#can’t link the tag on mobile for some reason so just look through the tag!!

[ceratonia-siliqua]

Hi! Super weird question to ask, but, I was wondering if you were the person that wrote a fan fic of Bucky/Peter called “Forever.” On Ao3? If so, I always wanted to know what happened to that fic, because it was literally the best of literature I’ve read on Bucky/Peter. It was so good that I would go back to read it again, and I was wondering if you still had that fic, or if something happened to it, I just wanted to know because it still eats me up to this day that I can’t read it no more 😭. Also if this isn’t who I think it is, then I’m sorry please ignore this!

Hi!!! I'm not sure how old this message is but yes, I am the person who wrote Forever. The reason it got deleted was actually not by my choice. The coauthor was found out to be lying about faking a terminal illness and so she deleted her entire account on ao3 and I believe on tumblr as well. Ao3 terminates even coauthored fics if one person decides to remove it so the entire thing was removed and I have just never gotten around to fixing the issue because it was so time consuming and during the aftermath I was still finishing by Bachelor's degree and didn't have time to sort through and make sure I had all the files. Sadly, after checking it looks like all the files were deleted at some point.

But! I do have some good news! Ao3 emailed me some documentation of the original fic so I do have a readable version, it's just not formally posted anymore. I keep telling myself I'll get around to reposting it and so I haven't released the link but I have a feeling I might never get to it so here's the link since I feel bad its been hidden in a backroom for so long.

It is the story in its entirety and pretty much all the original information. Really the biggest hurdle to me posting it on ao3 has been needing to divvy things up into chapters and do all the tagging again.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy! Let me know if the link works. I tested it while logged out to make sure you didn't need to be signed into my throw away account to access the info and it seemed fine but confirmation doesn't hurt.

[padawansuggest]

Hi! I really enjoy your fic ideas and writing, do you have an ao3 where i can find more at, or a tag i can look through? The latest post about the star wars/ trek cross over is really good! I enjoyed the humour of how the characters were confused by each others abilities, its great. and i saw that you also write for stargate, which i also enjoy alot, so its really cool that your making fun and interesting crossovers with them. Hope you have a good day!

This is sorta the nicest way someone has told me they love my ideas. I get the ‘I love your AUs’ comments all the time, and they always make me warm, but I love being told exactly what someone likes about them. So, answer first: I just put a tag on this post that says ‘my fics’ click and follow that, that will show you actual fics that I have posted on AO3. If for some reason you can’t find the link, the username is Bam4Me

Answer the longer; I will warn you, I don’t post a link here to everything that I write so you can still go there and see what you like, but also, I don’t stick just random ideas I’m not working on or actively posting/posted to in that link. So I have a million ideas but if something is there I’m either close to finishing and about to post soon, or already have.

A deeper explanation: this is so sweet of you to say. For my entire life I’ve dealt with disabilities, and in the past six or so months, I have written and posted more than I have in the past four years. What’s changed is that I’m sorta dealing with a lot lately and it’s given me a lot of sitting time. Lol. Frankly it’s been a major help lately (I am, at this moment, trying to shallow breathe through a very painful infection that is fighting tooth and nail to stay in my face it’s so painful I wanna die but this ask cheered me up so much that I’m able to think of something else) and so I’ve thrown myself back into writing, and I have actually been typing up stories that I had/have had ideas for years ago and still love now, as well as random ones that come to my head now.

And I’m actually really excited about that. Like I have been looking through old posts (I only tag my own work or art/meta/ideas that I TRULY don’t want to forget, so what I do is that sometimes you’ll see a blank post with nothing but tags on my blog… yeah that’s me trying to look for a specific post by tag hopping because it’s fastest and most reliable on mobile) and giving new life to AUs years old and adding ideas I didn’t think of when I wrote them. Rarely do I really stray from them.

So. If you truly love an AU I just posted, and you tell what you like most about it, it typically makes the time till I actually get to writing it a lot faster than some.

I just. I just woke up from the nicest nap (because of Benadryl lmao I’m so tired still) because of the WORST swelling (because of that darn infection that I’m hoping these antibiotics take care of soon it’s so painful they had to give me oxy cause I’m allergic to acetaminophen lolllll it hurts so bad I’m rubbing topical nsaids on it and downing ibuprofen and gabapentin it’s so bad) and this ask as well as a few comments I got otherwise, have absolutely made my day. I’m happy; and I love writing and this is very nice. Thank you.

[phoenixcoin]

❂⭃  Sending Memes PSA and Guide ⥷❂

❧ I’ve mentioned it in a couple of places, but as long as we’re mutuals, I am perfectly happy with you sending me any memes at any time. Literally anything that I have ever posted, no matter how old it is, or anything that you happen to come across, even if I haven’t posted it, is completely fair game.

❧ Additionally, you may also post answers to memes as if I had asked them, even if I have not. If you see a meme you’ve posted has a line there that reminds you of me and you think, “man, it would be nice if Aku sent this line in to me”, do not wait! Go ahead and post it as if I had sent in an ask and tag me in it. I will absolutely respond to you.

❧ This all being said, I know that looking through old memes to send in can be a little confusing, so here are some guidelines for approaching that:

If you want to look for memes, please go to my Memes page on my blog. If you’re on mobile and can’t access the Memes page, please visit my Idex post instead and search for the tag “they moved in ranks with a purpose ➻⌠memes⌡”. That should let you access most of my memes (though I’m well aware that not all of them show up on mobile... I don’t know why that is...).

Once you’ve found something you want  to send in, copy the line and send the ask like you would as if I had just posted it. If it’s a meme that I’ve recently posted, that’s all you need to do. I will always default to the most recently posted memes when I get an ask. For that reason, you have to add information if the meme is older.

If you’re sending in an older meme, you can do one of two things. Either send in the title of the meme (e.g. “headcanons based on the 5 love languages:”) or send the link at the bottom of your ask. Whichever method you’re most comfortable with will be good enough for me to respond to. Please also send this information when sending in an ask that I haven’t posted. This way I can make a link to it when I answer you’re ask. I won’t include the link you sent as part of your ask block, so if you’re worried about it, please do not. c:

❧ And that’s it! Simple, right? I’m looking forward to writing with all of you, so if you need any kind of jumping off point and just... aren’t very savvy on plotting (like me), then this is definitely worth a shot! I hope this helps you navigate roleplaying with me better and opens up an outlet for anyone that’s wanted a chance to roleplay and just didn’t know where to start. Happy writing, lovelies~!

[networkscrambled]

❒ Sending Memes PSA and Guide ❒

❒ I’ve mentioned it in a couple of places, but as long as we’re mutuals, I am perfectly happy with you sending me any memes at any time. Literally anything that I have ever posted, no matter how old it is, or anything that you happen to come across, even if I haven’t posted it, is completely fair game.

❒ Additionally, you may also post answers to memes as if I had asked them, even if I have not. If you see a meme you’ve posted has a line there that reminds you of me and you think, “man, it would be nice if Aku sent this line in to me”, do not wait! Go ahead and post it as if I had sent in an ask and tag me in it. I will absolutely respond to you.

❒ This all being said, I know that looking through old memes to send in can be a little confusing, so here are some guidelines for approaching that:

If you want to look for memes, please go to my Memes page on my blog. If you’re on mobile and can’t access the Memes page, please visit my Navigation post instead and search for the tag “❒ what's a meme? ⟿ memes”. That should let you access most of my memes (though I’m well aware that not all of them show up on mobile… I don’t know why that is…).

Once you’ve found something you want  to send in, copy the line and send the ask like you would as if I had just posted it. If it’s a meme that I’ve recently posted, that’s all you need to do. I will always default to the most recently posted memes when I get an ask. For that reason, you have to add information if the meme is older.

If you’re sending in an older meme, you can do one of two things. Either send in the title of the meme (e.g. “headcanons based on the 5 love languages:”) or send the link at the bottom of your ask. Whichever method you’re most comfortable with will be good enough for me to respond to. Please also send this information when sending in an ask that I haven’t posted. This way I can make a link to it when I answer you’re ask. I won’t include the link you sent as part of your ask block, so if you’re worried about it, please do not. c:

❒ And that’s it! Simple, right? I’m looking forward to writing with all of you, so if you need any kind of jumping off point and just… aren’t very savvy on plotting (like me), then this is definitely worth a shot! I hope this helps you navigate roleplaying with me better and opens up an outlet for anyone that’s wanted a chance to roleplay and just didn’t know where to start. Happy writing, lovelies~!

[enchantedbrew]

۞ Sending Memes PSA and Guide ۞

۞ I’ve mentioned it in a couple of places, but as long as we’re mutuals, I am perfectly happy with you sending me any memes at any time. Literally anything that I have ever posted, no matter how old it is, or anything that you happen to come across, even if I haven’t posted it, is completely fair game.

۞ Additionally, you may also post answers to memes as if I had asked them, even if I have not. If you see a meme you’ve posted has a line there that reminds you of me and you think, “man, it would be nice if Kohi sent this line in to me”, do not wait! Go ahead and post it as if I had sent in an ask and tag me in it. I will absolutely respond to you.

۞ This all being said, I know that looking through old memes to send in can be a little confusing, so here are some guidelines for approaching that:

If you want to look for memes, please go to my Memes page on my blog. If you’re on mobile and can’t access the Memes page, please visit my Idex post instead and search for the tag “۞ is this about to be one of those instances of coercion iʹm always hearing about…？ ⌱ memes”. That should let you access most of my memes (though I’m well aware that not all of them show up on mobile... I don’t know why that is...).

Once you’ve found something you want  to send in, copy the line and send the ask like you would as if I had just posted it. If it’s a meme that I’ve recently posted, that’s all you need to do. I will always default to the most recently posted memes when I get an ask. For that reason, you have to add information if the meme is older.

If you’re sending in an older meme, you can do one of two things. Either send in the title of the meme (e.g. “headcanons based on the 5 love languages:”) or send the link at the bottom of your ask. Whichever method you’re most comfortable with will be good enough for me to respond to. Please also send this information when sending in an ask that I haven’t posted. This way I can make a link to it when I answer you’re ask. I won’t include the link you sent as part of your ask block, so if you’re worried about it, please do not. c:

۞ And that’s it! Simple, right? I’m looking forward to writing with all of you, so if you need any kind of jumping off point and just... aren’t very savvy on plotting (like me), then this is definitely worth a shot! I hope this helps you navigate roleplaying with me better and opens up an outlet for anyone that’s wanted a chance to roleplay and just didn’t know where to start. Happy writing, lovelies~!

[strcngergirls]

gonna spend most of the day in bed prob so come send me memes to reply to in the meantime 🥺👉🏻👈🏻

[powdermelonkeg]

I’ve seen a lot of lists for “hey, if you’re here from Twitter, here’s what you need to know,” so here's a bit of my own advice.

You’ll learn the culture 100x faster if you follow a few hundred blogs, reblog from them without tacking on anything, and just read what shows up on your dash. Guidelines are great and all, but having to remember a checklist is hard. So, some simple step-by-step instructions:

Personalize your blog Get some picture besides the default as your icon. Doesn’t matter what it is, maybe a meme or something, it just can’t be a geometric shape with a few dots. Also worth noting, you technically CAN use a selfie for your icon, but people will give you weird looks. We more or less don’t do that here (99.99% of the blogs that do this are porn bots). If you can’t decide on an icon/header, etc, then at least put “New here, haven’t figured out the site yet” or something to that effect in your bio. We block blank blogs here, because they’re usually bots.

Pick a fandom and go on a following spree This is the easiest way to fill up your dashboard. Search whatever fandom you want, find artists in that fandom, and follow them. Rinse and repeat as many times as necessary, and your dashboard will be full of things you enjoy. If you’re like me and are constantly refreshing looking for new content at 4am, you’ll need to follow 1000+ blogs. If you’re more interested in searching things than having your dash bring you content, keep it around 100 to 300.

Reblog things without commentary Tumblr is a VERY different culture to Twitter, and if you’ve been on Twitter a long while, you’ll have habits around how you interact with people. The two generally do NOT mix well. I’m sure you’ve seen by now the posts like “reblogs are good, likes are worthless” or “don’t censor things in your tags” or “don’t tag like Twitter.” Genuinely, the best way to speedrun getting used to this place is to reblog things you like without adding onto them, and learning the culture by reading the posts on your dash. Once you’re confident that you know how we do things here, go ahead and sprinkle in some tag rambles or Tumblr memes, but that adjustment time is going to be different for everybody.

Scroll through your dash No, really. If you’re bored, take a tour through the recent posts of the people you’ve followed. You’ll find good artwork, cool stories, funny moments, and everything in between, but most importantly, you’ll start building those habits we regulars on Tumblr learned awhile ago, like which memes are a genuine response (Apollo’s dodgeball and red for color theory, currently) and how people tag things here.

Curate your dash Everyone’s pretty much been screaming it from the top of their lungs, but there is no algorithm here. The dash you have is the one you make from the people you follow. This means that you’re responsible for the company you keep. If you see a post you dislike, unfollow them. If someone’s going on a fandom spree that annoys you, unfollow. Point of view you don’t agree with? Unfollow. You can block for the same reasons, and block liberally. On top of this, you can filter out terms and tags in your settings. This is a link to it on desktop; scroll down and you’ll see an entire section titled “Content you see.” On mobile, you can find it by clicking the little person icon in the bottom right, then the settings wheel in the corner of your blog. From there it’s “General settings,” then scroll down a bit to “Content you see” and click it.

And that’s the easiest way to cozy up in this place.

If you’re worried about things not to do, everyone will give you a different list, but here are a few universal faux pas:

Sending hate Sending hate in the ask box is, unfortunately, something this site is known for, but doing so here tells everyone that can see it that you’re an obsessed child. If you do it on anon, you look even worse, even if you can technically “get away with it.” A mature Tumblr user doesn’t send hate no matter what; they block the user they dislike and move on. If you get hate, block them. Yes, even if they’re on anon. It blocks their IP address from sending you anything on anon, forcing them to use their real username if they actually want anything to get through.

Negative commentary Things along the lines of “I don’t even like this show, but-” are not compliments. They’re very discouraging to artists, and using them makes you look insensitive at best. If you want to convey “I don’t watch this show, but I like this art,” you can start it with “I don’t even go here, but-” instead. And if you want to criticize—don't. Genuinely, do not. It's the easiest way to get people not to like you here; if you don't have something nice to say about an art piece or fanfic, then just don't interact with it.

Censoring sensitive words The “content you see” feature on this site does its job and it does it well! If I, a Tumblr user, dislike the mention of “cleaning supplies,” I will block it. This means any post that contains “cleaning supplies” will be filtered from my dash. What this also means is that if you write it to get around this—for example, “clean*ng suppl*es,” “clea/ning sup/plies,” “cle@n!ng $uppl!es,” and so on, it will not be filtered, and I will have cleaning supplies on my dash despite my precautions. The only time you'll see someone doing this is if they don't want a specific user or term searched: squ/id-ink-per/sonal won't show up if I search my username, ze/lda won't show up in the "zelda" tag for that audience to see, etc. People on this site do not get terminated/shadowbanned for specific words. The closest we have ever gotten to that was when Apple tried to block sensitive content and made it so things like #girl wouldn’t show up on Apple devices. Which was a bug that was then fixed. Believe it or not, our moderation team is actually human, so if you’re terminated, it’s not because of some search-and-destroy program built into the site.

Now, before I go, here are some quality-of-life things to help you more easily use Tumblr’s features.

Only the first five tags on a post are indexed If I tag something #zelda, #loz, #fave mutuals, #ask bee, #worldbuilding, #you have no idea how long i spent on this, #i’m going to bed now then only the bolded tags are going to show up in the search results. Someone searching #i’m going to bed now won’t find my post, because it’s not in those first five tags.

You can change the color scheme of the site You’ll have to do it once on desktop and once on mobile, because the two platforms have different color schemes. On desktop, click the little person icon in the top right, then “Change Palette.” On mobile, tap the person in the bottom right, then settings wheel, “General settings,” “Color palette.” We have a lot more than dark and light mode!

You can insert links without interrupting your text Find whatever link you want to insert first, then highlight the word you want to turn into that link, press the “insert link” button, and paste it in. On desktop, it looks like a little infinity symbol. On mobile, it’s a little chain link icon. It lets you do cool things like this whenever you want.

Text can be colored! On mobile, it’s really, really easy to color text—just highlight what you want and the colors will pop up automatically. On desktop, it’s trickier to do, but we have a lot more options here: In the corner of your post, there’s a little settings wheel. Click that, then change “Rich Text” to “HTML.” Your page is going to look like weird code. This is normal. I recommend coloring text as the LAST thing you do because of this. Go here, type the text you want to color, and pick your colors out, then copy the HTML code at the bottom. Then go here, paste that in the box, and replace the “;” with nothing (I’m serious, nothing; not a blank space, just leave the “with this” box empty). Copy the semicolon-less code, go to the Tumblr post, and paste it in. It’s that easy! Fun fact, you can also do this in your desktop blog description, if you want; that little box is fully HTML-configurable.

And those are my starting tips! Have fun out there!

