll be right back Jazz, I need to do something real quick." Sentinel disappeared into a hallway without almost no explanation at all, leaving Jazz bewildered.

"Strange" Jazz thought to himself before shaking his helm wondering what in the all-spark Sentinel is up to now. Surely, he wasn't thinking what Jazz thought he was thinking after all what kind of crazy Autobot would willingly be modified into a jet? _________________________________________________________________________________

The Autobot council was in the middle of a meeting, discussing economic matters. The notable members present were Ultra Magnus, Perceptor, Longarms, and Alpha Trion, deeply engaged in the discussion. Meanwhile, Ironhide, not a part of the council, stood near the entrance, guarding it.

Everything was going well until Sentinel suddenly burst into the room with a determined look on his faceplate as he approached the council with a march of confidence.

Each of the council members slowly turned their attention to Sentinel Prime, their expressions a mix of confusion and irritation at the interruption of their meeting. Meanwhile, Ironhide still at his post observed the scene in intrigue wanting to know what Sentinel was up.

"Sentinel? This better be important," spoke Ultra Magnus in a professional yet slightly annoyed tone as he glanced up from the council table, his voice reverberating through the room.

Sentinel could see that all optics were on him. He made a quick fake cough before speaking, not wanting anybody to think he was a crazy mech who had entered the room for no good reason. He swallowed enough pride to come out with a quick but awkward apology, not wanting to look bad in front of Ultra Magnus.

"Huh sorry for interruption sir" spoke Sentinel in a lower timid voice than his usual loud confident smugness that came out from his glossa. "I just have one request "

Ultra Magnus was annoyed that Sentinel interrupted the meeting that he plans for cycles but was curious as to what this request that Sentinel asked for

"What exactly is this request?" asked Ultra Mangus in genuine interest despite his previous annoyance with the prime

"Well, Sir as we all know Jetfire and Jetstorm were modified to be jets from samples from Starscream so I was wondering, if possible, the same could be done to me "spoke Sentinel with his arms behind his back.

The council widens their optics at Sentinel's suggestions with some whispering behind each other since to them there had never been a jet subcommander in the ranks before, so the council begins discussing among themselves the implication of such a thing.

Perceptor instantly seems interested in the idea of modifying Sentinel already pulling out his tools from his desk ready for another experiment under his servos.

Longarms sees this as a possible advantage to take the Autobots out from the inside out since he knows how likely Sentinel is going to struggle with his new vehicle mode and perhaps even cause a risk in his career.

With Sentinel out of the way, he could be the next subcommander gaining him way more access to Autobot's resources than before with a perfect reason to be close to Ultra Mangus all the time.

All Longarms needs to do is sit and watch for Ultra Magnus to accept this proposal although he did plant a whisper here or there to approve Sentinel's idea to other council members.

Alpha Trion on the other hand immediately scoffed at the idea since to him they were slowly becoming exactly like their enemy which he hated since this wasn't the Autobot's way according to him after all they were meant to be on the ground not in the sky where Decepticons destroy lives of innocents

"And why exactly would you want like...these experiments..." asked Alpha Trion in a calm professional tone with a judgmental undertone.

Sentinel immediately caught this judgment undertone from Alpha Trion's voice squinting his optics at the old mech in clear annoyance

damn how badly Sentinel wanted to yell in that old clog face giving him a piece of his hard drive, unfortunately, he needs to do what Jazz referred to as "keeping it cool" otherwise Ultra Magnus may decline his proposal.

"Well, Alpha Trion I don't know if you know this but I had you know that those "experiments" prefer to be called Jetfire and Jetstorm" shot back Sentinel in a passive-aggressive tone refusing to let this old cog refer to his soldiers in that way.

I mean sure, Jetfire and Jetstrom were experiments but that doesn't give Alpha Trion the right to say it out loud.

"And I had you know isn't exactly all that easy to teach jets how to fly when you're on the ground and considering so far there have been three crushes in a role with the current training, I suggested we do something about it " Sentinel continued to the council.

Ironhide, who was still standing near the entrance, watched everything unfold in amusement. He put on 3D sunglasses and took out some popcorn that popped into his glossa.

"Ooh, this is going to be good," Ironhide whispered to himself, snickering with enjoyment as he ate his popcorn.

The council begins whispering and talking among themselves as they gather in a circle each of them considers Sentinel's words except for Alpha Trion who gives Sentinel a quick glare of annoyance before regaining his professional look when the rest of the council separates from the circle already making up their mind.

"Very well Sentinel from this moment onwards you shall gain wings" spoked Ultra Magnus standing from his seat before shifting his attention to Preceptor. "Preceptor you know what to do"

Preceptor nodded getting out of his seat with his tools in servos and walking up in front of Sentinel before gesturing for Sentinel to follow him out of the room which he does.

Preceptor leads him into the hallways of Fort Maximum to a dim laboratory, Inside the Laboratory were selves of data pads, a few mentors, and an examination table right in the middle next to a drawer.

Preceptor motioned for Sentinel to recline on the examination table, his expression devoid of any emotion or concern for what waited for the prime next.

Sentinel slurped a bit before reluctantly lying down on the examination table anxiously trying his best not to show it. At the same time, Preceptor flickered between his tools in his servos looking for the right one.

"So, huh out of curiosity this isn't going hurt right" asked Sentinel shaking a bit as he watched Preceptor stopping his servo on a syringe to prepare and use on the prime.

"Depends on your definition of pain" spoke Preceptor coldly lifting Sentinel's arm and inserting the syringe in his arm without any proper warning.

Sentinel yelped from the sharp pain from the sting of the syringe, he wanted to yell at this no-good scientist for not warning him first however he felt dizzy with his optics getting heavy before passing out.

Oh, by the whole spark, what has he gotten himself into??

[leornadodabvinci]

Hello! Do you have any other Grand Chase headcanons to share on this fine day? 👁️👁️

HI HELLO YES I DO OMGGG SORRY FOR THE LATE RESPONSE I DIDN’T OPEN TUMBLR FOR A BIT BUT I HAVE A DISCORD SERVER FOR KEEPING NOTES OF STUFF AND ONE CHANNEL IS JUST DEDICATED TO RANDOM HCS AND SO UM. I have a few (that would make sense without an elaborate explanation)👉👈 they’re mostly if not all elesis and sieghart though ahahah… ANYWYA

*takes a deep breath*

(Sorry if the terminologies aren’t right im just rambling skhdjsj) (also a lot of them are sieg and elesis aha…)

- Sieghart currently is built like a dancer, lithe and flexible, because of the extra innate godlike strength he got from being a highlander. He doesn’t have to exert as much strength as when he was just a mortal, or like the weight doesn’t affect him that much anymore? Plus, i hc that the highlanders’ style is more elegant and flow-y, compared to the brutishness of the sieghart family’s. When he was younger, around Elesis’ age, he was built more like her. Body builder, bigger muscle kinda look.

- Elesis, as she grows into her late 20’s receives sooooo many “you look just like Sieghart!” Or “you look just like your father!” Comments, but as she grows past 30 and 40, they die down. Because sieghart is stuck in his 30’s, and elscud died (? Disappeared?) in his 40’s.

- sieghart is a jack of all trades, master of none kinda guy.

- Dio and Sieghart have a strange way of being intimate. It isn’t really… intimacy. They don’t do pda, they do something more nothingburger and subtle that it feels more vulgar if you catch them doing it. Its like a game? But not really? Since they’re not trying to hide it either 😭 i don’t know how to describe it. Like the Chase could be in a meeting together and Sieghart/Dio is eating something and one of them goes “blech” and instead of eating the food, they try it from the other’s mouth and then is like “oh ew ur right omg” and then the chase woukd just stare at them.

- dio and sieg are truly, evenly matched in skill. Its a battle of attrition. Though probably sieg has the upper hand since he’s immortal?

- dio’s actually also playboy, just not in mortal sense. He takes up someone every 5 - 10 years, which i hc is the equivalent of changing gfs/bfs every couple of months in demon sense of time. He tries to mean well though, and doesn’t do one night stands.

- sieghart is a one night stand enthusiast. He’s a total flirt too.

- height hc: dio > sieg > zero > ley > grandiel > werner > (noticeable drop) > ryan > lire > jin > rufus > harpe > ronan > asin > lass > edel > rin > elesis > amy > (big drop here) > arme > lime > veigas

- Elesis is a doof and lowkey rich girl coded. “How much is an apple anyway? Like $10?”

- the Chase act more like childish, more their age (more carefree, unburdened, yknow young adults/teens) around Sieghart.

- lass and rufus have the same eye shape. They both take after their mother more.

- Grandiel finds Sieghart to be the best company. They both understand each other very well, and seamlessly fall into conversation no matter how long its been since they last met.

- that’s why when Sieghart found out who Kyle and Cindy was, it stung a little. But he understood, of course. He holds no grudge against Grandiel.

- Sieghart acts like a safeguard for the Chase. He doesn’t want any of them to go through any of this alone.

- Ley, Rin and Sieghart are besties. Wine date trio.

- Lime and Dio also unexpectedly get along well. They’re optimistic people. Two sides of the same coin.

- Rufus cares about Lass more than he thinks. When Lass gets sick, he most definitely appears and lingers around until he gets better.

Okaay i think thats itttt hehe :3 Thank you for this ask I definitely enjoyed it LOL

[thatuselesshuman]

Friday Kiss Tag

Pov: me explaining how I'm going to do the Friday kiss tag without having a single kiss to ever share

Anyways, thank you for the tag @wyked-ao3 @agirlandherquill @sableglass and @the-golden-comet

This week, I shall write how I imagine the first kiss between Five and Zero would go. This isn't a part of canon, since I'm writing it specifically for this, but I hope you still enjoy my attempt at writing anything past a hug (I've never written a proper kiss in my life)

Slight warning for a bit of steam under the cut. Nothing too bad, Five's just thirsty

The two sat on Zero's bed, Five leaning against Zero's chest while Zero played with a hand-held puzzle that looked as old as he was. “How old is that puzzle? It looks like it predates the Selim Empire,” Five asked, miming coughing from the non-existent dust. Zero didn't answer for a minute, finishing whatever step he was on before responding. “That's because it does,” He said wryly. “You forget that I built the Selim Empire.” Five grumbled at that, a faint mumbled ‘old man’ among the grumbling. Zero ignored him, continuing to play with the puzzle.

They sat for a few more minutes in comfortable silence before Five started to get agitated. “This is boringggg,” he complained. “We should do something more exciting.” Zero paused what he was doing and looked down at Five, more for Five's benefit than his, since he couldn't truly see. “And what do you suggest we do that's more ‘exciting’?” Zero asked, a hint of amusement in his voice, while Five reached up to take his mask off. Five thought Zero was plenty hot with the mask on, him having the mysterious vibe going on, but without the mask? Five couldn't be trusted.

“Hmmm, I do have an idea,” Five said mischievously, sitting up so he was face to face with Zero. Zero raised an eyebrow, but didn't move away. Instead, he set aside his puzzle. Five sat back on his legs, his hands going to Zero's waist. “I think you should kiss me,” Five said confidently. Zero seemed even more intrigued than before. “And why is this coming about?” Zero asked, leaning in closer to bridge the distance that Five had put between them when he sat back. “Because,” Five said primly. “We've had this thing going on for a few months and you have yet to kiss me. It's rude to leave a guy hanging like that, you know.”

Zero simply shrugged at that. “You never asked,” He said by way of explanation. Five rolled his eyes, not designing that with a response, and instead just closed the gap between them and sealed their lips together. Both of their eyes immediately fell closed. The kiss was nothing special, an experimental peck on the lips, but both of them seemed almost shocked when they pulled back. Zero was the first to school his expression, it turning into a taunting grin. “Is that the best you can do? Weren't you an infamous player?”

