#fat girl royalty

[angeloftheodd]

Venus On The Half Shell Chair 💋💖

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[bunnis-monsters]

NSFW

warning: yandere behavior, power imbalance, implied baby trapping

Yandere!Ceo that’s a professional business man at work but once he’s behind closed doors he’s your pathetic, needy lover boy.

Kisses your feet and legs, peppering soft kisses all the way up to your thighs.

“My beautiful girl, did you enjoy the roses I sent you?”

He purrs as you play with his hair, looking up at you with those warm golden eyes.

“They were lovely… though the note was a bit… alarming.”

Your lover paused, his fingers on the waistband of the expensive lingerie he bought you.

“… how so, my love? It was the best stationary I could f-“

“I mean the words you wrote… about getting rid of anyone that got in the way of our love.”

He pulled your panties off, placing a wet kiss on your fat, wet cunt. “Oh, that? Don’t take it so seriously, darling. You know I love you, it’s just… a badly worded joke.”

And you quiet down, unable to protest or continue arguing as he’s eating you out. His tongue was on your clit, fingers stretching out your pretty pussy to prep you for his cock.

“M-Mmph…”

He’s quite good at distracting you from his alarming behavior, kissing along your neck while bouncing you on his thick cock. Keeping you on his lap as watching your ass jiggle while he moves you up and down has to be one of his favorite things in the entire world.

“That’s my girl, my baby… just take it, sweet thing…”

And slowly, as your previous friends and past lovers start ghosting you or straight up disappearing, he keeps you occupied with gifts, lavish vacations, and eventually a pregnancy.

Even if you wanted to leave, you couldn’t. Everything you owned was paid for by him, he had all of your information and knowledge of your friends and family…

But who would want to leave when they were treated like royalty? All you had to do was be his sweet housewife and give him all of you attention~

——————

YANDERE TAGLIST: @katerinaval @sunset-214 @avalordream @atransmuter @icommitwarcrimes @bazpire @anglingforlevels @kinshenewa @pasteldaze @unforgettablewhvre @yoongiigolden @murder-hobo @leiselotte @misswonderfrojustice @dij-ology @lollboogurl @h3110-dar1in9 @aliceattheart @mssmil3y @spicyspicyliving @namjoons-t1ddies @izarosf1833 @healanette @lem-hhn @spufflepuff @zyettemoon1800 @exodiam @vexillum-moeru @imperfectlyperfectprincess1 @enchantedsylveon @readeryn68 @danielle143 @kittenlover614 @annavittoria-mm @makimamybelovedwife @midromiell @toocollectionchaos-universe-blog @fruk-you-usuk-fans @wil10wthetree @hammerhead96-blog @slightlyusedfloormat @bubblez-blop @sunshineangel-reads @heroneki-neko @soapybabyboop @sandramalikstyles-blog @anonymouskiwi

[ellecdc]

Hii, love your work. Can you please do a poly!marauders were slytherin reader feels insecure because she got jealous ran she is not use to it as she is consider slithering royalty and all. Is okay if you don’t. Take care <3<3

thanks for requesting lovie!!

poly!marauders x fem slytherin!reader CW: hurt/comfort, insecurity & slight jealousy, fluff

You felt ridiculous. How could you have been so naïve? How could you have thought this would leave you feeling any other way than you were feeling right now?

You watched as Sirius threw his head back and let out a boisterous laugh, his neck on full display as his hair fell behind his shoulders. He looked beautiful like this – completely serene in his joy. James was laughing too; his eyes scrunched closed as he leaned into Remus’ side, teeth shining so bright against his beautifully tanned skin. Remus had a wonderfully mischievous smirk on his face as he looked on at Sirius, pulling James further into his side before firing off some no doubt witty remark that you couldn’t hear from where you were standing. It was met with another round of laughter.

You don’t know what the joke was, you don’t know what was so funny. You’re not sure you want to know anyway; feeling sick at the sight of the boys surrounded by Gryffindor girls.

It wasn’t the girls that bothered you; you liked them – a lot - and you hated that you liked them. They were sweet and funny and easy going and so not you. 

It was the easy familiarity that the boys had with them – the inside jokes, the years of having lived in the same tower, the friendships that fully preceded your relationship with the boys. 

You could never manage Lily’s quick-witted comebacks. You could never compare to Marlene’s boisterous and colourful storytelling. You could never be Mary’s easy confidence in the group. 

You’d never feel that comfortable, that casual, that at ease.

You felt like nothing.

Perhaps you were nothing...at least up here. You were all but royalty in the dungeons, but your notoriety didn’t follow you up to the Gryffindor tower.

You were such a fool.

You quickly turned on your heel and headed back the way you came. You’d only been to Gryffindor tower once before – and it was in the middle of the night after a party in the room of requirement. The boys had said they would leave the portrait open for you to join them after you finished tutoring the first years in Transfiguration. Perhaps you should have known better.

Perhaps you should have known better.

Things were different in the light of day. You were different in the light of day. Certainly, they’d see that – they’d all see it. You were a fraud, getting by on borrowed time. 

You should have known better.

You were waiting for the moving staircase when you heard your name being called.

“Hey Princess! Where’re ya headed?” James greeted as he caught up to you.

Your shoulders began to migrate up to your ears, embarrassed at getting caught sneaking off. 

“Erm, I was just headed to my dorm, actually.” You admitted shyly. You felt even more guilty when you saw James’ face fall slightly.

“You didn’t want to hang out with us?” He teased, but you couldn’t help but notice the slight anxiety in his voice, looking like he was trying to stop himself from reaching out to you.

“There you are, gorgeous!” Sirius called from down the hall as he approached with Remus – no doubt having chased after you more slowly than James had on Remus’ account. 

“Well? Come on then.” Remus said plainly as he held his hand out – for you to take or for you to hand him your book bag, you weren’t sure.

“Uhm, I-”

“She said she was heading back to her dorm.” James interjected.

Sirius scoffed. “Fat chance babe, you promised us a date! Come on, the girls are waiting for you.”

“For me?” You asked incredulously.

Remus seemed tired of holding his hand out for you, so he moved to take your bag from your grasp and pushed you into Sirius’ side who quickly hooked his arm in yours.

“’Course! They love hanging out with you. We told them they could hang with us for five minutes only though – then we get you all to ourselves.” He said shoving his nose into your jaw before finishing his sentence with a kiss to your cheek.

“I didn’t know they cared for me at all.” You admitted, more to yourself than to anyone else.

Remus hummed as he moved to walk on your other side, his hand not currently holding your book bag safely enveloped in James’. “Is that why you were running away before?”

You felt like you were going to melt into the stone floor out of pure shame “I wasn’t running...” You huffed.

Sirius scoffed at you again. “Sure; you never run, and James doesn’t strut. Come on dollface, why were you running from us?” 

“I... I wasn’t running from you.”

Remus nudged his shoulder gently against yours, forcing you to sway listlessly further into Sirius’ side. “Did you get a little too caught up in your own head again?”

Honestly, the ground could swallow you up at this point, thank you very much – you both loved and hated that these boys could read you like the back of a potions textbook. 

“I guess.” 

“Sweetheart.” James cooed at you before he stepped out in front of you, forcing everyone to come to a stop. “We talked about this, yeah? You’re supposed to tell us when you’re feeling like this.” He punctuated his words by rubbing your upper arms and bending down to force you to make eye contact with him.

“I’m sorry.” You admitted, feeling embarrassingly close to tears.

“We don’t want you to be sorry, love. We want you to talk to us, that’s all. We care about you an awful lot – and so do the girls. We want you to feel comfortable with us.” Remus added softly. You groaned in response.

“But I can’t!” You stated perhaps more sharply than the moment called for. “I can’t.” You amended more softly.

“Can’t what, babes?” Sirius encouraged.

“I can’t be like you guys. Or your friends. I can’t be quick and funny, or loud and exciting, or confident and mellow. You are all the same, and I’m just...” you trailed off pathetically at the feeling of a tear fall from your lash line. 

“Oh, my love.” James cooed softly as he moved to wipe the offending tear from your face with his thumb.

“We don’t want you to be like us or them, dolly. Did you ever think about that?” Sirius questioned. You moved your dejected gaze to him. “Maybe we like you because you’re not like us; simply because you are the way you are.”

“I love how calm and collected you are all the time. Whenever the room feels too loud – I look for you.” James admitted.

“And I love how you’re always listening, even if you’re not actively participating in the conversation. I know you have smarter things to add to the conversation than the rest of us do, but you’re just as happy to let us flounder before one of us relents and asks you for your opinion.” Sirius said with a smirk.

“And I love how you’ve never once let your anger dictate how you behave. I’d go as far as to say you’ve never been angry, but I know everyone gets angry. So that just tells me that you are incredibly introspective, and face things with a clear mind.” Remus added.

“None of us are like that – none of us could ever be you.” James concluded with a gentle squeeze of your shoulder. 

You allowed their words to sink in before taking a shuddering breath and returning your gaze to them. “I’m sorry for running earlier.”

James offered you a lopsided smile. “Don’t be �� just tell us next time, yeah?”

You quickly agreed with a nod of your head, and he moved in to press his lips to yours.

“We better hurry.” Sirius said, squeezing your hand twice in his. “Marlene’s dying to hear your stories about the silly little first years from your tutoring group. She couldn’t stop talking about how funny your stories were last time.”

Perhaps you had no reason to feel insecure at all. 

[sohnric]

a brief inquiry into online relationships – k. sunwoo

pairing: kim sunwoo x fem! reader

genre: enemies to lovers au, internet best friends au. friends to lovers au. gamer! sunwoo and gamer! reader. fluff, comedy. sunwoo has a big fat crush and is a bitchless loser but is also simultaneously being very annoying and mean sometimes:(

wc: 20k

warnings: swearing, sexual innuendos/jokes/flirting, the reader is referred to with she/her pronouns and called a girl! i call league players virgins :/ (and im right). certain parts are really chat heavy (but what do you expect from an internet best friend au am i right). the reader is said to have dyed hair! I wrote this with a friend in mind yall just get to read it 😔

there's only one person kim sunwoo treasures the most in the whole world, and that person is his internet best friend. there's also only one person kim sunwoo hates with a burning passion, and that person is you. well, imagine his surprise when he finds out... they are the same person.

playlist: fruit roll ups - waterparks / royalty - enhypen

I wrote and dedicate this fic to @csenke 🩷 happy birthday best friend, I hope you like your little present. I dont like being sappy in public, but do know that I love u the absolute most.

a/n: a HUGE thank you to @from-izzy for beta reading and helping me out with this fic so much, listening to me ramble and cry and hyping me up izzy, it means a LOT. thank you @sanaxo-o for beta reading a bit as well. 🫶🏻 ive wanred to write this fic for literally years so im glad it is finally out hihi.

The first time Kim Sunwoo has ever been accused of having a crush on a girl he hasn’t even met in real life yet was on October 11th, 2023. It was a few months after meeting the said girl online through a Minecraft server and talking to her during the night over a Discord call, not being able to fall asleep after and coming to class looking like a zombie from the deprivation of relaxation. After he said the story to his friend Changmin, he got laughed at and teased– all because he said he didn’t want to hang up on his online best friend yet, and she was so full of energy, and Sunwoo wanted to know what she had to say because she was so adorable gushing over how much she loved Paw Patrol as a kid and how she got some magnets for her fridge from her local grocery store and put Skye right in the middle, where she keeps her shopping list. 

Of course, Sunwoo refused this accusation. He does not have a crush on his online best friend– the girl he hasn’t even met in real life yet. He doesn’t like her, because let’s be real, he doesn’t even know what she looks like. Navigating the boundaries of an online friendship was already hard as it was for the boy– was he oversharing? Was he being too much, too annoying at times? – so asking for the girl’s socials outside of Discord or begging for a simple selfie in the chat is far away from the things he’s comfortable saying out loud to her. 

And Sunwoo can’t be into her– because he doesn’t even know her that well. He doesn’t even know where she lives or if the name she’s given him online is her legal name. What he does know, though, is that she’s the same age as him, she’s funny and pretty fucking cool, she has obscure interests like the Spiderman movies or collecting albums of her favorite kpop artists, and her voice is nice over the speakers of his laptop when the two of them call and play Minecraft together in the late hours of the night.

That’s not enough to develop a crush on someone, right?

Right…?

The first time Kim Sunwoo starts to question his own feelings for his friend is also, coincidentally, October 11th 2023. See, he might say that he’s not as dull as one would think after looking at him, but after the conversation he had with his best friend in the morning, something started to click. (Mainly because he just couldn’t stop feeling the blush creeping onto his cheeks, bashfulness filling his composure. Why is it so hard to deny the obvious?)

In the late hours of the night, Sunwoo logs onto the Minecraft server and walks around the world he’s created. He is on a mission of cheering his online friend up– she said something about an exam going terribly wrong in his Discord DM’s just a few hours ago, and although he tried his best to cheer the girl up over messages, he thinks he has to go an extra mile to remind her that life is not as rude and that she’s loved even when she feel like a disappointment. (Just the sentiment of the wording in his head is suggesting that he’s trying to stay oblivious to his own feelings– there is no doubt he is failing, though.)

He checks the people online in the server, noticing she’s not there yet– as he expected, since the girl usually logs on only a few minutes before midnight– which assures him that there is still time to execute his little plan. With a pep to his step, Sunwoo’s character moves through the terribly half-assed house he’s built (that his friend teases him for) and opens  one of the chests in his underground storage area. After taking everything he prepared earlier– for whatever reason, he’s not sure (or just trying to deny the obvious, once again)– he skips outside of the wooden building and runs towards the portal he built leading to her house last week. 

Once she saw the portal outside of her house, she asked him about it. To the question of why he wants easy access to her house at all times, he replied that it’s so he can rob her when she least expects it. Her and him both know she’s not the one keen on mining, so there’s not really much to steal in the first place, but to Sunwoo’s surprise (and relief), his friend dropped the topic quickly, moving on to the next one.

After the vision of his character finally clears and he is left standing right outside of her house– which is a stunning piece of architecture, by the way– he looks around for a bit to find the best place for his little offering.

He settles on the place by the front door of her house and gets to executing his little surprise. Opening the inventory of his character, Sunwoo takes out a bone meal and uses it on the grass blocks next to the door, making all sorts of flowers grow next to her humble abode. When he’s satisfied with the colored petals blooming in their digital world, the boy gets out the pink wool and digs into the remaining dirt blocks on the ground, replacing them with the rosy cubes and shaping them into a small, but telling heart. 

He stands back and admires his work for a bit, laughing at the ridiculous actions he caught himself doing. Sometimes he gains self-awareness in the weirdest of situations, and this is surely one of them– he prays his friend doesn’t log on in this exact moment. He would have no other choice but to jump out of his window and kill himself, he thinks.

Still, he follows up with his initial idea and places a chest next to the heart, filled with emerald and diamonds that he gathered over the last week. He worked hard on them and she kept whining that she still didn't have any– and although he’d like to keep them, he figures he can just get more the next time he’s alone in here, mining. 

A cherry on top is placed next to all of this– a wooden sign that he types “What if we put our Minecraft beds next to each other? xx” on, against all his thoughts telling him otherwise. 

This might be a terrible, terrible idea, he thinks. But the thought of making his best friend smile fuels the boy. Taking one last look at his masterpiece, he snickers. Yeah, Sunwoo. Maybe there really is no getting out of those allegations. Maybe he won’t tell about what he did to Changmin– and he’s lucky the boy doesn’t play Minecraft and has no way of finding out by playing on the same server as the two of you.

Sunwoo logs out of the game, sitting back in his chair. After scrolling through his Instagram for a bit, he hears the familiar sound of an incoming Discord call waking him up from the doom, making him breathlessly accept and wait for the girl’s voice to come out of his headphones, making him feel excited and on the tips of his toes.

“Ya, Steve, was it you who made that cute altar in front of my house?” she asks, making his heart skip a beat.

“Depends,” he hums, “did you like it?”

Every Tuesday afternoon, 6 o’clock sharp, Kim Sunwoo takes the role of the head of the Video Gaming club at his university. It’s quite an easy job, he’d say– since all his responsibilities lay in meeting up with the members of the club in an internet café once a week, playing a video game of their liking– and he also appreciates the fact that he has something to put onto his CV. The extra points towards graduation are also good, and so in reality, he has nothing to complain about– he likes video games and he also likes socializing.

There is just one thing he hates about the Video Gaming club, and that is the fact that Y/N Y/L/N, his best friend’s ex-girlfriend, managed to somehow infiltrate herself into the circle.

Now, you and Ji Changmin dated in the early stages of high school. The two of you met in Science class, and although Changmin wasn’t the smartest when it came to Chemistry, he still managed to make himself your designated helper in all experiments, just to make himself close to you. That slowly worked and the two of you started dating– for 2 months, that is– before you realized Sunwoo’s poor best friend wasn’t who you were looking for and you broke up with him, starting a new relationship with Park Sunghoon, the handsome ice skater from the private school downtown just 2 weeks later.

Changmin cried for three days straight and then one more day after he found out he was replaced, and since then, Kim Sunwoo has decided that he hates your guts– because no one makes his best friend sad. 

Every Tuesday afternoon, 6 o’clock sharp, you waltz into the internet café with your friend Aeri clinging to your side, both of you laughing about whatever you found amusing that day. The sound of your laughter is insufferable to Sunwoo’s ears and the sight of your dyed hair makes his stomach churn with acid– everything about you angers the boy, makes him all alert of your presence. For some reason, he can’t control his anger around you– everything you do infuriates him, makes him wish you were anywhere but in the same room as him.

Can’t you read the room? Do you not realize you’re not welcome here? This is Sunwoo’s territory, and for some reason, he thinks you should respect it. You haven’t spoken to each other in over 4 years, but that doesn’t mean he forgot about everything. Maybe you just keep showing up because you know he hates your guts– you do it out of spite.

Kim Sunwoo won’t have that, though. If there’s something about him that he makes perfectly known in the Video Gaming club, it’s that he is awfully competitive– and for once, he tries to use this quality of his for something good: getting you out of the club.

Because he might be the head of the club, sure, but that still doesn’t give him the permission to kick you out of it for no apparent reason. 

He figures making your life a living hell for the entire hour or two you’re in his presence every week would surely be sufficient enough. Surely, one day, you must have enough.

“There’s someone behind you, dude, watch out–” Intak calls from next to Sunwoo, helping his teammate out. 

Today’s game of choice is CS:GO– too bad for you, Kim Sunwoo is exceptional at shooting games.

He watches his screen and moves his mouse swiftly, shooting the opponent– he thinks it might’ve been Jaehyun or Chan– before they even have a chance at spotting him. His team– Terrorists– are winning by a mile, coincidentally having the best of the best in the group. He’s playing a perfect 5v5 game alongside Intak, Haechan, Yeji and…. and you. 

“Do you even have your screen on, Y/N?” he grunts from behind his computer, glaring at the screen. He notices you not really killing any opponents, and even though he understands that not everyone is going to be the best at every video game that gets played over the course of semester, he’s making sure to trash talk you each and every time you’re even an inch away from perfect.

“Fuck off, I’m trying.”

“Doesn’t seem like it,” he snickers, pointing his gaze towards you only for a split second to watch you roll your eyes at his comment. An annoyed sigh escapes  your throat, making the boy’s veins reek with satisfaction.

“We’re winning anyway, so I don’t get why you’re so pressed about it,” you grunt, tucking your hair behind your ear as you play, momentarily taking your hand off the mouse.

Sunwoo notices your character in his point of view on the monitor– the nickname ‘ceo.Y/N’ shining proudly over the default skin of the terrorist figurine– when a bright, spiteful idea sparks up in his brain. The boy realizes he left the friendly fire option on when assembling the game room, and with that, he’s set on his decision.

You don’t deserve anything nice in Kim Sunwoo’s eyes– which is why he shoots you in the head the first moment he sees you, laughing to himself.

“Yeah, no thanks to you,” he comments as he watches your character drop to the ground.

“What the fuck?! Yo, why did you do that?” you gasp, snapping your head around to point your daggers of eyes onto the boy, frustration dripping off your face. It does nothing to ruin the mood of the satisfied boy, only making him shrug and offer you his brightest smirk.

“You weren’t contributing anything to the game anyway,” he shrugs, “might as well sit this one out, Y/L/N.”

Yes. This one surely will teach you a lesson.