[nitewrighter]

I’ve been lurking around your blog trying to find all the Cinderella posts, but it’s been difficult bc I’m on mobile and for some reason I can’t see “common tags” on ANY blog when you click the “search in blog” function, so I don’t even know if the Cinderella story HAS a tag but. I just wanna talk about how much I love it for a second?

Your narration style genuinely feels like YOU are the narrator, and we’re sitting in the lounge or study of a lovely cabin mansion in the woods and I’m a fourteen year old who’s begged a story off of my favorite older cousin, who’s fun and doesn’t give a shit and cares more about the story than the Way they’re telling it. It makes it more fun and casual and I think it harkens more to the way oral fairy tales would’ve been told back when they were more often oral rather than written. And in the same vein you reflect modern times in how you tell it, along with the humour while (as another ask pointed out) retaining the feel and time of the story. It’s actually facinating and makes it SO MUCH fun to read.

And I love the takes you have on the story that make the characters both recognisable but also unique and different enough to be interesting, and also fills in a lot of plot holes people lovingly look over in the og stories. And also how you characterised the fairy godmother is so amazing sjdbdjdbd like she’s normally matronly, motherly, and mature and wise and dignified and this is more like “you’re the “loser” main character in an early 2010’s disney channel movie and you dress in soft colours and you’re sweet and your best friend is the emo/goth loner with a weird sense of humor, ripped shirts and lots of eyeliner whos rly only here for the people and it’s SO FUN. I love the vibe of her. It’s so different

In the vein of fairy tales using children as currency, I would happily give my first born child for you to continue this series, or if you’ve already started doing that, directing me to a tag or master post where I can read more. (I read the intro and the two parts linked on it. Idk If there’s more? Looking is Very Hard on mobile >:| ) thank you so mcu for writing

Oh gosh! This was so flattering to read! I mostly just tag it under Cinderella, I didn't really think to call it something like I had the "Fightin' Daphne AU" a couple years back... "Cool Rat Girl Cindy," maybe?

The Fairy Godmother as the Quirky Alt/Goth Best Friend in a Disney Channel Original movie... oh my god... I can see it.

Honestly what inspired my take on the Fairy Godmother was a Blindboy podcast I heard a couple years back where they had an Irish folklorist on the show, and at one point the folklorist says, "You know, honestly, I feel like leaving gifts for the fairies is like paying protection money to the mafia" and that kind of stuck with me. I'm Irish on my mom's side so I'm very into the concept of "Do Not Under Any Circumstances Fuck With The Good People Under the Hills" so I thought it would be fun to have a fairy godmother who's like, a fairy godmother, but I also like scrappy characters so the concept of a Fairy Godmother who's kind of flying by the seat of her pants was appealing as well. I think like... one of the thing that makes Cinderella a hard tale for people to get through--certainly what makes it a hard tale for me to get through--is how you get so pissed off at how Cinderella is treated, the injustice of it all. Like in a lot of film adaptations, stretching it out often leaves you with like... 75% of the movie being Cinderella being treated like shit. I kind of liked the idea of the Fairy Godmother kind of having all that anger and spite that we, the audience, have on Cinderella's behalf. And there was also this one post about people on the east coast being "Kind but not nice" and I really loved that concept so that went into my Fairy Godmother as well.

[nachoscheesy]

Tumblr Revival

Tl;dr

Tumblr has a large interconnected community of artists and content creators, and should focus on its strengths and what it does right. Instead of trying to compete for space against Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Tumblr should focus on empowering its community and giving that community the tools to develop the site's unparalleled uniqueness.

Tumblr is the crossroads of the internet, with a monthly user traffic of 300 million it is the perfect space for artists, content creators, and small businesses to grow their following without having to fight for a seat at the table against companies with huge budgets.

Hi, I go by Nacho here on tumblr, and I'm sure as many of us on tumblr have noticed, the (hell)site is kinda going downhill. Tumblr was bought by Automattic in fall of 2019, and I am sure they have the best intentions to help tumblr stay afloat. However, I think it's time the community took a more deliberate approach to how tumblr is handled, and hopefully Automattic and @staff will hear us out. I think I have a solid solution to tumblrs money issues, that will help both the site and empower its online communities.

First and foremost, I am not involved with Tumblr or Automattic. I am just a simple blog trying to help out a place that I've been on since 2010, and I would hate to see it die here around 2023.

So, let's get to the root of the problem on tumblr right now. That being money, tumblr is currently costing more money that it produces, as we've seen with its 97% drop in value from 1.1 billion dollar sale to being sold at around 3 million dollars.

So the first thing that must be improved before anything else can be improved on tumblr is how much money they're bringing in a month. I don't think folks on tumblr hate monetization as much as we all collectively say we do, I think the issue is that most advertisers are completely disconnected from the groups they are trying to advertise to on here. Tumblr comprises roughly 65% millennials and 30% gen-z, the two generations that advertisers seem to have the hardest time advertising to for a myriad of reasons. The main one being that they don't fully understand what we want, and sometimes just don't listen to what we are saying.

Lets look at how tumblr makes its money, Tumblr has four main revenue sources,

Ads by sponsored posts

Display ads through video posts

Sponsored Day ads or banner ads

“Premium Themes”

I'll go into depth on all of these and how tumblr could make potential changes to improve their revenue anywhere from three to six months after it implements some or ideally all of these changes.

First tumblr ads and sponsored posts, these changes are going to be contingent on tumblr allowing its users to share, like, and comment on ads much like all other media sites currently allow. Or at least giving advertisers the ability to turn that on or off as a function.

The average tumblr post gets reblogged 14 times, that number increases significantly if the ad is engaging and actually caters to the communities wants and needs. My reasoning for giving users the ability to reblog ads is to increase user engagement while maintaining their current ad vetting process and all of the nonsensical ads that are run on tumblr 90% of the time.

The other reason for allowing tumblr users to share and comment on ads, or have it be an option for advertisers to turn on or off as they'd like, is that the appeal of tumblr is the ability to propagate and obsess over the most niche things (i.e OSHA.)

All the while allowing content that gets shared all over the internet bubble up to the top through the collective hand of the tumblr community. Along with this tumblr has no way for small users to share their own products or services, every single major site has a way for users to advertise their pages or products through the site.

Tumblr is a content machine that creates imagery and memes that get shared all the time across the internet, so the ability to share and curate its own ads is paramount to improving advertising and user engagement on tumblr.

My proposal here is for tumblr to expand its advertising capabilities to all users, while charging a flat rate fee to advertise on tumblr, with additional charges for popular tags or trending tags. Tumblr currently has no self service advertising system much like Facebook does for example. Where facebook charges a daily rate on cost-per-click(CPC) or cost-per-thousand(CPM)

Charging a flat rate fee at a rate of a day, week, month, or quarterly basis with variances in prices based on the lease term and what the advertisers would want to have their ads show up on certain tags. This would open up the doors for small businesses that don't want to advertise on places like facebook, twitter, or google with their complicated CPM and CPC models. Also bringing in more small locally owned businesses with the added value of less competition for ad space on tumblr.

This would also take some of the weight from tumblrs own advertising staff from having to explain a convoluted system to potential advertisers. Creating a simplified model with the the advent of tumblrs own infrastructure able to get a single post to a large variety of users. Where the current ad model uses a “shotgun” method to hit as many people as possible, the tumblr model could encourage advertisers to curate a more personalized and intimate experience that tumblr users would love.

Why not just advertise elsewhere? Tumblr still in fact gets over 300 million views a month as of June 2021 (Statosta), and the added benefit for users to be able to like, share, and interact with ads would allow ads that the community enjoys to be talked about more. Giving advertisers more honest feedback about their ads while increasing their SEO’s.

Also small businesses that can't compete with the vetting processes that are used on other sites, would have a better chance of developing their business and increasing their clientele on tumblr whose core demographics are approximately 60% millennial and 35% gen-z. This core demographic does in fact care about being able to shop at local stores, or even a store across the US that is trying to drum up its own online sales.

These ads could be placed inline on the tumblr dash while moving other sponsored ads to the right of the site on desktop, but making them alternate on mobile between user ads and sponsored ads.

Second, the display ads should be changed to allow tumblr users to share and further interact with ads to generate more user engagement, incentivizing more businesses and companies to build their brand status on tumblr. Tumblr has a good model for creating short diaries or daily vlogs for companies that wish to show off their products on social media. This includes smaller businesses and vlogers that want to post videos or tutorials of themselves on their blog.

Tumblr is a good site for user engagement with a pool of creative potential for anyone wanting to gauge the desire for a particular subject or piece of media, maybe even an upcoming show. Having the ability to share and comment on sponsored ads would also help advertisers by allowing them to get more bang for their buck with a considerable uptick on how users engage with that content.

Third, tumblrs sponsor day ads and banner ads are inexpensive and should be highlighted as a selling point over their competitors. Tumblr 24-hour banner ads are considerably more affordable for businesses when compared to places like twitter with their 200k price point. For the same amount of money on tumblr a business could have their company at the top of the dashboard or app for 8 whole days. Much longer and much better than the competition.

Keeping this price fixed, with a change in the price CPC is still a much more lucrative and attractive selling point than any of the competition on the internet today. I know this might not be exactly what tumblr wants to hear when it is hemorrhaging money right now, but let's look at the cost for these 24 hour daily ads and banner ads. If tumblr hypes up the price point on these ads they could see a significant rise in advertisers considering the lack of competition on tumblr and past success stories of companies who did advertise on tumblr.

At the same time larger advertisers should be encouraged to make engaging ads and blogs on tumblr that will make people want to actually go to their blogs, that then link to an external site or page. Not ads that instantly try to force you to go to some other site, by rewarding or offering special discounts for people who find a special code or something off of the actual blog. Or even for giving the same code to everyone who reblogs a certain post made by the advertiser.

Seems too good to be true? Look at “Asos” back in 2015 when they held a shirt design competition on their tumblr blog. Where they had 900 submissions, four of which were picked, and were sold out of the user generated shirts in 10 hours.

This is not the only case however, but FX ran their own campaign for the show “Man Seeking Woman” where they saw a 2.8% increase in user engagement, 86% increase in their tumblr followers, and they actually saved money through advertising on tumblr.

All this leads me to believe that tumblr actually was and continues to be the best place for brands, small businesses, and artists to develop themselves through genuine user engagement.

Finally, the “premium themes” that are available on tumblr that allow for unparalleled customizations that you hardly find elsewhere on the internet anymore. Tumblrs ability to take a variety of media sources, as well as having an unparalleled level of customization, user interconnectivity, and a vibrant artistic scene shows that it is ripe with potential.

Tumblr could still use its post+ feature, but in the same way that Discord uses its subscription service. For cosmetic changes that can be added modularly to the site or individual blogs for an additional monthly fee. In conjunction with partnering with community artists to bring small cosmetic additions to individual blogs, while paying the content creator and tumblr taking a small portion of the profits over a certain amount.

To be completely honest this is probably the hardest portion of this entire pitch to make changes to in a shorter period of time, considering all the testing and “under the hood” changes that must be made. However, I think that implementing this as well as the other changes I have proposed will bring back more foot traffic to tumblr as well as increase its revenue and profitability.

In closing, I am simply working with whatever information I was able to find online and a good amount of time invested on my part to do this. I think tumblr has a ton of potential still to return as a force for good for the communities that exist and want a change from what the internet has become. Time and time again when any company or public entity dies it was because it did not change and refused to adapt and innovate, oftentimes not at the hands of the people working everyday to keep the site running. Instead at the hands of people who dont see the value in what has fallen in their laps.

If you agree and think this is something that can be done, please reblog this post and follow me for more updates. If I don't hear back or this does not gain any traction by the end of the year, then tumblr can go to its inevitable end. I will be here sinking with the ship.

@support @engineering @music @wip @changes @photomatt

[yamagucji]

some tips for writing blogs, especially those who are just starting out. these are some things that works for me and may or may not work for others.

how to add a read more link on mobile

type :readmore: on a free space, then hit the enter or return button

personally i think they’re very helpful because it lessens the space you take up in your dash, and might encourage more people to rb

+ you can also add this on a spot where it gives a sort of cliffhanger, essentially making people want to ‘read more’

headers, banners, and dividers

though not necessary, it’s good to have a title for your work. make sure it’s bold and doesn’t blend in with your notes (aka pairing, warnings, etc.). this also helps when someone wants to look up one of your works in your search bar

i don’t really make banners or covers for my works. but some good apps that i know of would be picsart and canva. if you’re looking for ideas, i definitely recommend going into canva

wondering how to make those really small, thin dividers? you can make them using picsart! to make a divider hit tools > free crop > brush > size (adjust it to your preference > then draw a line along the edge of your photo > save

using the divider you just saved, go back to picsart and edit it again > draw option > hit rainbow square at the bottom left corner > hit suction/droplet symbol right below the check mark > color in the white spots bc for some reason picsart glitches and makes dividers look white-ish

new blog? just opened an account?

this is gonna sound really frustrating. but... tumblr needs to check if you’re a bot or not. what does this mean? it’s likely that your first few posts won’t show up on the search bar. you may not even get to edit your header/pfp yet ://

this happened to me and there was no visibility on my account at ALL. what helped me get ‘verified’ is that i followed a LOT of accounts, liked a bunch of posts, made some posts here and there. now that lets tumblr know you’re not a bot

visibility

the tumblr tagging system usually only allows the first 5 tags in your post to show up. so, what can do you about this? only use FIVE or less tags in your post. wait about 15 minutes or more until you can add some more tags in your post, and they usually all show up like that

another important thing about using tags is not to generalize! especially if you’re using a popular tag. but also don’t specify it too much where barely anyone looks it up. for example, if you’re writing a gn piece about oikawa, i recommend you use the tags such as: oikawa x reader, haikyuu x reader, oikawa x gn!reader, haikyuu headcanons, etc

a good rule of thumb is to use character x reader tags first, then leave the full name or fandom tag last

FOR NSFW: tumblr doesn’t let any tags with nsfw show up. so, give your nsfw works another tag. maybe #namegetspicy idk, you figure it out

FOR WARNINGS: especially if you’re a dark content creator, i highly encourage you to add tw:xyz tags. if you already have a warning note at the top then that’s great. but even better for readers who prefer to actually block these tags that way they never get to see it

another important thing to note is that people have different timezones. it helps if you rb your work at a different time of the day, in case people missed it! (icymi) i’ve noticed that reblogging helps to make your post show up in the tags

interaction + feedback

first and foremost, you are not obligated to write for your followers, and neither are your followers obligated to interact with you. remember that everyone has their own individual lives, and they have their own things to do— so do you, too.

make friends! become mutuals with other writers, visit their ask box. i know it can be daunting having to initiate these things, but you might just turn out to have fun! you can’t expect people to interact with you if you’re not interacting (back). it’s... kind of a two way thing yk? no need to be afraid to interact with other writers. oh, and rb other writers works!

pspsps join tag games or do ask games. it’s fun and very interactive

it never hurts to ask for feedback. i usually do this in a more subtle way because i don’t really expect a full on analysis on my works. maybe a little, is this okay? or feedback appreciated. sometimes it takes a little bit of coaxing for the silent readers

formatting your posts and blog

i generally put in the title at the top in big, bold letters

then comes the header/divider. helps to make the post more... visually appealing ig?

it’s important to add warnings (if any) and the pairing. the audience is not all female, and it might be a little frustrating for male readers having to find out its an x fem reader piece like halfway through your fic

if you have multiple works posted, it’s really really helpful to have a navigation page!

you can organize the posts you make with tags! for example, if you’re shitposting, you can use a specific tag for that. if you have a nsfw related post (ESPECIALLY when your blog is open to the general audience) please make a tag for it

themes + colors

if you have a color in mind but don’t know which direction to go from there, i recommend looking up color + aesthetic

looking to use the same color? download a name color app that’ll give you a hex code for any color you want to use. then, you can type in that hex code for when you’re choosing a color for your tumblr bio

wondering how to make your header image small like mine? just choose a photo for your header and turn off the stretch image option

want to use a different text color that tumblr doesn’t offer? it’s not as complicated as you think. you’ll have to go on a desktop to do this and do some html (but trust me, it’s not very difficult). look up “HTML noob but trying my best - how to use colored text on desktop”

^^ i don’t have the link for the color text tutorial so you can try looking it up

how to make an aesthetic navi and masterlist

step 1: decide a theme! if you’re stuck, think about a character + color/season/mood or look up “[insert] aesthetic” to find some inspiration. or you can try looking at other blogs too

step 2: find a color scheme! it’s easier if you choose fewer colors. if you want to use the same color for both divider and text, download a color name app in order to get the hex code of that color.

step 3: add categories to your navi! most navigation pages include a link to masterlist, about/byi, and rules. your navi should have a title that indicates that it’s... a navigation page. you can add thin colored dividers with the same color to make it easier for followers to navigate

step 4: you can choose to create a ‘cover’ or a picture for your navigation and masterlist! again, i recommend you use the canva app as a starting point

extra: search up emoticon symbols to spice up your titles!

reminder for you as a writer

you’re not obligated to do any of these things. i’ve noticed that we tend to build pressure on ourselves when it comes to content and interaction. remember, this !! is !! for !! fun !! when you realize that it’s no longer fun, then know that it’s time to take a break. and there’s nothing wrong with a bit of self care.