Five scowled and took it as a challenge. He surged to meet Zero's lips, immediately more heat behind the kiss. Five's hand went up to grab Zero's jaw, tilting it up to meet his so he could have a better angle. Zero pressed further into Five's space, but the angle was awkward. After a little bit, Five pulled away again. He didn't give Zero time to comment again before he was swinging his leg over Zero's legs and sliding into his lap, now properly above him. Faint blush dusted Zero's face and ears, which Five had the sudden urge to make worse.

Five stared down at Zero, running a thumb over his jaw. Apparently, he sat there just staring for a while, since Zero began to become agitated. “Don't just stare,” Zero said with furrowed brows. Five grinned, taking the demand for the win it was. “Just because you're a bitter blind old man doesn't mean I have to be. I want to be the fun old man, the one who drags your ass out to parties,” Five declared happily, leaning in so that their faces were mere inches apart. Five could feel the slight, uneven breath from Zero dusting his face. Saints the things he would do to this man.

Zero made a noise of discontentment. “Yeah well how about you be the old man who gets moving, hm?” Zero teased, hands going to Five's waist. Five scoffed. “Do I have to do everything around here? Lazy ass,” He complained before swooping down to kiss Zero again. Zero pressed their chests together, getting rid of any molecule of space between them. Five grinned into the kiss, pleased with the outcome of his suggestion. It was infinitely more exciting than that damn puzzle.

@moltenwrites @willtheweaver @illarian-rambling @katenewmanwrites @drchenquill +open tag

[oneatlatime]

The Swamp

Random thing I spotted in the opening credits: this Roku (?) silhouette is doing a spinning blade move with airbending, that Azula did with her blue fire while riding the mail system in Return to Omashu. I guess that despite the bending styles being based on different martial arts, borrowing is allowed.

A snippet of blue spirit music plays when that cart carrying the masks passes by. Maybe one second of showtime but the writers and track team put in the effort anyway.

I'm still mad at Zuko for stealing that lady's bird horse, but I'm happy to see that they're looking after it. It even has a blanky.

Those bangs would have done numbers in 2008.

So I'm wishing death on sword guy. Apart from the whole trying to cut off Iroh's feet thing, he can't even do up his shirt right. Zero redeeming features.

I wish I knew how to make gifs to show this, but the way that the diffused lightsource is reflecting off the water peaking through the vegetation of the swamp is incredibly realistic.

Is the sharpening stone the one that usually sits in the indent on the other side of the blade? It would be pretty cool to have a knife with a built in sharpener like that.

Sokka's got a point. How do you "land" on a swamp? Appa will need to break out his sea bison skills.

TIL swamps don't take no for an answer.

HOW are they still ALIVE?!?!

AcTuAlLy Aang it's "where ARE Appa and Momo?"

As someone who has literally had leeches on my elbow, this is not funny.

Also this episode's beat up Sokka quota has already been filled by a tornado, a swamp, and a vampire slug. And we're only 4 minutes in. I feel like this is going to be a rough episode for him.

Look I get that there is no solid land in this swamp, but they could at least move out of the fetid leech-infested water onto a tree root.

Shibari Appa. I ahd to google that.

Momo is a good friend.

Could you imagine what Apppa smells like after landing in the swamp water?

Poor Momo's like "dude. I JUST freed you."

Not everyone can airbend Aang. Some of us would have no option but to cut our way out of the swamp, niceness be damned.

You ever just go FWOMP?

I'm loving these little Appa & Momo scenes.

Did this episode air on Halloween originally? It's really leaning in to the spooky.

And now Appa gets to be a good friend. I love the ear twitch. Have I talked about how cute Appa's ears are?

King of the jungle Appa.

New fear unlocked. Never swimming in seaweed again.

Also kudos to them for sleeping sitting up. I can't do that.

It's neat how all three of their fighting styles are equally effective at freeing them from the vines. No bending superiority here!

How did Cletus and Brandine figure that Appa has six legs from this trail?

No comment. Just thought you'd all appreciate a picture of bowl cut Appa using an alligator as a toothbrush.

Pretty. Swamp wisteria.

This swamp is a dick.

This jumpscare got me. Also, swamp is now a double dick.

And Aang sees some rando. I was expecting Gyatso. Maybe being the avatar makes you immune to swamp dickishness?

If Cletus saw a lemoo at a travelling show once, does that mean that Momo is not the last of his species? Because I've been worrying about that.

This is a pretty cool use of waterbending. Although I don't think 'outboard motor with high manoeuvrability' is a recognised martial arts move.

All the background art in this episode is subtle but very detailed. Another episode I'll be watching on a better quality screen than my little laptop, which makes everything into a green-grey blur.

Sokka was looking for his friends. Katara was looking for her friends. Aang was chasing tail.

Tea party Sokka rocking a midi skirt and thigh high leather boots.

Have to give it to Sokka; they have all been huffing a lot of swamp gas recently. Hallucinating people you think of often after huffing god knows what is a more believable explanation than sentient, dickish swamp. Or it would be, if this wasn't a world where things like the avatar exist.

Looks like I was right about this being a beat up Sokka episode. The number of times swampy has thrown him to the ground, I'm surprised he's still getting up. Also, I think Sokka's voice actor was paid by the scream this episode.

Anyone remember the Absorbaloth?

Are these guys narrating NYOOM noises?

I have to commend the manoeuvrability of these boats.

Not to self: do not piss off a waterbender. They are human deli slicers.

"He's the Avatar. Stuff like that happens to us, a lot." Season 1 in a nutshell.

I applaud this guy's efficiency for styling his hair into a hat.

You guys are really going to go with this guy to a secondary location like 15 seconds after he stopped trying to kill you? Every so often I forget that the Gaang are teens or younger, then something comes along that really reminds me.

Nitpick! Are his socks made out of mud?

This guy has grey eyes like Aang does 50% of the time. I swear Aang has brown eyes in at least half the episodes so far.

More delicious reflections. I wish I could gif this too.

I love the lesson here. The swamp guy's speech about interconnectedness is good, made twice as good by the delivery. Excellent choice of voice actor. Also the bit about the people we've lost still being there hits hard.

A power this useful had better come up again.

Can someone who knows music better than I do tell me if Cletus is on beat? I think not.

New reaction shot!

Why does Sokka repeat "Hugh" so skeptically? What's the joke here?

"He don't eat no bugs. That's people food." This is the kind of stuff I love the most in this show. These seemingly inconsequential, throwaway worldbuilding comments that instantly double the depth of the universe of the show. Every time I get a glimpse of normal people living non-war-torn normal lives I love it.

Scenes like this. PEAK avatar.

That swamp just bitchslapped a bird.

I'd forgotten that Zuko and Iroh were in this episode.

Zuko is well on his way to being forgiven for stealing the horse bird.

Have to wonder why he had a spare set of black clothes lying around though.

Final Thoughts

This episode may well be my new favourite. I like if for the same reasons that I liked Bato of the Water Tribe: it shows us what comparatively normal life is like. Here's a random group of people that might not even know about the war. Looking at them gives us a glimpse of what Aang's pre-war world must have been like, and what the post-war world everyone is fighting to create could be like. It's both nostalgia and hope in one place.

I love that Sokka is still stubbornly anti-supernatural even after travelling for months with the human incarnation of a spirit, being kidnapped by a giant monster panda, and having his crush turn into the moon. Not to mention mega fishman Aang. Although, in a world where the existence of spirits is a scientifically observable fact, isn't believing in the supernatural actually the logical viewpoint?

Apart from that awesome deli slicer waterbending move, Katara did surprisingly little this episode. I think Momo and Appa had more to do.

Spekaing of, I loved having a little side adventure with Momo and Appa. There's enough personality in the animation and voicing of those two characters that they can easily carry dialogue-free scenes. Avatar should do a dialogue free episode with just Appa and Momo going on an adventure. I love their interspecies friendship.

The whole 'we're all connected' thing could have rung hollow if the writers hadn't taken the time to painfully personalise that message for two thirds of the Gaang. In today's arguably too-connected world (thanks internet) the lesson seems obvious, but in a pre-industrial world that's a century into a global war, I bet the connectedness of things is unknown, forgotten, or actively suppressed.

The incredibly short bookends with Zuko and Iroh were (I'm guessing) to establish that Zuko has taken a vigilante turn and that Iroh is inhumanly patient. Neither of those is a surprise. Honestly, if I found myself in that situation, I would react more like Zuko than Iroh. Guess that means I'm a work in progress.

The Storm last season showed that while Aang had a lot to learn, Zuko had a lot to unlearn. Instead of just unlearning incorrect things, it looks like the show is taking it a step farther and progressively stripping Zuko of everything. Zuko isn't one to sit idly by though, so he's fighting back by clinging to harmful things like his pride and learning things he arguably shouldn't, like how to commit theft of bird horses. Although I have no moral objection to stealing that jerk's swords.

This episode didn't have a beat up Sokka quota; it had a beat up everyone quota, physically and sometimes mentally too. Kind of surprised there weren't even bruises. And poor Sokka. The first cut is the deepest.

I'll definitely be rewatching this one.

[firecooking]

Here me out, in the tugs fandom there are 3 depictions of captain zero

1. Shitty mustache ( looks like it's pencil drawn)

2. Mustache that curls into a zero ( it curling to represent how he's the antagonist and also it resembles a 0 )

3. No mustache ( because he's either terrible at facial hair or artist just didn't draw him with one)

In your au is there an inside joke that zero can't grow proper facial hair?

I have been a conosuier of human Captain Zero's for years, and that theory does hold water!

I think the only Zero I can think of until a few that cropped up around this year with a beard that was drawn more than once is Dan-the-countdowner's over on deviant art. God speed Dan you where like the only guy drawing human Captains for years.

Also, your asks are always on deck in my ask box when I have a few minutes of free time, please don't think I'm ignoring them, sometimes it takes me a while to formulate my answers. Also I don't often do drawing requests, but I make an exception for my TUGS au's!

Anyways, on to my au! There will be a detailed explanation under the read more but tldr:

When Zero was a younger man he always kept himself clean shaven, after his time in he army he attempts to grow a mustache, which was universally hated and every one regarded as a bad move. Post War 1918-pre Zip 1920 is lovingly known as the rat years in the photo albums that reside around Zero Marine Bigg City.

Before the Great War Captain Zero clean shaved every morning, brushed out, cared for, and styled his hair, and generally looked put together and intentional despite living with rather wild, wavy, longer hair. I picture him around a 2b/2c if he makes an attempt to care for it but when he's not doing anything particular its just a frizzy/fluffy 2a, he has pretty fine hair so it's never consistent unless Zero makes the effort. His hair keeping short also makes it less wavy than it might be if he let it grow out.

He'll never admit it but he never really liked looking anyone in the eyes as a young man, and he still doesn't like it. His long bangs covering his face made him feel more calm and helped hide the fact he was avoiding eye contact.

When he signed up for the draft, Star had made a few passing comments about his hair, but Zero never thought anything of it. He's always remembered Star had had longer hair, and the Army wasn't that different to the navy, right?

After he was drafted and was in training, one of the first things that happened was his hair was trimmed back to fit in his helmet better and his daily grooming routine was reprimanded as a waste of time for a medic. He was told to change it or lives would be lost. So change it he did. This change consisted of not doing his hair routine save for 'basic maintenance' [ie, none] as needed, and only shaving one or twice a week, his facial hair never did grow very fast and was rather sparse anyways.

When he got back from the war, he vowed to grow his hair back out, but he was a different man returning home.

With his new found free time in the mornings meant he could always find time for tea and some breakfast. Making for a slightly less 'tired bitch of a captain' according to his three tugboats [data gathered from eaves dropping on their nightly poker games]. With his shaving routine fully altered and him no longer being picky about being clean shaven, he decided to try out facial hair, his father always maintained a beard, so why couldn't he? Genetics were on his side! He often forgets he's adopted.