When Kim Sunwoo reaches his room after his shower– at 1 in the morning sharp and feeling too awake for the late hour, since all the hot water ran out due to his roommate’s greediness (curse Eric Sohn’s long ass showers)– he notices a notification shining on his phone in bright light, making him reach for his phone with curiosity. He doesn’t have many friends that would reach out to him at the late hours of the evening, since he talks to most of them during the day anyway, and so even subconsciously, as he reaches for his phone, he expects to see his online best friend’s username pop up in the notification bar.

And he was right– clicking on the Discord notification waiting for him at the top of the screen, he already feels his heart skipping a beat, his insides flowing with immediate warmth despite the cold shower he took just a few minutes ago.

Further shaking out the water out of his hair before plopping onto his bed and reading through the girl’s messages, the boy finds himself smiling at her profile picture. It’s a close up of her Minecraft character standing in front of the little display he put out for her– and he can’t help but feel like this is some sort of a soft launch. Of what, he doesn’t really know– since the two of them are far from dating– but that’s okay. It satisfies him enough. Nobody even really knows it’s him who she’s showing off, but to him, it holds the weight of the whole entire world.

sunpoodle [0:22] – a missed voice call sunpoodle [0:35] – a missed voice call sunpoodle [0:36] – so u dont like me anymore sunpoodle [0:38] – i see how it is sunpoodle [0:48] – everything ok tho? sunpoodle [0:54] – a missed voice call

Squinting at the screen, Sunwoo starts to type out his reply to his friend. Before he has the chance to click send, though, his phone lights up with the incoming voice call from her, leaving him to accept it almost immediately. He hears her voice coming out of his speaker after a few seconds of silence, having his ears perk up and heart beat a little faster.

“Damn, took you long enough,” she hums, making the poor boy chuckle. “I thought you were either dead or ignoring me.”

“I wasn’t,” he replies before settling deeper into his bed, going as far as putting a blanket over him to provide himself the most comfort, “I would never ignore you,” he lets himself speak out, a full body cringe taking over him the second he realizes just how far gone and infatuated he must sound with his friend.

“Oh, okay,” she says, “I was getting kinda worried, though.”

“Worried?”

“Yeah, we didn’t speak at all the whole day,” she replies. And she’s right– Sunwoo was too busy the whole day to text her or check in with her throughout the day. He was working on his assignments with Changmin and Juyeon in the library, and then he had to listen to Eric talk about his crush on the new girl from the café he works at. Before he knew it, it was late in the night and all he wanted to do was shower and go to sleep– his plan was thrown into the bin the moment he got back into his room, though. 

He might have not put his online friend as his priority during the day but if it comes to sacrificing sleep for her, he won’t even think twice.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he mumbles, although something inside of him cheers at the fact that she cares about him enough to want his presence every day.“I was just busy with assignments and socializing.”

“You do that?”

“Strange, isn’t it?” he chuckles, poking fun at himself. There’s no doubt of him being an extrovert, but for the sake of hearing the girl laugh through his speaker– his insides squeezing on themselves with violent tenderness at the sound (what a contradiction)– he is content with simply ignoring the fact.

“What’s up, though?” he asks. “You usually don’t call and I have to pressure you into picking up in some way.”

“That’s not true.”

“Kind of is, when you think about it–”

“I just like to be persuaded,” she hums, making the boy chuckle. 

“Noted,” he says– and it might’ve been just a figure of speech, really, but there is a secret folder inside of his brain that he calls the girl-he-likes-folder, where he keeps all the information and random facts he learns about his friend safely, until he has a chance to use them. “But really, what is it? You seem uneasy,” he notes, making the girl laugh softly on the other end of the line.

There is some shuffling on the other side before he finally hears her voice again. Sunwoo furrows his brows at the ruckus, but he doesn’t mention it– maybe she’s just moving around the room, doing her own things as she talks to him on the phone. It makes his brain wander, though– imagining her cleaning her room, putting things away. Stacking some old papers or throwing stuff into the trash can. The image of his friend is always hazy in his mind– he was never really the most imaginative when it came to stuff he doesn’t know– but he still feels attracted to the girl in ways he can’t explain without sounding absolutely crazy to an outsider’s ear. He has no clear idea of her features– he doesn’t know how long her hair is, what her figure looks like, or what color her eyes are, but he still knows that to him, she’s absolutely beautiful and no reality he could see would break this image he has of her.

The fact that she’s calling him while going on with her life, as if he is an active, real part of it, makes him smile to himself. Every time the girl acknowledges her friendship with him, he feels like he’s on Cloud 9– he doesn’t really know why he needs that validation, though.

“This might sound stupid, but I just wanted to hear your voice,” she says nonchalantly through the speakers of his phone, and with that, Sunwoo is a goner. He feels the world stop turning for a while, his breath hitching in his throat. Something about the girl’s words makes his head spin and thoughts run laps around the walls of his skull– is it just him, or does that sentence sound strangely intimate?

“Why?” he asks on autopilot– because the annoying voice inside of him needs answers. 

“Hm? Oh, I dunno,” she quickly utters out before she makes a sharp turn in the conversation, completely disregarding her previous statement, “did I tell you about that party I’m invited to this weekend?” she asks instead, making the boy shake his head in disbelief and throw his face into his pillow to stop himself from screaming.

“No,” he sighs, “but tell me now.”

“Okay, so–”

The rest of their conversation is drowned out by his thoughts. Don’t get him wrong, he is actively listening to what she has to say– how she doesn’t know what to wear and she’s not sure if she wants to match with her best friend– but he is also subconsciously focused on the fact that the way she talks in her low tone, keeping her voice down to not wake up her roommate next door. It makes the atmosphere that much more sincere and intimate. He finds himself admiring his friend’s excitement and joy, the energy she has when she talks about how her day went and how she can’t stay keeping up with one topic for long– getting lost in the track somewhere along the way, making Sunwoo remind her what she was even talking about in the first place. Everything about the girl is mesmerizing to the boy, and before he has a chance to notice, he’s falling asleep to her rambling on the phone, eyelids heavy in comfort and sleepiness. 

“Are you still there?” she asks, receiving only a soft hum from the boy on the other side. “Am I boring you?”

“No,” he half-whispers, “I’m just comfortable. Keep talking,” he says, hugging his pillow to his chest and putting the phone next to his head. He hears a soft scoff on the other side of the line, a kind, sweet voice lullying him further into dreamland.

“Okay, keep using me as your bed time story, then,” she jokes, a tint of faux offense in her tone, “I’ll disconnect the call when you stop giving me fakely interested hums after every other sentence.”

And with that, Kim Sunwoo falls asleep to his online best friend talking his ear off on a Discord call. How could she ever think that wanting to hear his voice was stupid? He understands– he thinks that perhaps, he’d choose listening to her even over hearing his favorite song.

The idea of teaching you a lesson with his competitive nature is quickly thrown into the bin when the next week comes as the game his friends choose for the afternoon is one that he is not fond of. Why does he not like this game, you may ask? Well, simply put– he is absolutely terrible at it. 

The love for League of Legends is a telling sign of someone’s virginity, though, so Sunwoo thinks he can take pride in the fact that he is not a bitchless loser by playing it in his free time. (Don’t mention the fact that he is a Discord user and currently does not have a girlfriend. He will ignore it for the sake of his reputation.)

“I’ll go bottom,” Intak says as he chooses his champion in the lobby, making Sunwoo huff. He’s not really good at playing the mage, he’s terribly, terribly bad at going jungle, and tanks and fighters are equally as easy for him to play as learning the Pi number by heart (very difficult). Soon enough though, he finds that the rest of the roles are quickly divided in his team, and that leaves him nothing else to do than to just humbly take the responsibility of the middle lane, equipping the only champion he’s played before– Fizz.

With him locking in his character, the image on his monitor morphs into the loading screen, letting him once again scan the names that belong to his team. Having 10 members in the club is easy enough to divide into two teams by 5, which he is thankful for, but the teams are almost always randomly selected– which makes him angry only at times where he gets the obviously weaker players. 

This time around, surrounded by Intak and Yangyang teaming up on the bottom, Soobin taking over the jungle and Yeji resigning on the top lane, Sunwoo is satisfied to see he at least doesn’t share a team with you this time around– because that means he can do everything in his power to make your life a living hell while playing the game.

“Try not to die in the first few seconds, Sunwoo,” Soobin snickers as the game starts and the boy aimlessly moves towards the middle of the map, moving his character with the mouse. Sunwoo only salutes at the taller boy, making him giggle.

“I’ll try not to, boss!”

Sunwoo’s quest in this game is to protect the tower and farm as much as he can– so that destroying the opponent’s tower is easier and opens up the shortest way to the enemy. After seeing how his character moves in the game– don’t make fun of him but after so much time since he last played the game, he’s forgotten– he puts his head into his hands and mourns, noticing that he foolishly chose an assassin. It’s not that they’re bad per se, it’s just that Kim Sunwoo is much better at League of Legends when he has some distance from the opponent. Which, when he wants to attack, is not a feature Fizz awards him with. 

Much to his surprise though, the middle lane seems to be empty. There is no one from the opposite team walking up to him and trying to start combat, and that puts him at ease. Maybe he can do his job right– for at least a few minutes before the tower is damaged enough that the enemy realizes they need to protect it. 

And so clueless Sunwoo enters the circle under the tower, attacking it with the red minions by his side, veins flowing with satisfaction that hey– maybe he will be successful with something in this game. He surely doesn’t need the validation of his team, but look– all he needs is to not embarrass himself in the process of playing this game. His pride is precious to him. 

The talk around the internet café slowly drowns out around him, providing him only a background noise. He doesn’t need to listen to his team’s strategy– he knows he isn’t really included in it, as the weakest link. Hyperfocusing on the game, he almost jumps when two characters suddenly appear from the bushes– not skilled enough, Sunwoo didn’t think to check them when he arrived in the middle of the map– attacking him.

The nicknames aerichandesu and ceo.y/n shine proudly above the characters of Annie and Vi, both of the females cornering him and making him scowl at the screen. You don’t do much damage to him, he notices, but there is something about the way Aeri plays that tells him that he is royally fucked in this game.

Only a few seconds of combat pass before the banner saying First blood appears on the top of the screen, embarrassing him and making the rest of the team laugh at his death. He finally acknowledges that he was tricked, and as the seconds pass of him waiting to be revived, his eyes meet yours from across the room– and oh how he wishes to wipe that smirk off your face.

“As expected,” Soobin chirps from Sunwoo’s right, making the poor boy sigh and cross his arms defensively at his chest.

“They teamed up on me!”

“That’s the point, sweetheart,” Yeji hums from the corner of the room, “you’d know that if you knew how to play.”

“Oh, shut up, you losers…” he grunts as his character revives, making him hurriedly move towards his designated place again, noticing his team’s tower slowly falling apart due to leaving you in there unwatched. 

Once he appears back under his tower, he watches you retract from your place. Sunwoo takes this as his opportunity to show you that one on one, you’re not going to win against him– and so he chimes forward after you, using Fizz’s trident to deal you magic damage over the next couple of seconds. The clicking of his mouse onto your character resonates through the crowded café and the banners showing his teammate’s successful kills do nothing to help him focus on the task at hand– but your health bar is slowly dropping, and that satisfies the male.

“Not so strong without Aeri now, are you?” he teases, watching as you aimlessly start to run away from him, no longer focusing on killing his character.

He doesn’t get a verbal reply from you, but one thing is certain– the poor male forgot to keep a check of his own health bar, and while chasing after you with greediness, wanting to be the one to get you down, he foolishly gets shot down by the enemy minion following him. The kill is still written off to you though, and when his screen freezes with the death announcement, he watches you cheer– eyes glimmering and a victorious smile spreading across your cheeks– before you high-five with your best friend to your right.

Turns out that maybe you don’t need Aeri to carry you in League of Legends. At least not when it’s Kim Sunwoo you’re playing against– and that puts him at a big of a disadvantage.

Is this how you feel every time he conspires against you? Because if so, he has to applaud you– you have an awfully big patience. He can handle it for one Tuesday out of the semester, but if he was in your place, he’d be running away from the room the moment he dies in the game again, all because of you.

Running around, out of breath and heaving for oxygen, Kim Sunwoo starts to contemplate if all of this was even a good idea. He should’ve known the whole thing was bound to be a failure when the first mishaps started happening, but against his best assumptions, he decided to go on with it and try to figure things out. 

The first thing wrong with this whole entire thing is that it wasn’t even his idea in the first place. Hyunjae suggested that the whole friend group goes to play laser tag at the end of the week, to wind off a little before finals. And Sunwoo agreed– because that sounds like a lot of fun, doesn’t it?– and expected to just read out the details of it in the groupchat. He thought turning up to the place would be the only thing he had to do, but oh how he was wrong. 

Lee Hyunjae decided he didn’t really feel like going to laser tag on the single day where all of them were free– which meant that they either cancel the whole thing or go without him. And since Eric Sohn was all too excited for the idea, Sunwoo decided he won’t disappoint his dear roommate– in fears of getting sabotaged or killed in his sleep if he declines– leading into making Kim Sunwoo being in charge of the whole thing because as the only Aries of the group, he takes his leadership seriously when he has to.

And so he sucked it up and called the laser tag place, asking for a reservation for 5. Another failure hit him in the face when he was announced that they can only let them play if they have a group of ten people, and before he had the chance to let the rational part of his brain take over and cancel the plans, he was left agreeing and saying he will find 5 more people to come with them. 

Sunwoo figured that Eric, as the born extrovert, will have no problem finding 5 more people for the laser tag game. He was wrong, though, when his friend announced that all of his friends magically have some plans for that exact Friday– he thought that there’s a party that somehow, only the loser friend group he is partaking in wasn’t attending, for some reason– and Eric could only think of one person that would come, which left Sunwoo with solving the issue of finding 4 more people to come to play laser tag with him.

So he brought out the big guns– the Video Gaming club group chat. 

sunwhooo [9:31]: hello friends i need 4 people to join us for laser tag tomorrow sunwhooo [9:31]: anyone down meet us there at 5pm

And with that, he considered the task done. Too over with the whole thing and too tired of being the only one with common sense in his friend group, he didn’t check who agreed to his invitation. He figured that someone will either show up, or they will shamefully go home. Which option it’s gonna be is the problem of the day after– in this moment, he needed sleep.

He appeared in front of the laser tag arena on Friday, 4:45 sharp, waiting for his group to arrive. He felt like one of those tour guides in the middle of big cities– all he was missing was a flag in his hand, or an umbrella– either or– waving around and calling out for his friends. Five minutes after him, Changmin and Juyeon arrived, tailed by Eric and a boy that’s introduced to him as Jake Sim– who is, just by the way, a carbon copy of Sunwoo’s dear roommate both with energy and some of their small mannerisms. 

Five minutes before they were supposed to enter the arena and get the safety tutorial on how to play, 2 members of his club came up, smiling widely ear to ear. If Sunwoo had to guess who would say yes to his invitation the fastest, Myung Jaehyun and Lee Donghyuck would be first in line– and he was right. 

“Where’s the rest of you?” he asked after greeting the boys, and right in this moment, after hearing their reply, was when he knew he should’ve canceled the plans the moment Lee Hyunjae turned down his own offer.

“Y/N and Aeri’s bus was late, but they’re on their way now!” Jaehyun said, smiling ear to ear. “Y/N texted you in the groupchat, but I don’t think you saw it.”

“Pretty sure I have her number blocked,” he grunted under his breath, sighing to himself. Was it too late to leave now…?

“What?”

“Nothing.”

And that’s how he ends up in this mess. You and your best friend arrive 2 minutes late, but you’re still let in– much to Sunwoo’s dismay. Everyone seems to be excited– almost too excited– when they choose to play the game in the complete darkness, and before Sunwoo has a chance to protest, he is thrown into the laser tag game, nothing but a laser gun in his hand and a vest with the sensoring clutching to his chest.

He can’t see anything, he’s constantly bumping into the obstacles, the arena is too big for his own liking– because he doesn’t really know where he is and can’t see anyone else, making him feel strangely alone and kind of afraid– and it’s so hot inside that sweat is slowly dripping down his forehead, making him irritated.

Once in a while, he hears a scream from somewhere inside of the arena when two players meet. He contemplates just sitting on the ground and waiting for the game to pass– not really that mad about being the last one in the ranking– but the last remains of his pride are telling him to keep going, to keep trying.

He’s good at shooting games! What is he doing?

Taking a deep breath in and out, he makes a run for it– hoping he won’t be met with the wall and break his neck in the process (now that would really take the crown for the worst thing that could happen in relation to the laser tag), before he’s met with the sound of footsteps in his ears, making him painfully alert of his surroundings.

Turning his head around, trying to see where the sound is coming from and who he has to protect himself from– or shoot and get some points in, that is– he feels his body meeting full speed with another person, a yelp coming out of their throat right before the sound of clothes rustling and body mass hitting the floor resonates through the place.

“Fuck,” he curses under his breath, dropping the gun, “are you okay?” he asks, genuine concern lacing his tone. 

“Watch where you’re going, for fuck’s sake!” he hears your voice call out of him… and the last remains of genuine concern leave his body at that, irritation swimming to the shore.

“How the fuck am I supposed to watch where I’m going when you fuckers chose to play in complete darkness?!” He yells over the music– that is, just for the record, an atrocious EDM remake mix of early 00s songs– and lets his eyes adjust to the darkness for some more, watching the outline of your figure on the ground slowly appear in his retina.

Acting on auto-pilot, though, the boy reaches out an arm towards you, trying to help you to your feet. The view of your face is hazy in his eyes but he can still make out the scowled expression you offer him before you take his hand and let him drag you to a standing position.

“So much sympathy in one man, wow,” you grunt, shaking your head at him once you’re standing tall in front of him. “Wouldn’t hurt to apologize, you know–”

“This clearly wasn’t my fault–”

He starts, but stops himself mid-sentence when he sees you point the laser gun towards him, shooting. The interaction is short– it goes by almost too fast for him to register it– and before he has a chance to let the sensor cool down and aim towards your chest as well, you’re running away from him, full speed skillfully through the maze. 

“Hey!” he yells out, but is much slower at following you. Is he doing something wrong? Why is everyone suddenly so good at navigating the space?

And while Kim Sunwoo is competitive– there was an agreement that the last place pays for everyone’s meal after– sometimes, his spirit is overshadowed by his emotions. Frustrated, irritated and a little mad, although he pays much effort into shooting at his opponents and gathering up all the points he lost while he was aimlessly walking through the place like a blind man, he just can’t seem to catch up and crawl out of the last place.

Standing outside of the room and looking at the scoreboard after, having the rest of the team pat his shoulder and thank for the meal, his eyes land on you as you’re the last one to leave the arena aside from him.

“Looks like being good at CS:GO isn’t enough to be good at shooter games in real life, huh?” you tease, pouting at the scoreboard in mock sympathy. “Thank you for the meal, Sunwoo. I’d like a large fry and a cheeseburger, by the way. Make it extra cheese.”

Maybe he should’ve canceled the laser tag the first moment he wanted to. 

You know what? Maybe he should cancel the Video Gaming club altogether, while he’s at it.

Sitting around the study room in the library, accompanied by Eric and Changmin arguing about something and enveloped in a gray, fuzzy hoodie, Kim Sunwoo lets himself roll his eyes at the aimless quarreling and puts the hood of his sweater up, leaning back on the uncomfortable chair. After a couple of minutes spent listening to the fight– that’s about the assignment at hand, just for your information– Sunwoo feels himself zoning out of the room before he’s brought back to reality by the buzzing of his phone on the table with the incoming notification.

At this point of the uneventful afternoon, he would’ve replied back to anyone within a few minutes– anything to pass time, he figures– but when his eyes zone in on the name on his screen, he is left clicking at the Discord bar quicker than the speed of light.

sunpoodle [6:44]: can u call rn? notsteve [6:45]: no notsteve [6:45]: im at the library rn notsteve [6:45]: why

“You can’t just completely ignore that point of the essay, because it’s going to look like we didn’t do enough research,” Changmin argues his point in the background, the loud voice of Sunwoo’s roommate almost startling him as he tries to prove otherwise.

“We can’t just include every. single. point. in it, though, or else it’s gonna become a wholeass bible at this point.”

“Better to exceed the word count than to hand in an unfinished essay–”

sunpoodle [6:48]: oh so u hate me notsteve [6:48]: pretty sure this is emotional manipulation

“What do you think, Sunwoo?” Eric speaks up, turning his head towards the last boy of the three– the only one that hasn’t spoken up about the matter yet. It’s true that he didn’t really do much work on the actual essay yet– only some very, very brief research last night– but that didn’t mean he suddenly felt like doing much more. 