^^ c/p from this post lol

at the end of the day, follower count and interaction doesn’t define you. again for the love of beings, you’re here on your own accord.

will be adding more if needed/asked.

[acesydneysage]

Random headcanons, lightning round

I already had this post in my drafts. My answer to @biwonderland98 on the VA ask game is getting long, and tumblr mobile will only allow me to copy this one paragraph at a time. So I'm posting it as the answer the headcanons question, then I'll link it when I finish the ask. Am I gonna post on the tags every night this week? Maybe. Ask games are just so much fun, and getting work done is not.

Sydney and Adrian have a little herb garden for his cooking and her spells

Adrian organizes his books by color and it drives Sydney up the wall

Adrian bought remote controlled toy cars "for Declan", even though he was still way too young to use them. Sydney and Adrian race each other, and Eddie. Sydney gets adorably gleeful

I have zero reason to believe Trey speaks Spanish other than the last name Juarez, but I decided that he thinks Sydney is teaching Declan formal, gringo Spanish, and starts teaching him slang. It gets to a point where Sydney can barely understand him and has to play catch up

Adrian takes Sydney to the school where he teaches so she can do science experiments for his students, and they absolutely love it

Daniella is an incredibly doting grandma who spoils Declan silly. Declan is basically an example of communal child rearing so his parents still get the freedom to be young

Sydney and Eddie still claim to be twins, to justify why he lives with them. And because they are, they're twins, no one has ever been more twins than these two

Jared Sage and Nathan Ivashkov are utterly miserable, because their children's marriage humiliated them in their social circles, and they try desperately and fruitlessly to recover their status. Their dhampir grandchildren get very notorious, they take after their parents, so Jared and Nathan can never live it down. Some young Alchemist who used to suck up to Jared rises above him in rank, and he calls him Jeremy when he wants to be a dick. It gets even worse when Zoey leaves the Alchemists.

Sydney's mom (Deborah?) and Carly are a bit shocked by their relationship, but they still love Sydney very much and come to love Adrian. They absolutely cherish Declan.

Duncan and Chantal are very happy. I will be forever grateful that he was the first one to show Sydney kindness in so long, and she went through so much. They're in a queerplatonic relationship and live peacefully in a ranch somewhere, where they're healing. Chantal is a witch, that's why she was down in the punishment/torture level of re-education with Sydney. When the Alchemist revolution happens she gets to at least slap Sheridan.

Sydney used to get into trouble as a kid for asking too many questions, so she had to learn to suppress that and be more sneaky about her curiosity

Angeline eventually becomes an ambassador for the Keepers. I think for Angeline to become diplomatic it would require a lot of character development so that would be fascinating.

Declan and Eddie have matching raptorbot pajamas. I'm very attached to that headcanon and added that to my fic before it occured to me that a movie called Raptorbot Rampage is probably not age appropriate. It's alredy published, so I decided that there's a really cheaply made obnoxious Raptorbot animation that Declan loves. Even Eddie can't stand to watch it on repeat anymore but he won't admit it because if he does Sydney wins. It's a long term investment in turning Declan into his bad action movie buddy and torturing the whole family when it's their turn to pick a movie.

Also, I just decided this very second that Jill was the one who made their pajamas, since Raptorbot isn't that popular. Sewing is how she unwinds from her political duties.

Jill and Christian share A Look every time some big shot royal says something really stupid or heinous in a meeting. Jill advocates fiercely for his magical self defense program and attends classes herself when she can

[kageyuji]

there’s a lot of wattpad writers that i’ve noticed are coming to tumblr recently. due to that, here is a detailed list of things i’d like those people to know (because i’ve already seen all of these in the past few days </3)

here is a helpful thing about tagging triggers, please use it. also put content/trigger warnings at the top of your fics, especially if you don’t put that trigger in the tags.

(here is a list of common triggers, you don’t have to spend hours studying it but look it over at the least)

here is a carrd about tone indicators + why you should use them

put readmores if your post is long, i’m tired of scrolling through 12k word fics on my dash

there’s an option to put a readmore if you’re on desktop, but if you’re on mobile just type “:readmore:” on a line by itself and hit enter/return

plagiarism/reposting/tracing art is not okay in the slightest, you’ll get found out eventually and the only thing it does is cause the original creator stress (and you can see the time something was posted, so there’s no lying)

along with plagiarism is taking someone else’s idea without permission. if you see an idea you like and you want to do it, dm the writer and ask if you can

if you get permission you should also give credit for the idea to the author at the top of the fic/in an author’s note

there is also the issue with silent readers, which i could probably make another entire post about, but i’ll try to make this short:

people on wattpad are usually good about commenting on fics, we love that, bless you. however there is also the fact that wattpad shows how many people viewed and favorited a work

tumblr is completely different. a like is the least you can do, but reblogging is the only way a post actually gets shared. not wanting to clog up your follower’s dashes is an easy fix: set up a queue or schedule the reblogged posts

(reblogging isn’t reposting in any way, reposting is claiming something as your own and reblogging is saying “hi i like this and i want to show my friends! the creator is also really cool, look at them <3”)

and then there is the problem with people not reading blog rules or the writer’s about, they are there for a reason

i have my pronouns in my desc and i still get misgendered a lot, so please read “about the author”s as well. most of them aren’t even that long, 10 seconds is worth not accidentally upsetting your favorite writer

another big thing is age restrictions. there are so many 18+ or 16+ blogs that have people younger than that following/interacting with them and their posts

it’s uncomfortable for them if they find out you’re a minor + most of them will block or soft block you if you don’t have your age somewhere on your blog

and don’t write/reblog smut if you’re a literal fkn child. just don’t.

i wasn’t into anime whenever i was on wattpad but i just know there is cultural appropriation, please educate yourself

remember to be inclusive if you write x readers

when poc blush their skin doesn’t turn red, you can’t run your hand smoothly through their hair, not everyone is shorter than the character, so on and so on

also put whether or not the reader is fem, gn, or masc. and make sure you stick to that through the fic, i’ve read several fics where the “gender neutral” reader is called princess or something similar

TW: mentions of self-harm, mental illness, and unhealthy/ab*sive relationships (see? a tw is really simple)

i don’t know why but for some reason a lot of people from wattpad normalize and romanticize unhealthy things

i can’t tell you how many times i’ve come across fics that romanticize abuse (including where the abuser it the reader ~_~)

also uhm. i’ve not seen it on tumblr yet but whenever i was on wattpad there were a lot of fics that normalized things like self-harm to the point that being abused and having a mental illness was a quirky personality trait. spoiler: that is wrong on many different levels

some people don’t know what abuse is or isn’t i’m assuming, so here is a link to educate yourself on it

and please remember there is more than one type, i’ve seen a lot of psychological abuse being normalized and physical abuse being romanticized, but the thing is i don’t even think the writers know that

[meichenxi]

Hey, could I ask you how you do shadowing? Like the different ways you do it? You mentioned in your tag that shadowing is good and I'd love to hear how you do it! I do not attempt shadowing much so I don't really know what helps, etc. ToT (my studyblr is rigelmejo)

Hellooo! Thank you for the interesting question!

Tbh I think I do it fairly basically - I don’t use any particularly fancy software, but software like Language Learning with Netflix has certainly made it easier. There’s a whole video on how to get the most of it here: [on mobile, link didn't work - How to study Chinese with Netflix! by Chinese Zero To Hero] (I’d recommend checking out all of their videos actually, they’ve done a bunch of livestreams recently and they place a lot of emphasis on shadowing + the course they are trying to sell you is…actually phenomenally good)

(Also, I have to preface this by saying that I have been very lucky in terms of pronunciation: I learnt about 80% of my current vocabulary by ear without characters or pinyin. I have been in China for eight months in total, and while I didn’t speak Chinese for all of that, I was constantly soaking in info on natural sentence intonation. I still often don’t know officially what the tone of a vocabulary item is, especially if it changes tone like 教, 为 or 相, but I don’t get yelled at so I have definitely internalised a lot of those changes. I definitely would have more trouble with this if I hadn’t had that experience - my other areas are waaaay weaker because of this though- my reading SUCKS lmao and I can literally handwrite about ten characters)

Anyway. How I shadow:

1) Quite simply by playing the line, and repeating it with all the emotion it has!! I usually use Netflix or Viki for this. I try to do it as fast as possible, and if I can’t do the whole thing, I ‘chunk’ it: if I were doing the sentence 我们还不知道他会不会来, I would start from the end with 他会不会来, then 不知道他会不会来, and then the whole sentence. Notice that this isn’t breaking it down into words or even grammatical phrases, but intonational phrases: it would be perfectly sensible to just do 会不会来 without the 他 but realistically, since this is a question, it’s likely that a strong stress will be placed on the first 会, and you wouldn’t be able to replicate that without also included the more weakly stressed syllable before.

2) I locate (intentionally or subconsciously) the main locus of stress within the sentence, and I focus on that accordingly. Tones may become less extreme if they are not stressed, and may become more exaggerated if stressed. This is always a good exercise. I accompany this with physical actions - I throw my hands down, I sigh, I groan!

3) I put away the text, and don’t look at the tones or even my computer screen - more on this below.

4) Finally, when I think I’ve got it reasonably accurate, I’ll record them speaking the line into my phone with an appropriate pause for copying and play it back to myself at various points throughout the day.

5) I then go and find other words with the same tone contour to slot in, and copy it again. After that, I find words that are slightly different tonally and pop them in too.

6) I finally do fun things like hold a conversation with myself. This can be really simple phrases imbued with some kind of emotion - 这个女子到底是谁呀？为什么不认识我？应该是新手吧。You can do this either really informally, or very formally, or both - trying to speak in the latter way is very fun! So then it’d be idk something more like: 那位姑娘是何人，来自何处？This is fun because you can really slow down your speech and sound as elegant as you like!! (this will sound stilted if you do it for modern speech, but it’s a very fun exercise)

Choosing your media!!

1) Don’t use donghuas. Seriously. The voice actors usually speak at a ridiculous pace and not with the same range of ‘normal’ intonation

2) Your Chinese is definitely good enough to recognise when anyone is quoting poetry or speaking in a paricularly sexy literary way so, uh…don’t do that. That rules dramas like Nirvana in Fire OUT.

3) Modern dramas and reality TV shows CAN be great, but they can also be quite intimidatingly quick and almost too mushy at times. I’d recommend informal speech in guzhuang dramas more, because they have professional voice actors and extensive sound editing, meaning that although it might be fast and the vocabulary harder, it’s actually much more accessible and easier to copy. You don’t want to be stuck with the awfulness of 50% failed foreigner and 50% 12 year old boy who can’t enunciate properly!!

4) CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON WISELY. I try to find characters that speak in a dramatic, whiny or childish way. This is so important! There’s literally no use copying Lan Wangji unless you want to be able to have that particular cadence and tone of voice you get reciting poetry. Childish/whiny/dramatic characters on the other hand stress some words very strongly, and rush others together - this is great for hearing what actual real speech sounds like. Whininess wins. In The Untamed, characters like Wei Wuxian (not yllz!wwx but just…regular wwx), 一问三不知 Nie Huaisang, Jin Ling, and Jingyi are all great. Also Jiggy, who is just very extra constantly and speaks much slower as well, which really helps. In SHL characters like Gu Xiang are good.

5) CHOOSE YOUR VOICE WISELY! If you are really aiming to copy them 100% (which you should try at least sometimes), you want somebody with your pitch range to sound normal. I have a sort of party trick in Chinese that because I’ve spent so much time listening to women in guzhuang dramas I can change my voice and sound like a) a scheming concubine with honeyed words, or b) the voice of the Beijing metro. My teacher found it hysterically funny. But it’s not my natural voice, and if I speak like that for too long it hurts. The women usually are too high for me, and the big burly manly men too low - so I’d recommend finding a man with a higher voice, or an older woman (like some of the female characters in Nirvana in Fire). Again, sorry that this is mostly the Untamed (I’m just most familiar with it) but the voice actors for Wei Wuxian and some of the juniors (+jiggy) has a higher voice. Likewise Chengling in Word of Honour.

On intonation in general:

- The thing is that whilst shadowing is useful it requires prior ability in a whole bunch of other skills that you can train - it relies on your ability to accurately mimic pitch, emotion and other contrasts. Training this in ANY language, including your native one, will help your ability to do this in Chinese - so I’d recommend spending a fair amount of time practicing shadowing (or speaking just after somebody whilst listening to a string of text, like monolingual simultaneous interpreting) in your native language too. Any training copying accents or mimicking other people is going to similarly help, regardless of the language.

So, with that in mind, further tips:

1) Hum / try to copy the intonation without any words. What this does is force you to pay attention to what the intonation actually is, versus what you may think it should be.

2) Don’t look at the text! Do! Not! Look! At! The! Text! If you look at the characters or pinyin you’re telling yourself ‘ok this is a third tone here’ etc, but you want to override the part of your brain that has gotten into bad habits and is supremely self-confident in how you’re pronouncing the third tone, and actually just go straight back to mimicking.

3) Don’t be afraid to do it with vocabulary that is way beyond your level. Actually, I find this can sometimes be helpful, because you don’t have a prior idea about how a particular tone pair should be useful - and you don’t know which tone you should be producing.

4) Learn vocabulary by ear - listen to a vocab podcast or even make one yourself (I often do this; I record my daily Anki and listen back to it through headphones copying throughout the day - if you’re not confident in your pronunciation you can get Google Translate to do it). Similarly, pick unknown vocabulary out of a longer segment and remember it, trying to internalise the tones instead of figuring out which tone it is.

5) Find emotional sentences, and copy them with emotion. This is SO CRUCIAL!!! We remember things when we relate to them, and when we imbue them with emotion - and it also helps in hearing exactly how an angry second tone sounds, for instance.

6) When you’re copying, look up, and imagine you are having an actual conversation. Carry yourself with conviction and poise!! Really try to whine like wwx or slime like jgy. After a couple of turns copying them, try to turn off the audio and keep delivering it in the same manner.

7) Swap individual words out. Once you have a line properly figured out, swap a word or two that has a different tone pair, and focus on delivering it with the same pattern of stress.

8) Finally, practice doing this in your native language too!! It’s a skill that we don’t use often, and it can be trained. Some people are terrible at it at first go even in their native language, but you can work on it!

About intonation in general:

1) I think a lot of pronunciation problems with people sounding unnatural or stiff ultimately come down to a fundamental misunderstanding of what intonation looks like across different languages. In English we mark it by pitch: and we are so used to the rhetoric that Chinese has ‘tone’ and not ‘intonation’ that we try and focus on blindly copying every single word textbook perfect without listening to how it actually sounds.

2) Chinese does have intonation!!! Except that, unlike English, when you stress a word, the pitch doesn’t change, but the tone contour is exaggerated - basically the only time you will ever hear a full third tone is in isolated or very exaggerated speech. If you have a Chinese friend, get them to record a sentence like the English ‘I didn’t ask her to steal his rucksack’, and put stress on the different elements of it - I didn’t ask, I didn’t ask, I didn’t ask, and so on. Notice and copy how the tones change. When shadowing, you should always be paying attention to where the stress is in the sentence: when you speak by yourself, practicing saying a sentence neutrally, and then with stress on one component, the next, and so on. If it feels unnatural, it’s because you might not have practicised like this before - it’ll get better!

Hope that’s somewhat helpful / interesting!

- 梅晨曦

[chaos-caffeinated]

Emotions can help you remember Part 3 (Sebastian Michaelis x reader)

 Okay this is it, those words say everything you need to know, enjoy!

update: Oct/06/2020: To compensate for the part, I completed the story. 

Like I said -did I even say it?- I am an overachiever...and a sucker for plot

Not requested (Tagging @naniky​)

NSFW/T - 18+

Smut, lemon

One more thing: Do not forget I am not the only author, my brother and I share this blog for the sole reason of creating content together as well as maintaining an easy access to our stories. Just look under #caffeine for more stories from him, the media he does, previous works, requests/commissions/, and what he is willing to write and not write. 

Okay, NOW onto the story: Enjoy!

I wrote this part incredibly long that I just had to make another part, which will be uploaded in the next hour (October 31, 1pm). If you would like to be reminded, just click on the button on the top right corner (if mobile) and select “get notified”.

“Though it’s good, it’s not fluent enough. Again.” Sebastian ordered, his facial expression was laced with the strictness of his voice. His eyebrows were knitted behind his delicate oval glasses that were chained for easy access. He held a short whip that caught your attention each time he smack it onto his hand, sometimes wondering to ask him if it hurt to whip himself. 

Flinching from the sound, you involuntarily let out a whimper before gazing at the text before you, “Ce soir, je serai donné à l’obscurité, je n’ai que moi-même au prince des ténèbres. Oh Crow permettent à mon corps d’aider dans votre plaisir que votre vie s’est propagée avec la douleur que l’humanité comme elle l’a-a...a...^1” You felt burned out, your voice no longer being able to read off the text that Sebastian had you reading, emphasizing the importance of pronunciations. 