It never did grow in fast, or very full. Even with Zorran's best efforts to help, Zero never really had more than a slightly bushy mess. And his hair never really got back to it's same length/health after the war, he always blamed it on the fact it was cut back, and not the fact he was a depressed mess after Europe who had stopped grooming almost entirely for years.

When Zip was due to be christened, Zero finally went down to a barbers shop to get himself cleaned up for the photographs at the urging of his tugboats and mother.

The barber took one look at him and told him the mustache needed to go and that his hair was initially damaged from lack of care during the war and then exacerbated by lack of care after. Zero on a whim let the man do what he felt was right, it was a new decade after all.

Zero's up cut was initially very low maintenance for him and he quite preferred it that way. Zero didn't keep up steam with his hair care the same way he did before the war, but he could manage to brush it in the morning to keep it from getting as bad as it had been.

Once Zasha comes into his life and he realized she has much curlier hair than he ever did [a mix of 3 b/c], he starts to pick hair maintenance back up as he learns how to take care of her hair. He's gotta be a role model and a good father after all. He still never gets back to how he was before the war, but at least his hair is healthy instead of oily, frizzy, and out of place.

More importantly he's taking regular showers and grooming again. His tugs count both of those things as a win.

He never figures out why he was less particular about the way he looks after the war. He was living a life of crime before the war. In the army he never injured a soul or took a life, unlike his days collecting debts as an 'accountant.'

He doesn't see how the war to end all wars could have changed him.

[dramarising-replacement]

Free art threads.

Made a couple of these in the past, and I'm actually considering just.. not doing them on this site anymore? I actually think I'd be better off doing free art for people on Toyhou.se instead.

Cue the rant.

-------

So I'm sure some of y'all are familiar with the "Creative Corner" in the forums, yeah? You can share random art you've made, ask people how much they'd pay for your art, that sort of thing. Then, you got the free art threads. They can be titled things like "Drawing ur dragons :33" and "bored, draw humans. bye." and you'll also see the same couple users posting in those threads, but I'm not here to name-drop lol.

The ones who I have a problem with are the ones who don't read anything. Like, at all. You could spend thirty minutes crafting a decent looking thread, filled with information (but not TOO much, just enough to answer most people's questions) and highlight the "rules" part of your thread that has specific steps to follow for free art. Wanna know what the majority of the commentors on your thread are gonna do?

"[Insert dragon image] Pls draw :)" or "[Link to a page with over 60+ dragons] choose whatever one you want.]" and that's about it. There won't be any mention of any steps you wanted them to follow, (The steps are usually very simple, too. As in, let the artist know the bare minimum idea of what you want. I'm talking about expressions here. That's literally all they'd have to do to get some scrumptious free art.) and that feels kinda invalidating, y'know?

I'm not asking the commentors to describe a whole scene for me, I'm just asking them to give me ONE LITTLE IDEA (again, an expression or maybe if they want a bust) and I'll do the rest for them, free of charge. The art that they'd be getting isn't some random disaster of a sketch, nono, it's fully-colored and shaded. It also doesn't look like something that a 5 year old drew. (No shade to people who draw like that, I was stuck like that for years.) Bro, just do a MINIMAL amount of reading and I'll draw your dragon that has an absurd amount of apparel to tje point where it hurts my eyes.

..It doesn't just stop there, either. I've also seen these people never reply to artists who have given them an absolute masterpiece of a drawing, for free. Bro. You serious? I get that some people are inactive, which I'm not bothered by. But the ones who aren't? ...Ehh, I just think you could at least thank the artist before returning to the void with your free art.

The moral of the story is; Do the bare minimum and read what matters in a post, and thank the artists who draw your dragons for free. Especially the ones who could've easily charged you 1kg+ for the work they've done.

If you're socially awkward, then cool. I get that. If you can't afford to pay artists with fictional pixel money, then go ahead and visit the free art threads. I'm not trying to gate-keep them, I literally make these threads. I just don't enjoy having people put zero effort in their requests and then never acknowledge the fact that I drew their dragon for them. Just my thoughts, everyone views things differently and that's okay!

---

Btw, I mentioned Toyhou.se because I've posted on both before, and while there are SOME similarities in the users' behavior, there's also some notable differences, too.

Common flight rising free art thread comment: [doesnt read text and adds dragon image] thanks if you draw.

Common Toyhou.se free art thread comment: [links a character, goes into a VERY in-depth explanation about how said character acts, very passionate too. Usually reads rules, too.] Thanks if you draw. (gotta stay consistent lol)

Obviously there are some differences in the sites which affect how the users act, I get that. One's a literal dragon collecting game and the other one's focused on writing and drawing characters, it's expected that one would read more than the other.

...But again, free art. Not paid, but free. Someone takes time out of their day to draw your dragon. Just give them a simple "thanks" and go on your merry way. That's all you gotta do. Lets them know their effort was appreciated, and shows that you're a nice person. Win-win.

Please man, just read. Did I mention that these threads usually have a maximum of 100 words? I don't usually type this much. But damn, this just irritated me so much.

Well, that's the end of this rant. Like I said, a few people are obviously going to disagree with some/maybe everything I've said, and that's life. This was a disorganized rant, and that's all it's going to be.

[delistravaganza]

Can you explain this autistic person what happened here?

I was just scrolling r/mybrilliantfriendhbo and I made a goofy comment on a topic that seems to have touched a nerve:

This interaction left me shocked because I rarely have issues online, and also because the same person who was lowkey calling me a sex-obsessed pedo had replied to similar topics a few times, always stating that she preferred the actresses young (?).

Someone explained to me that I had phrased things wrong:

Looking back at my comment, I don't see how that could be understood by me referring to our girls. In fact, the job of Lila's body double, especially in the infamous bath scene where all she needed to do was to stand up and be looked at by Lenù in an "inner turmoil" from below, had been a joke between me and other MBF fans. Like, we laughed? Some of us had been nude models, and we knew how much the actress probably wanted to stop being cold and wet and leave already?

So I'm asking you guys, who have a very different approach and don't have a stick up your ass: What did I do? Is it because I wrote "boobs" and "pussy"? And - that comment was a personal attack rooted in some sort of queerphobia, was it?

I know this happens on r/ all of the time, and I know that this particular sub isn't very queerfriendly, to put it mildly. Which is weird, I know, because anyone who is familiar with the fans' demographics knows that the sapphic women are at the core of the fandom, especially between seasons. But alas, the sapphics usually stay silent and want no trouble.

Still, there are some interesting discussions from time to time on the sub (even when some topics can be repetitive - IS LILA EVIL?), and people who are genuinely knowledgeable, and I do have good times sharing my thoughts and reading others'. But - I feel a bit stupid because I seldom reference anything that could be considered dykey, and then I get this?

At some point in season 3, I was left scratching my head because some users were quick to say that if Pietro had intimacy issues with Lenù, he may be gay. I totally respect it if you think that Pietro might be gay, but for fuck's sake, are you even aware of the series you're watching? Where were you the 10,000 times when Lenù was in "inner turmoil" about her best friend, drooling over Nino, and having zero chemistry with Pietro from the very beginning, who was only a good catch for her? Didn't you see Lenù's vivid nightmare about being forced to put on the engagement ring? Didn't you notice that the one who has an (understandable) problem with this marriage is Lenù, and that nobody suggested that she was gay????

I guess I'm annoyed that after years of not suggesting "Lenù gay" as The Explanation for Everything in MBF, because, well, I don't think that things are that simple, and letting people discuss at length whether Franco or Nino are better or whether Lila looks better with Marcello or Enzo, I am suddenly the one who is weird and gets talked down to as some pedo predator.

A somewhat similar thing happened to me a while ago on r/ as well, when some people on The White Lotus sub complained that there were too many discussions regarding gay undertones (compared to MBF, there were definitely 1000% more threads, which is still puzzling to me). I was just annoyed at that comment, because you know how many threads I see about m/f interactions that people are constantly pushing as romantic? Fuck the straights complaining about a few threads regarding Cameron and Ethan, or Paula and Olivia. TWL is openly playful and was created by an openly bisexual man, OF COURSE it's full of gay undertones, and OF COURSE you don't see them because you haven't had the same experience! You never had to read between the lines, you never had to wonder whether something is platonic or romantic, you never had to navigate relationships without set roles! How great for you! Now let us have our little party without bothering anyone, will you?

Anyway, I just needed to vent. Feel free to tell me if you think you know where my original comment was flawed.

Oh, and if you participate on the MBF sub - say hi, and participate more. It can be cool, but it clearly needs more input from diverse sources.

[simowis]

Monthly nonsense 23.7

element zero and mass relay have make mass effect a unique sci-fi game. However it doesn’t means other sci-fi’s element can’t be used in ME fanfics. Which will add a lot of space to image, perfect

And I'm getting better at reading his microexpressions, and he has a lot of them

Does prothean have a Dyson ball?

prothean is like a weakened version of the triton

what‘s the hight of Javik?

seems tumblr ME fans like the emotional javik?

Was the design of the prothean, which is perceptive and strong and has four sharp teeth in the upper jaw, inspired by snakes? Could the primitive prothean have bitten its prey to inject venom and then dragged it back to its nest to slowly suck blood? I can't stop thinking about it.

The markings on the back of javik's head are just too much like a blue ringed octopus. How poison could prothean be! Do they Interracial Sexualizer REALLLY want to kiss Javik unprotected??? Emm..yes….

Can't stop imagining Javik squeezing venom out of his teeth every day and loading it into special bullet casings …… Saliva sticking to the mouth of the bottle…so horny…too much head canon!

JUST CAN'T STOP! Not objective, not correct, OOC, too erotic!

I'm still in shock Javik's smile was very rare and fleeting. He smiled just a few times in all. When the first conversation in Normandy, he had smiled briefly when he thought there may be survivors in Ilos and when he recounted his original mission. He had smiled sadly when he spoke to the Prothean VI in Thessia; he had smiled when he gave the echo shard to the Shep before the final battle. His fleeting smile always holds a lot of weight. And he actually comment with SMILE AFTER HE SLEPT WITH SHEP! I'm shocked.

What's Daily news like in prothean's society?

Javik being Catalyst was such a bad idea, good thing they changed it

How can he speak so calmly while having so many sad micro-expressions

its not a ME thought, but I wonder what’s Javik comment on Dragonball’s alien characters…

just so happy to see he smile, a pity he don't smile in game often. This makes me want to give him a happy future even more, maybe, in my story, future...

I think the prothean society described by liara might not conflict with what javik said

How difference in appearance between two prothean? In Javik’s memory there was only color and voice and the spot maybe, they even have the same height! There have to be more differences

Shep’s personality is too flat and not growing, only fanfics give him/her some kinds of explanations. I may have a different shep in my story

ME’s AI is too human like, EDI and Gess, just like human talking machine language, not like Galactic Empire Series which Ai has rules and different logic, Sense of heterogeneity, multiple angles. It’s hard I know

----

The main differences between prothean and tritonians are: The prothean do not live in a harsh environment and have scarce resources unlike the triton The prothean do not have a completely transparent mind like the triton, they still need to touch and smell to understand perceptual thinking, which is why I consider them to be a weakened triton Protheans do not inherit knowledge from birth like tritons, they still need to learn, although they may learn quickly through touch and echo shard. protheans can also forget memories.That's why the living span of a triton is thus probably infinite. Whereas Javik apparently mentions that the life span of prothean is finite

----

If prothean is sharing memories while mating ……ahhh

Has prothean ever engaged in class division as well as breeding control? The best people are entitled to leave offspring and all that?

The prothean must have been technologically advanced in biology because they worshipped the theory of the underdog and they were not averse to experimenting on primitive asari

I wish I could get javik to learn how to play chess

Just found Javik's eight pupils can look in four different directions.