“Hm? Me?” 

sunpoodle [6:49]: dont care sunpoodle [6:50]: youre probably with some other bitches

“Yeah,” Changmin chimes in, “say your part. It’s three of us here, so the majority will go. What do you think?”

“Oh, I don’t really care…” Sunwoo hums without much thinking, eyes glued to his phone screen.

notsteve [6:51]: ??? sunpoodle [6:52]: anyways i just wanted to show you my child sunpoodle [6:52]: but you’re clearly not interested so

“Are you even listening?” Eric asks.

Sunwoo hums in response, automatized. Did the words really register in his brain? You can bet they didn’t.

“Are you texting that online girl again?” Changmin scoffs, Sunwoo’s ears perking up just a little bit at the mention of his friend.

“Yeah.”

notsteve [6:53]: a child??? notsteve [6:53]: is this another sylvanian families toy  sunpoodle [6:54]: no:(( notsteve [6:54]: what is it then notsteve [6:54]: because we both know youre not responsible enough to have a child

“Still can’t believe you developed a crush on a girl you don’t even know,” Eric sighs from next to him, the previous topic of their conversation long gone when it means he can make fun of his roommate for being absolutely, totally infatuated with a girl in his phone screen.

“How can you even know she’s real?” Changmin jokes. “For all you know, that could be a 50 year old white male trying to get nudes out of you,” he adds, making the shortest boy snort at the comment.

“I don’t have a crush on her,” is all that leaves Sunwoo’s mouth, although his tone is not very argumentative– just mindlessly spoken out, most of his attention still glued to his messenger app.

sunpoodle [6:55]: are you underestimating me?? sunpoodle [6:55]: im offended sunpoodle [6:56]: might just block u. and here i was considering sending u a pic of my dog…

“Sure you don’t,” Eric sighs, “because you’re totally not smiling like an idiot right now.”

“Shut the fuck up…” Sunwoo breathes out, rolling his eyes. The smile on his face freezes and drops at the unnecessary comment, but his cheeks grow a soft pink hue to them, only further proving his friends’ point.

notsteve [6:56]: A DOG????”,?” notsteve [6:56]: show it to me notsteve [6:56]: show it to me rachel!!!!

“When are you going to ask her for a picture or something?” Changmin pries, kicking his friend to his shin under the table.

“When she asks first,” he shrugs, “I don’t wanna sound like a creep.”

“I bet you already do,” Eric jokes, making his roommate glare at him. 

“Besides, we call often,” Sunwoo shrugs, “I know she’s not a 50 year old man. And so far, I’m content with this. It’s not like it would be going anywhere in the first place.”

“You don’t know that,” Changmin says, and something about that sentence makes Sunwoo momentarily glance away from his phone screen, furrowing his brows at the male.

“Yeah,” Eric chimes in, “you don’t even know where she lives. For all you know, she could be just down the street and you two could be going on embarrassing lan party dates together, or something.”

“Or– and get this–” Sunwoo ironically argues, “she could live on the other side of the country. Which, logically speaking, is much more likely.”

“You never know until you don’t ask,” Changmin shrugs, “I mean, it doesn't hurt to know.”

Shuffling his feet under the table, Sunwoo thinks to himself. There is a reason why he never really asked his online best friend any personal questions– and that is because he was simply afraid. Afraid of what he might find out.

No matter the distance, it’s scary for Sunwoo to know about his friend’s whereabouts. Because if she lives far, it means the chances of ever meeting her are unlikely. If she lives close, the chances rise– but he’s also completely terrified of the chance to meet her because, to put it blankly, he is petrified of the image his online friend would have of him when she meets him in real life.

Hiding behind the cloak of the internet is much easier for the boy. His friend doesn’t know what he looks like, what his mannerisms are in real life. And it’s not like he is faking his personality online– because truth be told, he’s acting the same way in his Minecraft server then he would in any real life situation– it’s just that he is strangely insecure of if he’d still be liked in the same way, had his friend met up with him in real life. He’s nervous of awkward silence. He’s stressed out about the fact that maybe he won’t click as well with the girl he met online. It’s all strange and new to him, and that’s why he never really dares to ask.

“I don’t know,” he shrugs, “it’s all just kind of weird.”

At this point, he doesn’t know if he fears meeting up with his friend online, or never seeing her with his own two eyes more. 

sunpoodle [6:57]: doggo sunpoodle [6:58] – sends one picture sunpoodle [7:02]: wow youre ignoring me again sunpoodle [7:05]: why do i even try at this point… sunpoodle [7:08]: teaching my dog to bite u if he ever meets u irl notsteve [7:09]: how are u gonna do that notsteve [7:10]: BUT OMG THATS SUCH A CUTE DOG notsteve [7:10]: BEST BOY sunpoodle [7:11]: i have my ways… sunpoodle [7:11]: but he says thank u so i guess we will let it go for now

Sunwoo chuckles at your reply, making the rest of the boys in the room look at each other with knowing eyes, shaking their head in disbelief. It’s not that they’re disapproving of their friend’s little (big) crush on the girl he met online– they’re supportive of whatever makes their dear bundle of sunshine happy– they just fear that this whole thing… might not end the best for the young gamer.

notsteve [7:12]: u like me too much to make your dog bite me notsteve [7:12]: admit it sunpoodle [7:13]: im resuming with my lecture!! sunpoodle [7:13]: he is small and fat but he is strong. do be afraid notsteve [7:14]: all that for not paying attention to you for 5 minutes? notsteve [7:14]: your actions speak for themselves, honey <33

“Right…” Eric awkwardly clears his throat, calling the attention of the enamoured boy, “shall we dwell deeper into your online relationship, or do you want to help us with the group essay for a change?” He asks while kicking the boy into his shin lightly, to make sure he has his full attention.

“Essay please,” he replies, nodding to himself. There is no way he is going into details of the embarrassing crush he has on the girl living in his phone.

sunpoodle [7:15]: what can i say life isnt fun without my jasper :// notsteve [7:15]: try not to die as i work on this assignment sunpoodle [7:16]: dont lie u dont do those notsteve [7:16]: unfortunately i do:(( notsteve [7:16] – sends one picture

Sunwoo points his camera so only a part of his laptop is shown with the study room in the background– making sure neither his friends or him are in the picture– before sending it to his friend. It’s not like she needs proof– Sunwoo knows that despite the playful teasing, she understands his need to put in some work into his education– he just feels like slowly testing the waters with sharing more and more of his real life with his online best friend.

“Okay, so let’s get back to what we were talking about before,” Changmin says, “I was thinking we should at least briefly talk about the points that are against what we’re trying to argue here, but Eric says it would completely disregard like, half of our work, so…”

sunpoodle [7:17]: wait is that at SNU notsteve [7:18]: yea notsteve [7:18]: how’d you know sunpoodle [7:18]: oh my god ?? sunpoodle [7:18]: i study there too

You know what? Forget the assignment– it’s due in a week. It can wait 7 more days.

“Guys, uh…” Sunwoo hums, hands shaking and his heart doing somersaults in his chest, “I’d actually like to go back to the topic of my online friend for a sec…”

Although Kim Sunwoo feels like the world stopped turning– or shifted in its axis, either or– since he learned about the fact that his internet best friend goes to the same university as him, and therefore, could be just about anyone he sees in the halls on a day to day basis, much to his dismay, it did not. The world didn’t stop turning and nothing really changed, all events happening around him as if he wasn’t just gifted with the life changing information: and that meant that besides the exam week fastly approaching him, he still had to host the Video Gaming club the Tuesday after.

He still has to turn up to the internet café and take the attendance sheet with him, even though the groupchat announced to him that they’re all going to study for the incoming exams instead. Because the rules are rules– as the head of the club, Kim Sunwoo has to host the meetings every week, or else the rights for the club will be revoked and all the privileges that come with having one will be taken away from him before he even has a chance to blink.

It’s already bad that he will be the only one on the attendance sheet– if he doesn’t decide to fake some signatures, that is– but now, he is alone and bored, and as it turns out, playing games alone isn’t as fun as playing them with someone else. The competitive nature in him yearns for multiplayer games, it longs for the social contact he so effortlessly has with someone when playing a video game with them. He thinks he built a decent group out of the other video game lovers at this university, and he didn’t even realize it up until now– when he’s sitting alone in the internet café, in the far back on one of the couches. 

At least he has the chance to test out the new Playstation console they installed here.

Legs spread wide on the small couch, having the whole place for himself, Sunwoo turns on the Test Drive Unlimited game, clicking through the settings. He is not a big fan of racing games in general, but he figures it’s the only game that he can play alone and still have at least some fun, and so after picking out a fancy car to drive around the world, he focuses on racing and fulfilling the side-quests the best he can.

Until a figure squeezes itself right next to him, startling him. “Oh, Jesus!”

“It’s Y/N, actually,” you snicker, making the boy’s mood drop at least two notches, eyebrows furrowing at your sudden arrival. What are you even doing here? He thought no one was available this week?

“You came?” he asks, and despite the sincerity of the question, the tone sounds kind of spiteful.

“Yeah,” you shrug, “am I not allowed here? I thought the club is on every Tuesday?” 

“It is,” he agrees, a hint of annoyance in his voice, “I just didn’t expect you to come.”

“Didn’t expect, or didn’t want?”

“Both,” he grunts, before he turns his head towards the screen again, ignoring your presence completely. The noises coming out of the console provide you two with some background music, but it’s still not enough to diffuse the tense atmosphere. Sunwoo hates every second of you by his side– your thighs touching in the small space due to his dominant manspreading– even the sound of you breathing making him immensely annoyed.

“What’s your problem with me anyway?” you suddenly speak up, breaking the silence. Something about the way you ask the question puts a dagger through Sunwoo’s heart, for some reason, but he doesn’t dare to drop his tough facade.

“I don’t like you, that’s all,” he shrugs nonchalantly, chewing on the inside of his cheek as he focuses back onto the game, trying hard to not fail at his sidequest. Everything but focus on the difficult conversation beginning to take place right in this moment, right? 

And why do you even care? It’s not like the two of you are friends– anything close to that, even.

“Why?” you scoff, shaking your head in disbelief. “I mean, I don’t get it. I did nothing wrong, and you seem to be getting on fine with the rest of the girls, so I don’t think that’s the problem here,” you lightly laugh, trying to take some weight off the situation.

Sunwoo’s jaw hardens. He doesn’t want to have this conversation right now. 

“At first I thought it was just harmless teasing, something you do for fun or attention, but then I realized you were being serious about it, so I really… I really just wanna know what’s the deal behind all of this,” you grunt, swinging your arms in the air at the last word, putting more emphasis on the end of the sentence. You’re starting to get frustrated, and that’s slowly ticking off Sunwoo’s patience.

“Oh, you don’t know?” he scoffs, turning his head to you. “Then you’re even worse than I thought.”

“What are you even talking about?” you yelp out, the eyes of others in the internet café turning towards you with furrowed brows, annoyed glares pointed at your little commotion due to being disturbed while playing their favorite games.

“You’re my friend’s ex, that’s why,” he mutters, before scoffing at you and pointing his eyes back to the TV screen. 

There is a moment of silence following his confession. He’s not sure what is the reasoning behind it– if you’re rocking your head, trying to remember what he’s talking about, or if you’re just shocked that he is so loyal to his friend. Maybe you’re in disbelief. Maybe you feel ashamed. Truth be told, Sunwoo doesn’t really care.

“Ji Changmin?” you ask, suddenly sounding surprised. “This is about Ji Changmin?” 

Sunwoo hates the way you sound almost… amused? 

“You can’t be serious. That happened over 4 years ago! There’s no way either of you is still hung up about that,” you say, shaking your head at him in disbelief.

The boy snickers, talking to you, but not really offering you any eye contact as he continues on with his game. “Maybe you didn’t think it was serious, but I surely won’t like someone who did my friends wrong.”

“Sunwoo, we were kids.”

“Does that mean it didn’t count?” he scoffs.

“Yeah, basically,” you bluntly agree, a bitter laugh escaping your throat. “Ask Changmin. I’m sure he barely even remembers–”

“Well, I remember him crying over you for two weeks straight, so maybe stop bragging into spaces where you’re not welcome,” he snaps, finally looking at you.

He chose a bad moment to have eye contact with you, though. The second the words leave his mouth, hurt flashes by your face, your expression instantly dropping. Your orbs get a little sadder and there’s a wrinkle between your eyebrows that makes Sunwoo’s stomach drop, guilt washing over him in waves strong like tsunami. Realistically, he shouldn’t care about hurting your feelings– by his logic, you must have even deserved it– but there is something in him that wants to physically crawl out of his skin and give himself a big, fierceful slap across his face for the words he just said.

Because who is he to tell you you’re unwanted in the club? The other people there like you. Everyone gets on with you just fine– it’s not Sunwoo’s right to ban you from the space he created, just because he has personal vendetta against you.

You’re not even doing anything wrong… Maybe he did fuck up.

“O-okay–”

“No, wait,” he hurriedly says, reaching out an arm towards you instinctively so he can stop you if you wanted to leave. “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just… I care about my friends a lot, that’s all. It’s… nothing personal,” he explains, humming to himself.

Except he’s lying, and you both know that. Everything about this was nothing but personal– the targeted jokes, the mean comments, the rude energy he has towards you any time you show up. Everything about his behavior and his annoyance whenever you are around is personal, because it involves you, and only you. 

There’s no way he can save himself now, though. The words are already said and out there, and even though he regrets them, there is no way Kim Sunwoo is apologizing.

A cloak of silence falls over the two of you again but this time, it’s slowly eating Sunwoo alive. It’s biting on his arms and crawling on his insides, carving out every harsh word he’s said to you into skin, making it unbearable for the boy to continue just aimlessly sitting next to you. He has to do something.

“Do you want me to leave?” you ask in a soft, quiet voice– a tone slightly familiar to him. It makes his ears perk up and his stomach squeeze on itself. It’s a weird, visceral reaction, but he won’t really allow himself to put much importance into it.

Instead, he sighs and turns to you with the controller in hand, offering you a soft, guilty smile. “No,” he shakes his head, “you can pick your own car and play for a while as I order us some snacks, if you wanna. I’m also pretty sure there’s Smash bros on it, in case you wanna play with me when I get back.”

The air is tense and awkward, and Sunwoo curses himself from the way events unraveled. He feels like he is betraying his best friend, in a way, but the guilt he carries in him is too big to not try to dissolve. 

You take the controller from him and nod, chewing on the inside of your cheek. He thinks this might be the beginning of truce– not a friendship, just tolerance– between the two of you, but he is soon taken out of his delusions when he sees you clicking off the game and opening Smash bros instead. 

In that moment, he knows he is going to get his ass kicked, and he knows it’s going to be personal.

The remote control in his hands feels like a weapon after he managed to finally stick the strip of LED lights all around the ceiling– and with how things have been going (the previous ones not working and them falling down every few seconds this time around), it might as well turn into one if it turns out he failed at installing his newest room decor again. He will use it against himself, he thinks– there is not much will to live left in him after the whole day, leaving him weak and exhausted.

Praying a little before trying for one last time, Sunwoo clicks on the red button of the remote control in his palm, squeezing his eyes shut– and after wishing on all 11:11s and all eyelashes, it seems– the LED lights finally turn on and illuminate his room with a dark red glow that he quickly turns towards a more muted purple, because it’s easier on his eyes and he kind of doesn’t want his room to look like literal hell upon walking in.

The boy’s heart leaps in his chest. It finally worked– he is every gamer girl’s dream! (And to stay true to the statement, he reaches towards his phone, clicking on the Discord app, approaching the one he dreams about.)

notsteve [10:45]: ive got these really sick lights if u wanna come over ;;) notsteve [10:45]: they tried to scam me twice but omg look notsteve [10:46] – sends 1 video notsteve [10:46]: they can change colors hihihii

Ever since the moment Kim Sunwoo learned that his dear online best friend loves to be persuaded– her words, not his– alongside with the new knowledge of the fact that they both walk across the same halls and visit the same lecture rooms, the dynamic he had with the girl shifted just the tiniest bit.

First of all, they call more often. Not only during the late hours of the night, but also during the day– whenever either of them feels like chatting for a while. There is also an increased volume of voice memos and random pictures of their surroundings, which didn’t use to happen before. And believe me, Sunwoo doesn’t want to honk his horn too much, but he swears the amount of casual flirting increased at least twice the size– from his side anyway. But he promises his friend is reciprocating! Hell, she even starts it sometimes! You have to believe him.

sunpoodle [10:47]: and here i thought you died notsteve [10:48]: almost notsteve [10:48]: i couldnt get it up :((  sunpoodle [10:48]: i didn’t know that was a problem ://

Sunwoo snorts at that, heat rising to his cheeks at the comment. 

notsteve [10:49]: god i hate u notsteve [10:50]: no that’s not a problem for me sweetie notsteve [10:50]: i can show you if u come over cough

The moment he sends the last message, he regrets it. Every day he spends talking with his friend, the boundaries and lines get pushed and pushed, and he can’t seem to know why. Is it the prospect of maybe meeting her one day? The idea of somehow sweeping the girl off her feet and getting to know her beyond the level that the online space gives him– in a more deep, personal way?

Why does the idea of getting to see her with his own eyes, the idea of touching her, make the poor boy so flustered and excited? It’s not like either one of them actually initiated any real meeting in the first place– all of it was just half-jokes and invitations. He wonders when the day comes when he will be able to just nod and say yes to any of it– he wonders when she will feel comfortable enough to actually set a time and place, ordering to meet him there. He would drop anything– cancel any plans– just to run and meet her. 

sunpoodle [10:53]: i could get convinced sunpoodle [10:53]: to see the lights irl i mean sunpoodle [10:54]: nothing else…..cough sunpoodle [10:54]: youll have to clean first tho 

After the replies flood in, Sunwoo immediately relaxes. The girl doesn’t seem uncomfortable– quite the opposite, actually– and so he takes it as a sign to continue the playful nature of things, subtly pushing the idea of a meet-up more and more. For some reason, Sunwoo feels like it should happen soon– although no time is running out, he feels pressure somewhere in the bottom of his stomach and quiet buzzing in his fingertips any time the thought of his friend crosses his mind– and he knows it will only go away if he finally meets the girl. (Or it might even get worse– either way, he desperately needs to find out.)

notsteve [10:56]: my room is super clean!! notsteve [10:56]: and my bed is comfy sunpoodle [10:57]: proof or im just gonna assume youre lying

The boy tussles in his bed, his hair getting messy in his sheets. The music playing in the background only further pushes the intimate atmosphere, and so after receiving your message, he doesn’t waste much time in opening his camera and putting effort into the angle of the picture he’s going to send you.

He makes sure not much of his face is shown. His phone screen mirrors mostly the white fabric of his pillow– that is now tinder purple with the LED lighting– but in the right corner, the majority of his tousled hair is shown. It looks soft against the sheets and he makes no real effort in tidying it, since he thinks it adds to the aesthetics of the picture. A glimpse of his face appears in the picture as well– only his left eye, though. It looks sleepy, hooded, and after squinting at the screen for a few seconds, Sunwoo decides to hit send. 

The line is once again pushed a bit farther, making him wonder if his friend will follow in his footsteps and send a similar photo back. It’s secretive enough, yet also daring enough to make the other side wonder and fantasize– what does the rest of his face look like? Did she see him around? Does she recognise his face? 

…does she find the glimpse attractive? (God, Sunwoo, get a fucking grip!)

notsteve [11:02] – sends one picture sunpoodle [11:03]: i feel like a victorian man seeing an ankle for the first time

The reaction makes Sunwoo’s heart pick up at pace, a dumb smile running to his cheeks. If anyone saw him right now, he’d get bullied and picked on until the rest of his life– it’s hard to hide the feelings he tries to keep under control, though. It’s already difficult enough to deal with them on his own– he bets bottling it all up and pretending they don’t exist would even result in making it all that much harder.

notsteve [11:04]: WDYMMMMM notsteve [11:04]: be serious for once sunpoodle [11:04]: oh i AM serious sunpoodle [11:04]: i mean that bed sure does seem comfy o:))

Sunwoo feels like he is going to faint soon. Hell, he feels like the world is suddenly turning faster and it’s hard to keep up.

notsteve [11:05]: i heard its even comfier when you cuddle i mean what who said that sunpoodle [11:06]: im open to trying that out for myself

There are pools forming in Sunwoo’s palms during the course of the conversation, but they only deepen when he realizes that maybe he has to be the one to make the first step and initiate something actually real. Something that isn’t just mysteriously looking selfies in the chat or silly conversations about cuddling and meeting up that could turn into reality, but aren’t, and for what reason is making him absolutely insane.