Sebastian, on the other hand, was enjoying the moment you were casting yourself off to him, simply smiling behind his façade of strict teacher. Once you finished your speech you would his for the night, but he flinched when you stuttered towards the end, his attention towards you made him realized you looked tired, “Sebastian...I’m sorry, but I...I am so tired...French is not my strength, I am so sorry.” You gazed downwards, too ashamed to even look at him in the eye. You felt the constraining corset shift underneath as you crossed your arms, disappointed at yourself.

Before he could sigh subtly, his brain had racked up the idea to try something. He smirked widely, his eyes glinting the mischief with the intertwined lust. 

“It is unfortunate, Miss. (L/N), but you have four days before the ball, and I’m sure you want Miss. Hopkins to be delighted upon your return without a language barrier, right?...”

“...Y-yes.” You confirmed, saddening at the fact that you may potentially be upsetting her. 

“Well then, I hope you realize I have a couple tricks under my sleeve, however, some may deem it as unorthodox because of its-” he used the thin stick in his hand to whip the desk, his free hand placed on the mahogany desk leaning over slightly, hovering over your body. Your head whipped upwards where you immediately came face to face with the handsome butler/tutor, to which your cheeks were tinted with a slight pink hue from the closeness between you. 

“Physicality.” He finished with a smirk, “Of course I need your permission, but time waits for no one my lady.” He adds as he rose the tip of baton from in-between your collarbones up to your chin with a light tap. You subconsciously tipped your head back lightly in response to the baton to which he responded with a subtle smirk. When you heard his sultry voice, you almost swore to hearing a purr at the end. 

Entranced by his proximity, you gulped subtly and let out your respond:

“Yes....Sebastian.”

“Then we shall start immediately.” And he closed in by pressing his lips against your lips, one second secure and passion, the next dominant and rough. You let out a soft meek as you were trying to push against him, but he was strong. You sensed he wanted more, hence why he was rough enough to lean you back. 

He removed himself, smirking and revealing the fang as he lick his lips lightly, “I hope you are ready, Miss. (L/N), for I am not lenient.” And he stood up, “Stand.” He commanded, raising the baton to visually represent his command as you obeyed. 

You watched as he made his way behind the desk, but you looked ahead as you were afraid of anything sudden.

He made his way to where you sat and the chair scraped along the floor. 

“Sit.” He ordered, and you sat down to an unfamiliar seat when you realized the firmness and slight shift underneath. You blushed as you realized you sat on his lap.

You trembled softly as you felt as he placed his hands on your hips as he adjusted both of you, “You will read and translate the words I point, if you fail, I will punish you accordingly. Ready?”

You nodded, “Yes, S-Sebastian.”

With a smug look, he pointed at a word of ease to get you comfortable. This went on for a couple dozens of words before he began to challenge you: adding feathery touches to your back, causing you to flinch. 

“And this one?...” He leant by your ear, his voice having a slight rasp as he ushered.

While his gloved finger lightly traced your back, your body shivering from the touch, your voice faltered from it, “Uhm...eh...p-plaisir^2...”

“A stutter, Miss. (L/N)? When the ball is in session, I’m sure you’ll have someone like this as well. You can’t be distracted with this simple touch.” He took his forefinger and traced down your spine, making your cheeks blush again from the vulnerability. 

“...S-so what’s my punishment, then?...” 

“You want to be punished? Hm~...I’ll speak two paragraphs in French and you’ll translate them.”

Groaning as you had trouble listening and understanding, you took a deep breath and sighed, “Fine...”

“Good. Now...Dès que je t’ai posé les yeux, j’ai étré enchanté par ta beauté. J’avais espéré que vous travaillions pour Mlle Hopkins, et vous avez fait votre preuves devant elle ainsi que le jeune maître; talentueux et belle, je te voulais. Je vous ai dans mes mains, votre cœur bat vite, votre corps est à la chasse d’eau- Je sais que vous me voulez tout aussi bien, et à tout moment vous vacillez dans vos leçons Français, je vais m’assurer que vous souvenez de mes mains, mon corps, ma voix. Vous ne m’oublierez jamais aussi bien que la belle langue de Français.^3“

You couldn’t concentrate while he was caressing your back. Images flashed in your mind and you were shy to even have them possessed into your brain. You were fantasizing about being fondled, his hands caressing in other places, to have your own hands running through his raven locks. You wanted it all. However, when he spoke you understood some wording, his distinct pronunciation brought the sense of familiarity which gave you the confidence to translate his message, making you blush in the process as you processed the message. 

The more you spoke, the more Sebastian grew with anticipation. As you finished, he had held your hip, without moving his digits and whispered into his ears, “Good, now for a reward. (Y/N). Tell me, are you in any way against of my teachings?”

“...N-no...” you shyly confessed, “Please...keep it going...I do believe it’s helping me.”

His smirk widen, enough to reveal the fangs, “Good.” He whispered, “Then from now on...nous parlons dans Français ^4.”

(From this point on, it will all be english, I promise. I just thought this was fun)

~

You let out a gasp when he rose his hands, groping your breasts as his lips grazed on the back of your shoulders; he let out whispers you were able to catch, only to respond with the same whispered voice. Each word he spoke out you would be given a kiss from his soft, yet rough lips onto your warm flesh. His hands lingered over your breasts, his fingers rubbing your clothed-areolas triggering them to harden. 

“Tell me how are you feeling, (Y/N). Describe it.” He pulled back his hands as he teasingly, irritatingly, slowly removed your dress to expose your soft skin to his greedy mouth and hands. He removed his gloves to expose his black nails and the Faustian contract that linked his current master and him as property as he was currently ready to devour a mortal body in front of him, “Tell me, (Y/N)...what do you want me to do to you?”

“I...I feel like...my skin is on fire, like I want more just to get rid of it, but...but I like it...I like the feeling of your hands on me...I never want it to stop... I know I want more, I want to feel you everywhere...” You let out shaky breaths as you tried to muffled your moans in, your chest heaving as you gazed down to see his right hand placed on your abdomen area and you gently grabbed it, leading it back to your breast. His touch alone was driving you wild, craving for more as you tried so hard to hold back; believing that you were strong only to fall back.  

Sebastian hummed in response, "Then so be it." Where his hands were located, he easily held you down while bucking his hips, earning a few mewls from you, and your head lulling back as your chest arched forward. You hated how your body betrayed your logical side, falling into the temptation that you thought you had handled, but it was only destroyed from his presence, from his words, from his eyes. 

He bunched up the skirt so your clothed womanhood would be pressed against his clothed bulge, your moaning raised slightly to place your hands on the top of the desk, immediately interrupting the craze. You were panting, you were blushing, you were craving for more of his hot touches that got your body to get tingles, “...It is overwhelming...how is it that your so good to get me so desperate like this?...You are like the devil everyone warns to stay away from...” You attempted to take control of your body again, but you felt something pressed against you as you not only felt a hand on your hip, but another placed in front by your hand. 

Sebastian was even more entranced, while you felt he was responsible for your craze, he blamed you for his craze towards you. Other people would feel guilt while in the bliss of pleasure, others feel a sense of betrayal for their partners, others feel used when the Head Butler of Phantomhive seemed to be intriguing enough to have his attention, but when there isn’t a direct order from Ciel to gather information, to get them to cooperate, he feels a sense of ferality since his interest is purely internal. His plans were to make you his; you can be feisty, you can be yourself, he was most amazed that a simple being such as yourself can manage to stir a demon with their core motivations. He just wanted you, but there were instances where he believed he was doing this because he was to be yours, and that did not sit well with him, which is why he would do everything to get you to submit to him first.

When Sebastian stood up, the chair sliding back, he pressed against you, "Are you scared of me?" He whispered into your ear, "Because I can assure you that even the devil can open your eyes to reality...” He taunts as he raised his hand to caress your exposed arm with his fingertips then grazing them with his black nails before placing on top of yours, interlacing with your fingers.

You whined desperately, turning your head slightly to glance at Sebastian who was smirking. Once again your flesh burned with passion as you feel him start discard your undergarments, the idea that you two were getting closer and closer to bond was filling you up with anticipation, with more shivers down your back. What surprised you was to see each piece of your dress in front of you as he asked you what they were called: he wanted you to continue to learn despite the situation you two were in.  

"What is this?" He asks as he takes off each material. You grunted as he was testing your French by having you name every single material. Each time he removed something he would ask you and it was getting annoying. It was torture, hell, trying so hard not rip anything apart to get closer to become one.

After what felt like an eternity of hell of torture, you were naked in front of him. You realized how vulnerable you were in the position, offering yourself to the Head Butler of the Phantomhives and that made you cower slightly. Trembling, you tried to close up when you felt two soft hands placed on your back.

"Such a magnificent body you have, it's no wonder why everybody else wants you. Beauty like this deserves to be shown off...,but at this moment, and moments like these...you are mine alone." He whispered to you only, his ushered tone had a growl towards the end, like a predator growling in victory towards its prey. His fingers trailed up your back to the nape of your neck and held it in place as the other groped your breast.

You wondered when he had the opportunity to unbuckle his pants, but you shivered once you felt the head of his cock rubbing against your clit, a wanton moan releasing as your body pressed against him almost out of instinct.

"Mmm, desperate for more?~" Sebastian teased as he smirked devilishly, holding you in place as he rejected to further your pleasure.

"Please....please, Sebastian." You begged, tearing up, "Please..." you panted as you swayed your hips in an attempt to tempt him further.

Sebastian smirked and remained like that only to hear and see you move less and less. You tried waiting patiently, tried, but you simply closed your eyes and imagined the scenarios that made you blush. As you imagine him, your thoughts were quickly interrupted as he guided you to bend over the desk as he held your hips, "Distracted yet again, Miss. (L/N), my my. You are one persistent student, aren't you?" He snapped his hips towards, his cock rubbing against your entrance which startled you, "Patience 'will get you anywhere and everywhere', my dear." He reminds you before he proceeded to enter.

As you stiffened from the pressure of his member stretching you, you let out a strained moan as your hands gripped the edge of the table. Even Sebastian groaned subtly as you tightened around him and he calmly rubbed your back in a soft manner, "...W-was...Was this your first time?" He caught his breath as he eased the thrusting by removing himself until the hilt.

You involuntarily let out a breathy moan as he returned, thrusting in a steady pace. Each thrust felt more good and pleasurable than the last before you your hips pressed back against him. You even arched your back as you press back to feel his hips slap against you. The pace was increasing ever slightly, his breaths were audible as he let out breathy moans with your vocal ones. He had an immense grip on your hips that bruises were going to appear, but you didn’t mind. You would have to deal with that in the near future, at the moment you getting taken care of very good by the butler. 

Sebastian let out a soft chuckle as he removed himself and proceeded to sit on the chair. You gasped and whined from frustration when you looked over your shoulder to see him sitting, his erection was resting against abdomen; the image alone was an unholy sight, for he had achieved his core motivation. 

The way his hand rolled over to curl his finger into a “come hither” motion made you and your body responded by flowing with his hand. You turned around and watched as he accommodated his sitting position for you to sit on him once again. Facing forward, you rested your knees beside his thighs and remained uplifted as you stared into his enchanting crimson red eyes. His smirk widen -his bloody smirk- as he leaned forward to nip at your flesh. His arms entangled you in an embrace, but he held you down; he had successfully trapped you fully, he had you, not the other way around he thought you intended. 

You took a deep breath as you felt him once more, but this time it felt different. The way he held you, the way he gazed into your eyes as your back arched and your head leaned back, mindlessly staring at the ceiling. He leaned forward once again only to lick at your mounds and made suckling motions over  your harden nipples. His right arm wrapped around your waist and held you down as he thrusted into you unexpectedly with a steady speed. 

Moaning and instinctively placing your hands through his raven locks, you tilted your head down only to look straight into his devilish eyes. He pulled away from your nipples as you tugged at his locks; his eyebrows twitched subtly as they furrowed slightly; lips were agape as he panted softly. There were sweat beads decorating his pale face as he let out soft moans, your blush darkening from the mysterious man himself, 

“Are you e-enjoying the view, Miss. (L/N)?” He asked in his best attempt of a flustered tone, “You’ve gone back to your head once again, and just how would you feel good if trapped in there?” He bucked his hips which made you buck your hips in response. He pulled your body at an angle which trigger a hyper vocal activity, even your hand left his hair to cover your own mouth, closing your eyes to sense him intensely than before.  There was an intense tingling sensation as your body took over control to reach their goal too. 

As the speed and pressure built up, you had the courage to not only sit back up, but wrap your arms around his neck, curving forward so your mouth latched onto his neck, biting into it as he stiffened from the sudden move. 

You had reached a point that you desperately wanted to increase the speed from how close you were, grinding against him; knowing him already, you were the one that had to obtain it instead of asking. 

Sebastian was completely thrown off guard from the bite, his nails puncturing your skin as he stood up with you in his arms and laid you on the top of the desk, his hands gripping on your thighs, bruises would be appearing in a while, but he didn’t care as he aid in your goal, “A naughty girl indeed..” He panted, his eyes darkening, “Marking me in such a way is unforgivable...now I have no choice to reciprocate your feelings-”

Before you can even comprehend his intentions, you felt a sharp pain on your shoulders, your back arched forward as you cried out in pain, “S-sebastia-”

A hand covered your mouth, your voice muffled as he moaned as well into your shoulder. 

As you came onto his girth member, he remained still as he tried to hold off, even his body shivered from the denial- the torture he put himself into when he purposely holds himself from pouring his pleasure into you. As your body shivered and bucked into the pleasure, you simply held onto him as you rode out your orgasm, the sensation of the building pressure continue to overwhelm, the feeling of pushing him off whilst holding him close was a dilemma. 

As your eyes closed, you can feel him shift, you hear the rustling of clothes in a quick, yet slow manner. Instead of the clothes, you focused on yourself: your legs slightly shaking, your chest heaving as you breathed heavily, your cheeks burning, your body freezing from the sweat that had gone out to refresh you from the hot man in front of you. 

Slowly, you opened your eyes to see him dressed up already. His deep red eyes maintained fixed on you as he fixed his tie, his smirk plastered on his facial features, “Miss. (L/N), I do believe the lesson over for now, I think it’s best for you to rest.” He offered his hand towards you while you just had come down from the high. You felt queasy, but it wasn’t it. No, you felt lighter, you felt fresh for some reason. Could the taboo act made you much bolder, could it have made you more experienced?

“...My dress.” You managed to croak out in English, your voice sounded hoarse and you blushed from embarrassment as your hand hovered over your mouth.

“Oh my...I think overstepped my boundaries a bit, my apologies my lady, I will prepare some tea to soothe your voice...We don’t want our lesson to go to waste.” He spoke in a matter-of-fact. You blushed as you averted your eyes from his as you nodded, “Y-yes...”

“Yes?” Sebastian’s eyebrow quirked slightly which you quickly corrected, “I mean, ‘Oui, monsieur’.” 

When you saw him smile in a satisfied manner, you nearly sighed in relief, but you were now flustered and quiet from the ‘lesson’ that he performed to help you learn French. Without a doubt it left an impression you, an act of intimacy and vulnerabilities in a lovemaking surely stirred things up to help you remember words -events- more effectively. 

While you were thinking, Sebastian helped you back in your dress, “I have to say, I didn’t know of such a strong bite from you, my lady. It was certainly an eye-opener.” He explained as he helped with a few items. When he got to the corset, he lifted you onto your  feet and turned you around, “Hopefully you don’t forget about our time like...this” he whispered as he guided his hands across your abdomen which you instinctively let out a breathy moan, “Y-yes...I’m sure I’ll never forget about the event...” you stabled yourself as he pulled on the corset only to make you gasp from how tight he was pulling. 

After a couple minutes, you both cleaned up the area and headed to your room to rest. Your voice felt raspy, nearly gone. When a surprise visit from Ciel caught your attention to ask about your lessons, Sebastian intervened for you, “I apologize young master, but realizing that Miss. (L/N) is tight on schedule for the ball, I had a trick under my sleeve to ensure she would capture the lesson, but...I believe I was too harsh on her.” He smirked lightly which you forced yourself to nod.

“...L-lost my voice a bit...” you confirmed, “But it’s not like a cup of tea won’t help.”

Ciel nodded slightly, glaring at Sebastian, “I’m sorry as well, I know Sebastian can be too rash with his studies, but if he does it again you can tell me. I’ll be in my office if needed- Sebastian, I want cake when you’re finished.” and he proceeded to walk to his study room. 

“Yes, my lord.” Sebastian responded before guiding you to his bedroom.

“Couldn’t have been more obvious?”, You bit as you rested your hand on your neck.

Sebastian chuckled behind his fist as he arrived to the room, opening the door for you, “If you wanted me to, I could have.”

“You really have no shame, Mr. Michaelis, but please...I ask that you keep this our secret...I don’t want you to get in trouble as well as I...” You asked of him as you entered the room to sit on the bed. 