-

What is the ecology of Prothean's home planet? At least given his bipedal form, his planet's gravity shouldn't be too far off from Earth's.They may have once been aquatic, and if they can detect a spectrum of light other than natural light, this could also explain their gill-like throats. They may have had webbing between their toes in the past. Or perhaps they are terrestrial creatures, but the planet's thin atmosphere cannot absorb most of the ultraviolet light.

If they were perhaps ever able to fly, the atmospheric pressure of their planet would have been not insignificant, as wings of this size would have been difficult to drive a body of the Collector's stature and mass on Earth.

-

Does prothean have a temperature sensing system?

Have the remains of a defeated Sovereign not been studied? Do they really just treat everything as a gess rebellion?

With Javik's eyes, there is usually an expression on one side and none on the other (the eyes are always wide open), except when emotionally aroused when there is an expression on both sides together. I wonder if the half of their brain that controls their emotions only controls half of their eyes?

his face is a bit like Mickle Jackson!

Finally, both geth and EDI have a soul because of the code of HARVEST. And HARVEST, from ORGANIC

What if ME's amino and dextro-amino are thought to be designed? Because in reality humans can eat dextro-amino acids and the prothean appears to be unrestricted

what if Javik was waked by human (even Cerberus)BEFORE the reapers invade? Human will become a giant empire! He will help human a lot, to prevent reapers, to find his people exist possibility.

Ever notice the line 'More of my people survived?' It even looks a bit ridiculous to see the way his lips switch rapidly between smile and displeasure, but that's the struggle of being in despair when he's holding on to hope..

What's the hole in his head under the carapace for?

What's prothean's skull like?

I wonder what javik would think if he smelled what Shepard is thinking: that prothean really is the right bed partner...

Is prothean a democracy? Or a democratic republic? Or a hegemony? Or an imperial system? What is their authority like, AVATARS?

I don't remember javik ever refusing to let shepard ask him a question.

Think about it, if Javik had originally planned for all the races he led in this cycle to fight the reapers and your race refused. Then in his mind, you are the husk that will be manipulated by the Reapers in the future, and then even exterminating you now would be a way to reduce the threat in the future. Don't forget that Javik's mission has always been to fight the Reapers, and he is completely ruthless about it. But he's just saying, let your race face the reapers on its own. Very merciful. Indeed.

[eternally6pm]

Irresistible Force - Part 4

Tending Towards Zero

Rating: M

Characters: Jakob, FCorrin, Xander, Silas, Camilla.

- They dance -

PART 3 | PART 5

---

Jakob found himself settling into routine before he even realised the month had ended and it was time to turn in his first report to Xander. Corrin was perhaps one of the easiest assignments he had ever been given – she was transparent and cooperative, and any potential threat to her safety seemed to be minimal at worst. 

And yet at the same time, this job was in fact the most difficult thing he’d ever had to do. No matter how many times Jakob tried to school the jumble of inappropriate thoughts in his head into submission, it was painfully apparent that the more time he spent with Corrin, the worse his crush on her became.

At first, he tried to fight it, skirting the idea like the time bomb that it was, trying to convince himself that the frantic fluttering in his chest he felt when she lit up at the sight of the coffee he brought her every morning was the effect of the first few sips of his espresso, and that he only reason he had to swallow the heavy feeling he had on evenings where she dismissed him early was because he didn’t like the idea of having to commute on the trains during rush hour.

But it wasn’t duty that made him stop her at the door so he could retrieve a coat and make her put in on before he drove her to university, or any written clause in the contract they’d signed that required him to impulsively buy her flowers under the guise of “brightening up the place”.

“You’re always underdressed,” he complained, helping her into a long tan coat.

“I don’t remember the weather report. You’re my reminder.”

“What happens one day, when I’m not around to remind you?”

She grinned. “I’ll freeze and die. So you’d better be around.”

And it was at half-past eight, on a gloomy Wednesday morning, standing by her front door with her silk LV scarf in his hands, late again for classes, that he decided that he couldn’t fight it anymore. 

Not when she spoke so thoughtlessly – empty, playful comments that made him wish for more time, more contact, more closeness. Not when her smile ignited something in Jakob that made him feel like everything inside him was alight, burning until it consumed every last beat of his heart, every last breath.

I love her, I love her, he realised, and it felt like someone had held a gun to his head and blown reality away.

---

The younger boy was nervous and Jakob suspected that he might have been intimidated by the prospect of confrontation, but once he finally found the courage to speak, it was clear that the subject of discussion was what had him on tenterhooks. 

 “Are you into her? Corrin, I mean.”

Jakob peered over the rim of his drink at him. He took another swallow. It was a sorry virgin substitute for a gin and tonic – the bartender had given him a very confused look when he asked for tonic water with a squeeze of lemon – and it was awful. But not as awful as this conversation he was being forced to have.

“Why?”

“Why do you think?” And all of a sudden, Silas was angry, his eyebrows scrunching, the corner of his mouth turning down. It overrode his nerves, but only served to make him look less anxious and more irrational. “You follow her around everywhere, it’s freaking weird. Every time I call her, she’s either with you or she says she’s gotta take you with her. What is hell is up with that?”

“It’s nothing,” Jakob replied simply.

Nothing. Just a contract.

He looked to where Corrin bent over at the pool table, lining up a shot as her tongue peeked out at the corner of her lips in concentration and her skirt rode up to where her patterned stockings faded at the border of the top of her thighs.

“I don’t have friends here. My mother wanted her to make sure I wasn’t spending my time alone.” Sometimes, he surprised himself with how easily the lies came to him.

“Oh,” Silas blinked, visibly relieved at the explanation. 

“You know how Corrin can be.”

Silas nodded, unsuccessfully hiding a smile with a large swallow of beer. He picked up the coaster and folded it in half. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply –“

Jakob waved him off. “It’s fine.” God, he hated not being able to drink on the job.

“I mean, I thought it was pretty weird anyway, being her cousin and all, but if you were into her,” he chuckled awkwardly, “how messed up with that be?”

More than you could possibly imagine.

It was a mess of lies, a mess of secrets, a mess of emotion, a mess when he thought about her for too long while he lay in bed alone.

“Quite,” Jakob agreed.

But it wasn’t as messed up as this. The boy would take this as permission, of course, confirmation that it was acceptable to go ahead and sweep her off her feet, and Jakob had just given it himself, while still barely getting his head around the fact that the idea of her spending time with someone else – falling in love with someone else – made him feel sick with despair.

“Well, um, thanks for that.” Silas raised his beer at Jakob. “You’re not too bad, you know? Just need to cheer up a little. You’re always so serious.”

Jakob tilted the drink in his hand, watching as Corrin leaned back and gave a small victorious pump of her fist. She turned and caught his eye, flashing him a smile that made his heart twist with longing.

“You’re not the first to tell me that.”

---

Corrin was tired. 

She couldn’t remember exactly when it had started to build up, but all of a sudden, midterms had arrived and she had three other assignments due within the week of each other, two quizzes worth ten percent of her final mark and no time. All of it seemed to blend into an endless, indecipherable blur of late nights and a constant feeling of dread, like something was chasing her and the moment she let her guard down, it would seize her and shred her to pieces.

Her only comfort lately had been, ironically, her own bodyguard. When Xander had insisted that they hire a new one, she had tried to talk him out of it. She was old enough; she could look after herself, and besides, no one knew who she was anyway. It wasn’t like the Paparazzi were camping outside her apartment.

But Xander would not relent. She had to either get a bodyguard or move back home. Defeated, Corrin asked for a compromise: she would accept another bodyguard if she was allowed to choose the person protecting her. Xander agreed to let her accompany him downtown to the offices of Northern Fortress, and there, a block away from the conversation she would have with Gunter over a bunch of files, she met Jakob for the first time.

She shouldn’t have been surprised when his photo came up – of course the tie and the black bomber was a uniform – and once it did, she immediately lost interest in every other guard she had seen. He was handsome even in the standard headshot, his pale hair pulled back neatly to reveal the strong lines of his jaw, his blue gaze dark and solemn, and she knew the voice that passed those lips was accented in a way that gave her butterflies when he spoke.

I want him.

And he turned out to be more than just a firm hand and a handsome face. He was intelligent, efficient, serious to a fault, but also incredibly witty, and she found herself more and more prone to laughing in his presence. He was thoughtful. After she had commented on his coffee on the first day of semester, he brought her coffee every morning, a tall, strong latte that she knew he ordered hot so that it would still be warm by the time it reached her.

He was attentive. As the weather grew colder, Jakob wouldn’t let her leave the house without putting on a coat. The first time, it was genuine forgetfulness on her part – Corrin liked to wear skirts and dresses, and with the heating running at her apartment almost constantly, she never knew what the true temperature outside would be. But when he briefly vanished and reappeared with a coat from her wardrobe and then proceeded to put it on her and slowly button it up to her collar, she felt herself flush pleasantly from the feeling of his hands on her. 

Every morning she forgot afterwards was entirely deliberate.

Jakob stood close when he did this, and she could smell the faint, fresh scent of his cologne, momentarily imagine that all this was happening in reverse and he would undress her, take her to bed and do things with his pretty mouth that would make her lose her mind.

He was kind. The one time she panicked at the sight of a spider, he had come running, so suddenly wrenched from his own evening that his hair was still damp from the shower she had clearly interrupted. But he still helped her even though he didn’t have to, and he’d even stayed afterwards to make her dinner. Corrin had pushed the limits of what was appropriate that evening, going so far as to try and get him drunk, but he was still, infuriatingly, a gentleman, even with almost four glasses of wine in him, and she had drunk too much herself to do anything other than fall asleep on the sofa. It was a small miracle that he’d woken her to get her to go to sleep properly and then somehow made it home without killing himself.

The only thing she’d really gotten out of that had been the fact that he used to be a ranking officer in the Royal Marines, and the thought of him in uniform only helped elevate her daydreams to a level that left her agitated and distracted.

It was almost ridiculous, how quickly and desperately attached to Jakob she had become, even though she knew he had nothing but a professional interest in her. Despite his ability to be constantly and consistently wonderful, he always seemed to be standing an arm’s length away from her, and it drove her crazy how someone could be near her every single day, and still not be close enough.

In fact, if Corrin took a step back from the sheer physical attraction that clouded her judgement, she found that she craved conversation with him the most, the hilariously dry banter that he would toss her way to bat back, the way he sighed when she said something nonsensical, the very rare smiles  he would occasionally turn away to hide. She wanted to know him, not just be beside him, and it frustrated her to no end that it was impossible, given his role in her life.

Still, there were moments where these lines blurred and she couldn’t quite tell if Jakob was carefully toeing some sort of boundary, or if she were simply choosing to see it that way. He had brought her irises one morning, beautiful and so blue that they made his eyes almost look violet, and her heart had leapt excitedly into her throat at the sight of them, even though he said it was for no reason other than the fact that her apartment looked too dull and grey for his liking.

Lately, he had taken to the habit of remaining for just an hour or so after he drove her home from the university to make her dinner. She had told him it really wasn’t necessary, but he simply continued to do so, going so far as to set the table, before leaving for the day.

The only time Jakob stayed to eat with her, she had asked him to explicitly, sick of how empty her apartment felt after he was gone, hungry for more time in his company so she could tease him and hopefully this time, get him to laugh.

“Are your tests and assignments done?”

She sighed heavily. “Almost. I’ll be done by the start of next week.”

He moved another helping of green beans onto her plate. “Make sure you eat. Drink plenty of water, rest. And not at your desk. Go to sleep in your bed.”

“Yes, mum,” she rolled her eyes.

He cleared his throat, but it might have also been a noise of amusement.

“Would I… be able to help you at all?”

She looked up at him and saw that he had stopped eating, watching her almost uncertainly as he waited for her response.