And so he picks up all of his remaining courage and starts crafting the message inside of his head. How does he bring it up? How does he make it sound real? Like he’s being serious– that he wants to meet her and will turn crazy if it doesn’t happen soon? 

The semester ends in a few days and lord knows if his friend lives anywhere near the campus. Knowing that he wasted his only chance and opportunity would absolutely destroy him, no matter if it’s Christmas or not. 

Before he has a chance to send the carefully crafted message, though, the tone of a new message in his phone makes his attention perk up, reading out the words she’s sent to him via Discord and making his heart drop to the deepest pits of his stomach.

sunpoodle [11:10]: in all seriousness tho we should hang out sometime sunpoodle [11:10]: since we live on the same campus and all lmao sunpoodle [11:10]: (im trying to be so normal about this)

Well, that’s sudden. And unexpected. The boy feels himself grinning, resulting in biting down on his bottom lip to keep himself from screaming out. It’s finally happening– and he wasn’t the one having to write it down first. It’s not only him that seriously wants to meet up, and that has him metaphorically bouncing against the wall of his newly decorated room.

notsteve [11:10]: oh my god its happening notsteve [11:11]: everyone stay calm sunpoodle [11:12]: LMAO bE SERIOUS FOR ONE SEC sunpoodle [11:12]: would love to meet outside of ur bedroom first tho  notsteve [11:13]: omg ofc that was just a jokey joke notsteve [11:13]: just tell me when and where n ill be there notsteve [11:14]: im free literally whenever except from when im not and even then ill make sure i cancel any other thing sooo sunpoodle [11:15]: what about after exams? sunpoodle [11:15]: im busy on tuesday but i can do any other day sunpoodle [11:16]: they opened a new café close to the campus if u wanna see?:)

Sunwoo feels on Cloud 9. It’s finally happening and it’s so close– in just a week. More than 7 days, sure, but it’s still close enough– much closer than never, as he once presumed. Tussling a little in his bed, he makes sure his mouth is covered with his pillow before he lets out the scream he’s been holding for the last few minutes. 

If Eric hears him, Sunwoo is gonna try to convince him that he just stubbed his toe. Nothing else.

The boy is painfully aware of the fact that he’s acting like a teenager in love for the first time– kicking his feet, giggling, thinking of his crush before falling asleep– but frankly speaking, he doesn’t really care. In just over 7 days, he can prove Ji Changmin and everyone wrong: he doesn’t have a crush on someone he hasn’t met before. Because in just over 7 days, he will meet the presumed love of his life and look at her with his own two eyes for the first time.

That day somehow feels more important than his own birthday. Maybe he should get the date tattooed… He’ll think about it.

When he finally takes his face out of the soft pillow, he notices his room went dark. When he reaches for the remote that belongs to the newly installed LED lights, he finds it not working. In any other circumstances, he’d consider either drowning himself in his bathtub or jumping out of his window– since he and Eric live on the 6th floor, it would be high enough to cause the damage needed– but right at this moment, he feels like nothing could ever break his mood again.

notsteve [11:20]: about the lights tho…

Sunwoo doesn’t really know how he grew to love video games. If he really thinks about it, perhaps he could say it was just how boys always turn out– fascinated with anything electric that had a cord attached to it (he once managed to make the power go out for the whole street when soldering his old pair of headphones that stopped working in one ear), but there was also something so fun about gaming that managed to make the boy stick to it– and that thing was how easy it was to make friends during it.

When he was little and his dad bought him his first game boy for Christmas, he not only managed to boost in front of everyone at school during recess by playing with it, but he also managed to lend the device to everyone who stared at it with even the tiniest bit of desire in their eyes for too long. Sunwoo knew not everyone was as fortunate as him, and playing it was so fun– he thought no one should go without trying the game boy at least once. The other kids at the playground kept going back to him to play with his toy and the friendships eventually blossomed to the point that the people around him stayed even beyond the video games– and that’s how Sunwoo met his first ever friend, Ji Changmin. 

Sunwoo always liked having a group of people around him. He enjoyed when his friends from high school would come over to his house and play with the Playstation console he begged for his birthday. He didn’t mind anyone borrowing his phone during class and trying to solve the most difficult level of Geo Dash (since he’s the one that got the farthest in the game), because it meant he got to talk to the desperate gamers during break and have someone to run to the convenience store to buy snacks with afterwards.

He loved going to internet cafés, because even though the initial friendship he had with Eric Sohn and Lee Juyeon came around because they asked him to play Valorant after finding the poor boy alone, waddling into the place completely lonely during his first week of university, the bond got deeper and he can’t imagine his life without the two men in it anymore.

Sure, video games are fun. He likes to play shooting games because he enjoys winning. The competitive nature in him thrives during video games– he loves to tease his opponent, he loves to show that he’s the best. Yeah, Kim Sunwoo enjoys spending his time in the virtual world, escaping the mundane reality. But if he really dwelled deeper on it, he doesn’t think playing Minecraft would be as enjoyable if he didn’t talk to his online friend on the server every day, or if him and his friends didn’t go out and eat dinner together after a round of Overwatch in the late hours of the day.

Which is why he created the Video Gaming club in the first place. To connect people– to play games with the ones who need a buddy in their life. It made him smile to see people that met because of his club hanging out together even outside of it– he felt like he was doing something good. Sunwoo prided himself in the fact that he was the one to connect people together through his hobby, that he could share precious moments and make precious bonds in his circle through gaming. 

Maybe that’s why the last meeting of the club for this semester made him so emotional. Truth be told, he didn’t think the Video Gaming club would make it big– hell, he thought not many people would care to show up each time. As a pat on his back of some sort, Sunwoo decides that the last game of the winter semester should be his favourite.

“Can’t believe you got us playing Minecraft of all games, what are we, 11?” Chan mutters from next to the club leader, making the boy snicker.

“Just say you’re embarrassed about the nickname you chose when you were 11.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Okay, mega_dino, I’ll believe you,” Sunwoo hums and nods, hearing his friends giggle as the younger one takes a hold of his gaming mouse.

Squinting his eyes at his screen, the club leader makes sure everything is set before the game starts. He already moved all of his important items from his main house into an underground hiding place of which coordinates he’d written down before getting to the internet café– knowing that his friends would want to sabotage him as soon as he lets them play on the server he carefully created. He knows letting them play on a different one would be much easier, but he kind of prefers to have the upper hand of owning a couple of diamond swords already, and he’s also too lazy to set up a new one. (And he would have to pay for it– which he isn’t really a fan of. Money is tight when you have to buy new LED lights off Temu every other week.)

“Are we starting already? I miss Minecraft,” Intak whines from the other side of the table, a glass of coke sitting in his hand.

“Why are you saying it like it’s a children’s game?” Sunwoo shakes his head at the comments. Ever since he announced the game of choice for the week, all he’s gotten were either complaints or dreamy sighs about how nostalgic it’s gonna be. Is Minecraft not cool anymore? Should he get a new hobby?

“Kinda is,” Yeji laughs, making the boy roll his eyes at her.

“You’re just mad you’re missing out on all the fun,” he argues, “heal your inner child a little. Make that pretty house you’ve always wanted!”

“I fuck with Minecraft,” an innocent voice lands into his ears from the opposite of him– a voice he would often curse out and cringe at just because of it’s sheer existence in his proximity, but now tolerates in favor of keeping peace in the room. The comment still startles him, though– he didn’t expect anyone to agree with his point. Not if it’s you, anyway.

“Can’t believe you two finally agree on something,” Aeri sighs from your side, the girl always glued to your hip. “You do realise you’re having an advantage if you’re letting us play on your server, though?”

“It’s not like we’re playing extreme survival tournament, come on guys–”

“You aren’t,” you shrug, “don’t really know about the rest of us,” you comment, meeting his eyes with a smug look, a teasing grin slowly slipping its way onto your lips.

“I’m banning anyone who tries to kill me today from the club,” Sunwoo suddenly announces, making everyone sigh at the dramaticness of his theatrical words. “Forever.”

“You can’t ban anyone over a game–” Haechan chimes in, but is cut off by his peer instantly.

“I will call it harassment and bullying,” Sunwoo shrugs, “try to argue with that.”

“You’re just begging to get targeted at this point,” Aeri mumbles, shaking her head at him. She’s right– but Sunwoo is also kind of confident in his defence abilities. 

Unless he gets ganged up on, of course.

Which could happen– truth be told, he’s had it coming.

“Less talking and more gaming, please,” Yangyang calls from the corner, “I wanna steal Sunwoo’s diamonds now. Turn the shit on.”

And although Sunwoo doesn’t really like the implication of his friend’s words, he doesn’t argue. Mainly because 15 minutes have already passed and the club is only supposed to go on for an hour– which leaves the 10 of them only 45 minutes left to mine and do something meaningful. The owner of the server also moved the spawn point the farthest away from his house– in hopes of them not finding it and putting TNT all over the premises. (If they manage to craft some in the limited time space, that is. He doubts it, but truth be told, he can never be too sure.)

“Okay, I sent the IP of the server into the groupchat, so just type it in and press the Play button on the left and it should take you instantly here,” Sunwoo exclaims as he clicks on his server and connects to it, walking around the spawn point with his character for a bit, waiting for the rest of his group to arrive.

Pressing the TAB key, he keeps checking the usernames of the people jumping in. Once mega_dino turns up, he lets out an amused chuckle– there’s nothing that tops the nicknames you made when you were 11. Sunwoo’s email address scares him to this day, but he is too lazy to make a new one, since all of his subscriptions and social media are tied to it– it does make sending official emails to his university coordinators that much embarrassing, though.

Some nicknames are recognisable– such as yejiiiji or haechanahceah, but some are less decipherable, leaving him guessing who could be the one joining the game. He doesn’t ask about them, though, thinking that figuring it out as he plays will be more fun– when one nickname he recognises all too well suddenly shows up on the list of players, making his heart jump in surprise.

What is his friend doing on the server at this time of the day? She doesn’t usually play in the early hours of the afternoon– leaving her sessions to evening or late night. That’s when she calls Sunwoo and asks him to help her with mining (or begging for his diamonds, which he sometimes rejects, but complies with on the days he is the most weak to her cuteness). 

He considers pulling up his phone and texting her on Discord to notify the poor girl about the influx of new players on the server. She must be confused– maybe even scared, who knows– to see so many new people playing at the same time. The server Sunwoo created was a bit small, hosting only a few of his friends and a couple of people he met online, so a big amount of players would surely make it seem like someone hacked him, right?

“Is everyone in?” he asks instead, hearing everyone let out excited hums and nods.

He furrows his brows. The server says 10 people are currently connected to it, but if his calculations are correct, the number should be 11– everyone from his club and his online best friend, sunpoodle.

He does a double take on the list, shaking his head. He counts the people in his head over and over again, a little frustrated. Why is everyone saying they’re in? It’s clearly not adding up.

Looking up from his computer, he eyes the rest of his friends in the café. Everyone is playing soundly and happily, it seems, paying him no mind as they get accustomed with the new world and warm back up to the controls of the game they haven’t played in ages. 

Everyone but one person. Everyone but you.

Instead, you’re left staring at him with stern eyes. The look you offer him is sharp, maybe a little hurt– and at the moment, he doesn’t know why. Confusion is the only feeling jumping around the walls of his brain, making an unpleasant crease appear in between his eyebrows. Gears slowly turning, he tries to figure it all out.

You’re not playing. You’re not paying attention to the game. It’s like you know it all– like you’re so familiar with it, as if playing it daily. As if you know the server he made. As if you have your house in it, decorated with a cute offering in front of the door, a portal to his own home residing in the front yard.

It happens quickly– the realisation. He finally makes the connection. It dawns on him why you look so surprised. Why you look so shocked, so disturbed. 

Because if you’re the only unmoving one on the map right now and his online friend is not the one to play on Tuesday afternoons, there is only one explanation. 

“Oh my fucking god,” leaves his lips, albeit a little involuntarily. His voice is hoarse and harsh when he says the words, a final nail in the coffin for you as you stand up, the sound of the wheels of the chair churning against the floor, making everyone’s eyes snap to you.

You don’t turn off the game before you storm out of the room, giving him a clear view of your back, the character with the adorable skin you’ve picked out staring back at him blankly in the game. For a second, he doesn’t follow you– letting himself process. Everyone turns to Aeri for answers, as she’s the closest with you, but they get nothing as the girl just shrugs, equally confused, before she runs out of the room to find her best friend.

Sunwoos' ears start ringing. He feels like throwing up. 

This can’t be…

There’s nothing more in this world that Kim Sunwoo enjoys more than playing Minecraft. He enjoys mining with music playing in his headphones. He loves crafting and making his house look perfect– just like little him always wanted it when he watched all those videos on youtube growing up. He likes to prank his friend Juyeon by putting random dirt blocks all over his house, or stealing all of Younghoon’s sugar cane when he’s offline, too lazy to grow some himself. He likes to teleport to his friend’s house and leave little surprises at the door, only to hear her call him a few seconds later, her cheerful, yet soft voice repeating in his ears even after he turns off the game and goes to his bed, letting her stories lull him to sleep. 

There’s nothing more in this world that Kim Sunwoo enjoys more than playing Minecraft with his online best friend– the two of them ganging up on the dragon or entering the Nether together to find some glowstone for her house, because she wants it to look aesthetically pleasing. There’s nothing more he enjoys than helping her with little tasks and fighting off creepers away from her property, making sure they don’t blow out all the hard work she’s been putting in.

There’s nothing more in the world that he enjoys more than talking with his online friend during the mundane hours of the day, her messages making him hide his giggles in the back rows of his lecture halls. Nothing he enjoys more than her laugh, her jokes, her voice, her online presence. It calms him and sets him on fire all at once, and he doesn’t think he’s ever cared for anyone this deeply. 

How has he never noticed that the person he hates the most is also the same person that he’s pretty sure he’s in love with? How has he never noticed it was you all the time?

And really, there’s nothing in the world Kim Sunwoo enjoys more than playing Minecraft with you. This time around, though, no progress in the world is made and your voice is not talking his ear off in the background. He shuts off the computer and leaves the place, not giving anyone an ounce of explanation.

You don’t text him in the evening like you always do. There’s no night call to help him sleep better.

He doesn’t turn the LED lights on in his room either, contemplating his life in complete darkness.

Nobody’s seen or heard of Kim Sunwoo in just a little under a week. Actually, that is an over-exaggeration– he went to take his exams, and he also went grocery shopping when he went out of ramen and his signature comfort food: red tasty KitKat bars– but other than that, it’s like the boy has disappeared from the face of earth.

There is no Video Gaming club, since it’s officially break time now– for only 2 weeks, but still– and he is declining every single invitation to hang out coming from his friends. He’s simply not in the mood to go anywhere or do anything, and so he spends his days locked away in his room.

Nothing is able to cut off his stream of thought. He’s not listening to music, so the occasional sounds of his roommate moving somewhere in the shared apartment are the only background noise to his loud inner voice. The elevator music usually playing in his head is replaced by a screaming match, and although he wishes it would stop, he can’t really control it– until the sound of his door opening makes him jolt away from the nightmare he’s living in.

Usually, he just tells Eric to fuck off and leave his room– since he is not in the headspace right now to spare anyone kindness, it seems– but when the disgusted face of Ji Changmin enters the place, Sunwoo knows there is no escaping this interrogation.

“Man, it stinks in here,” the boy grunts, moving through the obstacle course Sunwoo’s room has turned into in the few days he hasn’t bothered to put away his dirty laundry. 

“Go away,” Sunwoo says. It’s a weak attempt– he already knows he lost this battle.

“Yeah, no,” Changmin shakes his head before moving to the window, opening it. “Eric orders a wellness check on you, so I’m not leaving until I figure out what’s wrong. I was told you left the club early the last time?”

Sunwoo doesn’t offer him a response. All Changmin can do is guess in this situation, and trust me, although they’re best friends, sadly, they still haven’t developed telepathy– and so the conversation is a little tougher than the squirrel-like boy would prefer.

“Did something happen?”

Sunwoo recognises it’s already dark outside, the sound of cicadas landing into his ears through the open window. He doesn’t know how long he’s been glued to his mattress, but it makes him feel a little foolish. Not more than his previous actions, though– that surely takes the crown.

“I have a crush on Y/N,” Sunwoo speaks into the existence, startling the boy.

It’s weird for the boy to call you by your name in regards to his feelings. While he was so sure of his growing adoration for you when he spoke to you online, unaware of your real identity, it’s much harder to admit it to himself when the person he spent countless nights dreaming about finally turns into reality, and it’s not the form he expected. It’s confusing. It’s overwhelming– it leaves him thinking. Why did it have to be you?

“What?” Changmin asks, genuine shock and surprise coating his tone. “I thought you hated Y/N.”

The words sting like a slap to his face. He hated you. How could he ever be so reckless with his words to you? How could he be so mean? You must hate him now.

“Didn’t you have a crush on that online girl? What– I’m confused, man…” Changmin trails off, finally sitting at Sunwoo’s bed, the weight of his body making the mattress shift under the lazy man’s figure. 

“She’s the same person,” Sunwoo explains, the weight of his words making heaviness fall over the whole room, coating it with deep silence.

Changmin must think he’s foolish. He must think he is being crazy– hell, he must judge him for liking someone who once broke his heart, even though he was unaware it was the same person that made him feel so loved just by talking to him online. 

He cares about what you think more, though. Do you never wanna see him again? Do you hate him? He would hate himself, if he was you. 

Does he hate you? Does he want to see you again? Is your friendship over?

Did he lose you?

He hasn’t spoken to you in what feels like forever. Sunwoo’s throat closes on itself, making a real, visceral emotion run through his whole body and hit right in his chest, close to his heart. The corners of his eyes burn and he feels like running out of the room straight onto an ongoing traffic– he is unsettled. He feels terrible.

“Dude, are you crying?” Changmin asks with a shiteating grin on his face, pointing towards the younger one’s face. 

“No!” Sunwoo bluntly replies, voice hoarse and scratchy, harshly wiping off the tear that managed to roll down his cheek– almost slapping himself in the process. 

Changmin laughs. He laughs. Like it’s funny. Like it’s unserious and nothing is going on, like there is nothing to be worried about, and Kim Sunwoo is just being his overdramatic self, as always. Changmin laughs as if liking someone who once broke your friend’s heart is silly and not a big deal. As if not recognising someone you like online in real life is a normal experience, and not completely embarrassing– as if being mean to the same person you claim to adore is fine, and nothing to hate yourself over.

Sunwoo is conflicted. Talk about cognitive dissonance.

“Why are you laughing? It’s not funny,” Sunwoo pouts, the familiar wrinkle appearing in the middle of his eyebrows again, making his friend roll his eyes at the boy’s distress.

Changmin sighs. “It kinda is, if you think about it,” he shrugs, “you claim to hate Y/N, but turns out you’ve been in love with her all along…”

“You’re really not helping.”

“Well, what do you want me to do?” Changmin snickers. “I think this makes it easier for you. I know you were nervous about meeting her in real life, so this kind of takes off the pressure, since you already know each other.”

Sunwoo looks at his friend like he’s crazy. Does he not get the full weight of the situation? Does he not realise how serious this all is?

“What are you even talking about? Do you not hate me?” Sunwoo asks.

“Me?” Changmin asks, his head turning to the side like a confused puppy’s. “I don’t think I’m the person you need to worry about– although I’m sure you worry plenty– why would I hate you for liking Y/N?”

“Because she is your ex-girlfriend?” Sunwoo mumbles, twisting in his bed to have a better look at his friend. 

He is met with a few seconds of silence. He is starting to think his whole life is a joke and he is in some sort of a weird knock-off of the Truman show. How can you and Changmin both have the same reaction to his undying loyalty? He is being taken for granted, that’s for sure.

“You utter buffoon, that was ages ago! I honestly forget we even dated sometimes, it was so short-lived,” Changmin laughs before he rests his back against the wall of Sunwoo’s room, getting more comfortable in his new position. He knows the conversation isn’t over yet– there is more on the boy’s mind than the past relationship.

“Oh,” Sunwoo hums. 

“Yeah, oh,” Changmin laughs. “I honestly thought there was more to your hate towards Y/N, but I never really asked because I thought it was some gamer stuff or something that I couldn’t give two shits about. If I had known it was all because of my relationship from high school, I would’ve set the record straight a long time ago.”