Sebastian placed a hand over his chest as he leaned forward wit his eyes closed, “As you wish, I will keep it between us.” He stood up once again with his eyes open halfway. 

You smiled small as you leaned against your hands behind you, “You’re so...intriguing Sebastian. One moment you are a shadow, the next...uhm, you are almost a beast, and right after that you are....back to a shadow- how?...” You sat up, “I’m...beyond tired- very tired- and you are still up and going to complete your duties.”

Unnecessary to withhold his smirk, his half-lid eyes glanced on your way, “Your observational skills never cease to overwhelm me, Miss. (L/N), however..” his voice got more stern as he got closer, “ I have mentioned before that if you look into someone, you might regret it later, so I advise you my lady to keep at bay..”

The closer he got, the more you look up to stare into his eyes, challenging him, “Temptation rises when provoked, so I suggest you stop provoking me, Mr. Michaelis. Because we...intertwined in a forbidden act, you opened the doors to temptation, my... I even have to take care of myself in order to walk through those doors again...”

The corners of his lips curved slightly, Sebastian took your statement into consideration, but as entertained as he was to continue this conversation, his duties in the manor made him realize he had to cut it short, “I do have a few ways to cure that, my lady.” he suggested, his tone completely changed from the previous ominous tone to the mischievous one he possessed earlier. 

“Keep your tricks in your sleeve, please. I’m already exhausted from...your lesson there.” You huffed with a flustered face as you avoided eye contact once again. However, you failed to realize just how close he gotten. He reached out to your chin and pulled you close to him, “My lady, I have many tricks under my sleeve that I am not afraid to show you...four days is all I need.” He smirked darkly as he pulled away with a cheerful smile as he closed his eyes for the moment one again, “I will be right back with the tea as promised. In the meantime, please do relax and rest your voice...madam.” he added and proceeded to close the door behind him.

He left you speechless, knowing full well that his tricks were just promises ready to occur.

~

When Sebastian reached to the kitchen, he couldn’t help but rest against the door for a moment. After taking a deep breath, he chuckled darkly as he placed a hand over his face, “Sweet, sweet (Y/N), you drive me into a deep craze.” The hand hovered the side of the neck you bit him at. He was serious when he said you had a strong bite, and it wasn’t just that of muffling your moans. He strolled over to the counter and took out a knife to use as a mirror. He lowered his collar and managed to see a bruised bite-mark on his neck. His smirk widen and he clicked his tongue as he placed down the knife, “You’re a feisty one; I admire that.” He smiled darkly as he removed his coat to prepare the young lord his dessert. 

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~4 Days later~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

The music was soft and inviting, a subtle siren in your head to set the atmosphere of the ball. It was a slow drag from the violins which gave you strength to take a deep breath and walk forward to the crowd whom were laughing. 

Ciel was conversing with a man -the truth being the other way around-, commenting and opinionating of events that bore the young master to a tremendous level, but he remained to act as if he was in interest to the best of his ability to focus on capturing a special guest. When the nobleman excused himself after recognizing an acquaintance, Ciel called forward Sebastian who stood behind him, “Sebastian, keep an eye on Miss. (L/N) and anyone she is speaking with, there may be a chance that she’s talking with him at this moment-” as he gave him his order, Ciel spotted you with someone casually talking in French. He stood there slightly impressed at your proficiency and commented instead, “Miss. (L/N) has a lot of confidence with her French, she even looks different from before.” 

Sebastian smiled with his eyes closed as he respond, “Thank you my lord, it took a little more effort due to the time restraint, but additional teachings were added to ensure proficiency.”

Ciel eyed him for a moment, “Additional teachings? It didn’t involve something like close proximity did it?” He asked with a near disgust that his demon butler would go that far, but not surprised if he revealed the information. 

Placing a finger over his lips, Sebastian responded, “Miss. (L/N) has asked me not to disclose any information regarding our situation young lord, but that should already tell you.”

Ciel’s eyebrow twitched before releasing a sigh, “...Unfortunately, it did.” 

When he turned back to look at you, he audibly gasped when he didn’t see you there anymore, “Sebastian, track her.” He ordered  with a slight urgency in his voice, 

Bowing his head, Sebastian replied, “yes, my lord.” and he walked from his master to find you.

~

While the dynamic duo were talking, you were having a conversation with someone that was visiting a friend. It became so casual and so friendly that the two of you had walked over to the table to take a few pieces of snacks. 

His name was Jacque Arias, born into a family that dealt with the fabric industry in South France, you thought having a good friendship with him would help Miss. Hopkins with future business after you explained to him that you worked as a tailor for her. 

As you took a drink from your glass, he spoke: “I am so relieved to finally have something to go to, if I had to stay in the office one more night I would have gone insane.”

“So you like parties to distract yourself from work?”

He nods, “Yes, and to meet lovely ladies that could potentially be my future wife, like yourself.” He smiled small with a slight tilt of his head.

You blushed from hearing this, stiffening slightly, “Searching for a wife? Me? Surely you gist, sir. I am merely just a tailor intern.” You explain to him, ‘At least for the time being, I like having those small arguments with Sebastian,’ you admitted in thought. 

He reached forward to your hand only to caress, "A beautiful intern no less-...it maybe my imagination, but perhaps the party has tire me out. Shall we go somewhere more...silent? Somewhere we can be more intimate?"

You were ready to say no, already losing the interest of a business partner potential. If he wanted to marry you, for some reason you felt it was your choice to choose, and you wanted to choose someone that perhaps wasn't necessarily available to be taken, and you responded, "I don't want to offend you, but-"

He took your hand in his and lightly started guiding you out, "Then let's enjoy nature together." He suggested, "I...I don't-" You glanced around to see the mysterious man himself offering glasses to the guests, but he also glanced at your way. You noticed the faint smirk before he tilted his head forward, 'Go.' You felt him say before he went back to attend with the rest of the guests.

Almost feeling your body going light, you then followed the man ahead of you with a light smile.

It was chilly, your skin shivered to make some warmth, "Are you cold? I'll call up my carriage." He offered as he took off her coat, "In the meantime, here." He placed the coat over your shoulders, "I'll be right back." And he walked with a rushed speed.

You were surprised to see his nice side as he was going to get the carriage. You were suddenly curious about taking his offer, but you wanted to reject by the interaction at the table. Giving him the second chance to see him truly, you decided to wait outside than inside where it was warm.

~

Waiting patiently for a couple minutes, you felt your body shiver once again, but you subconsciously glanced around. You felt like someone was staring at you- stalking you. It felt uneasy for you, your hands tightening the coat around your body while you made your way back to the manor so you would at least be with someone before you spotted someone in pitch black. You almost called out his name until your eyes widen at the revelation.

While the ball was still in place and everyone was blissful at the moment, with the earl holding in his disinterest in people and balls overall, Sebastian kept a close connection with you. He immediately recognized the man you were with and knowing how humans seemed to be believe they were mated with one intense session, he just had to play the role of the silent lover, granting the permission for you to be with the next chaperone, 

The atmosphere was filled with a wave of chattering, the laughter whether genuine or filled with arrogance, Sebastian could listen to all with depth. He listened to the piece played by the string quartet and multi-task with his butler duties. Suddenly, he heard a change in the quartet, a new piece was to be played and he listened.

The violins and violoncello were stroked rapidly in the next piece that it threw people off guard. They were not expected such an allegro tempo from the players: notes raised, dropped, the moments of silence, the notes raising a subtle anxiety from the audience even Sebastian felt it. He felt the anxiety, he felt -for a moment- his heart beating faster and faster and he turned to glance at the young master only for him to just watch the quartet as well. In that instant, he heard your panting with his demonic ears, it was the only thing that stand out from the silent crowd and the musicians ahead of him. 

He strolled to the head of the family and bent over at his height only to whisper by his ear to prohibit eavesdropping. While Ciel watched ahead, his full attention was for the demon. 

“Sebastian, I order you to find him and bring both of them back here after the ball.” He ordered with the ushered tone as the butler replied: “Yes, my lord.” before smirking at the slight liberation in his current state.   

Previous Part/ Final Part 

~Translations~

1: Tonight I will be given to the darkness, I have but myself to the prince of darkness. Oh Crow allow my body to help in your pleasure as your life has been done with the pain that humanity as it (cut out: brought/ apporté.)

2:Pleasure

3: “Good Now...”The moment I laid my eyes on you, I was enchanted by your beauty. I had hoped you worked for Miss. Hopkins, and you proved yourself in front of her as well as the young master; talented and beautiful, I wanted you.

I have you in my hands, your heart is beating fast, your body is flushing- I know you want me just as well, and at any moment you falter in your French lessons, I will make sure  you remember my hands, my body, my voice. You will never forget me as well as the beautiful language of French is in your possession.”

4. we will speak in French

A/N: Tell me why I spent over 45 minutes searching the music sheet for the Diabolic Waltz and Danse Macabre (Can you blame me? It’s amazing work.) only to confirm or learn from parts where in the music because I am an overachiever and I go all out when I attempt to describe the music without being “the music played louder” come on, I didn’t spend two years in the marching band and be discriminated for being a woman and a semester in Music Appreciation in college for NOTHING- TEMPO, FORTE (Brother save me, this is my call for you to save me, this has gone way too far even for my own sake).

P.S. I am saying it again: Do not forget about my brother, Caffeine, he makes exclusive and waaaaay better stories than I. Just look under #caffeine for more of his content as well as a list of the media he covers for any requests/commissions.

[inevitably-johnlocked]

Hi Steph!

I’m sorry it’s my first time sending you an ask, so I dunno which button I clicked man. Sorry about that.

Ok, so what I wanted to request! I love your blog. You’re really kind and genuine, and I’ve found some great fics to light up my day from here. But sometimes, the posts are suuupppeeerr long, and I may not be looking for this info exactly? Like it clogs up a lot of my dash. So I wanted to request if you could use a “read more” feature after a brief, at least for the fic rec posts.

I hope I didn’t offend or anything. Thank u for all the kindness you put into the world each day. Have a good day fren!

Hey Nonny!

Ahh, okay, you’re not going to like what I am going to say, but you are very respectful and were smart and sandwiched your issue in compliments, so Ahhhh, I feel conflicted now.

With all due respect Nonny, this is my blog and I get more engagement on my lists if people can see the full list; many people prefer it that way, and honestly I get crapped on either way, so I’ve made the executive decision to not cut my posts. The only time I do is on “second” reblog on super long LONG lists so that I have a “cut” and “uncut” version of the post, but even those I’ve been reducing. 

I’ve tried both ways, and full posts get better notice. All I want to do is share my love of fics and content with y’all, and the best way to do that is to just have it all there so people know what they’re getting. 

Plus, am I to just “readmore” every single reply on my posts? A lot of the reason my blog has stayed as long as it has is because I’ve always been a very interactive blog. People LIKE seeing their replies added to a comment thread on my post, and it helps smaller blogs get noticed. It’s not much on the surface, but I’ve had smaller blogs come to me DELIGHTED that their name is now attached to one of my posts that are going through a “popular reblog cycle” (that is, a post that is being interacted with for a good few days before I actually finally add it to the month-reblog queue). It helps create a sense of community, I feel, and that’s one of the things I am very honoured to be: a starting place for community.

And this is just in a general sense and NOT directed at you, more at the people who shit on me in the notes of my long posts, but I don’t GET people getting upset about my TEXT BASED POST WITH NO IMAGES IN IT, but not on any of the image or playlist posts I reblog, which take FOREVER to load on mobile. I GENUINELY don’t get it. I don’t even use the app on my phone, I’m logged into the browser on my phone, because the app is garbage. 

The problem is the app, in my opinion. That’s the gist of it. It loads slow, it scrolls terribly, and the UI is annoying, but instead app users blame the bloggers and not the fact that Tumblr staff ignore every suggestion we make. And because more of the newer people use their mobiles these days, us old-time Tumblr users are expected to microblog like the shitty sites that are Twitter or Facebook. Tumblr is a blogging platform, like LiveJournal, laid out all nicely and clean and honestly, (the royal you) you’re getting exactly what you signed up for: long posts, opinions, and interaction. If one wants shitty layouts, shitty comment threads you can’t follow and reactionaries, go to Twitter. Call me a boomer, whatever, I just find Tumblr so much more appealing now more than ever. 

Sorry, I’ve needed to get this off my chest for awhile now. I don’t know. Maybe I’m being pedantic. I don’t care, really. My thoughts on this: if (the royal) you don’t like the content, or find stuff annoying, don’t follow me.

Because you know what a lot of my longest posts are? Helpline numbers at the bottom of posts. Useful links. And just stuff that make people happy. People in despair are not going to click on a read more of a post. People who want links to resources aren’t going to click on a read more. People who just want happiness after a stressful day are literally just scrolling to smile, and they ain’t gonna click a read more.

YES, there are reasons read mores are good, absolutely. I just PERSONALLY don’t like them because I like engagement. I don’t get much of it anymore on my posts, EXCEPT the fic rec posts, and THOSE work better as a full view.

BUT NONNY PLEASE KNOW I AM NOT UPSET AT ALL WITH YOU, and you’ve given me a great opportunity to discuss this thing that I’ve put off for awhile because the other people were less-than-kind, and it only made me NOT address it out of simple spite because I’m nothing if not a passive aggressive old lady. 

So, here are a few ideas you can implement:

If you like my posts but not the longest ones, I always tag them “long post”. Tumblr finally has its own tag blocking feature, so just block “long post”. All of my very long lists will be blocked, and you can decide if you want to click on them based on what the additional tags are. I try my best to tag all my lists appropriately.

Similarly, you can “tag block” my username, and only click on the posts you like the tags for.

DON’T TAKE THIS THE WRONG WAY, PLEASE, this isn’t a “so there!” comment, I promise!!: You can unfollow me if you’re only following me for the fic lists, and instead follow me on Twitter at @inevitablyjohn1, which is used only to promote my new lists and art. Every Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday I post up the Wednesday Reblog, Five Fics Friday, Fic Rec Roundup, and Fic Rec Sunday, with a link to each post :) Then you’ll get all the lovely full lists I post 4 times a week. OF COURSE, this is the option I don’t want to happen, because I love all my lovelies and you’ll miss out on the random fics, insightful asks, and suggestions I get throughout the week, BUT I want you to enjoy your time on Tumblr, and if my blog is causing you stress, it’s the last thing I want to happen. I love all of y’all too much to see that!

THAT ALL SAID, Nonny, I’m really sorry to disappoint you, and I hope you understand my POV on this. I just don’t see any benefit on my part, for MY blog, which I run for MY happiness which has the side effect of making other people happy. I also hope you will still stick around regardless, but I care about your well being and I understand if you have to leave.

AND everyone, please don’t be harsh on this Nonny! They asked a question respectfully and deserve our respect in kind.

I truly wish you the loveliest of days, Nonny, and have a great week! <3

[gallickingun]

welded hearts || b.k.

SUMMARY: You and Bakugou have to try and pick up the pieces after the incident with Awase, but neither of you are doing a very good job. It leads to distance and lies, and you’re not sure if there’s any way to save the fragments that remain of your shattered relationship. Especially when you find out that Bakugou has been tracking your every move.

Follows the events of Ensnare, an Awase x Reader x Bakugou fic written by @lady-bakuhoe​.

PAIRING: Pro Hero!Bakugou x Fem!Reader RATINGS: M/E+ WARNINGS: language, smut, slight violence, etc. WORD COUNT: 11.7k+

LINKS: ao3 | masterlist | mobile | writing tag

AUTHOR’S NOTE: after reading Jo’s fic, I immediately rushed to her inbox to foam at the mouth about what kind of angst would follow when Bakugou and Reader attempt to put back together what is left of their relationship, with Bakugou really not feeling like a man, and reader feeling absolutely suffocated, and this little fic was born. Also, this is my first time not tagging any blogs, I just need to start fresh. I hope everyone understands!

if you like this, feel free to request more HERE!

　 ҉　 ҉　 ҉　 ҉　 ҉　 ҉　 ҉　 　 ҉　 ҉　 ҉　 ҉　 ҉　 ҉　 ҉　 　 ҉　 ҉　 ҉　 ҉　 ҉　 ҉　 ҉　

The strange combination of distance and suffocation make your head spin.

Nightmares plague your mind at night, leaving the opportunity for visions to run rampant through your sleep-deprived brain during the day. You spend the daylight hours looking over your shoulder, your forehead broken out into a constant sweat, and you spend the evenings wondering if you might have imagined the whole thing.

You wake up alone most of the time, no matter what phase of the night you are suffering through. The first few times you would go searching the house for him, wondering where his overactive body could have taken him this time. Most nights you found him at the kitchen table going over suit designs and contracts for more hero patrols and brand deals.

You’d ask him when he was coming back to bed only for those familiar vermilion eyes to pass you a blank stare and his dry voice to echo out, “Don’t worry about me. Go back to bed.”

And each night you’d listen.

You curl up beneath the covers, tugging the fabric to your chin, and stare at the wall. You attempt breathing exercises and grounding techniques, but that does not stop the shadowy figures you see in the hallway or the closet. Your imagination gets the better of you as it hallucinates the image of the culprit himself stood in your bathroom doorway, a smirk on his lips and a glint in his eyes.