“You’re already doing plenty.”

“Well,” he sighed quietly, “let me know if I can do anything else.”

You could kiss me, she wanted to say, but it was absurd, because he was just being nice, and she was being monumentally stupid about all this, letting her mind run away with deliberate misinterpretations, just because he had agreed to have dinner with her.

“Thank you, Jakob,” she said instead.

He shooed her to the study after dinner and insisted that he would do the dishes. By the time she returned to check on him, he had already left.

---

It had been almost five whole minutes since he had shut off the engine, but in the darkness of the basement garage, he sat without moving, his hands still on the wheel as he watched her sleep.

Gently, ever so gently, he reached across to push the hair away from her face.

She looked peaceful, beautiful enough to break his heart.

“Corrin,” he whispered.

Her eyelids fluttered open.

[originemesis]

@cast-you-dxwn xxx

Michael harbored no such contempt for the young man. His resemblance to his father was incidental, an in-built design of human genetics that meant little in the grand scheme of things. Any shared personality quirks or ticks did not engender ire in the Seraphim, indeed they only served to remind him of older days, when Adam had been young, before sin had slithered into his soul. “Not in the midst of combat, no.” He shakes his head, dismissing the idea with a small snort as the Legionnaire fell in beside him, his own pairs of silver and white Harpy Eagles wings tucked carefully against his back, slowing his stride so that the shorter soul could keep pace. “Mortal militaries use ‘drop pouches’, which they store their depleted magazines in. While retaining used ammunition containers is not strictly necessary for us, it would give you a much more accurate count that could be tallied once you are at rest.” A laugh, a genuine one, accompanied by the tinkling of bells and the tweeting of songbirds. “Yes, I suppose she will, you all are always so interested in my so-called ‘work-life balance’.” He is about to comment on Abel’s hobby, express some interest in this ‘surfing’ activity that more and more of the Saved seem intent on taking part on. Perhaps ask about how to get started upon such a thing, for when such an outing might work out best for the First Martyr. Of course, such a casual conversation could not go interrupted, and he dimly notes how Abel’s helmet seems to materialize upon his head as the last voice Michael wants to hear finds form before the pair. The light and friendly expression melts from the Seraphim’s face, as through the mere presence of the First man is siphoning any warmth of good humor from his body, only a small glance spared at the now-silent Legionnaire at his side. “I suppose I will simply have to attend more yoga sessions, then. You know how paperwork is, Adam, but I thank you for your concern.” Not that he believes said concern is genuine, simply a way of digging beneath his skin with some semblance of deniability. A small hum of acknowledgement is all he gives to the Commanders request, gaze following his broad form until he is out of earshot before he speaks again. “You are a grown man, and can make your own decisions, but I must ask: Why do you avoid him so fervently?”

The genuine interest in his commander's musings faded into the gentle whirring of his helmet's fans- always seeking to cool the device down being built to outlast the heat of hell over the mere uncomfortable warmth blooming shades of gorse along his cheeks beneath the circuitry. His interest in the topic turned would simply have to wait until the two heavy weights finished their inescapable encounter in the conjoining hallway between their offices.

Adam, on the other wing- had zero interest in whatever Mic thought he was doing after hours and only chirped like he did if only to usher him out the door faster. Any semblance of stress or a tantrum held at bay, he knew, would shovel the seraphim's suspicions to the surface, so it's with a fairly non committal eye roll and flick of his wrist that he dismisses the other's explanation.

"Well, I wouldn't want to have to pick up your slack, I guess. You know how the girls get...can't leave em alone for longsies, the needy bitches." Which was why, in part, he was such a good fit for the flock. Who better to deal with needy bitches than the neediest bitch of them all? "But ch'yeah, don't hold your breath on the yoga meet up. I know you probably look forward to our romp in the short shorts, but I'm not looking to exacerbate the whip lash from that hell wedgie I got last time." And with a shrug and a condescending wiggle of a wave with one set of talons, he was on his way back to his office, robes dragging behind him and keeping the floor dusted with the efforts of his waddling.

Abel waited a good moment or two before he peeked back up to see if Michael had relaxed back into himself or not. The slam of the door to the exorcist wing prompts him to slowly, sheepishly slide the helmet back off and retuck the device back under his arm. "It just...doesn't ever seem like the right time, is all." With a blink or two nervously trained on the hallway the first man disappeared down, he swings his gaze up to meet his commander's with a faint flicker of disquiet as if he felt he should be the one apologizing for the run in.

"I mean, heaven is forever- right? I'll find the right time...you know ~ eventually?"

[zyafics-recs]

reblogging comment review by @zyafics

i’m alive i’m here (i’m fulfilling my duties bc damn a bitch went offline for 9 days and is behind on everything 😭) ⬇️

You drifted to your room, collapsing onto the small bed. The familiar scent of home did little to soothe the ache in your chest. It didn’t feel right. It never did, only when your brother was around, but now, not even that thought gave you faith as you closed your eyes, picturing Rafe’s face. His smile, his touch, his voice – they were all painfully vivid.

ugh i miss ur writing sm i love how this scene felt “slow” like u were navigating this lagged moment with her because nothing felt real

As you both settled in, the familiar warmth of his presence was a small comfort, a reminder that despite everything, you were still here together.

i don’t give a shit the one thing i love more than romance stories is sibling relationships 😭 they’re my heart n soul

"He’s facing several charges, but the severity of his sentence could depend on his cooperation. If he agrees to testify against his father, the authorities might offer him a deal."

i fear he won’t do it 😭😃

“You’re too good, y’know that? Personally, I don’t give a fuck if he dies.”

jj 😭😭😭 leave her alone 😭😭😭

"Complicated? Complicated is being stuck on an island, wondering if your sister is alive or dead. Complicated is dealing with the fact that the guy who put us through hell gets to play hero for a day and suddenly he's got your sympathy."

screaming into my pillow ur dialogues r too good

A carbon copy of your mother, your punishment.

okay pause ✋🏼 not the thematic parallel to abusive and neglectful parental figures i cannot handle this

You were just trying to find a shred of humanity in someone who had shown you a glimpse of it.

THIS LINE EATS SO HARD 😭😭😭

“Is that what you tell yourself to make you feel better?”

my jj would swing at ur jj for the way ur talking to ur sister

“Because I want to!” You screamed even though you hadn’t meant to. Tears of frustration fell as you raised your head, “And as far as I’m concerned, I’m still my own person and I can make my own decisions.”

PERIOD!!!!

 “He was good to me.”

girl *I* held my breath

Sarah never pushed you to talk, never demanded explanations. Instead, she just sat with you, shared a laugh or two, and let the silence speak for itself. It was a strange comfort; one you hadn’t realized you needed until it was there.

i love ur sarah sm mines a bitchhh 🙂‍↕️✋🏼

“No. Uh, a friend, I guess—” You were about to ramble, not too certain of what to say, but settled for, “Can you tell him Maybank’s calling?”

WHY DO I FEEL LIKE HIS PUNK ASS IS GONNA BE LIKE “i don’t know a maybank”

"I’m sorry. Mr. Cameron has requested not to speak with you," she said. "Is there anything else I can assist you with?"

YOU PUNK ASS BITCH

You screamed until your throat was raw, until you had nothing left to give.

no i didn’t (personally cannot scream LOL)

Six months had passed since that day

what the actual fuck

You had spent the afternoon alone, lounging in the living room with a half-read book and a broken fan that did little to ease the stifling heat. 

such good imagery god i love this

Your words caught in your throat as you saw him standing there. 

my heart is pounding omg

“You had six months.”

YIKES 😬

You looked at him, searching for any sign of deceit. His eyes were clear, more focused than you had ever seen them. “Why should I believe you?”

i’m shaking rn pls give a girl some respite

Rafe looked offended, eyes zeroing in on your lips before his gaze met yours. That's when you felt it again, “I never lied to you.”

i’m throwing punches into my pillow rn biting my teeth ohmygod

Rafe’s expression softened, and he reached out tentatively, his hand stopping inches from your arm. “I’m sorry, baby.”

go away demon 👹 @ gigi

It’s only then, when your brain cleared slightly that you noticed he looked different. His hair had been buzzed, his skin looked tanner than the last time you’d seen him, he looked healthier. 

oh we’re in season 3 now ok

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “I’m so sorry.”

i’m literally scraping my fingernails against chalkboards rn pls stop this madness 🛑🛑🛑

Rafe paused in the doorway, his back to you. His voice was barely above a whisper, but it carried clearly through the thick air. "I don’t regret it," he repeated, his shoulders tensing as he spoke.

gonna die ok 🪦

You had tried so hard to suppress your feelings, to deny the depth of your connection with him. But this…wasn’t something that could be easily forgotten or ignored. You had been so afraid to admit it, fearing that acknowledging would destroy you. 

You were in love with Rafe Cameron. 

oh my fucking god u did it again

final thoughts — ohmygod. i dont know why i kept putting off reading this? i think a part of me was scared because the literal content warning was “aka angst” and i said no. anyways, first and foremost u done it again gigi. what i was so impressed about this chapter was ur ability to create such flowing, strong and long dialogues. the one between jj and reader i read twice because i can’t believe how naturally-paced this story goes through that u don’t even realized it’s chunks on chunks of dialogues. that’s such an incredible feat and knowing now that ur from europe and english is probably a second language? the way u select the right words at the right time is an talent i strive to have. i’m like re-editing in my head being like “would i come up with that?” and being like “yeah i would’ve ended it there (bc i don’t know how to elongate a scene) but gigi knew how to keep it going.” gigi, when i tell u that’s one of the most impressive skills i’ve ever seen in my life i’m so serious. also, the way you structure and keep a consistent flow of emotions. the beginning of the story is stretched out in a way that i cinematically imagined a lagged moment. yk how in euphoria where it drags a scene from one part to the next? like that. and then the ending, when i said i was shaking, i was truly shaking. u had my heart clutched in ur hand and u just SQUEEZED IT 😭 💔 the way i felt everything and was so scared and panicking and my eyes wanted to read ahead because i wanted to know what happens but i also wanted to enjoy the writing 😭 u got me doing mental gymnastics trying to figure out how to read 😃 i thoroughly enjoyed this to the very end and ngl, i am so scared to read the next chapter i think imma hold off for a min…

THE OTHER SIDE OF PARADISE - rafe cameron (+18) - five

request: "a rafe enemies to lovers 🫣 the reader is jjs sister the whole drama before but then she gets left behind on the ship and rafe ends up comforting her and then yea that’s all I got you can do whatever else the rest 😛"

warnings: angst <3333333 for everyone <33; might need some editing bc im too tired to check everything but yeah

word count: 7.7k

The ride back to home was a blur. The plane ride, the ferry.

Everything. 

Every mile that took you further from Rafe felt like a wound being reopened. The police officers tried to engage you in conversation, but your responses were monosyllabic at best. They eventually gave up, letting you stare out the window in silence.

When you finally arrived, the sight of the familiar streets of The Cut did little to comfort you. Your house felt alien, a place you barely recognized. The officers escorted you inside, their presence a reminder of the reality you were returning to. 

“Your brother and your friends were rescued from a remote island a while ago. He was informed of your whereabouts an hour ago, he’ll be here soon.”

Their words barely registered.

You nodded numbly; your mind still stuck between the events that had unfolded just two days ago.

What kind of sister had you turned into? Barely phased over the fact your little brother was thankfully alive and well? You were supposed to protect him. 

Sensing your detachment, they exchanged a look before retreating to the porch, giving you some semblance of privacy.

You wandered through the house, your steps heavy. Each room felt like a snapshot from another life. The couch where you and your brother used to bicker over TV shows when Luke spent days doing God knows what, the kitchen table where meals were shared and stories were told, only between you two– they all seemed like relics of a past you could no longer touch.