“Well, maybe you should’ve.”

Sunwoo feels defeated. Like a deflated balloon. The weight on his shoulders stays the same despite the newfound information– because truth be told, this was never the problem in the first place.

And he is aware of that. Changmin is as well– he knows his best friend a little too much.

“But that’s not all there is to it, is it?” Changmin hums, poking the boy’s side with his long finger, burying it into his hoodie-covered flesh.

Sunwoo’s averted gaze and the chewing on the inside of his cheek is enough of an answer. “What is it?”

“It’s just… I don’t know how to feel about Y/N anymore,” Sunwoo confesses, snickering to himself. “Like, online, she was this perfect angel, like– don’t laugh at me now, you know I’m fucking sensitive– she was just… she was everything, you know?”

Changmin hums. “And in real life?”

“In real life, we were never really close and I hated her. How can I like someone I so strongly dislike in real life? It’s stupid…”

“You only hated what she did to me when we were teenagers, Sunwoo. You made yourself loathe something that wasn’t even there,” Changmin says, smiling sympathetically at the boy. “Do you think she is suddenly a different person to the one you got to know online just because she made a few mistakes when we were young?”

“I dunno…”

“I think you do know, you’re just scared to admit it to yourself, because you know you were a dick to her,” his best friend bluntly announces, watching Sunwoo wince at the words. Truth hurts– but it’s what he needs to hear. Because Changmin’s right, and Sunwoo is too tired of keeping all of these doubts hidden.

“Changmin, I can’t like her–”

“Why?” the boy cuts him off. “Because you said so? You were so big on saying how much you loved her for who she is, without knowing her in real life and knowing what she looked like. And sure, I made fun of you for it countless times before– but don’t you think you know her well enough by now? And don’t try to tell me you don’t know her just because you met online, because you know you’d be a fucking hypocrite.”

“But it’s Y/N.”

“Does that make any difference?”

Sunwoo moves from the inside of his cheek to bite at the dry skin of his lower lip. After tugging at the chapped mess, he feels iron on his tongue from tearing off a piece of his skin, eyes still pressed sternly into the ceiling. 

Does it make any difference? Does Sunwoo like you less now that he knows who you are? It was never about the looks for him– and god knows he barely even knew you in real life. Saying he wasn’t interested anymore would make him a hypocrite. 

Every time he thinks of the night talks you two shared and the secrets you’d tell him, trusting him with anything and everything, his heart still stummers in his chest and his stomach does that weird thing everyone in the romantic movies his roommate Eric watches talks about– but now, the girl has a face and a voice, and Sunwoo can’t say he hates it. He can’t say he hates you.

“I guess it doesn’t,” Sunwoo whispers, saying the obvious.

He still wants you. Just the way you are. Sure, he was shocked– anyone would be– but the feelings he has for you are still the same; it’s just the hate that slowly left his body, disappearing like the puddles of rain on the pavement on a sunny day. 

He can’t hate someone so important to him. How foolish of him to once think you were the bane of his existence.

“So why don’t you two just talk it out?” Changmin asks, pointing out the obvious.

Sunwoo plays with the skin around his cuticles for a while, nervously picking at the loose skin and making himself bleed once again, the nerves getting the worst out of him. “I think I’m a little scared.”

“So I was right. You’re scared she will push you away because you were a dick to her all those times before,” Changmin once again states the obvious.

“Basically,” Sunwoo says, his insecurities slowly slipping through his mouth and out to the wild, hanging in the air. “As much as my feelings didn’t change, I think hers might have. And that’s… that’s scary.”

In Sunwoo’s eyes, what you and he had together was special. He never wanted to lose you to something like this– over spite, a foolish lack of judgement. The thought of never talking to you again is making his insides crash on themselves, guilt slowly, but surely eating him alive. The best thing that’s ever happened to him might be royally fucked over, and there is no one else he can blame but himself.

“Well, you don’t know that. And although I know you might be too scared to find out, you two both need to have a talk. Don’t you think you owe each other that much?”

Changmin’s right. He almost always is– he doesn’t know why Sunwoo ever thought the older one needed protecting. Like a pouty child, Kim Sunwoo is comforted by his best friend’s words, maybe even a little scolded and enlightened by the dimpled boy. The appreciation in his heart almost outgrows the worry, but there is still a you-shaped hole in his chest that he feels the need to fill– only if you allow him to.

He didn’t expect for it to end up being you, but he doesn’t hate the idea. 

He’s not opposed to it. He welcomes it, because 

It’s still the same you. In whatever form, in whatever shape– he knows your soul, and he fears nothing will ever take away and move the feelings he treasures for you to another place, to some other.

They’re reserved for you only. (Also, he always thought your cunning smile was nice to look at. He just tried to suppress the idea of it deep, deep within his mind.)

“We were supposed to meet tomorrow,” Sunwoo hums, “I’ll see if she… still wants to come.”

Changmin smiles. “I knew you were smarter than this.” 

The backhanded compliment would rile him up on most occasions– this time, though, he knows it’s deserved.

One would say Kim Sunwoo didn’t think much before going up to the new café that opened downtown the week after exams, just like you two scheduled. Why?

First of all, he didn’t really check in with you to see if the offer is still up and if you want to meet him after all of this. Second of all, he turned up almost 35 minutes too early, since he was so nervous pacing around his flat that he physically couldn’t stay in the closed space anymore, and third of all, he’s fairly certain he put two different socks on when he was dressing himself, and after further inspection by the front door of the coffee place, pulling his jeans up to take a look, he finds out his suspicions were correct.

The thing is, though, against popular belief, Kim Sunwoo thought almost a little too much before going to the scheduled hangout. He thought about it the whole night before– and the whole previous week, if he’s being honest. He thought about it so much it consumed his every waking thought, leaving him all over the place, distracted and distressed. On most occasions, Eric had to ask a question five times before he was heard by his dear roommate, and if he wanted a real answer out of him, he had to gentle parent him through the conversation.

Sunwoo thought about it so much up to the point that you were all that was in his head. You and your last conversations on Discord which he spent the whole week rereading, you and your house in Minecraft that was left untouched since the last time you two played together (he checked). You and your laugh and the gentle, soft voice you only used with him on your calls– the voice that lulled him to sleep and make him feel butterflies in his stomach, unrecognisable to the hardened tone you used with him whenever you met up in real life when the conflicts he used to stir got the best out of you.

You and your cunning smile. You and your piercing, playful gaze. You and your hair that always kept falling into your face when you were crouched over the keyboard. It’s almost laughable how much he managed to pay attention to you in real life before knowing you were the same person he spent months adoring over the internet– the universe really works in strange ways sometimes.

So really, Kim Sunwoo has thought a lot about you and you two meeting before actually leaving the house; which could also very well be the reason why he didn’t text you to see if you still want to see him in the first place– in fear of being declined, in fear of being rejected by the only person he so deeply craves the validation from.

If you don’t show up, he will just go home and pretend none of this ever happened.

(Or at least he hopes he can.)

The more time he spends standing in front of the coffee shop, though, the more his hope of ever seeing you again gets smaller and smaller. Minutes are slowly passing him by like last summer, and he swears he’s never felt the passing of time more than right in this moment. He feels like he is gaining 5 years every 5 minutes that he’s standing in the middle of the pavement– the clock striking well past 20 minutes of when you were supposed to meet.

He will give it 10 more minutes, he thinks. 20, at most. Maybe he can wait an hour. Maybe you got stuck in the traffic. Maybe you got confused with the time…

Or maybe you’re just not coming, and he has to accept that.

Kicking the rocks under his feet while also trying to get out of the way of people walking past, he puts his hands deep into his pockets. He would rather die than to embarrass himself in front of you by texting you, and so he figures that if he just waits a few more minutes, God will surely give him a sign of when to stop holding back his tears and go back home…

“You look like a kicked puppy,” a voice– teasing, yet also a bit cautious– falls into his ears, making him perk up and look behind his shoulder. God must really love him today, he thinks.

No words escape his mouth for the time being. His brain goes short circuit a little at the sight of you– and in that moment he fully realises that he didn’t actually expect you to come, and that makes him feel even worse about himself. Relief washes over him like a wave of tsunami, the surprised look adorning Sunwoo’s face disappearing in seconds as he tries to manage his racing heartbeat.

“You came,” slips out from between his lips, making the boy immensely embarrassed with his choice of words. 

“I did,” you nod, pressing your lips tightly against each other, an awkward half-smile doing nothing to calm down Sunwoo’s nerves. “I figured you either come and we figure this out, or you don’t and I get something to treat myself to chase down the disappointment.”

You’d be disappointed if he didn’t come. Just the sentiment makes Sunwoo’s heart do backflips in his ribcage– how could he ever think he hated you? 

“Kind of same, actually,” he replies, nodding.

An awkward silence falls over you two like a weighted blanket, making Sunwoo’s stomach churn in discomfort. This is not how he imagined your first meeting to be– but then again, it’s not like he is meeting his online best friend (if he can even call you that anymore) for the first time. He tries to find the memory of your first meeting somewhere in the depths of his mind, but much to his dismay, he is left unsuccessful. He never really deemed it that important before– curse him and his reckless teenage mind.

“Uhm,” you hum, scratching the back of your neck, “I was… the bus was late, by the way. I didn’t purposefully let you wait to like, get back at you or something,” you suddenly explain, your lips stretching into a sympathetic smile.

The explanation doesn’t matter to him anymore. He doesn’t care if you came 20 minutes late and if you took the bus or if you built a portal in the back rooms of the very café you’re supposed to enter in a few minutes– all that matters is that you came and that you’re here, right in front of Sunwoo’s eyes, and you’re not pulling out a machete or an axe on him as a revenge for all the times he acted wrongly towards you in the past.

“Oh, no worries,” he hums almost immediately, “you’re here now, and that’s all that matters,” he nods. 

After another shared, prolonged look between the two of you– one in which he scans you up and down, as if actually seeing you for the first time (and noticing the switch in your usual attire: you exchanged your cargo pants for a skirt, something more fancy, yet telling), a look in which he gets all red in his cheeks, wondering if you noticed the way he did his hair differently today, just to appeal to you– he clears his throat and takes a step towards the café, opening the door for you like the gentleman he tries to be today. “Let’s go in, then!”

You follow his lead, entering the small, yet cozy place. The cold weather outside makes a good contrast with the heating of the café, and when Sunwoo takes a look at the board above the counter, he finds a seasonal menu welcoming him in with a big bear hug. Hot chocolate is just what he needs after all of this, and he won’t deny himself the pleasure of one now.

“Hot choccy?” you ask, smiling softly at the silent figure standing next to you. Sunwoo is caught off-guard with your suggestion and the gentle curve of your lips just the same, warmth spreading to the inside of his heart at the realisation that you know him so well. It’s her. It’s really her, he gasps in disbelief.

“Want one as well?” he asks after nodding, watching you shrug. He takes that as a yes, and since he thinks he did a lot of damage over the course of your friendship, he takes the lead and pays for your drink to try and make up for it– which you don’t fight him over, and he doesn’t find it in him to care. Actually, he thinks he kind of appreciates it. 

After taking a seat in one of the booths in the corner– the cream sofa hugs him in just well, and Sunwoo thinks he might just give this place a 5 star review on Yelp, depending on the way this date- I mean… friendly gathering goes– he is met with another excruciating, suffocating silence. He never really had much trouble talking to you before– surely not online, but also not whenever you were around in real life settings as well, since he always found a way to tease you and make fun of you, giving you most of his undivided attention– but this time around, he thinks keeping up a conversation with you might just be the hardest thing he’s ever had to experience. 

You make him nervous. You make him doubtful. If he wondered about how you’d perceive him after meeting him before knowing you two were acquainted already, he is wondering even more now– do you hate him? Do you wish he wasn’t the one sitting opposite of you right now? Do you want to leave and never talk to him again?

Is he good enough? Does he live up to the expectations– if you even had any?

All previous hatred towards you disappears as fast as a click of your finger, and Kim Sunwoo is left breathless at the fact that you’re right there, in front of him– his online best friend. He thinks he might have still liked you even if you turned out to be a mass murderer. He thinks he might have still liked you even if you were a 50 year old male in a disguise. He thinks the bond you two have built over the internet is much stronger than any mean comments he threw your way before– and the only thing left is to hope you feel the same.

Opening his mouth to speak, he thinks it’s time to have that conversation.

“Listen, I–”

“Were you disappointed that it was me?” you cut him off suddenly, fast as lightning– as if to hurry to get the question out before you chicken out of it.

Sunwoo is left staring at you open-mouthed, shocked. There was not a single minute of his existence where he’d feel disappointed with your identity. The thought never even crossed his brain once, and suddenly, he feels stupid. 

He left you hanging for a whole week– all because he thought you’d hate him. He left you wondering in silence, doubting yourself and thinking you’re not who he would’ve liked– all because of his own insecurities. Why has he not thought of your side of things as well?

“No,” he simply states, watching your face morph into a more relaxed one, eyes softening. “Not at all, no,” he shakes his head.

“I just– it’s…”

“I’m sorry if I ever made you feel that way,” Sunwoo utters out. You press your lips together, listening. “Was I surprised? Mhm. Shocked? Yeah, of course I was… but no, I was never disappointed that it turned out to be you. Not for a single moment.”

“I thought you hated me,” you note, chuckling. The words sting on Sunwoo’s skin, but he figures he’s not the one to be hurt right now– and so he sucks it up and hums.

“I was being petty,” he agrees. “And childish. Nothing to be so passionate about as I was,” he admits, forcefully laughing at his own actions. “Nothing to throw away everything we… nothing to throw away the friendship that means so much to me.”

The sincerity of his own words scares him. There is a quiet desperation in him that wants to prove to you that he’s not as bad as he presented himself to be. There is a need in him to fix everything he ruined, to show you that he’s the same Sunwoo you know from the internet, and that all of this is worth it. 

“And I’m sorry, just… just by the way.”

Sunwoo never thought he’d be left apologizing to you– but here he is. Maybe this whole thing taught him something– maybe you taught him something. 

“Ah,” you shrug. “It’s okay. I mean, it was kind of fun watching you be so pressed about nothing, but I’m glad it’s resolved now,” you laugh.

You laugh, and the atmosphere immediately clears. Sunwoo feels like he can breathe lighter, like the cold isn’t so overbearing outside, like he hadn’t just spent the last week locked in his room, contemplating the point of living at all. He didn’t think it would be this easy… 

Something inside of him truly believed he lost you for good. 

“I mean, you were the one that ran out of the internet café without an explanation–”

“You cursed me out!” you argue, kicking his shin lightly under the table.

The boy fakes offense, pointing his finger at you. “That wasn’t directed at you! Just the situation in general.”

“That includes me,” you add.

“Sure, but still– I was just surprised. I really didn’t expect my online best friend to be sitting in the same room as me every week, that’s for sure,” he says, watching as your eyes light up at the title, a cute smile overtaking your features.

“I also didn’t expect you to ghost me for a full week after,” you add, shrugging. “You’re usually so desperate for attention,” you hum, making the boy’s cheeks heat up like a furnace, eyes averting your gaze at all costs. Now, this surely wasn’t on the list of things he wanted to discuss with you today.

Clearing his throat, he makes eye contact with his mug instead, desperately trying to shift the topic of the conversation. “Drink it, it’s getting cold…”

“Sure… Whatever you say, Steve,” you tease. When he looks up at you from under his eyelashes, there’s the same cunning smile on your face that he watched all those times when you won against him at League of Legends– the same smile that used to always drive him crazy, but he now recognises that he translated the implications of his insanity all wrong (because he thinks that maybe somewhere deep inside of his romantic, rotten soul, he might have known all along)– and he wonders if this was the smile you always wore when you made fun of him for falling asleep on the call with you again, the boy using your soft, sleepy voice as a lullaby. 

Sunwoo almost chokes on his drink, pointing an accusing finger at you. “Speaking of,” he starts, “the kids miss you. Go and feed them, miss,” he says, watching you roll your eyes at him. The dogs you co-parent with him in Minecraft  have been sitting near your front door ever since you last logged out, and even though coming to your house felt like an emotional torture in the time you were gone, Sunwoo always managed to feed them like he would with a real animal.

Call him childish, for all he cares. 

“Okay, damn,” you say, rolling your eyes at him. “You only say that because you want me to finally move our beds together, don’t you?” you tease him, referencing the little offering he made for you months ago– the one that’s still secure outside of your house despite many of its renovations.

Sunwoo almost chokes on his drink again. You grin at him– a sight that makes his insides feel like they were threaded with gold. He swears hot chocolate has never felt so sweet before. 

If he wasn’t sure of it before, he’s fairly certain now– you can fall for someone over the internet. And yes, the crush translates to its full form after meeting them in person.

“I mean, I wouldn’t be opposed to it…” he mumbles, not really quick enough to come up with a good comeback now that he’s face to face with you, making you giggle cutely at his sudden shyness. This is not how you know Kim Sunwoo– the sheepish composure is so far of the boy you met online, but also the one that ridiculed you during a casual game of CS:GO weeks ago.

“I’ll decide if it’s worth it after you show me the lights you’ve been talking my ear off about,” you say– and he thinks he won. Because this is an invitation to his room– an invitation for further hangouts. If you keep flirting with him like this, Sunwoo thinks he might just combust.

There is only one problem, though.

“About the lights…”

BONUS // A YEAR LATER

If you would’ve told Kim Sunwoo that he will end up in a long distance relationship only a bit more than a year ago, he would’ve believed you. See, he’s a stranger to denial– he is quite good at accepting his own feelings for what they were, inwardly, at least– and so he was fairly certain he was in love with his online best friend even before he had a chance to meet her. Somewhere along the line, given the fact that his feelings would be reciprocated, he imagined going further with the establishment, no matter how far or close in distance you were from each other.

Turns out, life is funny in many ways and his online best friend, the proclaimed love of his life, lived just around the corner with her roommate Aeri. She still doesn’t like him that much, but Sunwoo puts effort into visiting his girlfriend at her place often, in hopes that her best friend finally warms up to him a little– he thinks it’s almost like approaching a stray cat. The Sylvanian families shrine the two girls hold in their living room is also fascinating to him– he didn’t think someone with a stern look like Aeri’s could stare at something so adorable and small so lovingly.

“Sunwoo, once again, we are not in a long distance relationship,” you say over the speakers of his sister’s laptop that he borrowed just so he could call with you, making him mourn into the poor-quality microphone. 

“We are! You’re so far away right now, how can you justify it not being a long distance relationship?” 

“We literally saw each other a week ago,” you deadpan, “and we will see each other again after we come back to uni, you moron.”

See, Sunwoo’s definition of a long distance relationship is a bit warped. As long as you’re not in the same town as him, he considers you too far away– and in any other circumstance, you would find it cute (bless his heart), but when you’re trying to enjoy your break with your family that you haven’t seen in a while, it’s becoming just the tiniest bit overbearing.

“That’s too long.”

“You’re being a baby,” you grunt, making your boyfriend pout at the other side of the call, seen by his web camera. You were against turning your own on, but were forced to nonetheless– Sunwoo’s ‘I need to see your face or else I’ll die’ was too convincing not to. You know he won’t, but at the same time, the poor boy could turn a little manic at times– you had to make sure he will survive until your next meeting.

“God, a man can’t even miss his long distance girlfriend in peace–”

“I am not your long distance girlfriend. We’re literally only like 4 hours away from each other right now, that’s not even–”

“If you think about it,” Sunwoo cuts you off, making you sigh. “It’s like we’re back to square one. Y’know, before we started dating.”

“Not really…?” you try to argue with him, planning to point out the fact that back then, you used to call on Discord and not Whatsapp, with no camera on and using fake names, but the boy cuts you off fast, knowing that you’re right and he just can’t let you have the point.

“I miss your kisses, that’s all.”

Still hung up on the previous comment, you sigh. “We weren’t even kissing back then, Sunwoo.”

The boy stares at you for a second, blinking, before he breaks out into a huge grin. “Well, maybe not you. Me, however, I was kissing the screen everytime your character showed up–”

“I’m going to end the call,” you warn him. Why are you even dating him? He has a bitchless loser energy– maybe you should let him live up to it.

“No no no– okay, I’ll be normal.”

“I find that hard to believe,” you sigh.

If you would’ve told Kim Sunwoo that he will end up in a long distance relationship only a bit more than a year ago, he would’ve believed you. After seeing the little heart shaped altar in front of your house in Minecraft every time he plays– your beds now stuck together, making him sense that he finally made it– he truly wouldn’t find this accusation hard to believe.