“So fucking pretty,” his mouth snarls around the words, dark hair shining despite the dark. His teeth are pearlescent even in the dim moonlight filtering through your window, “Whose going to stop me? You?”

A shudder shakes your shoulders and when you blink, he’s gone, like a phantom escaped in the night. You rip your hands through your hair and tears drip down from your lids into your lap, staining the fabric of your pajama pants. Your hands shake in front of you, fingertips showing double the harder you try to concentrate.

His presence is akin to smoke billowing within your belly. The tendrils of his black cloud wrap around your spine, traveling up your torso until it sits in the base of your throat, suffocating you endlessly. Every day you spend breathing is another day fighting for relief from this monstrous thing in your chest.

Bakugou turns to much different means of coping.

At first it was sweet – him checking in on you. He would offer to come pick you up from work if you’d ever decided to leave anytime after seven, and if he was stuck on patrol or in meetings, he’d arrange a car to bring you home. When you go on your afternoon runs, he’d volunteer to go with you even though he’d done rigorous amounts of training at work.

The simplest ways he would show his sense of pride in protecting you would be to hover closely, his body within an arm’s length so he could snag you out of any bad situation if there ever were one. Still, even with his insatiable hovering tendencies, he would keep his own personal touch at bay.

At times when he would usually hold your hand or brush up against you, he stays at least three feet away. It’s as if he’s chosen to self-quarantine himself from you, deeming your affections as either insufficient or insufferable, which neither are good options to choose from.

Once it becomes overwhelming, you find yourself in too deep, too bitter. You try to reach out to him in the form of affection – brushing your palm over his hips as you pass him in the kitchen, trying to grab his hand when you’re walking together, and reaching out to touch his shoulders when he faces away from you the few nights he does end up in bed.

To shout out now would be hypocritical, as you have had a part in pushing him further from you, isolating his affectionate touches even further. Yet, the longer he keeps himself from brushing even his clothed thigh against you when he passes you by in the kitchen or at the grocery store, you wonder who is actually suffering from the lack of physical affection and who is merely existing.

Eventually he grows more suffocating.

Bakugou will not let you be out of his sight for longer than a few minutes at a time despite sitting opposite from you on every surface he can find. You have started to hide in the bathroom, proclaiming cramps or bad pork before skittering off to the bathroom with your phone clutched in the grasp of your fingers, if only to find some peace from his prying eyes for a few moments at a time.

He has never been so clingy before, and you know that it is laced with the trauma as a result of the Awase situation. However, this doesn’t make it any easier to stomach his lurking. On the other hand, it adds a stinging sensation at the irony of it all.

Bakugou wants to be completely involved in every facet of your life without even kissing you good morning when he hands you your coffee.

You knew that what had happened with Awase all those weeks ago had to have affected him, coloring his outlook on life no matter how bleak it had been before. With each passing day he grows closer to you, hands metaphorically wrapped around your throat, squeezing every last pound of air from your tongue. But still, you never imagined that he would take t his far.

And so, you lie through your teeth.

Yaoyorozu was invited to the grand opening of a bar in the plaza sector of the city, and she invites you and the other girls for a night out. You know that if Bakugou heard about you going on about visiting a bar and intending to drink, he’d say some new form of the word ‘no’ and persuade you with his big, round, crimson eyes to stay home.

There were too many safety hazards, after all. Especially if you are going to be drinking. Your senses would be impaired, and you would be much easier to take advantage of once you are two shows into the wind. And then Bakugou would casually remind you that Momo normally finds a guy and ditches you, thus forcing you into taking a cab ride home, which creates an entirely new set of problems.

Which is why, when you tell him why you won’t be home tonight, you lie, “It’s just a sleepover, like back in high school! Momo and Ochako wanted to get back together and I think Mina might even be coming too!”

Bakugou nods, looking over the top of his combat training manual, “Just let me know if you need me to come pick you up, alright?”

You nod, not daring to reach forward and try to brush your hand against his forearm, afraid he might recoil or redirect you. Instead you force a smile, nodding your head as you open the door, “Momo is picking me up, and she said she’d be fine with driving me back tomorrow, but I’ll let you know if anything changes.”

His posture visibly relaxes at the sentiment. It is maddening how one simple shift of his composure makes you want to barrel into him, to forget your entire night and attempt to curl up with him on the couch. It has been so long since you last felt his touch, even in a casual sense. The bar counter top acts like a prison, barring him from you as he isolates himself.

“Have fun,” he manages, eyes falling away from you.

And you’re glad, too. At least when he’s not looking at you, he can’t read your face for lies. Bakugou is like a human lie detector, able to sense any unease in your usually relaxed posture.

Of course he has no reason to disbelieve you – why would you lie to him in the first place? You have preyed on that trust, a thing you feel so despicable for even considering, the fib scraping against your teeth like nails on a chalkboard. You wince at his tone, unbelievably naïve, but the door stays open regardless of your conviction.

The lie rolls around in your belly like a parasite, preying on the poor decisions and leeching on your inhibitions. You feel it suffocating your throat as you blow a kiss his direction, telling him not to wait up as you readjust your backpack full of overnight accessories and a change of clothes that is slung over your right shoulder.

Bakugou smiles but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes, which only further feeds the parasitic being taken up a home in your stomach. It sits heavy on your tongue when you tell him goodnight, threatening to chew right through your cheek until it’s been bared to the whole world.

He nods, licking his lips as he watches you leave. You wave one last time as you shut the door, guilt eating you alive until you feel tears press against the backs of your eyelids. You swallow your conscience and head towards the car you recognize as Momo’s, the weight of your club clothes sitting heavy in your backpack. You cinch it closer to you, praying that Bakugou hasn’t somehow developed x-ray vision to be able to see through your bag.

And yet, a part of you wants him to come barreling down the stairwell to beg you to come back inside, back home. You want him to whisper your name like a prayer, his hands outstretched so you can reach forward to slot your knuckles between his.

At least in your hallucinations he still wants you.

--

Once you’re at the club bar, it doesn’t take long for you to find yourself in a drunken stupor.

“Listen,” you slur, pointing a finger into Momo’s ample chest, “I-I’m not sayin’ he’s gotta dick me down every night, b-but like-once?!”

You take a long drag of beer, swallowing the acidic liquid until it’s burning your throat. You slam your cup back down on the table top, pursing your lips as you take in a deep breath, “I mean it’s been months, guys. Months.”

“A-Are you serious?” Uraraka leans in closer to you, eyes widened, “N-Not since-”

“Nope,” you huff, slumping down in the booth seat. “I-I know that since the incident that things have been different, but it’s like he doesn’t even want me anymore.”

Momo reaches her arm around your shoulder, tucking you into her side, “I’m sure he just doesn’t know how to handle all of it, and he’s just trying to do his best.”

“Bakugou?” Mina laughs, bright eyes hidden behind her lids as she screws her face up into a giggle. She takes a sip of her beer, propping her feet on the nearest unoccupied table, and sighs, “Good luck with that one, babes. I don’t see things returning back to normal anytime soon, not with how damn stubborn he can be.”

The beginning of a fresh set of tears presses like a crater into the backs of your eyes, a pulsing headache drawing out a groan from your lips. You drop your forehead to the tabletop and relish at the cool surface opposing your heated flesh, “I-I know that normal isn’t exactly an option yet, but I would like to feel like I wasn’t so fucking alone in my own house, y’know? I mean, he’s right there and yet it’s like I’m there all by myself?”

Your phone buzzes from within your purse and there is a collective grouching that echoes from everyone at the table, sour expressions making it obvious the way they feel about your ringtone. Momo crosses her arms over her chest, “You do realize this is the seventeenth time he’s called you, right?”

You reach into your purse but her hand is on your wrist before you can snatch your phone. She shakes her head and Mina huffs through her nose, “Why can’t you just put that thing on silent? When is he going to stop bugging you?”

“Yeah?” Momo brushes her thumb against your forearm, “Didn’t you tell him you were coming out with us tonight?”

A bright red tinge sits hot on your cheeks, making your skin look flushed. Your friends understand your conflict then, sitting back from you in shame. Mina is the first to speak, “You lied?”

“I-well, I couldn’t just-” You rack your brain for the right words to say to defend yourself, sweat accumulating at the base of your back in droves. You want to run away, but there’s nowhere to go. If you head home now, Bakugou will most likely have a full rant ready for you as soon as you walk in the door.

“You can’t keep lying to him like this,” Momo presses her palm to your cheek, brushing away a tear before it can slip down your face, “You’re going to have to be honest with him eventually. He needs to back off, to let you live. There’s no reason he has to be attached to you like an umbilical cord all of the time.”

“His concern is kind of nice, though,” Jirou speaks up.

Your head snaps towards her and she shrugs, “All I’m saying is at least he’s trying to protect you. He’s not completely self-absorbed after all.”

Before you can try to refute her or defend him, your phone starts ringing once more. Your hand dives into your purse, pulling it from within and looking down at it like that might keep it from ringing any longer.

“I don’t understand!” You’re whining now, fresh saltine droplets settling in your lashes. You wipe at your face, “I-I don’t get why he won’t just leave me the hell alone. I told him exactly what I was doing tonight, exactly where I was going and who I was going to be with. I just-”

“Except you lied.”

You feel all of the heat leave your body, only frozen fingertips and an icy, rigid spine left behind.

You turn your head at the familiar baritone voice that cuts into you from behind, and your heart drops into your stomach. When you breathe, the parasitic thing living there begins to swallow your stomach whole, gnawing away at your most sensitive parts first.

You grit your teeth, forcing yourself to feel anger instead of shame, “What the hell are you doing here?”

“What, pray tell, the fuck are you doing here?!” Bakugou snaps, eyes a conflagration of brassy tones, pupils dilated to prove his anger, as if it weren’t so evident from his tone.

Mina goes to speak up when she sees you flinch, but you’re already being dragged out from the safety of the booth seat. Bakugou’s blunt nails are digging into your bicep and forearm like little spears, snagging you so you can’t get away. He yanks you into the hallway, your back pressed into the wall as he further infringes on your space with his closeness.

“You fuckin’ lied to me?”

His voice is held together by rage, begging to be broken apart as he lets the feelings seep through the cracks of his resolve. Bakugou’s jaw quivers as he grinds his teeth together, heaving breaths making his chest expand to brush against your own. It’s the closest thing you’ve felt to intimacy since that night in the alley – since he decided to pretend that you and your needs didn’t exist.

You want to start bubbling out another fib, foaming at the mouth with lies so smooth he’d have to believe them. Your brain is stumbling in attempt to keep up with his fast paced thinking. Every phrase you could possibly say to make this go down like honey instead of vinegar passes through your mind, but you know that this will sting no matter how long you put off trying to swallow it.

The intentions you have now, to make everything easier on him and spare his emotions, have been tainted by your conniving words from before. You weren’t preparing for a confessional in the middle of this hole-in-the-wall bar, but not every night goes exactly how you plan it.

The both of you understand that sentiment rather intimately.

Bakugou’s eyes are ablaze, vermilion bleeding to amber nearest his pupils. His jawline is flexed, nostrils flaring, and you know that laced within his anger is something akin to fright, fearfulness. Every single feature he possesses is pinched tightly, as if his body were wound like a coil, and he is going to snap at any moment.

And then, when your mouth bobs open and shut, and you can’t find the right lie to squeeze between your teeth, you begin putting the whole situational puzzle back together. Anger replaces the acrid taste in your mouth, cinders of fury settling on your tongue the more it all starts to make sense.

Your eyes meet his and he feels the shift, his grip on your arm lessening at the sight of your furious irises honing in on him. The reality that he is not as innocent as you would like to believe seeps into your skin, settling like sticky acid, and you itch religiously to get it off of you.

“How did you know that I was here?” you ask, voice eerily calm as your vision begins to blur at the edges. You gnaw on your lower lip, tilting your head to consider every falter in his expression, “I told you I was going to be at Yaoyorozu’s. You had no idea that-”

You can’t help the choking sound that comes from your throat next, gagging on your words as pure fury overwhelms your body. Your shoulders shudder under the strain of these destructive emotions as realization settles in. Even the fear in his own irises cannot stop the tumultuous build of vehemence that seeps through you like molten lava, crawling upwards through your veins until all you can see is red – blinding red.

You’re repeating your question when it appears he won’t answer you to speak the truth; eyebrows furrowed, forehead wrinkled. Your jawline pulsates with muscle tremors as you grit your teeth down fervently, a high-pitched whining sound echoing within your own skull at the action, “What did you do, Katsuki?”

It’s not a question, though, not this time.

Bakugou’s throat bobs and before he can give you some shitty, half-thought out excuse, you’re poking your finger into his chest, directly between the taut line of his pectorals, “Where is it?”

“Wh-What?” he manages to cough out, tongue bitten between his teeth.

You take a step back with each question of the location, chin wobbling in denial, “My bag? My phone? My car? Did you put it in me, Katsuki?”

The sound of his given name dripping like toxic acid from your tongue makes his heart constrict within the confines of his chest. The organ beats at a thunderous pace, so hard that he’s sure there is an outlined bruise in the shape of it if you were to peel his shirt back and look. Still, he knows better than to argue with you – knows even better than to try and deny it. You are a human lie detector when it comes to him. You know his mannerisms so well that you’re able to spot a stuttering breath from a mile off, even the smallest of hints to his dastardly secret-keeping seeming like bright white lights to you.

He has backed himself into a corner in trying to keep you safe, so he admits with his head hung low, “Your phone.”

A shuddering breath makes your chest collapse, jaw fallen slack at the confession. Your spirit was praying that he might have just found out from a friend, maybe Kirishima discovered that you were out with Momo and Mina and told him. But no, now he’s admitted to the crime and he knows that he’ll have to face the punishment.

You want to root around in your purse until you’ve found the offending object, but it’s not the time, at least not right now. He can’t take advantage of using it while you’re both still in the same location. You’ll have to handle it later.

“How long?” you ask, voice small.

Bakugou does not answer immediately. His eyes are downcast, unable to meet yours as his lower lip quivers just enough for you to make it out in the dim light of the bar. Your heart thrums at the sight of him so distraught, but you lock your knees and force your body to straighten your spine and steel your resolve.

You repeat the question, digging your fingertip into his skin until you are sure that you’ve drawn blood underneath the fabric of his black tank top.

He snaps, the blood vessels in his neck thudding against the tanned skin there, “Since Awase, when the fuck else do you think?”

And just like that, your entire body is thrown back in time. You are that helpless woman in that alleyway, your body used for the lustful gratification of someone else, thrown to the side like a plaything when he was through. You feel hands, lips, skin, all over you, torturing your body even now when you are awake. The ghost of his crooked touch makes your eyes water, thick droplets sticking to your lashes.

The sound of that villain’s name makes your ears burn and your tongue turn to sandpaper. A chill runs down your spine despite the massive blanket of heat in the room from all the bodies burning with alcohol and movement. Your head feels fuzzy, eyes unable to focus as you attempt to come back to this version of reality.

A single tear drips down your cheek, but Bakugou knows better than to try and wipe it away like he might if it were any other time.

“I-I can’t believe this,” you murmur, withdrawing your finger from him to cover your mouth with both hands. You blink slowly, turning your gaze from him to the floor, taking it all in with stride, attempting to breathe as evenly as possible while still processing everything unfolding in front of you.

Bakugou reaches up to touch your elbow, just enough contact to try and bring you back down to earth. Your eyes snap upward, meeting his vermilion gaze with an expression opposing your fiery wit from earlier. He’s never seen your body waver in such a way that would leave him to believe you to be weak, but now all he wants is to hold you between his arms, piecing you back together bone-by-bone, vessel-by-vessel.

You’re lost in the simplistic touch of him, the first you’ve felt in what you know to be weeks, but believe to be eons. He has been so distant from you that you almost forget why you are angry when he’s this close to you, suffocating your body in the best of ways. You can smell the telltale sign of his quirk, an ashen sweetness that you are sure you’ve become addicted to throughout the entirety of your relationship.

A breath bites through your lungs and you sharply cut your teeth into the inside of your cheek, trying to snap yourself out of your dazed stupor brought on by isolation. As you open your eyes again, you steel yourself, stepping up with brazen confidence to slap away his hand from your arm.

The burning flames licking at your throat turn to white-hot rage, “I don’t know what the hell your problem is, Katsuki, but this controlling me shit has got to stop.”

His eyes refocus on yours again, pupils swallowing those pretty red globes whole, fear riddling every bone in his fragile body, “Wh-What are you talking about?”

Now it is you who has backed him into a corner, his backside and shoulder pushing against the wall. He tries to reach out to stop you, to beg for your forgiveness, but the stony expression in your irises tells him that he needs to be still an listen no matter how many biting insults and wanton words sit on his tongue.

“You’re breathing down my neck, Bakugou,” you inhale a shuddering breath at the sound of his surname being forced through your teeth. Tears lick at the corner of your eyes, your fists shaking by your sides, “I can’t take a shit without you wondering why I’m gone for longer than three minutes. You’ve been so fucking controlling that I can’t even go out with my friends without you needing to make it a momentous occasion!”