Things would never be the same, you knew that.

You drifted to your room, collapsing onto the small bed. The familiar scent of home did little to soothe the ache in your chest. It didn’t feel right. It never did, only when your brother was around, but now, not even that thought gave you faith as you closed your eyes, picturing Rafe’s face. His smile, his touch, his voice – they were all painfully vivid.

That must be your punishment. 

A soft knock on the door jolted you from your thoughts. You sat up, heart racing. Your body was still on high alert, every little noise sent shivers down your skin. The blasting of the gunshots was still deeply rooted in your brain. It hadn’t even been three days. 

The old wooden door creaked open, and your brother's face appeared, bright blue eyes wide with concern. He rushed to your side, pulling you into a tight embrace nearly knocking the air out of your lungs.

"Holy shit,” he whispered, his voice thick with emotion, “Holy shit.”

You clung to him, the dam breaking as tears streamed down your face. The sobs wracked your body as JJ held you like you used to hold him. It devastated you. It felt so disappointing. He was never supposed to be the one carrying the family burden, you were. After what felt like an eternity, you pulled back, wiping your tears. Your brother sat beside you, his eyes searching your face.

“You’re not hurt?”

You took a shaky breath, trying to find the words, but all you managed to blurt out was a small “No. You?”

“No,” JJ nodded, lips pursed into a tight line as if he was figuring out what to say next, “They told me about the shooting.”

Your heart sank further at his words. You had hoped to avoid talking about it, at least for a little while. But he was watching you like he used to when you would act as a human shield for him, you couldn't brush it aside.

“I’m fine, I promise.” You reached out and squeezed his hand. "What about you? How did you get off that island?"

JJ let out a bitter laugh, shaking his head.

“It was a mess. We were stuck there for weeks, trying to find a way out. Pope and Kie kept us sane, but it was rough. We finally managed to signal a passing boat, and they rescued us. But the whole time, I couldn't stop thinking about you."

You squeezed his hand tighter, guilt and gratitude warring within you.

"I'm sorry I wasn't there. I'm so sorry, JJ."

He shook his head vehemently. "No, don't apologize. None of this is your fault. I—I should’ve saved you on that ship, okay? It’s on me, not you.”

You’d cry again if you didn’t feel like your body was about to collapse, “You did everything you could. We both did. It's not your fault."

“The one time we changed places, and I couldn’t do it.”

"Jay—"

"I should have been there for you," He insisted, "I hated it."

It was your fault, not his. You pulled him into another hug, trying to convey with your touch what words couldn't express. The weight of your shared guilt and pain was almost suffocating, but at least you were together. You felt his body shaking, whether, from exhaustion or emotion, you couldn't tell.

When you finally let go, you took a deep breath, hoping to find some semblance of strength.

"We’re gonna be okay.”

JJ nodded, though you could see the doubt lingering in his eyes. "I know. It's just... hard."

"I get it. But we're both here, we're alive.”

A small, sad smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. "Yeah, I guess you're right."

The two of you sat in silence for a while, it was a fragile peace, but it was something. The familiar sound of the waves crashing against the shore outside the window was a reminder that life continued, even when it felt like your world had stopped.

"Do you think things will ever go back to normal?" JJ's voice was quiet, almost hesitant.

If he only knew. The one time you managed to close your eyes and sleep you were plagued by nightmares of JJ finding out what you’d done. About you and Rafe. It made you want to scratch your skin raw. 

“Yeah.”

You could see the exhaustion in his eyes, a mirror of your own fatigue. You knew you both needed rest, but the thought of sleep was daunting. The nightmares felt too close, the darkness too suffocating.

"Let's try to get some sleep," You suggested softly, though you weren't sure you could follow your own advice. "We both need it, ‘kay?”

JJ nodded, but you could see the wariness in his eyes. He laid down next to you, the bed barely accommodating the both of you.

As you both settled in, the familiar warmth of his presence was a small comfort, a reminder that despite everything, you were still here together.

The minutes ticked by in silence, the only sound being the rhythmic crashing of the waves outside. You focused on that, letting it be your anchor. Slowly, the tension in your body started to ease, the weight of the day’s events beginning to lift, even if just a little.

"Do you remember the first time we went out on the boat alone?" JJ's voice was a whisper in the darkness, a fragile thread connecting the past to the present.

A small smile tugged at your lips. "Yeah. You insisted you knew how to steer, and we almost ended up crashing into that sandbank."

He chuckled softly. "We were so scared. But you figured it out. You always did."

The memory was a bittersweet reminder of simpler times, a time when your biggest worry was navigating the boat, not navigating the chaos your lives had become. When you weren’t a complete fuck up.

Exhaustion finally began to overtake you, your eyes growing heavy. JJ's breathing evened out beside you, a comforting rhythm that lulled you closer to sleep. You wanted to tell him everything, but you couldn’t. Not without losing him in the process. 

Sleep came slowly, but when it did, it was deep and dreamless. Completely void, much like yourself these days. 

Morning came too soon, sunlight filtering through the curtains and casting a warm glow over the room.

You blinked awake, disoriented for a moment before the events of the past days came rushing back. JJ was still asleep beside you, his face peaceful in repose.

Carefully, you slipped out of bed, not wanting to wake him. The officer who comforted you after the shooting promised to call as soon as he got an update on Rafe’s condition. And so far? No call.

You wondered if the hospital or the police had contacted Sarah. She was Rafe’s closest family, aside from Wheezie who was still a kid, and Ward who was a sought-out criminal. It made sense that they would reach out to her.

If you rang the hospital, they wouldn’t disclose a thing, you weren’t family, and it wasn’t like you could ask Sarah. She would know something was wrong the moment you asked about Rafe. It was risky. 

The kitchen felt eerily quiet, the early morning light casting long shadows on the walls. You made yourself a cup of coffee, the warmth a small comfort against the chill that had settled in your bones.

Sitting at the table, you sipped slowly, trying to come up with some sort of tangible plan. You wanted to know if he was okay, needed to know, but every option seemed fraught with risk.

Your new phone buzzed on the table, jolting you from your thoughts.

You picked it up, heart pounding as you saw an unknown number flashing on the screen. You hesitated for a moment before answering.

“Hello?”

“This is Officer Thompson. I promised I’d keep you updated on Rafe Cameron’s condition.”

You closed your eyes, thanking God for finally giving you some piece of mind, “Yes, thank you.”

“He’s stable,” Officer Thompson continued. “The surgery went well, and he’s in recovery. It’ll be a while before he’s fully back on his feet, but he’s out of immediate danger.”

The knot in your stomach loosened slightly. “Thank you for letting me know.”

There was a pause on the other end.

“I know this is difficult, but you should focus on your own recovery too. There’s a chance the feds will contact you, they’re building their case on Ward. What happened to you is, unfortunately, considered a minor crime compared to everything he’s done, so maybe you’ll get some peace. If not, you might have to testify against him.”

The idea of having to testify against Ward made you uncomfortable to no end. Reliving those moments in front of a courtroom full of strangers seemed unbearable. 

“And Rafe? What are his charges?”

"He’s facing several charges, but the severity of his sentence could depend on his cooperation. If he agrees to testify against his father, the authorities might offer him a deal."

A deal. It was a slim chance, but it was something. You hated yourself for the weight that left your shoulders. He should be locked up, you knew that, back then you prayed for the day he paid for what he did and yet here you were, holding on to any possibility of freedom.

You thanked Officer Thompson again and ended the call, setting your phone down with a shaky hand. The coffee had grown cold, but you didn't have the energy to make another cup. You sat there for a long moment, staring into space, trying to gather your thoughts.

The sound of footsteps drew your attention, and you turned to see JJ standing in the doorway, his hair tousled and eyes still heavy with sleep.

“Who was that?” He asked, his voice still groggy.

“Uh—Officer Thompson. He was at the scene the other day and told me he’d keep me updated.”

JJ tilted his head, his messy bed hair following suit, “Updated on what?”

“Rafe’s condition,” You replied, the words feeling heavy on your tongue. It was a half-lie. At least you were giving him something. 

JJ stopped in his tracks, “And you care because…?”

“For closure, I guess.”

JJ’s gaze softened slightly as he walked over to the table, pulling out a chair and sitting across from you.

“You’re too good, y’know that? Personally, I don’t give a fuck if he dies.”

You winced inwardly. "JJ, you can't just say stuff like that.”

He leaned back in his chair, brows furrowed. "Why not? After everything he’s done, he deserves whatever he gets."

You couldn't argue with that, but part of you still felt the need to defend Rafe. He saved your life.

“He’s still a human being, okay?”

JJ scoffed, shaking his head. "Barely.”

You didn’t know why you suddenly felt so angry, so defensive. But it made its way up your body until your lips were moving again, practically spitting the words out.

“He saved my life.”

Your brother stared at you like you were speaking another language, “Saved your life? Are you serious? It’s his fault you were there in the first place!”

“He chose to help me. And I can't just forget that."

JJ ran a hand through his hair, clearly agitated.

"This is insane. One good deed doesn't erase all the bad he's done."

You reached for his back, “I know that.”

He pulled away from your touch, your fingers only brushing against his shirt, “Do you?”

His retreat felt like a knife to your heart. JJ had always been your rock, the one person you could count on. Seeing him look at you with such disbelief and anger made you feel more isolated than ever. He looked at you like you’d imagined in your nightmares, but the real thing felt ten times worse. 

"I’m not saying he’s a good person. I’m just saying… it’s complicated."

He paced around the kitchen table.

"Complicated? Complicated is being stuck on an island, wondering if your sister is alive or dead. Complicated is dealing with the fact that the guy who put us through hell gets to play hero for a day and suddenly he's got your sympathy."

"It's not sympathy," You insisted, your voice rising despite your best efforts to stay collected. You never raised your voice at him. "It's just... I don't know. I saw a different side of him. Maybe he can change. Or at least help put Ward away."

JJ stopped and spun around to face you, his eyes blazing. "And what if he doesn't? What if this is all part of some twisted game for him? People like Rafe don't just change, okay? They manipulate, they hurt, they destroy."

“JJ—"

“You sound exactly like her.”

You didn’t have to ask to know what he meant. Suddenly your entire soul felt like it was being drained out and slashed into pieces.

You spent a lifetime hearing it, from Luke.

A carbon copy of your mother, your punishment.

“Don’t say that.”

“That’s exactly the type of bullshit she would spit out about dad, wasn’t it? And look where it got her.”

Memories of your mother flooded back. The excuses, the false hope, and the endless cycle of pain and disappointment. You weren’t her, were you? Holding out for a man who was never going to change, who would only inflict pain upon your life? It couldn’t be. You spent your entire life making sure you were nothing like her.

It wasn’t fair.

You weren’t making excuses for Rafe as your mother did for Luke. You were just trying to find a shred of humanity in someone who had shown you a glimpse of it. You stood there, feeling the weight of his accusation like a leaden cloak.

How could he think you were blind to Rafe’s faults? You knew them all too well. Standing there in the kitchen, under the harsh morning light, you felt exposed, vulnerable, and fiercely defensive.

“I’m not her,” You finally managed to say, your voice cracking, “I’m not defending him like she did.”

“Is that what you tell yourself to make you feel better?”

Your eyes narrow into slits, “I’m not doing this with you, not right now.” 

You turned away, your fists clenched at your sides as you fought to regain your composure.

He followed you hot on your trail, "Don't walk away from me.”

"I'm not defending him," You insisted, your back still to him, “I’m just trying to understand, okay?”

“Understand what? Jesus, Rafe is who he is.”

"And maybe he can change," You shot back, the words spilling out despite the tightening knot in your chest. "Maybe he saved my life because he wants to change."

"He's manipulating you," JJ retorted, his jaw clenched. "Just like he always does. You went through some traumatic shit together, but that doesn't mean you owe him anything."