Truth be told, though, he’s much happier with having a normal relationship with you.

One where he gets to hold you, one where he gets to kiss you. One where you finally come over and he gets to impress you with the LED strip he finally got off a proper electronic place instead of a cheap online store, investing money into the device he gets to use behind the locked doors of his room for atmospheric purposes whenever you two–

Anyways. 

Maybe Changmin was right and he was always being just too overly-dramatic. He was also right when he accused Sunwoo of having a huge crush on you online, after all. 

Still, Sunwoo wouldn’t change it for anything. Despite the history you share, he actually thinks you’re pretty fucking cute.

And real. And his. 

And thankfully, not a thousand miles away. (Although it may feel like it right now.)

[bengals-barnesbabe]

“Thank You TikTok” Masterlist

~ a series of text imagines between you and Joe all inspired by random TikTok videos ~

Started: 12 September 2024

Last Updated: 31 December 2024

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fluff - 🌞 smut - 🌚 mix - 🌗 angst - ☄️

most popular - 🌙 newest - ⚡️ request - 💫

i. booktok ~ ever since he downloaded TikTok, Joe’s learnt a lot more about his beautiful bookworm 🌗

ii. say high ~ Joe takes part in some recreational activities and tries (and fails) to hide it from those who know him the best 🌗💫

iii. the real afterparty ~ y/n comes across a TikTok of a bride and groom doing a wardrobe change together, so naturally, she asks her fiance his opinion 🌚

iv. happy weight ~ nothing says a great relationship like two people falling in love while getting fat together, well that’s what TikTok says 🌖

v. pay attention ~ cons to working with your man... he's you're a distraction 🌞

vi. come home ~ it’s been a while since you’ve seen your man, so you left him a present🌒

vii. how that shit tastes ~ they say it's a man's drink so you've never tried it, so you ask your man about his drink of choice 🌗

viii. you like that ~ inspired by another TikTok, Joe compiles a list of things he likes about you🌖

ix. babies ~ you tell your husband about your daughter's supermarket antics, and he gets baby fever? 🌖

x. heroes & princes ~ everyone makes mistakes, even great boyfriends but especially if he has Tee and Ja’Marr as friends 🌞

xi. roses ~ you have a new favorite song and a certain TikTok gives you an idea on how to introduce it to your man 🌚

xii. you're enough ~ you and Joe feel losses hard, so you try your best to make him feel better after this one 🌖

xiii. i can fix her ~ you end up on Joe's fyp for the worst reason possible ☄️

xiv. im a fan ~ Joe finds your secret TikTok account in the best way possible 🌖

xv. it's just a trend ~ you participate in a certain dance trend with a song Joe does not like ☄️ 🌖

xvi. hey shawty ~ you watched a TikTok on how to domesticate your boyfriend, let's see how he does ☄️🌞

xvii. treat me ~ despite always receiving royalty treatment from your boyfriend, you decide to tease him with one of your favorite songs🌚

xviii. ruined me ~ Joe ruined you for all men, this is how he reacts when you tell him 🌗

xix. hey daddy ~ in order to keep your relationship fresh, you do what all couples do... send each other ridiculous pick up lines 🌘

xx. boyfriend blindness ~ your boyfriend becomes a comedian, so you have to show him who he's playing with 🌖

xxi. mini gossip girl ~ your daughter comes home and spills everything about her dad's life 🌞

xxii. daddy duties ~ Joe's left alone for more than a few hours with his boys and chaos ensues 🌞

xxiii. mini gossip girl 2 ~ your daughter is at it again, but this time it works out in Joe's favor🌖

xxiv. talkin nonsense ~ relationships should be fun, especially when you both are on the same level 🌘

xxv. speechless ~ you sent your friend Joe some messages that were not for him to see 🌖

xxvi. mini gossip girl 3 ~ now older, your daughter's mouth reveals some truths she was not ready for 🌖

xxvii. bye week ~ Joe gets caught lying to his pregnant wife 🌖

xxviii. wait, pause ~ you and joe are in the middle of a fight, but he has some tea to spill 🌗☄️💫

xxix. we listen and we don't judge ~ Joe has an idea, Joe regrets his idea 🌖☄️💫

xxx. tatted truths ~ your true feelings for Joe are exposed by decisions you made on one drunken night 🌘

xxxi. hearts on deck ~ ~Joe needs to apologize for his acts… in his fiancée’s dream 🌗☄️💫

xxxii. bending your rules

xxxiii. just friends ~ 🌗💫

updates about twice a week🪷

requests to join this series are open! just send me a quote or link to a video and your fav pic of Joe (along with anything else you desire) to be included!

[thewintersoldatt]

SORRY, NOT SORRY -RAFE CAMERON

Pairing: Rafe Cameron x fem!listener

Summary: Rafe can be a “good” boyfriend when he wants to be… with a sprinkle of manipulation of course.

Warnings: Naughty language, Fluff low-key from our toxic daddy, ft. JJ being a chaotic mess.

notes: This audio is set during 1x05. Instead of it being midsummer's, it's the listeners birthday! I've been working on this all week and I'm tired of listening to it on repeat, so if something doesn't add up, it's because I got lazy. And I wish Rafe told me he loved me. 😭

word count: Its audio, my panties are wet and so are yours.

Scene one

JJ: Ah, would you look at this! It's our birthday girl!

You: What are you doing here?

Our cutie patootie rambles on then walks off with the security guard.

During this pause count to about 6 or 7.

You: What the hell did you guys do to his face?

Rafe: We didn't do anything… his face was like that when he…showed up.

You: Well, why did you guys corner him in here?

Rafe: We were just making sure... he knew his place. And that he's not allowed here. If anything, we were doing you and your parents a favor, I mean, god knows what he already took.

You: You promised me you wouldn’t start anything tonight, Rafe.

Rafe: Can you give us a minute? I'd like to talk to my girlfriend... alone, so get out. Alright, um, can I speak first since you wanna do this right now?

You: Go ahead.

Rafe: How long have you lived here?

You: I was born here.

Rafe: Yes you were born here, but where - where did you grow up?

You: Figure 8.

Rafe: Yes, you grew up on Figure 8. And where did... our pal JJ grow up?

You: The cut.

Rafe: The Cut. and that's exactly my point, baby. We're kooks. And... what is JJ again?

You: Jesus, Rafe don't start-

Rafe: Come on, you wanna talk, let’s talk. What about communication? Isn’t that what we're supposed to be working on?

Count to 3 during this pause.

You: He’s a pouge.

Rafe: See that wasn't so hard, now was it? Now, let me make something clear, and stop me if you get a little confused - you and me. We’re practically royalty on this island. We’re together for a reason. And before you saying, yes I do love you. I always have and I always will. You’re mine. You’re it for me, sweetheart. And… you’re a kook. So, start acting like one before I do something about it, mkay?

You: God, you’re a dick you know that? How about you leave too.

Rafe: Ugh, look I’m sorry, alright? It’s just… it’s just when I saw him on the patio talking to Sarah I lost it. This is supposed to be your day and I didn’t want him ruining it. Kind of like when… uh… we switched out the coke with flour and gave it to Top because he ate your cupcakes.

You: And how is that relevant to this?

Rafe: It’s sorta the same thing. You - you worked hard on those. Uh, he ate them. I was pissed because they were for me. And you were upset because I wanted to punch him in the throat. Tomato, tomahto. Blah, blah, blah. See you’re smiling, I love it when you smile.

You: You’re such a sap.

Rafe: I love you.

You: I love you too.

Rafe: And again, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to cause a scene, I just didn’t know how else to get him to leave. You know how JJ and his friends are. All of them are drawn to us like a moth to a flame. Now, uh, can we put this behind us and get back to the party?

You: Thats the smartest thing that’s come out of your fat mouth all night, baby.

Rafe: By the way, I really do think he took something from your bedroom.

You: What?

Rafe: I saw him come down from the hallway, unless he took something from your dad’s office?

You: You’re serious?

Rafe: As a heart attack.

You: But… I’ve never done anything to him.

Rafe: That’s what they do though. You should know this by now. They butter you up, just to take whatever they can right from under our noses. It’s sick, if I’m being honest.

You: So much for trying to be civil.

Rafe: I know, yeah, I’ll talk to your dad, and um, see what we can do. But for now, let’s go celebrate. It’s not everyday someone turns 17.

@rafesapologist @rvfecamerons @sadfury @rafesthroatbaby @rafesaddiction @hockeybabe87 @rafeinterlude @starkeyisthelastname @secretly-tumb1r @kingkylie444 @stayonmars @maybankswhore @barbiiecams @princessmisery666 @ilovebarrykeoghan

If you would like to be tagged, I gotchu sis.

[nerd-space]

Could you do hard dom tomas, bihan and Kuai liang?

Hi lovely! My pinned has all the characters i WILL write and kuai and bihan are not apart of that list- as i feel like i would butcher their personalities royally :') i can do some headcanons on tomas though! my beloved boy..

warnings: impact play, switch!brat!reader brat-tammer!dom!tomas, manhandling, mean!tomas

this is super long because i have an awful obsession with him :(.

Dom!Tomas - Love love loves treating you like a princess and like royalty in public and infront of people, but the second you start actung up he sweetly goes along with everything and notes every single time you brat out. Who when you get home approaches you very softly and kisses your cheek... suspicious...he sets down your guys outting bags and smiles a wide grin at you as he gently raises his hand and points to the bedroom, his demeanor seeming quite soft for poking at him.. maybe you were in charge of things in the bed still?

Dom!Tomas - who once you sit on the bed, with a big fat smirk on your face as you cross your legs and look at him with a confident face, patting a spot next to him to sit, he stands there with a soft smile... almost condescending in a way, you huff and furrow your brows as you get up and walk up to him, his tall height suddenly quite apparent as you place a hand on his chest, poking his chest harshly as you yap your bratty mouth off at him once more

"Hellooooo!? Earth to Tomaaaaas?... Sit on the bed for me?... Don't just staaaaand there-"

Dom!Tomas - who suddenly takes a strong hand to your throat as he walks into you- forcing you back against the bed as you gasp in surpise, this is something Tomas had never done or never acted before. both of your hands gripping his thick forearm for stability, your small hands barely fitting around each side. he kicks a knee between your legs and forces them apart as he shoves you back onto the bed. his knee slotted between your thighs as his voice drops an octave you have never heard so feral before.

" What gives you the right to talk to me like that, Princess? Hm?... i allowed you to do and say whatever you wanted today.. and it seems like you have much more attitude than normal...let me help you get all of that energy out yeah?"

Dom!Tomas - who makes you cower back in fear at his sudden dominance, finding it unbelievably hot but the second you showed any fear he pauses and his voice goes back to being the soft attentive way it always is

"Was that too far, My Love?... i- apologize if it-"

when you cut him off with a violent and rough kiss his eyes widen in surpise for a split second before realizing you are very much into this as much as he is- spurring him to further his dominant advances as he dips his meaty forearm under your back, arching you by force as he holds you there, biting and kissing up your collarbone to your jaw, stopping to breathe out a stern comand

"My love.. you are going to obey me tonight.. you will do as i say and be a good.. good girl for me wont you?"

you mindlessly nod along as his voice coaxes you into an intoxicating headspace, the sub side of you crawling out, something new that tomas had yet to see. Your usual dominating self fading into something unknown as your naisl dig into his shoulders, your breathing picking up and becoming shallow as he kisses you softly, a false sense of security and gentleness. You're suddenly snapped out of your hazey headspace from the soft kisses as he pulls back to roughly make contact with your flushed cheek- the sting making you gasp and melt further into his arms.

He smirks down- but an uncertainty with his action, knowing that hurting you in a genuine manner would break his heart into a million pieces...so when he sees you nod and ask for it again as you writhe under him he sighs a sigh of relief before once again repeating his stern and harsh action against your pretty flushed face. seeing you gasp and giggle out a whimper making his stomach flip- this new submission growing on him like a fungus.

Tomas leaving bright red and dark red marks all over your skin, the bruises beautiful against your skin as he sits and takes his time practically covering you in them. your whimpers and wriggling making him hard beyond belief as he flips you two- now laying down with his strong hips grinding up into you without warning, forcing you to stabilize yourself with your hands to his chest- moaning in surpise as his buldge grinds into your panty covered clit perfectly- also making you realize he somehow got all of your clothing off besides your underwear while he is still fully dressed.

jejsjs cliff hanger.. this got TOO longhg!-):$/&

[spotlightlowlife]

hella decent vs hella descent

The satan character is decent.

A judge and a reasonable one at that who it seems is well respected among his peers, all the sins but sadboy showed to his court, there was plenty of room to speak and this court session was abruptly held because of one little snitch (with a good case) so we get the impression that he is a stickler for rules and justice.

No idea how powerful he is but he showed us something that this series has been lacking which is a hierarchy. A stickler for the rules but clearly had some favouritism and affection for Stolas who sits high as royalty, was Stolas spared by satan or is there a known and accepted exception to the rules when it comes to royalty? That was left open.

Stolas's punishment, if it's committed to could actually something excellent for his characters growth, the opportunity to genuinely slum it and gain empathy and appreciation for what is a lifetime to the average person.

I like how the moment Stolas lost his position the general public would turn on him, again, finally establishing that these titles stand for something.

We're definitely not missing out on sadboy Lucifer over at the hangout hotel, he truly isn't needed.

Stella can love her daughter and loathe her husband who loathed her right back. No proof that's she's the incompetent parent. Nothing hard to understand here. The Octavia scene could have made Stella look more of a villain had this all been her plan but no, her brother pulls the strings.

Still, Stella remains interesting .

I appreciate that Mammon was tediously bored, unbothered and was looking forward to taking a break to eat, like many people forced to be at meetings, this further told us that these meetings are something that must be attended like it or not.

They really laid it on thick that nobody likes this guy and were so petty about it, reminding us that he's gross, fat, glutinous, stupid, unfocused, childlike and doesn't get that those who aren't snapping at him don't like him either.

Were we supposed to find a grownup playing with toys that ranged from fidgit to toddler an annoyance or amusing, since the whole direction of this character is that he's offputting and wrong in every way possible?

Mammon had no time for Stolas's song yet Stolas would approach him briefly and knock over his building blocks, is his lack of interest in 'emotional' song and dance another reason we should be disliking him, who didn't have a song to sing in his episode where he additionally broke the mould of 'no fun'?

Why does Bee have issue with him? Wasn't she a fun, dismissive and shallow, binge eating and drinking pushing party girl when we last saw her? Couldn't these two easily be close?

What exactly is ancient Ozzie's issue with ancient Mammon outside of the past 10 years with 30 something Fizz?

Bee and Ozzie being attached at the hip and practically sharing lines is so tacky. They're reduced to cheering on Blitzø despite their few exchanges with him, exchanges which involved unresolved critique, these two are truly the worst, they got worst, Ozzie heckled Blitzø on before he got neutered, but after neutering he knows that Stolas had been lending out his grimore, Blitzø no longer has Stolas's book but now has Ozzie's crystal, so he's unser his jurisdiction now, a deal Stolas and Ozzie made behind Blitzø's back, how about talking about that? Bee on the other hand got neutered during her introduction, when she all of a sudden saw Blitzø as a huge problem that was ruining her party and killing a vibe though we saw no NPC walking out, now she's arguing that he's harmless? We don't get much of them but the brief moments we do get just dump on their credibility further but hey, what matters is they're both dating on Blitzø and co. level so they're 'nice guys'.

Two sides of the same coin is what they are. Though their opening lines were to cape for Blitzø things soon turned to Bee sex shaming Mammon, yes Queen Bee, the prince gluttony who sat cringing at Mammon's gluttonous display, makes the sex remark. I repeat, coin, two sides.

Really gives more credence to critism of fat phobia and acephobia (because asexual means nobody wants you, it's just another word for incel) that I've seen, there may be room to throw neuro divergence ignorance in there too.

[angeloftheodd]

I’m Blue Da Ba Dee Cutie Pie 🥧💙🎀🩵

[prying-pandora666]

The Gaang’s Favorite Foods

Aang is an ovo-lacto vegetarian. He still consumes milk and eggs, just nothing that requires killing an animal. Being more used to getting nutrients from a variety of plant foods including nuts and seeds, supported by nutrient rich bison milk and whatever eggs they eat in this world, Aang’s diet is surprisingly diverse and not as restrictive as it first seems. People have and still do eat this way. He loves egg tarts!

Sokka is a growing teen boy, used to a high-fat diet of primarily fish, mollusks, large ruminants, marine mammals (and their blubber), full fat milk, eggs, blood, etc, and only minorly supported by additional foods like seaweed, berries, tubers, perhaps the occasional imported flour or rice. He is going to need a LOT of animal meat and fat. Especially organs. The cookbook says he loves dried salmon collars.

Katara is also a growing teen girl, and considering what starts for girls around her age, she probably also has higher iron requirements. Heme-iron (from meat) is the most easily absorbed, and if it’s what her body is accustomed to, I imagine there’s going to be a lot of cravings there too. It’s possible she slowly converted to a vegetarian diet eventually, but there isn’t actually anything in canon to say that Katara and Aang didn’t just maintain different diets. The comics and cookbook say she likes soups and stews including sea prunes which are actually a type of mollusk.

Toph comes from a wealthy family. Although most of the Earth Kingdom relies primarily on staple grains (rice mainly, but also others), she likely had a decently diverse diet compared to others. Including plenty of meat (beef, chicken, duck, pork), a variety of vegetables, and even luxury items like refined sugar. According to the cookbook, she doesn’t like to eat her vegetables, which implies she had open access to meat for most of her life. She is fond of tea eggs.

Zuko comes from the wealthiest nation which is also in a tropical climate. He’d have access to a plethora of fruits the others had never even heard of! Tropical fruits, berries, coconut, and all the different dishes you can make with them. The nutrient-rich volcanic soil would also lend itself to farming, giving this country plenty of fresh vegetables and staple grains. However, culturally they seem to be a meat and seafood loving people, and spiciness is critical! Being a prince, Zuko would have even more access to all of the above than the common person. According to the cookbook, his favorite snack is sizzle-crisps which is basically fried and seasoned pork belly. He also sneaks Komodo-chicken to his uncle in prison.

BONUS:

Azula, like Zuko, is royalty in a nation blessed with great diversity of fruits, meat, seafood, and fresh veggies. We know she attended a harsh military academy which puts its students through rigorous survival training. Azula knows how to live off the land and likely can survive off of whatever petty things she can forage or catch. But being royalty, she is more accustomed to having whatever she desires prepared for her. She seems to have a bit of a sweet tooth, which can happen when you give a teen unfettered access to luxury goods like sugar. With her nation’s relatively advanced stage of industrialization, certain more processed foods and desserts are available to her. She is fond of cherries and in the comics she is a fiend for mochi!

[writingsofwesteros]

Jace being a little slut with the dragonseed girls, the bratty prince needs all the girls to serve him since he is royalty. Poor girls follow him like little puppies, doing whatever he says and apologizing when he degrades them. But there is one pretty dragonseed that he desperately wants as to taste and claim, a spoiled little whore who resembled the late Princess Viserra. Jace could have her at any moment but it was her twin brother that stopped him, a hotheaded entitled boy who already had her as his wife. With the brother riding one of their biggest and fiercest dragons, he couldn’t be going around and piss him off. So for now the prince could only enjoy her drooling mouth on his cock in the darkest areas of the dragon pits or watch her ride her twin in the soft bed his mother had provided them.

That alicole riding scene has fucked my brain;)

Oh!! Slut!Jace on the rise and we love it; he would be so damn hot !!!!

The alicole scene did not need to go so hard but we are here for it !

Oh its so unfair that all he can take is her hot mouth as she moans and drools against him. His hand reaches for those bright locks of hers and brings the little dragonseed against his stomach. She gags so prettily for him.