“You lied to me, for fucks sake!” Bakugou presses into you, snarling around his words. “You expect me to just forget that? What else have you been lying about?”

Your teeth clatter against one another, rattling around in your head, “I had to! You’ve been this glass case of emotion lately! And you won’t even let me walk home alone! I feel like I have a damn shadow everywhere I go!”

“I’m trying to-”

A thought hits you then, mulling you over so powerfully that you stumble backward, putting distance between the two of you. Your gaze falters from him to the wall, unable to look him in the eyes as you utter the next few syllables, “You don’t trust me?”

Bakugou is quick to refute you, stepping forward to take you out of your haze, “Hell no, baby! Of course, I trust you.”

“You put a goddamn tracker on my phone!” you snap, muscles quivering beneath your skin as your entire body tenses at the statement. Tears settle in your lids, dripping down over your cheek when you force him off of you. “What the hell am I supposed to think?”

He reaches out and wraps you up in his arms forcefully, despite your thrashing and shoving. You tear into him with your words and your touch, trying to punch him even though your range of motion is rather limited. Bakugou puts his chin on the top of your head, bottling you up like liquid rage, holding you together as you try to fall apart.

Bakugou has one hand against the back of your head, hands tucked into the tresses of your hair to cradle your head into the curve of his neck. His other palm rubs up and down the length of your arm as he tries to calm you down from your frenzied state, the loud music and pulsing bodies in the background of the bar doing little to deter your heightened temper.

You gulp as you feel his mouth bury into the crown of your head, kisses sprinkled into your hair like little flowers, petals of kind words tucked against your scalp. Bakugou wants to take you by the hand and drag you home, to curl up with you for the first time since that horrible night in the alleyway, and whisper promises into your skin until he goes hoarse.

You tilt your head upward, face shining bright with tears, nose bumping into his chin, “The-Then why do you-”

Katsuki nudges his nose over yours, a shuddering breath making his lip tremble against the bow of your mouth. A snarling growl rips his throat wide open as every feral, primal instinct buried deep within him is unleashed, “Are you really that dense, dumbass?”

The insult takes you by surprise, facial expression souring as you roll your tongue against your teeth, attempting to swallow the acidic retort sitting on the tip of the muscle in your mouth. Bakugou watches you with a careful eye, making sure that you aren’t going to speak up before he tries to rephrase himself.

“Listen, I just-I…” The words are caught in his throat, raking into his esophagus like shards of glass. Bakugou hates being vulnerable, especially with you. It makes him feel raw, torn open, and uncomfortable. He wants to be the pillar of strength you believe him to be, and how can he prove that he’s worthy of your trust when he feels so weak?

And yet, with you standing in front of him with expectant eyes and shaking hands, he finds it within himself to say what has been plaguing his mind for weeks.

“This shitstorm happened to me too, y’know?”

He sounds so heartbreakingly honest that it makes your skin prickle. A chill tightens like a coil around your spine, spreading shards of ice throughout your veins until your whole body is burning from the frigid feeling, fingertips numb.

Bakugou’s mouth bobs open and shut before he tears a hand through his hair, the other never leaving your body, frustrated at the fact that he can’t think of the right things to say. He looks up at the ceiling, a breath expanding his chest so he’s flush with you.

“Every fucking time I close my eyes, I see that shit all over again.” The veins in his body are prominent as he stresses himself out by trying to speak, “I see you, helpless, because I fucked up and lost focus. I-I couldn’t do anything and you needed me an-”

He can’t force the words out, can’t muster them up from the back of his throat no matter how many times he licks at the inside of his mouth, desperately searching his own skin for the answers. The reality of what might come to fruition when he says his truth out loud is too much to bear, no matter how much he knows he has to have this conversation with you. This is not something you both can just move on from, not without addressing it in all of its ugliness first. He wills the words to come out, closing his eyes and breathing deep. And even still, his mind will not cal.

Katsuki is a raging sea and you are the rickety lifeboat caught in his violent storm.

You swirl in his vortex for a moment longer before prodding him, hand pressed flat against his chest. You brush your thumb over his collarbone, ��Katsuki, come on, talk to me. Please.”

Bakugou’s hand flinches by his side and you wonder if he wants to reach out to touch you with the pads of his fingers; to use you like an anchor, weighing him down in the right in the right way to bring him back to the current version of reality.

“I’m right here,” you whisper, pushing him further, knowing what he’s trying to tell you, but needing to hear it from his own tongue.

You step into his space and crowd him into the tight expanse of the hallway, and he can’t draw his eyes away from you despite the shame he feels from the tears currently clouding his vision. Every naysayer in his life comes to him in that very moment, telling him that he’s weak and spineless, completely useless if he can’t do the simplest of tasks. They scream at him, clawing at his heart until he’s bleeding out tears, hands shuddering in pain.

All he wants is to see you smiling again; a genuine, shining smile. He wants to watch as your eyes light up when he kisses you, or when he touches you here and there, casually in passing. Bakugou misses the old kindling the two of you had before that fateful night all those weeks ago. There was a familiarity that now feels lost in translation, wafting somewhere between the space separating the both of you.

You’re begging him in his ear now, words lodged like knives into his heart, a new syllable signifying a new blade, “Why are you doing this, Katsuki? Please, tell me!”

That is the last one – the proverbial blade that shoves its way through is spine to split him in two. He can’t help the way his voice shatters when he finally breaks, falling forward on weak knees, “To fucking protect you! Goddammit!”

You take a short step backward, shuffling away from him at his sudden furious outburst, the change in volume startling you. Goosebumps pebble on your skin and you feel a wave of anxiety wash over you, settling in your stomach to eat away at your resolve, that same parasite from earlier flaring up all over again. You swallow the pent-up emotion in your throat, but Bakugou isn’t finished, not yet. Now that he’s finally been ripped open, he can’t stop the flow.

“Every night you’d get further and further away from me,” his hands are flexing at his sides, knuckles turning white, little crackling explosions lighting like a warning sign, “And I can’t fucking get over this shit, okay?!”

The familiar ashen sweetness lingers in the air at the bare minimum usage of his quirk, but it’s comforting in a way. You breathe it in and try to stave off any tears from stemming down your cheeks. It is his turn to crumble, to fall down at your feet and beg for you to help him repair the gaping wound in his chest.

As you watch him fall apart, it’s physically painful to witness the way his body quivers, every muscle coiled and ready to spring into use. His lower lip, full and pink, is wobbling while he tries to form coherent sentences. You’ve never wanted to reach out and touch him more, to calm him with a tender brush of your knuckles over his cheek, or a hand flattened onto the plane of his chest. But he is too far away from you now, distant in the worst way.

It’s like he’s a figurative bomb, building up and ready to detonate. Each passing moment only fills him with more gunpowder, stuffing his throat until he’s suffocating under the notion that he can’t save you. Has he ever been capable of keeping you from harm?

“I-I was weak,” his voice breaks and so does his façade, tears brimming in the ducts of his reddened lids, “I let that fucker get the best of me, and i-it cost you. You were hurt because I couldn’t protect you.”

Bakugou’s palms shudder at his sides, fingers curling around smoke. You want to step forward, to reassure him that he is the furthest thing from weak that you have ever seen, but he cowers from you when you get too close. He reminds you of a caged animal finally set free, unsure of where to step, how to breathe all of the fresh air at once. Almost as if he is withholding himself from you now that his confession has broken through the bars around his heart, echoed loud for you to hear.

“Throwing yourself into danger isn’t going to help,” you answer him, “and neither is suffocating me.”

The fire fueling your bones from earlier returns at the realization that he has been distancing himself from you on purpose. You assumed it had been a subconscious decision based on the trauma experienced from the encounter with Awase, but you never would have guessed he was actively choosing to ignore you, especially physically. And now, with his hands shaking at his sides, you are beginning to wonder if he feels the same pull that you do, the desire to let your palms search one another’s skin to find the answers to your innermost questions.

“The only thing I’m any good at is fighting!” Bakugou falls back against the wall, eyes downcast in defeat as his shoulders slump forward. He opens his palms in front of his body, flexing his fingers. “All I can do is work as hard as I possibly can to be the best. I have to be the best.”

He curls his fingers back to fists, fury coursing through his veins like fire, accumulating in his palms to a head, a bomb settled in the cracks and crevices of his skin. “All I can focus on right now is getting stronger, to be a hero that you can trust to keep you safe.”

When his eyes snap up to meet yours, there’s a flame burning deep in his vermilion irises that makes them look alight, the bright amber color in contrast to their usual hue. It frightens you slightly, sending a tremor down your spine until you are curling your toes.

Bakugou’s hands creak as he turns them to fists, knuckles turning white, “I’ll be the best, even if it kills me.”

The very permanent word involving mortality turns your knees to jelly, bones grinding against one another in a desperate attempt to keep yourself upright. Your throat closes, emotion billowing like smoke in your esophagus until it is pushing into every available space, effectively choking you where you stand.

“Y-You don’t have to be so, so,” you struggle to find the words, breath hard to come by as you gasp for air, “so-”

“So what?!” Bakugou’s voice is patronizing now as he grows defensive at your tone, taking a downward turn to the other side of kind. He grits his teeth and you allow yourself to see him for what he truly is in this moment – a frightened child, begging for a savior, or at least some solid ground. He grimaces, shaking his head, “I couldn’t protect you when I needed to. And if I can’t keep you safe, what else am I good for?”

Silence hangs between the two of you at the heaviness of his words, creating an even further distance as his words settle like embers on your heart.

You want to brush the cinders away, blowing the ash into the wind and along with it, the horrific memories from the past few weeks. His name sits on the tip of your tongue, scratching at the muscle and begging to be freed from the cage of your teeth. Your fingertips ache at your sides, keening towards him with the desire to find something to feel, some tactile version of reality to reaffirm that you have not lost everything. The heaviness in your feet keeps you from shuffling forward, tucking yourself into his body and promising him that you’ll never see him as anything short of incredible.

“See?” Bakugou’s voice shatters into another wave of jagged pieces with every longing look you give him, tossing his arms in the air to show his defeat, “And then you go and do shit like this, where you look at me like I put the fuckin’ sun in the sky every morning.”

He’s wheezing the words out now, manic movements jerking his arms and shoulders, praying that his palms might go off in the middle of this club so you both can get booted out and forced to go home. Maybe then he can break through the barrier of how he has been feeling to show you why he’s treated you like a child.

“How the hell am I supposed to live up to this pillar of greatness you’ve made me out to be? This perfect image of me you have in your mind is a lie,” Bakugou is begging you for an answer with his gestures. His hands reach towards you, never touching, eyebrows cocked upward as his eyes search your face for a secret message hidden beneath your skin. “You think that I can do no wrong, that I’ll always be your hero. And now that I’ve fucked that up, and you still look at me the same exact way, how am I supposed to live with that? With being a fraud?”

Bakugou blinks and two identical tear droplets seep over the corners of his lids, tracking down his cheeks as he gasps for air, “I-I can’t help it when you look at me like I have all the answers when I-I can’t even fuckin’ figure out how I-”

You cover him like sunlight, warm and safe. He feels your mouth against his, your hands on his face and chest and its like you’ve pulled him from where he was floating midair back down to the ground again. Bakugou’s body is flush between your torso and the wall, either side of him pressed into something. He is hot, too hot, like his body temperature has skyrocketed. Sweat trickles down his spine, sticking his shirt to his shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” you murmur as you part from him.

Your nose brushes against his, the bow of your lips still touching when you speak, “I haven’t been very considerate of you. I was too wrapped up in the way I was feeling that I didn’t stop to consider how it has been affecting you.”

You palm at his face, fingertips fawning over his cheek bones and brows and temples. Bakugou’s jaw is quivering, hands still dormant by his sides, flexed until his palms are splotched red with effort. You run your hand up from his chest to his shoulder, kneading the heel into his muscles to try and relax his body.

“Katsuki,” you call to him. “Look at me.”

And he listens.

The trail of your fingertips on his forearm feels like gasoline, trickling down his skin slowly but surely, making its way to his palms where his skin will act like a detonator. Bakugou grinds his teeth together as he tries to stay focused in on your face, the effort from it all makes the vein on his forehead protrude, thudding profusely beneath his skin.

“Take me home.”

--

The walk up the stairs to your door is tense, quiet.

Bakugou turns the key into the lock, the door opening with a gentle click. The two of you step inside, your bags strewn on the countertop and your shoes kicked off near the mat. Your hands wring in front of you as he faces away, the only visible thing being his backside.

“I don’t deserve you.”

The words take you by surprise, shaking you to your core. You stumble backward, hand clutched over your heart when it starts to sting, “Wh-Why do you think-”

“Do you know what it’s like to have people’s lives put into your hands, and then to fuck it all up?” Bakugou turns to look at you, hands glowing with the threat of his quirk, “To put the one person you care about more than fucking breathing into danger?”

His jaw quivers, “You didn’t see the look in your eyes when he was putting you through that shit. You were looking to me for help and I was fucking welded to a goddamn wall!”

You reach out to press your fingertip into the center of his palm, diffusing the built-up nitroglycerin in the crevices of his skin. Bakugou’s shoulders shudder, his eyes widening at your touch. You force a smile, but it does not reach your eyes, and he notices.

“Hey,” you call to him, your other hand drifting up to cup his cheek, trying to turn him towards you. “Stop that. Look at me.”

Bakugou’s eyes stop flitting around and focus on you, connecting your gazes. He looks frightened again, like a scared child. All you want is to hold him tight and put him back together again until he feels whole.

You push yourself up onto your toes, nudging your nose over his cheek slowly. You’re taken aback when you feel his hesitant touch dredge over your hip, thumb just beneath your top. It’s the most intimate feeling you’ve received from him in weeks, and it sends every atom of you on high alert. Your spine tingles as you stutter-step forward until you’re pressed into him.

Your breath hitches at his closeness, fanning out over him in a wave of heat that makes him shiver. You feel your heart ready to explode from within the confines of your chest, begging to be let free as it tries to claw its way out of your ribcage. You can’t look away from him, it’s like he’s turned into a magnet for your body.

As you graze over his chest with your other hand, the one against his cheek brushes up into his hair to card through the blonde strands. Your thumb catches against the stubble of his undercut just behind his pierced ears and it makes you smile, remembering the conversation where you coerced him into getting the new haircut in the first place. And now he can’t go a couple weeks without getting it shaped back up.

“Kiss me,” you plead, your touch like that of a siren, calling him deeper into the water, “please, Katsuki.”

In spite of him suffocating you mentally and situationally, you know that he’s been distant physically. It wasn’t hard to realize the shift in affections, especially since you’ve grown accustomed to his wayward glances and casual touches. Once he started to withdraw from you, you began to worry but your own anxiety wound so tightly around your body that it drowned out any other inhibitions that might have drawn you closer to asking questions. Bakugou has never been one to bare his emotions anyway.

Every morsel of him wants to dive headfirst into your waters, to drink you in through his nose and mouth until it is only the essence of you that remains. And yet there is something holding him back, like strings attached to his shoulders, forcing him to stay still.

It is that very look in your eyes right now that keeps him at bay. The reality that you’ve not tainted your view of him makes his stomach churn. You should hate him for letting Awase take advantage of you. You should want to slap him across the face and punch him in the gut. You should want to rip your fingers into his chest and slay him where he stands, cutting a gaping hole where his heart once was, filling it with a black ooze that might represent your disdain and disappointment.

Anything other than this overwhelming prideful look gleaming in your eyes that tells him he could do no wrong.

The sight of it brings tears to his eyes and he has to look away, the weight of it all too stifling as he attempts to breathe again. Bakugou struggles with oxygen, feeling lightheaded as you stand so near to him.

“Look at me,” you beg of him, your own voice sounding raw. You swallow every possible reticence you might have in this moment and focus all of your energy on him, “I love you, okay? There’s nothing you could do to change that, Katsuki. Nothing, so-”

You’re cut off mid-sentence by the familiar feel of his lips, warm and full against your mouth. He has captured you entirely, his hands on your face as he steps in closer to you. You shudder with tears at the sensation of him kissing you for the first time in weeks. A wash of warmth seeps through your body, starting at your head and curling around your spin until it has reached your toes. You feel lightheaded at it all, so wrapped up in him that you can’t focus on anything else.

Bakugou’s arms wrap around your shoulders, his body squatted in front of you to push himself closer into every crevice of available skin. You dip your hands beneath his top, the pads of your fingers mapping out the contours of his muscular frame.

“Fuck,” he murmurs between your teeth, your tongue catching the word by lapping against his gums.

His hands find your backside, squeezing the supple skin like his life depends on it. You moan, rolling your hips forward. Your mind is foggy, your entire being in a haze, at the passionate way his hands obsess over your body.

When he taps your hips with his thumbs, you know what it means. You leap upward, his forearms catching your thighs to wrap you around his waistline. You don’t break away from kissing him. You’re not sure after this if he might retreat back into himself, so you full well intend on milking him for all that he’s worth in every aspect of the word.