You stopped dead in your tracks, turning to face him again. Your head was tingling, the headache already forming itself, and you felt hot all-over. 

“Some traumatic shit?” You repeated, “Are you fucking serious?”

JJ raised both his hands, tangling them in his hair in frustration, “You almost died, and now you're here defending the guy who put you in that position?"

The accusation stung. You felt the heat rise in your chest. You hated fighting with your brother. You were letting your feelings for Rafe get between the two of you.

He shook his head, disappointment oozing from him in waves, "Good luck with that. Just don't expect me to sit here and act like everything's okay."

You blinked away the dryness in your eyes, "I'm not asking you to. Can't you see that maybe things aren't as black and white as they seem?"

“All I know is what he's done to us, to you."

"And what about what he did for me?" You shot back, the words bitter on your tongue.

“And what did he do exactly?" Your lips parted to speak, but words continued to spill from his mouth, “What did you do?”

You gave no reply, unblinking, short breaths escaping you. His accusation lingered in the air, challenging you to defend the indefensible. The truth was there, clawing at your mind, but you couldn't bring yourself to voice it. 

Not to JJ, not yet.

"I don't expect you to understand," You finally said, voice strained, "But I’m not turning my back on him.”

JJ's eyes narrowed; frustration etched on his face. "Why?”

“Because I want to!” You screamed even though you hadn’t meant to. Tears of frustration fell as you raised your head, “And as far as I’m concerned, I’m still my own person and I can make my own decisions.”

He opened his mouth to respond, but the words seemed to evaporate. For a moment, the kitchen was filled with nothing but the sound of your heavy breathing and the instant regret that filled your bones.

Finally, JJ spoke, his voice low and strained. "Fine. Do what you want."

You watched as he turned away, his shoulders tense with anger or disappointment – perhaps both. His footsteps echoed loudly in the quiet kitchen as he stormed out, leaving you standing there, feeling raw and exposed. It was the first time you had ever raised your voice at him, and the aftermath left a bitter taste in your mouth. 

Alone in the kitchen, you sank into your chair again, your energy completely drained. Part of you wanted to run after him, to explain, to make him understand. But he never would. None of them would.

Because unlike you, they weren’t stupid enough to sympathize with Rafe Cameron.

Sitting there, you couldn't shake the feeling that you'd crossed a line, one you might not be able to uncross. You stared at your hands, still trembling from the argument, and let out a long, shaky breath. What was it about Rafe that had such a grip on you? 

You heard the front door open and close, a clear sign that JJ had left the house. Maybe it was for the best, giving you both time to cool down. You got up to pour the coffee down the sink, the sound of the liquid swirling away a tiny comfort.

You spent the entire day locked away in your room, avoiding any kind of social interaction, or the sun. Your phone buzzed again, and for a moment, you considered ignoring it.

You picked it up, expecting another call from Officer Thompson, but the name on the screen made your heart skip a beat.

Sarah.

With a deep breath, you answered. “Hey sweets.”

“Hi,” Sarah’s voice was almost unsure. “JJ and the police called earlier, told us what happened. Are you okay? I’m on the mainland with John B, we’re taking the next ferry back home.” 

You closed your eyes, somewhat relieved that you wouldn’t have to face them yet.

“Yeah, I’m…Managing. I'm okay.”

“Good, that’s good,” There was a pause, and then she asked, “Have you heard anything about...Rafe?”

Had the hospital not called her? The question hung in the air. You had, but you didn’t know how much to share. 

“He’s stable. The surgery went well.”

Sarah sighed, “Good. That’s good to hear I guess.”

“Sarah,” You began, hesitating. “Did the hospital call you?”

There was a long silence on the other end before she replied, “Yeah. But I…I don’t know. I just couldn’t bring myself to answer. I knew it was coming after the police called. But—Yeah, it’s just, it’s really hard.”

You didn’t know what to say, “I’m so sorry.”

“You’re the only one not giving me shit about still…caring? I guess. He’s my brother, you know? And I want to hate him, so bad, but I can’t.”

"I get it, Sarah. He's your brother. It's okay to feel conflicted."

"Yeah," She exhaled heavily, "But I don't know how to deal with it. He's done so much harm, and yet. I keep hoping there's still some good left in him. I know there's no hope for my dad, but Rafe..."

She had seen him before Ward turned him into this. She still carried the guilt of reveling in their father’s approval, the clear favoritism that she never stood against for her brother, even though she could see her father’s fingers printed on Rafe’s cheeks. 

Her words echoed your inner struggle. You understood her—how love and hate could coexist in such a tangled mess when it came to family. 

 “He was good to me.”

There was a long pause.

You expected her to hang up on you, to call you a list of degrading names, all of which you felt you deserved. She had suffered deeply at the hands of her brother— the same brother you had come to care for, despite knowing the full extent of what he’d done. 

But you underestimated her.

Caught between your own anxiety and the dread of truth being exposed, you momentarily forgot just how compassionate and noble Sarah was. She possessed a goodness that mirrored your own—loyal, forgiving, and endlessly understanding.

Both lovers and fighters.

 "I know, the feds told me about the shooting," Sarah finally said, "And I think that's what makes it so hard. Picturing him as the same monster from before was a lot easier.”

You nodded even though she couldn't see you, feeling a deep ache in your chest. "Yeah."

"I don't know what to do," She confessed, her vulnerability cutting through the distance between you. "Part of me wants to see him, to talk to him. And part of me wants to never look at him again."

"I think... whatever you decide, it's okay," You offered tentatively, not entirely sure if your words were comforting or just empty platitudes.

“John B disagrees.”

“Yeah, so does JJ.”

"I appreciate you telling me about Rafe," Sarah continued, her voice softer now, more vulnerable. "I... I don't think I could have handled hearing it from anyone else."

You felt a pang of guilt. "I'm sorry you had to hear it like this, sweetheart. I wish things were different."

"We all do," she replied softly. "Thank you.”

“Of course," You said, "Take care of yourself.”

"You too. We'll see you soon, okay?"

"Yeah. See you soon."

The call ended, and you stared at your phone for a long moment, the screen dark and lifeless, much like yourself lately. 

You spent the next few days in a haze, avoiding JJ and the rest of your friends as much as possible. You’d only seen Sarah. Somehow her presence didn’t make you feel as nervous as you thought. It weirdly calmed you down. You’d always been close, ever since she joined the group, but now you felt like she was the only one who understood your point of view. 

You knew Pope and Kie wouldn’t, and you couldn’t blame them.

Sarah never pushed you to talk, never demanded explanations. Instead, she just sat with you, shared a laugh or two, and let the silence speak for itself. It was a strange comfort; one you hadn’t realized you needed until it was there.

The small house felt like a prison. It wasn’t until a week later, as you sat on the beach watching the waves crash against the shore, that your phone buzzed with a message. It was the officer: "Rafe’s awake."

Your heart leaped into your throat. You still hadn’t told anyone the full extent of what had happened between you and him, and you weren’t sure you ever could. They knew he was in the hospital, that you two had gotten caught in a shooting, that he’d somehow saved your life. That was it. But now, with him awake…You didn’t know what to do.

With trembling hands, you dialed the number the officer had provided. After a few rings, someone answered.

"Hello, this is St. Michael Hospital. How can I help you?"

You snap out of your daze, "Hi, I'm calling to check on a patient, Rafe Cameron. I was told he’s awake."

There was a pause, the sound of keyboard keys clicking. "Yes, Mr. Cameron is awake. Are you a family member?"

“No. Uh, a friend, I guess—” You were about to ramble, not too certain of what to say, but settled for, “Can you tell him Maybank’s calling?”

“Okay, just a minute please.”

The hold music was the only thing keeping you centered on the moment, each note heightening your anxiety. When the nurse returned, her tone was pitiful, and you knew then that you weren’t going to like her answer.

"I’m sorry. Mr. Cameron has requested not to speak with you," she said. "Is there anything else I can assist you with?"

You wanted to hurl the phone into the ocean, plunge your head underwater, and only resurface when the ringing in your ears ceased.

 What the hell? 

You had spent weeks on edge, consumed by thoughts of him, hoping he would survive, praying for him despite not believing in that sort of thing. You didn't have it in you to put up a fight.

"No, that's all. Thank you." You ended the call and stared at your phone. 

Rafe didn’t want to speak with you.

You felt foolish, as if you were just now glimpsing the bigger picture and recognizing that maybe he didn’t care after all. Perhaps, on the island, you were the one thing keeping him grounded, but now? Now you were back to being a nobody, just a pogue.

It felt like everything you had shared was for nothing.

Had you imagined it? No, you knew you hadn’t.

Rafe had kissed you and touched you with the tenderness of a lover, as if you were precious and any rough movement might break you.

The moments you had shared, the way he had saved your life—maybe they didn’t mean as much to him as they did to you. The bond you thought you had formed with Rafe was, perhaps, a desperate attempt to find something good in the chaos.

The waves crashed against the shore, the sound a distant roar as you sat on the sand, a storm brewing inside. You tried to hold it together, to keep the facade of normalcy for a little longer, but it was getting harder with each passing day. This felt like it was the final straw.

Without warning, a scream ripped from your throat, raw and unfiltered. It echoed across the empty beach, a primal release of everything you had been bottling up.

The anger, the confusion, the hurt—it all came pouring out in that one moment. Tears streamed down your face, mixing with the salty sea breeze.

You hadn’t cried properly in weeks. 

You screamed until your throat was raw, until you had nothing left to give. The sun cast long shadows on the sand, the beach deserted except for you. Collapsing back onto the sand, you let the tears flow freely. 

There was no one to judge you, no one to see you fall apart. You’d spent a lifetime pulling yourself together, it was only fair you finally got to breathe properly. When the tears subsided, you wiped your face with the back of your hand and took a shuddering breath. The tightness in your chest began to ease, replaced by a hollow ache.

You were many things, but none of them were weak and yet...It was almost unbearable, the way your mind replayed every interaction, every look, every word, searching for signs you might have missed, clues that would have warned you not to get attached.

The sound of footsteps in the sand pulled you from your thoughts.

You turned to see JJ approaching. Your heart sank; you weren’t ready to face him after the argument. He sat down next to you, silent for a moment as he followed your gaze out to the horizon.

When he finally spoke, his voice was softer than you expected.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

You nodded, unsure of what to say.

“I’m sorry for what I said about Mom,” he continued, his tone filled with regret. “I shouldn’t have compared you to her. That wasn’t fair.”

You swallowed hard, the tension easing slightly from your shoulders. “It’s okay, JJ. I know you didn’t mean it.”

“I did, and I didn’t,” he admitted. “I just... I don’t want to see you get hurt. I don’t trust him, and I hate that you’ve been caught up in all this.”

“He doesn’t want to talk to me.”

He glanced at you, eyebrow raised. “What do you mean?”

“I called the hospital. They said he’s awake, but he doesn’t want to speak with me.”

Your brother frowned, his protective instincts flaring up. “That fucking asshole. After everything—”

You shook your head, cutting him off gently. “Maybe it’s for the best. Maybe he’s right.”

JJ’s expression softened, and he reached out, placing a hand on your shoulder.

“Hey, don’t do that. Don’t blame yourself. You did nothing wrong.”

A lump formed in your throat, but you nodded, trying to believe his words. “I just... I thought there was more to it. That maybe he could change.”

“People like Rafe... it’s hard to change.”

“Yeah.”

 “But that doesn’t mean you’re wrong for wanting to see the good in him.”

He spoke with such gentleness and wisdom. You forgot he wasn’t a kid anymore. That he’d also done his fair share of growing up way too fast. 

You leaned into his touch, “I know.”

“We’ll get through this,” JJ said firmly. “Together. You and me, like always.”

 “Love you.”

“Love you too.”