And the dresses that adorn her figure are tempting; she does this on purpose, the Prince thinks to himself as those fat breasts nearly fall from her

[callsign-datura]

would u ever make a version of fboy ghost for konig? 🙇🏻‍♀️🙇🏻‍♀️

WOULD I EVER? yes.

fuckboy!konig isn't like fuckboy!ghost. he tells you he loves you to butter you up, shows you affection and promises your relationship isn't some fwb thing that will end up in heartbreak and tears.

fuckboy!konig buys you pretty things. you're a pretty person, you deserve nothing but the best. sometimes you tell him he shouldn't, he doesn't have to because those sexy pieces will end up torn to bits by the end of the night anyways so he shouldn't waste his money. but he takes that as a challenge. ends up buying a few hundred dollars worth of lingerie and cute little outfits and normal every day pieces for you to wear. he says it's because he likes seeing you feel pretty, but in reality, seeing you in skimpy outfits because it gives him a raging boner.

fuckboy!konig who treats you like his prince/princess everywhere but in bed. in bed, he says the dirtiest things. things that, if he wasn't buried into you up to the hilt, you'd probably end up tearing up a bit from the venom that coated his voice as he said them. "come on, maus. give me another like the slut you are... you know you wanna drench my cock, mm?" fuckboy!konig who has a habit of shooing off other guys when you're out together. since he treats you like royalty, it's a routine for him to take you out to dinner or take you out to buy clothes or anything like that. and since you're so attractive, you get looks from people in public. he always has a hand on you somewhere to give off a protective vibe to anyone in the vicinity. and since konig is a big fucking guy, most people feel too intimidated to fuck with him and his girl. fuckboy!konig has had plenty of partners. met plenty of women who've begged for his cock, begged for him to put them in a mating press, but when you beg, you do it so prettily. that glossy look in your eyes when you're looking up at him with drool dripping down the corner of your mouth from the intense facefucking he'd gave you minutes prior, when you're whimpering his name so softly and begging him to fuck you... he can't resist. to him, you're irresistible. fuckboy!konig likes being in control. whether that be choking, pulling your hair or putting you into stressful positions, whatever he wants you to do? you will do, and that's just how it works. (f!reader) fuckboy!konig has a breeding kink. a painfully strong breeding kink. he's sworn off hitting it raw since last time he did, you had a pregnancy scare. but when you text him and tell him you're going on birth control? he almost gets hard instantly. thinking of being able to fuck his cum into that pretty hole of yours, thinking of how it would feel to hit your cervix over and over with each bruising thrust and not having a care in the world? holy shit, he's fucking his fist minutes after you text him. (and definitely sending a video) (m!reader) fuckboy!konig is a switch for his boys. loves dominating you, but also loves letting you dominate him; either way, part of him loves just being close to you in general. whether that be with you bent over a counter and one of his hands wrapped around the base of your cock, giving lithe pumping motions as his hips rock back and forth into you, or lying on his back with that pretty body of yours bouncing up and down his cock and fucking him into overstimulation. has a thing for pushing your legs up to your chest and holding your legs together with one hand while he grabs and squeezes the fat of your ass and pounds into you at the same time. this man has you seeing stars. def makes you taste your own cum. fuckboy!konig dreams of fucking you. nightly. definitely wakes up with a painfully hard cock and definitely sends you a video of him pulling the hem of his boxers down underneath his cock, making sure the angle catches the way his length bobs and twitches a bit as he grunts softly into his phone. he's desperate; and his desperation is hot as fuck. fuckboy!konig insists on you seeing other guys, but he can't deny the way his heart flutters when you say no. "you're all i need," you mumble to him, your soft voice making heat blossom throughout his belly. "why would i want some other guy?" and he smiles when he looks down at you, his gaze filled with something that he never expected to feel-- affection.

[serraphinm]

♕Chapter 1 - The Crown♕

Notes: This has taken me so long, but it was totally worth it. Hope you all agree. When I wrote this, I thought of The Princess Diaries, but I wanted to make it have magic. There are phones in this world, but nobles are old-fashioned and don't really use them. If you have any questions, put them in the comments, and I'll do my best to answer them!

WC: 8k

Taglist: @bready101

Reblogging and comments are loved and welcomed!!

Field trips were the fucking best. Not only did you get a break from schoolwork, but you also got to run around like an idiot with your friends. The one downside was that I still had to wear my school uniform. Old thing was stiff as a board and smelt like dust, whatever the hell dust smelt like. 

Almost tripping up the stairs, I head into the Midiri National Museum, where our professors have chosen to have us walk around for the next 5 hours. My feet were hurting already. I huff, tighten the straps of my satchel, and pull my hair out from under it. Opening the heavy ass doors, I spot my friends and grin. Before I run over to them, I look at the museum entryway again. The massive walls and high ceilings always manage to steal my breath away. Taking in the details, I walk to my friends. Once I reached them, we exchanged whispered hellos and giggled. Our professor, Professor Hallam, instructs us to go wherever we like as long as we remain in the building. We head to the Royalty section to get a look at the Princess's crown and try it on. According to the legend, if you were the heir to the throne, the crown would glow, but everyone was sure they were just rumors. The King and Queen were assassinated twenty years ago, a month after the Princess was born. And on the same night, the Princess was taken. Many hoped the Princess would try on the crown and return, but I believe that's total bullshit.

"You gotta try on the crown.. come on!!!" A voice says to me.

"Absolutely not, Miriam. I'm pretty sure the thing is cursed."  Miriam was a sweet girl with butterscotch hair and green eyes. We had met at Sareth Academy about 13 moons ago, and she was well aware of how I felt regarding the Royals and the current temporary monarch. This was partially why I chose to apply to the academy in the first place. 

"Not even for a millisecond?" Evelyn practically pleads. She was tall and fair with blue eyes and blonde hair.

 She loved the royals and was thoroughly convinced she was the lost Princess despite having completely different features. When we came here a year ago, she tried on the crown and wore it for the full minute. Magic was funny, though; the crown teleported back into the case with some of her hair. We laughed about it for weeks, commenting on her bald spot as if our lives depended on it. I still don't think she's fully forgiven us for that. My footsteps echo throughout the massive room, and I begin to regret wearing these shoes.

"You guys are well aware how much that crown freaks me out. It's still a big fat no."

Miriam and Evelyn both roll their eyes. They didn't understand why I hated the crown so much. And I sure as hell wasn't about to tell them. We reach the Queen and King painting and bow to it before walking over to the crown.

"You know, Y/n.. every year we come here, you look more and more like Her Majesty..it's almost creepy, honestly.." Evelyn says, her eyes still focused on the painting.

"I'm sure it's just a coincidence." Miriam's voice rings out. Looking at the painting again, I study the Queen's face. I hated to admit it, but we were strikingly similar. We had the same nose and skin tone, and our hair and eye color were the same.

"It is kinda creepy, but a lot of people look like the late Queen. I'm sure Miriam is right." I say before I walk over to the crown with the girls. Evelyn puts it on as soon as she can reach it. Miriam and I chuckle, but she just grins at us. Evelyn sets the crown back on its stand, not wanting to lose her hair again, and steps back.

 That's when I hear it. A small… whisper..

Y/n

My head snaps in different directions, trying to figure out where that is coming from, but it ultimately lands on the crown. My friends look concerned.

"Y/n, you ok?" Miriam says softly as if she were scared of scaring me.

I ponder telling them that I'm hearing voices. This is why I hated the crown. It gave me a terrible headache and it whispered my name. It creeped me the fuck out.

 "It's nothing.. Just thought I heard something." 

Y/n

There it is again.

 What the hell is going on?

 I stare at the crown, almost glaring at it. A group of students comes in, their footsteps like thunder. One of my Professors is among them. My friends' heads snap in that direction, and mine would, too. However, I still stare at the crown as if it were mesmerizing. 

Y/n 

Y/n

Y/n

The voice gets louder, so much so it hurts. I groan and grab my head. Evelyn and Miriam call for the teacher. I hear something about the Prime Minister for some odd reason. Closing my eyes, I try and stop the pain. Dull aches find the smallest corners of my mind as the voice screams.

"Make it stop!" I cry out, my throat going dry. 

Opening my eyes, I see a man dressed in a light red suit. He has blue eyes and very short, combed-over, white hair. He smiles calmly at me and reaches for the crown. I panicked and tried to back away from it. A wall of mass sits a few steps back, though, and I look back to see two guards standing tall. I want to yell at them to move. To do something about the screaming. But it hurts so much I can barely think. The Prime Minister gently holds a hand out to me. To steady me. I take the hand with my own shaking. He gently places the crown on my head. And all is quiet. Before I can even take a deep breath of relief, a blinding white light fills the room. Groans and screams fill my senses, and I close my eyes once more. When I open them, I see everyone staring at me in shock. It clicks then….

I was Midiri's Princess.

How the fuck-

Whom the fuck- 

WHAT THE FUCK

The prime minister's voice pulls me out of my internalized panic and places a hand on my shoulder.

"We've been looking for you for a long time, Your Highness." What he says makes my ears ring and my brain hurt. 

I open my mouth to protest, but he turns to the room before I can. With a booming voice, he announces, "I present to you, her Highness… Princess Y/N L/N!"

He bows to me, and I'm acutely aware of how uncomfortable I am with this situation. Soon, the room follows in varying forms of curtsies and bows. I feel like Percy Jackson when it was revealed he was the son of Poseidon. 

The prime minister raises his head and gives me a look, which I can only assume is meant to be calming. 

Guards escort me to the front doors, and my feet seem to move on their own. Once outside, a large black limo comes around the street corner and stops in front of the museum steps. I want to scream. Say this is all wrong and go back to my friends. But something inside me is telling me this is right and that I can change what I hate about the monarchy. I steel my resolve and, with shaky legs, enter the limo. It felt bigger on the inside than it looked. On the plus side, I didn't feel claustrophobic. On the negative side, I was so overwhelmed and overstimulated that I felt like I was going to puke. The prime minister sat a few seats away from me, and I decided that while I was stuck here, I might as well ask a few questions.

I look up at him and, with a dry mouth, ask, "How did you know to put the crown on me?" 

He looks surprised for a moment, but to be fair, this is the first time I've spoken to him, let alone asked him a question.

"I saw your face.. and saw Her Majesty… I thought it couldn't hurt to try… I'm sorry if I scared you, your Highness." He says gently. I let out a breath I wasn't aware I had been holding and whispered, "What's going to happen now…?"

He gives me a sympathetic look and says, "Now, we begin planning for your coronation. Some instructors will teach you all you need to know, and a seamstress will be by to take measurements for a coronation gown and clothing." He begins listing other things that will need to be done, but I zone out. Switching on the TV, I see news report after news report about me—my face, where I went to school, all of it. 

"How did they find me so fast…?" I ask the prime minister, my head snapping in his direction.

"I'm not sure...However, there will no doubt be paparazzi waiting for you when we arrive at the palace." His voice is stressed, and I can tell he's worried about something, though I can't determine what.

"I'm assuming the Duke and his family will be awaiting my arrival as well," I note darkly. 

Duke Haleson was an all-around dickface, and I didn't need to meet him to know that. As the temporary monarch, he had more power than any person should ever have without proper checks and balances, and it showed. 

"I'm sure he will be there to greet you along with the Duchess. But not to worry, " he says, noticing the look of disdain on my face. “You currently have more power than him as the Princess."

It takes a whole minute for that to sink in before I realize that, yet again, this is real. I pinch myself once just to make sure, and when the pain registers, it too registers. This is not a dream. Then, so suddenly, as if it were lightning, Im determined and a little pissed off. If there's one thing I know about this whole situation, it's that I've been given the power to make things right. Being resentful came with knowing I'd have to clean up the Duke's mess. 

"Your Highness, if I may ask, how much do you know about the Duke and his family?" the Prime Minister asks softly. 

"Well, for starters, I know the Duke is the temporary monarch, which he took over when the King and Queen died… well, I suppose I mean when my parents died.." It felt weird to say that and to be honest, it just made me depressed. "He's the late King's cousin, and I believe he has two sons and a daughter. His eldest son is Emon, and his second son is Oren… I believe they're both 19."

Recalling information about the Duke's family was easier than I thought despite knowing the most about the Duke himself. "His daughter is Elora, and she's 14. I've seen several photos of them in the paper and magazines." 

The Prime minister nods and confirms the information.

"What I don't know are their affinities," I say, subtly asking the Prime Minister. Each member of the royal family by blood had affinities, which I suppose meant I had them too. Power takes form when a royal member reaches 10 and is in tune with their affinities. A type of energy per se. Different kinds of energies lead to various types of affinities and so forth.

He taps his chin as if deciding whether or not to tell me before simply saying, "The Duke has an ice affinity, The Duchess a plant affinity, Emon has a plant affinity as well, I believe Oren has force affinity, and Elora has a surprising teleportation affinity."

It was indeed surprising to have a teleportation affinity. From what I knew, they were extremely rare. 

"A teleportation affinity..?? Jeez.. I bet the Duke loves her.." 

He says nothing and just avoids my eyes. Deep down, I know what that means, so I turn my attention back to the TV.

We pull up to the palace, and cameras are flashing before I even step out. Guards line the pathway; I can see the Duke and his sniveled-up face from here. Someone opens the door, and cameras flash so much that I'm practically blinded. The same person who opened the door held a hand out to me, and I took it. As I stand, the flashes just get worse. Covering my face with my hand and walking, tons of questions are thrown my way. People are screaming my name somewhere, and it takes me a moment to realize there are tons of people with signs and posters outside the gates. I realized they were all there for me, so I decided to wave to them as a show of courtesy. That just makes them scream louder, and I try not to grimace. Focusing my attention on walking, I head toward the Duke. He bows to me, and his family soon follows. I was surprised to find out they'd all be here at once. 

"Are you sure this is the Princess? She looks like a teenager… and she's wearing a school uniform." The Duke comments with a grin on his face. Man, this guy is more pathetic than I thought.

"I'm 20, and this is usually what people wear when going to school, Duke Haleson."

He looks down at me once more as if acknowledging me was some horrible fate he had been subjected to. I keep eye contact with him and try not to glare… or bite his head off.

"My, you have quite the tongue for a young lady…"

"That's Her Highness to you, Duke Haleson. I respect your title; you should respect mine, don't you think?"

His jaw clenches, and I can see the irritation in his eyes. Good, it's about time he understands I won't be pushed around.

The Duke glares at me, poised to speak, but the Duchess interjects with a warm welcome, guiding me into the palace. As she shares captivating stories about the grounds, I struggle to keep my jaw from dropping. The sheer magnificence leaves me in awe when we step into the foyer.

With its soaring ceilings, the space feels vast and inviting. Gold accents glimmer on the walls, while the marble floors shine under the gentle light streaming through grand windows. Splashes of light purple and lush greenery breathe life into the room as vibrant purple flowers and cascading vines adorn both the walls and ceilings.

As we venture further, the beauty of this palace is almost intoxicating, yet there's an underlying weight in the air, a sense of history that seems to seep from every corner. Each detail is meticulously crafted, and I can't shake the idea that beneath this elegance lie untold stories—much like the voice that haunted me earlier.

My thoughts flutter between what the Duchess is saying and how on earth this room is real. We enter the drawing room, and more splashes of purple and gold fill my vision as I'm led to a plush white chair. As she is well known, Duchess Victoria sits across from me while her husband stands and stares. 

"I'm sure you have many questions. Are there any we can answer, Your Highness?" the Prime Minister asks. I suddenly realized that I hadn't even bothered to ask for his name yet. 

"What's your name?"

He looks shocked momentarily before he smiles and introduces himself, "My name is Bennet Winton, Your Highness."

I open my mouth to respond when I hear a chuckle from the Duke. This man was already pissing me off.

"You must really want my attention, Duke Haleson if you can't even keep yourself from being the only one laughing."

He shuts up.

I turn back to Prime Minister Winton and smile at him. "I appreciate your help thus far. My other question is when the coronation will be held and whether I'll be crowned Princess or Queen."

"It will be held in one week. And you shall be crowned Queen." Duke Halesons' cold voice fills the room. The Duchess speaks next, her voice quieter than the Dukes': "Don't worry, dear. We will prepare you for the coronation. I have a lovely seamstress I could recommend if you'd like."

"Thank you.. I would like that. What about education, though? I have no idea how to run a country."

This time, the Prime Minister says, "Not to worry, Your Highness. We have the best professors and instructors across the globe."

"Well, that's good; thankfully, I know quite a lot about nobles and such from studying at Sareth Academy." 

"Sareth Academy, you say. I thought I recognized that uniform from somewhere, " the Prime Minister says warmly. 

I was quite proud of myself for getting into such an elite school. "Yes, I learned quite a lot." 

Learning about people who were far more fortunate tended to anger people, and I was no different. However, attending the school helped me learn about affinities and nobles' power. I wouldn't have my seething hatred for the Duke without my education. Mostly because I'd be ignorant like most people who believe in the royals and nobles. The Duke had been placing people in positions of power who had no idea what they were doing or had too much of an idea and were using it to hurt ordinary people. 

"Oh really…?" 

I take a deep breath. The Duke had yet again tried to undermine me. He must take me for some idiot who just wants to be royalty.

"Duke Haleson, if you're going to be immature, I can get help elsewhere." My voice is unwavering and determined. In a matter of seconds, I see his expression flicker between outrage and calm. He clears his throat as if he were trying to stuff down another rude comment.

"Excuse me?" His voice cracks a little.

"You're not excused." 

Everyone in the room looks like I've just slapped them across the face. Then suddenly,… laughter. Oren laughs and soon follows his brother and then his sister. The Duchess follows naturally. The Prime Minister even cracks a significant smile. I feel a bit ashamed for a moment before I realize… they're laughing at him. Duke Haleson's face is red. I can't tell if it's because of my ridiculous petty comment or because everyone is laughing at him. Maybe a combination of both. 

"Now then.. I'd like to see my room, please." The exhaustion of the whole situation has finally worn me out, and I have decided to give the Duke some undeserved respite. I stand, and the Prime Minister waves a maid over. She looks to be eighteen, though I can't be sure. She curtsies to me and beams me with a smile. I smile back before I turn to the Prime Minister.

"Thank you for your help, Prime Minister.."

"Please, call me Bennet Your Highness. Rest well, and I shall see you in a few days."

He bows once more, and I decide to follow the maid for some well-deserved rest. With one last glance at the people in the room, I realize I may have more allies than I once thought. 

Exhaustion was a bitch, and we weren't friends. There were so many stairs in this palace I thought my legs were going to fall off. I learned the maid's name was Jane. She was seventeen and had been working at the palace for almost a year now. She seemed very shy and surprised by the many questions I was asking her. We reach this massive hallway with an enormous window at the end of it. Flowers and vines crawl up the sides of it in a delicate pattern. Jane snaps me out of my trance by walking up to a set of lovely double doors. They arch at the top with intricate designs along the sides. Everything in this palace was just so damn pretty. She opens the doors, and I feel a breeze. I smell the room before I see it. Vanilla and Rose fill my senses as I try not to trip over my feet when I see the space. It's an open floor plan; everything is marble, gold, and light purple. So simple yet so elegant. A bed the size of my old bathroom lays off to the left with a canopy and vines covering it. The sheer drapes are held up with delicate ribbons made of lace. Picking my jaw off the floor, I take it in the rest of the room. A covered balcony with flowers galore and a view of the gardens. A sitting area that could fit a football team. A massive walk-in closet with so many accessories I can't even count them. A bathroom that shines brighter than my future and a large desk that overlooks the garden. The space feels surreal, like something you'd only see in your dreams. Everything is soft and expensive, and I just want to jump onto the bed… or into the bath… I wasn't about to be picky.

It takes me a few hours to find everything in the space. And a few more to remember the names and faces of my maids. Anais had red hair and blue eyes; Rose had brown hair, a fair nose, and pretty blue eyes; Ivone had deep black hair curling at the ends and brown eyes. While Jane had light brown eyes, freckles, and green eyes. It was odd how close I had gotten used to them. Which also felt weird because these girls would most likely see me naked. At Sareth Academy, they taught us that working with nobles came with having to see them in all states. It was a requirement to know how to serve them even if you weren't going to be in that line of work. I thought it was ridiculous, but you do whatever it takes to learn how to beat the system. 

A lovely woman named Cherry came by as well. She was the palace seamstress that Duchess Victoria had sent over. As the palace seamstress, she took my measurements while I stood on a small fitting room platform. Cherry works quickly and efficiently, but as I'm wearing close to nothing in front of a room of strangers, it was difficult not to shiver. 

"Just a few more measurements, dearie." She chirps as she walks around me. Writing on her notepad, she looks up at me.

"You did wonderful, Your Highness, I'm all finished."

I immediately relax and step down from the platform. A maid whose name I've learned to be Ivone steps forward and holds out a fluffy robe. Slipping it on immediately, I shiver into it. I was thankful to no longer be in my knickers in front of everyone. Cherry waves over another maid whose name I believe to be Anais. She hands her a stack of what looks to be pajamas, and I'm thankful that I have something to wear to bed tonight.