The next thing you feel is the cool sheets beneath your steaming backside, sweat making your shirt cling to your body. Your hand sifts through Bakugou’s hair and he nips at your lower lip, relishing in the way the moans fall freely from your tongue.

He sits back on his thighs, tugging his shirt over his head, when he mumbles, “Shirt. Off. Now.”

The momentary burst of authority makes your cunt clench beneath the lace of your underwear. Your eyes go wide, but you do not hesitate to pull the offending fabric from your upper half. Bakugou has settled between your thighs when you can finally see him again. He makes quick work of your bra, flinging the garment across the room carelessly before swooping in to begin sucking at your chest.

He tweaks one piqued nipple between his thumb and forefinger, the other side of you preoccupied with his mouth. You whine, bucking your hips upward. Even through the thick fabric of his jeans, you can make out the impression of his bulging erection. The thought of getting to feel his dick again makes you keen, reaching up to thread your hand into his hair, the other palm digging fingernails into the thick, corded muscle of his shoulders.

“Damn, Princess,” he murmurs as he releases your nipple with a pop. “Such a good girl for me.”

Your breath shudders out of your lungs, fanning over his hair to make the strands shake in the darkness of your bedroom. You wrap your legs around his midsection to try and grind yourself up into his clothed length.

Bakugou slips his hand beneath your shorts, unbuttoning them swiftly as his middle finger finds your clit immediately. You can’t help it when your whole body goes rigid, the once lost sensation of his hands on your lower half returning in a blinding wave of white-hot pleasure.

“Please, Katsuki,” you force yourself to look him in the eyes even though you think you’re seeing stars, “I just want you, please. I want you in me.”

He’s hesitant when he looks down at you, eyes stuttering over which of your features to focus on first. The tip of his middle finger is brushed up against your slick folds, not delving in just yet. Your chest is heaving, eyes clouded with the threat of tears while you palm at him, desperate for every inch of his skin to be mapped out beneath your fingerprints.

“You have me,” he whispers, cracking voice barely audible. He nods, slipping his finger slowly between the walls of your cunt, “You have me, baby.”

As he starts to coil his finger within you, the squelching sound of his digit and your pussy echoing off the walls, he looks you directly in the eyes. His free hand is near your head but you wish he’d touch you with it, your body insatiably itching for his next pass. You lick your lips and go to beg for him again, unwilling to sit through the torture of his fingers, but he stops you with a kiss.

“Let me do this, let me make you feel good.”

You are speechless, left only with a gaping mouth that is claimed by his tongue. He licks at your teeth and cheeks, whining for you to reciprocate while his finger still pumps in and out of you, knuckle dragging in a tantalizing way against your smooth walls. You hold him as tightly as you can by the neck, keeping him anchored to you, the fear of him running away from you again settling like a lead anchor in your belly.

It doesn’t take long for him to push you to the edge of your first orgasm. You’ve been denied of him for so long that you’re sure you could come undone under any circumstance at this point. But still, his thick digits curled up in the heat of you, coaxing forth the first white-hot wave of pleasure makes your body shudder.

“Katsuki,” you pant, rolling your hips in time with his finger’s thrusts.

The coil within your stomach starts to bunch up, so you clench around his finger. You whine, throwing your head back, jaw hung slack. Bakugou kisses up the column of your neck, “C’mon, baby, I know you can do it for me, yeah? You’re so pretty when you come apart.”

His encouragement is what throws you over the edge. You’ve missed the sound of his timbre coaching you into orgasm after orgasm. You cry out, your voice breaking, and your hips fall slack against the mattress as the pleasure digs into you. The silvery strands of your slick coat his fingers, but he doesn’t part from you until he’s sure that he’s lured every last whimper from your lips, every last wash of arousal from your hips.

You have him by the neck, digging your fingers in to pull him back towards your mouth for another drawn out kiss. Your nose and teeth clash, but it doesn’t matter because he’s here and he’s got his hands on you. The way your body sings at his caress does not go unnoticed by him, or rather he relishes in it, basking in the sound of your wanton moans and the reaction of your begging limbs.

“Please, Katsuki,” you’re grabbing for him as he pulls away. Your fingers desperately cling to his skin, digging in and forcing half-moon prints into the tanned flesh, “I need you, please.”

The words throw him back to those moments in the alleyway when your eyes screamed the phrase you’re speaking now. He was powerless to help you then, but he can be the one to save you now.

Bakugou stands to his feet and shuffles out of his pants, his cock throbbing between his thighs when he pulls away his briefs. You try to tug down your shorts but your body is so weak and you can’t force your brain to communicate with your extremities, so you end up pouting, hot tears clouding your eyes in frustration.

“Hey,” he nudges his nose over your cheek before kissing you long enough for you to forget about your predicament. Your body molds to his intentions, hands finding his undercut to sift through the short hair there, his skin providing you with some sense of calm despite the raging emotions thudding like thunder in your brain.

He gently tugs down your shorts, peeling them from your ankles before depositing them on the floor. Bakugou runs his hand down his cock, using his bead of pre-come and what remains of your arousal on his hand to lubricate the skin. You’re salivating at the sight of him, inflamed red cockhead ready to split your cunt wide open. You’ve missed the familiarity of him inside of you, and your body notices because despite just having a spectacular orgasm that should have put you to bed for some time, your pussy flutters as a new wave of slick trickles down to the sheets.

The tip of his cock opens your pussy up enough that you’re keening forward, pleading to take more of him with the canting of your hips. You whimper out beseeching words, eyes searching his face as your hands try to find purchase on his shoulders. He shakes his head, brushing his thumb over your cheek, “Hush, baby. I promise I’m gonna take care of you, okay?”

The duality of his words is not lost on you.

Your jaw hangs open slightly, eyes wide as you look up at him. Bakugou grips the headboard with one hand, the other guiding his cock into your heat. If you look close enough, you can see the threat of glassy tears washing over his pretty red irises, making them look like little jewels in the moonlight filtering through your bedroom windows.

“Katsuki,” you whimper his name like a prayer as he slowly sheaths himself between your folds. He grunts when the base of his cock meets the lips of your pussy, eyelids fluttering somewhere between open and shut at the sensation.

He drops his head, gritting his teeth, “Fuck, I missed you.”

A relieved, broken laugh shakes your throat, the smile left behind making Bakugou see stars. You palm at his chest, “I missed you too, so much.”

The two of you have still been together every day, even sleeping in the same bed, and yet you’ve been so distant it was heartbreaking. You feel the shards of your shattered heart slowly piecing back together with each thrust he throttles into you, his hips slamming into your thighs.

It’s intense, but somehow graceful. Bakugou is not just ramming his cock into you for the sake of doing it, but he’s proving to you with every stroke of him that he’s never leaving your side again. He’s gripping the headboard so hard that his nails are leaving scratches, but you’re more focused with the tantalizing snap of his hips, the drag of his cock and those prominent veins as they stimulate your pussy even further.

His jaw quivers, hands white knuckling as he clutches the headboard even harder, picking up his pace to start building that starburst in your belly. He’s unwilling to let his hands go near you now that he’s got himself sheathed completely.

He doesn’t deserve every part of you, not yet.

Bakugou’s chest twists as he realizes he hasn’t earned his honor back; he hasn’t won the prize of feeling your skin under the sensitive pads of his fingertips while he’s fucking into you with his aching cock.

His breath stutters, heart clenching within the confine of his ribs, at the sight of you, your irises focused on only him. Your pupils are blown wider with each thrust, black swallowing the color of your irises as you reach that peak subservient headspace. His hips move slow but with purpose, his cock pulsing within your walls as you clamp down on him.

Snapping his hips up into you, the heat of it all starts to overwhelm him and he can’t breathe. The mix of your warm skin and the absolute adoration held for him in your eyes is too stimulating once you tighten your cunt around him, trapping his dick in your heat.

“Fuck, baby,” he whimpers, stilling his hips as his nails screech against the headboard.

Your hands are on him in an instance, exploring his chest and shoulders. You lick your lips and force your ass to stay put on the bed, breathing heavy through your lips. You swallow and your throat bobs, only proving further to him how absolutely enamored with him you appear to be.

“Katsuki,” you whisper into the void, cheeks warming with a blush.

Bakugou shakes his head and with the ferocity that he’s gripping the headboard, he wonders if your nailbeds can bleed. He bites down harshly on his lower lip, listening to your pleading calls for a moment too long before responding, “I-I don’t-”

He can’t form coherent sentences, not when he’s buried to the hilt inside of you and you’re gazing up at him like he’s just gotten back from hanging the moon. He squints hard, eyes filling up with tears, “I can’t, fuck.”

“Hey,” your breathless voice catches him in midair, anchoring him back from the dull hallucination that he could never find his way back to you. You reach up to gently press your palm onto his cheek, the cooling touch of your hands doing enough to dispel some of the heat on his cheeks. You push away the sweaty locks of blonde hair sticking to his forehead so you can see his eyes in their full clarity.

Katsuki’s chin wobbles as he looks down at you, forcing his eyes to stay trained in on your face no matter how much he wants to look away. He still doesn’t believe he deserves that look you hold for him within your gaze; the way you tell him that he’s nothing short of a pillar of strength in your mind with a simple look is absolutely baffling.

“Hey,” you call again, tender tone striking a chord in his heart.

Your thumb brushes underneath his eyes, the height of his cheekbones, and you smile at his fragility. Bakugou’s eyes flit around to everything but you, overactive and unable to focus on you when you’re looking at him like he’s painted the stars in the night sky.

His conscience berates him as he lays with his cock buried deep into your pussy, his hips flush with yours, the doubt kicking him in the ribs to remind him that he must be nothing short of a piece of shit – how could he let you fall into someone else’s hands? How could he be so careless? How could he-

“Katsuki,” you rub your hands over his face once more, patiently pulling him from the recesses of his toiling mind, “Come back to me.”

Bakugou’s pupils dilate but somehow you manage to bring his attention back around to your face, connecting your gazes once more. You are struggling to maintain your composure between his cock pulsing within you and the lack of his hands on your skin, your body stimulated but still wanting, but you whimper the words, “Will you kiss me?”

In that simple sentence, Bakugou realizes that he could never truly run from you.

Tears drip down from his cheeks onto your neck, pooling at the little cavity created by your collarbones. You smile up at him, brushing at the droplets as they drip down from his eyelids, cradling his face as he makes the decision to start running back to you instead of sprinting away.

“I love you,” he chokes out the words before claiming your lips with his searing hot kiss.

Your hands dip into the curves of his hips, prodding him to move forward while your lips sink deeper into his. Bakugou groans at the sensation, eyes rolling behind his closed lids, and slowly his palms find your body.

It’s almost like the first time he touched you, his fingertips searching every inch of available skin as if it were new to him. He rolls his thumbs over your ribs, counting each one under his breath as he fucks into you slowly. You whimper when he bites your lower lip, your jaw slack as he starts a biting path of kisses down from your chin to your earlobe.

“Katsuki,” your toes curl when he bottoms out within you, the tip of his cock brushing that delicate, spongy spot at the back of your core. Your nails drag salaciously down his shoulders, drawing little beads of blood in their wake.

“Fuck,” he groans, biting down harshly on your neck. He chokes on a sob before licking and kissing your collarbones, “I love you.”

Bakugou is fucking into you steadily now, his hips slamming into you at just the right angle that the vein running along the underside of his dick drags against your folds. You clamp down on his cock when you feel it begin to twitch again, his cockhead brushing your cervix. He’s sniffling, breath catching at the sound, “I love you so goddamn much. I don’t fucking deserve you.”

He’s overcome with emotion but it only spurs him forward faster. His hips slam mercilessly into you, every rut telling you what he cannot coherently say with words. And you accept his wordless confessions with the tightness of your core, the openness of your eyes.

You respond in fervor, your lips singing his praises as you feel the beginnings of another orgasm curling into a hot fire in the pit of you. It’s like lava has dripped down every vein in your body, lighting your skin on fire with its proverbial heat. You whine, your back arching in the perfect way for his mouth to latch onto your pert nipple.

“Katsu’, please, fill me up,” you whimper, palming at his injured back, finding scars and wounds alike, “I want your come, won’t you come in me?”

He’s nodding around your nipple, affirming you non-verbally, but the gentle tug of his teeth makes you whine again. You are completely distraught with the pounding of his cock into your tight, wet heat, the obscene sounds reverberating off of the walls only to bounce back at you like an echo.

“So fuckin’ pretty, baby,” he grunts, hot tears mixing with the saliva that covers your breast, “such a good girl for me. Takin’ me so well. Gonna take this load?”

You can’t help the way you nod ferociously, pleading with him through both words and actions. You whine, a shuddering of your throat making the sound much more desperate than you intended, “Please, Katsuki. I just want you to stuff me full, I want to be full of you.”

The last time your cunt was full, it was with another man’s seed.

Thinking about it makes your tongue turn heavy and your stomach sour. You grit your teeth and the scent of ashen sweetness fills your nostrils, taking over every thought you’d had previously. You can’t linger your memories on the way something made you feel before, you will destroy your mind and your pride.

All you can focus on is scrubbing yourself clean with Katsuki.

He washes over you like a soothing balm, the heat of his body burning away any trace of anything else from any time before this moment now. Every one of your senses are overwhelmed by him – his body, his breath, his scent. You want to drown in him, only fulfilled through his means for the rest of your days, to dive headfirst into his pain and break through until it is only the two of you left.

You lick at him, the familiar taste of his skin settling on your tongue as you lap over flesh and bone. You beg for his hands to touch every inch of you with wanton moans falling from your lips, scrubbing away at the nightmares and replacing them with the fiery blonde with a quipping tongue to match his superpower. If you thought you might could handle it, you’d ask him to blast you with his quirk, to burn away what is left from before until there is only the now.

“I love you,” you whisper into the dark, “It’s only you, Katsuki. Always.”

Bakugou’s mouth is licking at your neck when you feel his hips still, the telltale sign of his release begging to be set free. You palm at his face, forcing him to look you in the eyes because you can’t hold it in anymore, the words making your chest swell until you think you might burst wide open, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

He thrusts forward in time with your chanting, his lower lip quivering with desire as he pumps himself forward at a much faster pace. One of his thumbs reaches down to brush against your clit, stimulating you until you can’t speak in full sentences, let alone syllables. You grit your teeth together and beg for his load, “Fill me up, Katsuki.”

Your words mixed with the tone of your voice are what push him over the edge, the cusp of his release washing over the both of you. Bakugou’s hips stutter, sloppily fucking into you as he chases that blinding pleasure only you can provide him.

“Take it, Princess,” he murmurs into your lips as he claims you by painting your walls white, the final part of you that needed to be wiped clean.

Katsuki’s hands rest on either side of your head as he holds up his quivering body, spent from effort and emotion. You brush your thumb over the tear-stained parts of his face, clearing his skin of what remains from his vulnerable confessions, no evidence left behind. He can start anew, pretend that he never bared his soul to you only mere moments ago.

His eyes never leave you, drinking you in religiously as you blink slowly, irises soaking up every inch of your precious expression. Your pupils shrink enough for him to see the color of your irises clearly, tilting one of his hands upward so he can brush his thumb over the curve of your jaw. Your lids flutter closed at the tender sensation, losing yourself in the feel of his fingerprints.

When you blink your eyes open, you reach upward to tenderly cup his cheeks between the palms of your hands, “I need to tell you something.”

“Yeah?” he leans his head into your hand, nudging his nose over the swell of the heel. Your pulse thuds in his ears and he can tell that you’re nervous based on the pace.

Your voice is thick when you whisper the words that have always rang true in your heart, but you’ve never said aloud because they seemed so pointless. He hears them every day from citizens, begging him for autographs and screaming his name when they see him on patrol. You’ve been afraid that they would fall hollow on deaf ears, futile and empty. But your heart squeezes within your chest and you know that it doesn’t matter anymore. The two of you have learned how precious a few moments can be.

“You’re my hero, Katsuki.”

Your thumbs run back and forth over the skin of his cheeks, seeking out the heat and also providing him what you hope feels like comfort. His cock twitches within the walls of your aching cunt, mouth hung open slightly, just enough for you to see the pink of his tongue.

You nod, sniffling as tears press hot into the back of your eyelids, “You’ve always been my hero, no matter what. Nothing will change that.”

Bakugou kisses the inside of your palm before leaning forward to press his lips to yours. This kiss is slow, deliberate, as if he’s trying to communicate something between the volley of your tongues. You lean up and wrap your arm around his neck when he snakes his hands up the expanse of your back. He’s fully pressed into you now, your bodies flush with one another as he kisses you.

Secret words are passed back and forth from your throat to his, emotion swelling in your chest, begging to burst the longer he’s pressed into you. You curl your hand into his hair, anchoring him to you despite the growing heat billowing in the lack of space between your bodies. Bakugou licks at the seam of your lips and you let him in, you’ll always let him in, your hips rolling forward to meet him at every juncture of your bones.

And that’s how you fall asleep that night, entwined in such a way that neither of you can tell where one of you ends and the other begins.

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a/n: i hope you guys enjoyed it! drop me an ask if you did!!