As the sun began to set, casting a warm glow over the beach, you and JJ sat there in silence. The waves continued to crash against the shore, a reminder that life moved forward, even when it felt like everything was falling apart.

Maybe things would never go back to the way they were, but you had your brother, your friends, and a resilience you hadn’t known you possessed. 

⋆ ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ⋆ ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ⋆ ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ⋆ ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ⋆ ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ⋆ ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ

Six months had passed since that day.

Life had settled into a fragile semblance of normalcy. The days were longer now, summer heat pressing down on The Cut, making the air thick and heavy. You had spent the afternoon alone, lounging in the living room with a half-read book and a broken fan that did little to ease the stifling heat. 

You were lost in your book when a loud, insistent banging on the door jolted you from your reverie. Few people would knock with such urgency.

The forceful banging on the door didn’t stop and you jolted upright.

Without thinking, you got up and flung the door open, irritation flaring. "What the f—"

Your words caught in your throat as you saw him standing there. 

"Rafe?" You blurted out. You immediately tried to close the door in his face, but he was quick. His hand shot out, holding it open, "Are you kidding me?" You hissed, pushing harder against the door.

"Maybank—"

"If you don't get off my property, I swear to fucking God—"

"Wait!" Rafe's voice was strained, his hand trembling as he held the door open. "Just listen for a second."

You glared at him, every instinct telling you to push harder, to shut him out. But something in his eyes—fear, desperation, a flicker of the Rafe you once knew—gave you pause.

The last time you saw him, he was bleeding out and terrifyingly pale.

The last update you had on him was from Sarah, months ago. He had left the hospital and kept sporadic contact, reaching out to her only every few weeks.

You never asked her about his well-being or what he was doing; despite guessing that he was cooperating with the police. At least you hoped he was. 

You were determined not to care anymore.

He leaned his weight against the doorframe, “You look good.”

You were going to slap the lack of common sense out of him. 

You scoffed, not letting your guard down. “What are you doing here?”

He looked down, struggling to find the words as he scratched the back of his head, “I... I needed to see you. To talk.”

“And I need you to crawl back to whatever hole you just creeped out of, have a good day.”

You tried to push the door shut again, but his grip tightened. “Please, just give me a minute.”

“You had six months.”

“I know, and I’m sorry. I was— It’s messed up, okay? I’m still working with the feds. I was losing it. Still am, probably. But I need to explain. Please, Maybank, just a minute.”

You hesitated the anger and hurt battling against the small, lingering part of you that still cared.

Finally, you stepped back, letting the door open just enough for him to enter.

“Talk,” you said, your voice icy.

Rafe stepped inside, looking around your small living room as if seeing it for the first time, which you now realized he'd never been in your house.

He turned to face you, his expression earnest. “I didn’t know what to say. I felt—“, He took a deep breath, cheeks puffing, “Ashamed. I don’t know.”

You crossed your arms over your chest, keeping a safe distance between you.

“Ashamed? You’ve done a lot of things to be ashamed of. You can’t just show up after six months and expect everything to be fine.”

“I know,” He admitted, taking a deliberate small step closer to you, “I wasn’t expecting that. I just... I wanted to tell you that I’m trying. I’m in therapy and rehab, trying to get clean. I’ve been going to meetings. It’s been hell, but I’m trying.”

You looked at him, searching for any sign of deceit. His eyes were clear, more focused than you had ever seen them. “Why should I believe you?”

He took a deep breath, visibly struggling to find the right words.

“Because you’re the only person who ever saw anything good in me. And I can’t forget that. I don’t deserve it, but I need you to know that your faith in me wasn’t for nothing.”

The vulnerability in his voice took you by surprise. You had expected anger, arrogance, manipulation—but this was different. Genuine. It felt like you were back in that motel room, in his arms.

You let out a scoff, focusing your gaze on the couch you were just resting on, as you shifted your weight on your feet. “Is that all?”

Rafe's eyes darted to the floor, “No, it’s not all. I just—Shit. I need to make things right. With you. I don’t know how, but I need to try.”

You took a deep breath.

Part of you wanted to believe him, to give him another chance, but the other part of you—the part that had been hurt and abandoned—was screaming not to fall for it again.

“You didn’t even want to talk to me when you woke up.”

He looked up, guilt etched across his features. “I didn’t know how to face you after everything that happened. I was a mess.”

“So you shut me out?” You snapped, “You made me feel like I meant nothing.”

“That’s not true,” He snapped back, head whipping up, then immediately softened his tone, taking another step closer. “That’s not true. You mean more to me than you’ll ever know. I was getting better for you."

“Don’t lie to me.”

Rafe looked offended, eyes zeroing in on your lips before his gaze met yours. That's when you felt it again, “I never lied to you.”

“Cameron.”

Another step closer. His eyes pleading with you to understand. 

You were staring up at him now, the look on your face completely unreadable. You were waiting for an answer, but he had a feeling that no matter what answer he gave, it wouldn't make a difference.

"I never lied to you," He repeated, his voice shaking slightly. "I was scared and confused, but I never lied.”

You felt your anger rising again, every muscle in your body tensing as you tried to keep control. “Scared and confused? That’s your excuse?”

Rafe flinched at your words, but he didn't back down. “I know how it sounds. I handled it all wrong. I’m trying to fix it.”

“You think saying sorry and showing up out of the blue makes it better? It doesn't erase the months of silence.”

His hands reached out, his palms open as if he was dealing with a wounded animal. “I’m not asking for forgiveness right away. I just want a chance to make things right.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” You spat, your voice trembling with emotion, “How it felt, watching you almost die. I spent days wondering if you were going to be—” 

You stopped yourself, knowing that if you continued your voice would crack and the tears would start pouring down your cheeks.

You already cried enough for him. 

Rafe’s expression softened, and he reached out tentatively, his hand stopping inches from your arm. “I’m sorry, baby.”

You took a step back, putting more distance between you, needing the space to think clearly. “I needed you to be sorry six months ago.”

It’s only then, when your brain cleared slightly that you noticed he looked different. His hair had been buzzed, his skin looked tanner than the last time you’d seen him, he looked healthier. 

Rafe noticed your eyes wandering to his head and ran a hand through his short hair, a hint of a self-conscious smile flickering across his lips. “Yeah, I uh, made some changes. Trying to start over, I guess.”

You nodded slightly, not quite trusting yourself to speak. Finally, you broke the silence, your voice steadier now.

“I’m happy for you, but I can’t do this.”

“Pretty—"

You sighed, rubbing your temples as you cut him off, “I feel guilty enough as it is around everyone else.”

“I told Sarah.”

His words hit you like a punch to your gut. 

“What?”

“About us.”

You felt your stomach drop and your vision narrow, the world tilting sideways as the reality of what he just said sank in. “You what?”

“I told her.” 

“You absolute fucking—” You hissed, your voice rising without warning, “Are you serious?!”

“I thought it was the right thing to do,” His tone faltered to one that could’ve fallen on deaf ears if not attentive enough. “I needed someone to talk to, and she’s…my sister.”

“You thought it was the right thing to do?” You were shouting now, unable to contain your anger. “You think spilling everything to Sarah was the right thing to do? Did you ever consider how that might affect me? Or her?”

Rafe flinched, taking a step back. “I didn’t think it would be this bad.”

“Of course you didn’t,” You nearly growled, pacing the small living room. “You never think about anyone but yourself, do you?”

“Listen— “ He opened his mouth undoubtedly to fire back with another half-assed apology - but you barreled forward, letting the months of bottled resentment continue to burst open.

“You’re so selfish.”

“She promised she wouldn’t tell anyone,” His throat bobbed in an audible gulp, “It’s okay.”

“You really believe that?” You stopped pacing and turned to face him, your hands clenched into fists at your sides. “This is too much for her to keep to herself. It’ll eat away at her until she tells someone. And when that happens, my life here is over.”

Rafe looked stricken, his face pale. “I just—I needed someone to understand what I’m going through.”

For the first time, he took the time to explain what was going on in his head instead of letting his frustrations take over and kissing you.

“And what about what I’m going through?” You demanded. “Did you ever stop to think about that? I’ve been trying to move on, to rebuild my life, and you just waltz back in and blow everything up.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “I’m so sorry.”

You spotted his sun-kissed freckles. They wouldn’t be noticeable if you hadn’t looked at him so closely before.

“Sorry doesn’t fix this,” Bitterness began to overpower the pit of your heaving chest, “Sorry doesn’t make it go away. You can’t just undo what you’ve done.”

“I know,” One shaky hand scrubbed over his face, refusing to meet your wide-eyed stare., “But I’ll do whatever it takes to make it right. I swear.”

“Make it right? You can’t make this right, Rafe.”

“I don’t know what else to do,” he said, his voice breaking. “I’m trying, pretty. I really am.”

You felt a smidge of sympathy despite your anger. You could see the pain and desperation in his eyes, the same pain and desperation you had felt for the past six months. But that didn’t change the fact that he left you hanging for so long.

“I need you to leave,” you said finally, your voice cold and distant.

You expected him to put up a fight, to lash out, hide his emotions with empty threats and petty names. But he didn’t.

Instead, he nodded, his shoulders slumping slightly as he turned to leave. You watched him go in silence.

Part of you wanted to run after him, to give him another chance, to believe that he could change. But another part—the part that had been wounded and left to heal on its own—knew that it wasn’t that simple.

You had to protect yourself, even if it meant shutting him out for good.

Rafe paused in the doorway, his back to you. His voice was barely above a whisper, but it carried clearly through the thick air. "I don’t regret it," he repeated, his shoulders tensing as he spoke.

You blinked, taken aback. "What?"

He turned slightly, just enough for you to see the raw honesty in his eyes. "I don’t regret what happened. Between us. I regret how I handled it, how I hurt you, but I don’t regret feeling something real for once."

The words hung in the air, and for a moment, the suffocating heat seemed to dissipate, replaced by a cold clarity. You crossed your arms tighter around yourself, trying to hold onto your anger, your resolve. But his words had hit a nerve, bringing back memories you’d tried so hard to bury.

You looked away, unable to look at him, "It doesn’t change anything."

"I know.”

With that, he turned and walked out the door, the door clicking shut behind him, leaving you standing there. The room felt emptier than it hand in months as you leaned your forehead against the cool wood over the door.

You pushed away from the door, needing something to distract yourself. 

You picked up your book, but the words blurred on the page. You tossed it aside, your thoughts too chaotic to focus. Instead, you paced the small living room, replaying the conversation in your mind.

You eventually collapsed onto the couch, staring blankly at the ceiling. You did the right thing, so why did it hurt so bad? 

You felt like a wound had been reopened, and you hated him for it.

But you hated yourself more for letting him get to you. The hours dragged on, the sun dipping below the horizon and casting long shadows through the windows. You tried to lose yourself in anything—TV, reading, cleaning—but nothing could shake the gnawing feeling of unresolved problems that clung to you.

You only saw Rafe's face, his desperate eyes, his trembling hands.

You remembered the feel of his skin, the sound of his voice when he was vulnerable. The memories were too real, too persistent. You couldn't bring yourself to explain it to yourself. Your eyes begin to itch, warning you to think of something else.

Anything else but Rafe.

Was this heartbreak? No—it couldn't be. 

You weren't in love with Rafe Cameron.

 At least, you didn't think you were.

You had never allowed yourself to consider it, to dwell on what you felt for him. But now, in the stillness of your small living room…it was different. You never had a good parental figure to teach you these things.

All you knew was destruction, violence, and heartbreak. And although you’d done pretty well for yourself, all things considered, this was new to you.

The thought hit you like a tidal wave, overwhelming and inescapable.

You had tried so hard to suppress your feelings, to deny the depth of your connection with him. But this…wasn’t something that could be easily forgotten or ignored. You had been so afraid to admit it, fearing that acknowledging would destroy you. 

You were in love with Rafe Cameron.