"Rose, could you please get my stationery?" I asked my fourth maid. Somehow, during my panic attack over the crown, I lost my satchel and phone. So, for now, I was stuck writing letters, though it did kind of make me feel more like royalty.

"Of course, Princess," Rose says a little too happily. She runs over to my desk as Cherry packs up. Anais walks over to the double doors on the other side of the room and opens them to my walk-in closet. I watch her go before walking over to my desk and writing a letter to my friends back at the academy. Writing everything I felt on paper left it rushed, but I doubt they would care much. I seal the letter when something crosses my mind. 

Where was the Royal Seal?

I had heard about it in history lessons. It was used when royals sent letters to other countries or when the letter held important information. But if I didn't already have it, that meant only one thing: The Duke hadn't given it up. The Royal Seal was a sign of power, a sign that the current monarch was truly in charge. 

I hand the letter off to Rose, who happily takes it away as I ponder. I needed to get that seal if I was going to be Queen, whether or not I had to take it from his hands. 

"Princess, what would you like for dinner?"

Jane's soft voice reaches my ears, pulling me from my thoughts. I mutter a reply even though I feel too tired and stressed to eat. Usually, I would eat more than I needed, but for some reason, tonight, I just wasn't feeling it. Cherry says her goodbyes and well-wishes and I find myself relaxing a smidge more. I just wanted to be alone.

An hour later, Jane returned with the dinner I had requested. Surprisingly, I managed to get a decent amount down, and soon it was time for bed. Changing into the silk pajamas Cherry gave me, I find myself drawn to the massive bed. My maids leave, and suddenly, I feel everything all at once. Grief for my old life, happiness for my new one, fear and determination for the future. So much has happened in one day, and I feel the exhaustion clawing at my body. The bed surrounds me, and I fall into a deep sleep.

My whole body feels soft. Silk envelops me, and I wonder if I've died and gone to heaven. I open my eyes and see soft sunlight cascading onto the double doors of my room. The warmth is inviting, stirring a sense of calm I didn't know I needed. I yawn and sit up, stretching the sleepy energy right out of me. Glancing at the cord, my maids told me to pull when I awakened. I tug down on it, and a minute later, Rose, Anais, Ivone, and Jane come walking in. Rose pushes what seems to be a gold cart of food and brings it to the little area where I eat. Obviously, I get out of bed and walk over to eat.

After I eat, Cherry returns with dresses she altered to fit me until she can make some new ones for me. I wasn't exactly keen on wearing dresses every day, so I asked her to make me some pantsuits and everyday clothes, too. She seemed a bit shocked that I asked her that but nonetheless made a note of it. Ivone helps me get into one of the dresses, which is super awkward. Ivone doesn't seem to mind, thankfully, and we slip it on. It's a simple day dress made of silk. Rose suggested kitten heels, which I'm thankful for because I did not want to walk around in my uniform shoes any longer. I slip them on, and Anais fills me in on my schedule for the day.

"First, you will meet your new professors at 10 am, a small break for lunch; then you have dancing lessons at 3 pm."

"That is all, yes?" I practically plead. Wanting to be a good ruler and being lazy were both strangling me, and I couldn't decide which to fight off first.

"Yes, Princess, that is all." Rose giggles. I giggled along with her, and soon, I was headed to meet the professors.

The professors were certainly interesting. Despite growing up as a commoner, they seemed shocked by my seemingly decent education. However, one wasn't sure of my abilities and decided to question me further; needless to say, I put her in her place.  

I had also learned the steps to the Rumba, which couldn't have been more awkward. At least my teacher was a woman and not some old creepy guy. The song playing in the background isn't one I've heard before, and later, in my room, I find myself humming it.

"What's that song you're humming Your Highness?" One of my girls asks. Based on the voice, I think it's Ivone. 

"I'm not entirely sure…"

Each day is the same maddening cycle. 

Dresses get delivered.

Professors drone on for hours about history and math.

Lunch.

Dancing class while I try not to look at my feet and not step on hers simultaneously.

It was exhausting.

Thankfully, today would be different because today was my coronation day. The fun part was the ball right after. For hours, I was cleaned, prepped, and clothed. Maybe I wasn't cut out for this whole royalty thing….

I shake my head and steel my resolve. No. I wasn't going to quit now. I had worked too hard, and I could finally make a change. The girls step away from me as it seems they're finally done with their invasive techniques to make me look prettier. I stand and turn to look in the mirror. Doing a double take to make sure it's me, my mouth falls open in a way that isn't very proper. My girls had outdone themselves. My hair was elegantly wrapped into a low bun, and a lovely tiara was placed on my head. A deep purple Coronation Mantle was draped onto my shoulders, and a stunning light purple gown was underneath it. Jewels drip from me like water, and I feel myself twirl before it registers; my coronation was really happening. Grinning, I hug each one of my maids, thankful for their existence. 

"I… This is gorgeous, girls… thank you.." 

They all blush and mutter different responses before Ivone speaks up, "You better hurry Princess; I hear you're riding in an actual carriage to the Coronation Hall!"

An actual carriage, well, at least I'd get to see horses.

I walk down to the foyer and almost stumble over my dress. Walking in a ballgown and heels was more challenging than it looked. I manage to make my way outside and spot the Prime Minister, or Bennet, as he insists I call him. He bows to me and assists me into the open carriage.

"Nervous Your Highness?" His calm voice asks.

"I would be a fool not to be," I mutter as I fiddle with my fingers. Those long fake nails were on, and picking them was so much more challenging.

"Try not to stress too much, Your Highness. It will be over before you even realize it, and after that, your hardest triumph will be the number of marriage proposals you'll have to turn down." 

His joke doesn't help.

"Oh gosh, I didn't even think about proposals…"

"Yes, well, you will be the most powerful woman in the country… unmarried… suppose there's someone on your mind already?" he asks with a chuckle.

It almost warms my heart that he didn't immediately assume I'd be in love with a man.

"No… but I know it'll be hard to meet her in this position.." I say, a little annoyed that my love life is essentially going down the drain.

"Don't fret, Princess. I have a feeling you'll find her." His warm smile almost calms my nerves. 

"Thank you, Bennet."

If I had a dime for every time I had been in a massive building and emerged with a new title of royalty, I'd have two dimes. Which isn't many in the grand scheme of things, but it's odd that it's happened twice. 

The Coronation Hall of Midiri was ablaze with light as thousands of candles flickered above, casting a soft glow on the ornate decorations that adorned the stone walls. Tapestries depicting the kingdom's rich history hung from every corner, while fresh purple blooms filled the air with their intoxicating fragrance. The anticipation in the air was palpable, with nobles from all corners of the realm gathered to witness this momentous occasion—the coronation of Princess Y/N L/N, the new Queen of Midiri. 

Usually, the previous ruler would crown the monarch; however, since my parents were dead, the Prime Minister got the honor. His usually calming voice boomed across the hall, demanding everyone's attention. 

The ceremony was long and grueling, and what pissed me off even more was the fact that the Duke had the audacity to sit in the section reserved for royals. I wished then and there that I knew what my affinity was just so I could use it on his pompous ass. 

The massive crown they put on me practically broke my neck, and I felt so relieved when they took it off. 

I stand before the nobles, and they all rise and bow to me. It feels almost surreal. One week ago, I was a humble student in a country I loved but wanted to change.

 Now, I was its Queen.

I walk out of the Grand Hall, scepter in hand and crown on my head. As I ride back to the palace in the carriage, people scream my name. Guards are stationed on each side of my carriage as I ride through the streets of Midiri. Flowers are thrown in my direction as chants fill the air.

"Long live the Queen!"

"The Queen has arrived!"

"Long may she reign!"

Tears well in my eyes as I smile and wave to the people. Once at the palace, I'm rushed to my room by staff for a bath and a quick change for my appearance at the coronation ball. I would have to meet with delegates so I had to arrive on time. My maids scrub my skin so hard I'm surprised I don't lose any. I dressed, and a new set of jewels graced my body. Thanking my girls, I leave and walk to the ballroom. It was one thing to stand before so many people, and it was another to talk to them all. Maybe even dance with a few if I managed to avoid stepping on their toes. 

The guards notice my arrival and bow to me before telling the announcer that I am here. He bangs his staff on the floor to gain everyone's attention. The talking lowers to whispers, and as the announcer says in a loud voice,

"Presenting Her Majesty, Y/N M/N L/N Queen of Midiri!" 

As I walk out, the room erupts in louder whispers and conversations. I feel everyone's eyes on me, and I try not to panic. Bows and curtsies can be seen from every direction as I clear my throat and begin my little speech.

"Hello all, and welcome to my coronation ball. I appreciate you coming all this way to celebrate with me tonight. As I look out and see so many friendly faces, I can't help but be grateful for each and every one of you. Let us celebrate tonight so we may work hard tomorrow!"

Cheers fill the room as toasts are being made in my honor. I walk to the staircase on my right, and as soon as I come down, men swarm all around me, asking me for dances and to talk. I reject them all and make my way to my throne that sits against the main wall. Sitting down, people begin lining up to meet me. The first people I see are a couple. A very tall blonde woman is on the arm of a shorter man with black curly hair. They bow and curtsy to me, respectively, and I nod my head in acknowledgment. Based on their attire I would assume they're from the country Amaris. It's a gorgeous country known for its beautiful people and goods. They must've crossed the sea to be here, as Amaris is to the south of Midiri across the ocean. 

"Good evening, Your Majesty. My name is Prince Alwyn of Amaris. This is my lovely fiancee, Lady Isabella." Crown Prince Alwyn was known to be a womanizer, so it was a little surprising to see an actual fiancee on his arm.

"Congratulations on your engagement, you two. I wish you all the best. I appreciate you coming all this way for my coronation." 

Lady Isabella blushes before saying, "You're too kind, Your Majesty... Oh! That's right! We've brought you a gift."

She waves over a staff member, and they hand me a delicately carved wooden box. Its rich color and fresh scent catch me off guard, but I school my expression and smile. I open the box to find spices galore inside. Amaris was known to be a merchants' paradise, so many goods were imported to and from there.

"What a lovely gift, thank you!" It's challenging to procure spices here in Midiri, so I offer my appreciation. Trying to be the perfect Queen simply by talking was hard, but they seemed to hear the sincerity in my tone. 

"Please take this as a token of our goodwill and hope for a promising future between our two kingdoms," Prince Alwyn says before he and Lady Isabella depart. I hand the thoughtful gift to a staff member and instruct him to send it to the kitchen for my food. 

Next, Duke and Duchess Haleson step up. Both bow and curtsey to me before I speak.

"Ah, Duke Haleson, I was wondering when I'd see you. It seems you have something of mine. I'd like it back, please." I say ever so politely.

The Duke grins, happy to play my game, "I'm not sure what you mean, Your Majesty... Perhaps you could jog my memory?"

"Hmm, yes, perhaps I will… Duchess Victoria, do you have it?" 

The Duchess grins, and I see the smug smirk the Duke is sporting slip off his face. She reaches into her pocket and holds out the Duke's most prized possession, the Royal Seal. I smile and take it in my hands gently. 

"But- How did you- Victoria!!" The Duke turns his rage on his wife in an instant. But I knew this would happen. I pocket the seal and stand. 

"Duke Haleson, are you seriously so immature that you'd yell in my ballroom?" My voice carries across the room and eyes and necks snap in our direction. Whispers flood the hall, and I can practically see the Duke start to sweat.

"No…of course not Your Majesty…." His voice is quiet to avoid attention.

"Well then. I hope you keep to yourself this evening... Oh, and Duchess Victoria?"

Her eyes meet mine, and she winks before curtsying.

"Just Victoria is fine, Your Majesty."

"Victoria, then… do let me know if he acts up when you two are alone. I won't stand for domestic abuse. Not even from a Duke." 

Hopefully, other ladies in the room realize this also extends to them, and they can contact me. But for now, I focus on the Duke.

"If that is all, you two are dismissed."

The Duke begrudgingly bows, and he and his wife leave. I sit back down and let out a massive breath. If I hadn't had the Duchess's help, I have no idea what I would've done. I rub my temples and prepare for the next person when an almost raspy, calming voice speaks.

"Well, he seemed like a dick."

My heart skips a beat as I look up. She was…. Ineffable. Short auburn hair that looked like an organized mess. I spot a glimpse of a tattoo, but only a sliver. It looked like.. A fern..? She wore a deep grey suit with space pins on the suit jacket and a simple deep green cape. Pale green eyes one could get lost in. And a smirk that stole my breath away.

My heart skips a beat, and I realize I've been staring.

"I- sorry, what did you say..?"

She doesn't seem to judge and just repeats herself.

"I said he seemed like a dick." Chuckling and shaking her head, she smiles down at me.

"Yeah, he's a real piece of work… I, um, I'm sure you know who I am already, but allow me to introduce myself; I'm Y/N Queen of Midiri."

She smiles and bows to me, a slight blush flushing her cheeks.

"Yea, I know, this is your ball, isn't it?" The way she said it wasn't cocky. Almost understanding as she puts her hands in her pockets.

I clear my throat and internally scold myself for being so stupid. Gay panic was a real thing….

"Right. Of course, you know that… my apologies." 

"Oh gosh shit.. Sorry didn't mean to make you feel bad. Look, I'm not too good at this whole conversing with royals thing. Let's just start over, yea? My name is Ellie Williams, I'm the prince of Jackson." 

Jackson… yes, I was familiar with it. However, I knew nothing of the royal family, let alone their affinities. They were a very closed-off family, and few knew anything about them, let alone their customs. 

"Prince, you say…?"

She scratches the side of her neck as if it were a nervous habit.

"Yea.. I don't really like all the frilly princess stuff. Prince just suits me better, I guess. Wait fuck- I didn't mean that frilly things were bad." She quickly says, looking at my dress. She groans into her hands, and I burst out laughing. Her ears turn bright red, and I can't help but feel a little bad.

"That is the first time someone has sworn in front of me properly in the past 168 hours." My giggles spread throughout the room. She looked dumbfounded, and I can't help but beam a smile at her. 

"Wha- that makes me feel even worse!" Her face contorting to one of shame.

"Trust me, it isn't a bad thing. I'm so sick of being treated like a child. It's been driving me crazy. I hope you didn't think I was laughing at you…"

That seemed to help her relax, so I decided to ask her something now that she was calmer.

"Would you care to dance with me?" My voice is as calm and soothing as I can force it to be. However, on the inside, I was shitting bricks, hoping she wouldn't say no. Usually, a dance between a man and a woman meant the prospect of marriage. But no two women had ever danced before. It was completely unheard of, and while most of society had evolved, the nobles stayed in one spot. 

"I'm not a very good dancer; I'm afraid I'd step on your toes."

"So, is that a no…?" I say, feigning disappointment.

"No! No—I would love to dance with you. It was more of a warning…" she clarifies quickly.

"I'm just teasing you, Prince Ellie." I grin as she huffs.

"Could've fooled me." She mutters as she holds a hand out to me.

I take it, and she gently leads me to the dance floor.

"I think I did fool you," I say with a smug grin. She rolls her eyes and huffs a simple "Shut up…"

We stood in the middle of the dance floor, and I felt people begin to realize what I was doing. Prince Ellie wraps a hand around my waist, and I can feel her calloused fingers on my back. I stiffen just a little at the touch of her cold hands, and she mutters a quick sorry.

"It's fine; your hands are just cold, is all.." 

She chuckles and holds my other hand. Merry Go Round of Life begins playing, and I move through the steps I was taught. I discover very quickly that Prince Ellie is a horrid liar. Her dance steps feel precise as she leads me. We twirl around the dance floor, and my grip on her shoulder tightens as she lifts me. When I come back down, I almost tumble into her, but she catches me and swiftly moves me to the next step. I can feel my face heating up from the embarrassment. 

Getting into the rhythm of the Waltz, we reach the peak of the song, and I lock eyes with her. My heart pounds from the exertion, and I feel myself being pulled in by her. When she lifts me again, I feel like I'm floating. Everything from the glittering chandelier to the people in the room just… disappears. 

Locking eyes with her again, I realized then and there how some people fall in love simply by dancing with one another. 

"You're a liar…"

I whisper softly. Ellie looks at me, confused with a ghost of a smile.

"How so?" She whispers back as we twirl again.

 I meet her eyes again and say, "You're a wonderful dancer." 

"I'm only as good as my partner, Your Majesty…" Her ears turned a slight pink.

I want to glare at her and tell her she knows damn well that's not true. But I bite my tongue. We may be dancing together, but we weren't friends.

My gown swirls with me as we move, and I can't help but think of how nice it must be to dance in a suit. Suddenly, I looked back at the others and noticed that no one else was dancing. Everyone is staring at us in awe. I hold onto her tightly, and we move through the last bit of the song. We move in harmony as whispers and murmurs fill the space. Prince Ellie dips me, and when I look into her eyes, all I see is awe. The last notes of the song die out, and she lifts me back up. 

Applause erupts, and Prince Ellie still hasn't let go of my hand. We both curtsey and bow, respectively, as the cheers build. I can hear our deep breaths synching up as we wave and smile.

Pulling her by our connected hands, I rush to the balcony. People part as I open the doors and close them behind us. Walking over to the railing, I lean onto it and let out a massive breath.

"Holy shit…"

"Holy shit is right, I didn't think everyone else would stop dancing." Her voice rings in my ears as I try to calm my breathing. She seemed a little better off than me but must've been in better shape.

"That was… I didn't know…" Forming sentences is hard.

"Yeah…" She mutters breathlessly; she understands. 

"Sorry for dragging you out here… I just figured you might need some air, too, after that."

She says nothing and fiddles with her fingers again. I look back at her and stare into her eyes.

"Call me Y/n…"

She looks stunned, her eyebrows raising. "But you're the Queen.."

"Oh gee, really? I had no idea." I say, sarcasm dripping from my tone. She rolls her eyes yet again, and I smile. 

"Alright, smart ass, no need to get all sarcastic on me... I'll call you Y/n.. but only if you call me Ellie." Her smile is infectious, and I can feel myself grinning wide.

"Alright.. Ellie… tell me, how long are you staying in Midir?"

She walks closer and leans onto the balcony as well.

"Well, Joel said I should stay for a few weeks to 'properly show our acceptance of the new Queen, " she says, using finger quotes. My attempt not to laugh fails, and I chuckle a little.

"Then if you'll be here a while... I'd like to ask you to form an alliance with me." I say, pretending to be all posh. She stands straighter and puts on a fake fancy face.

"My lady, I would be absolutely honored." Her dramatic tone sells it. We burst out in laughter, and she held a hand out for me.

"Freinds?" Eyebrows lowered and small look of hope in her eyes.

"Friends," I say, taking her hand and shaking it. 

"Now that we're friends, I should warn you, I'm new to being this whole... Royal thing. I only found out a week ago."

"Yeah, I heard. Don't stress. I'm terrible at it, too."

"Liar, you're an amazing dancer."

"Well, that's just dancing... I'm far more interested in Savage Starlight than I am running a country.."

"What's Savage Starlight."

If I didn't know any better, I'd say I just slapped her across the face. She looks at me like I have.

"You don't know what Savage Starlight is??" She looks at me incredulously.

"Um…. no..? Should I?"

"Uhhhh.. yea! It's only the most popular comic book series in all of Jackson! I have the ultra-rare editions too. You can read my copies if you want. Just not the ultra-rare ones…Those gotta stay in their packaging."

She looks at me, hopefully.

"Sure, I'll give them a shot."

"Fuck yea!" 

We talked for a bit longer, and I discovered that her favorite color is green and that she plays guitar. Apparently, she has a guard named Dina, with whom she's practically best friends, and a butler named Jesse. They're here with her, and she has offered for me to come to her room to meet them sometime. 

"I'd love to. I'll try and stop by sometime this week."

"Great..I um.. I'm not too good at hosting, but it should still be fun."

"Oh great, another lie," I say, rolling my eyes, my tone heavy with sarcasm.

"It's not a lie!" She says, pretending to be frustrated.

"Uh huh…"

"Uh huh!"

I soon have to withdraw from the conversation. "I'm sorry, Ellie, but I have a lot of people I have to meet with... But I promise to visit you soon."

She frowns but nods in understanding, "It's alright. I get it… Come by soon, yea..?"

"Yea.. I will."

I leave the balcony and close the doors behind me. It takes all I have to not go back and talk to her but I force myself back to my throne. Throughout the rest of the night, I meet nobles as they praise me for absolutely nothing. They're all so… fake. Ellie is the first real friend I have in this world, and I don't want to fuck it up. She is like a breath of fresh air. If fresh air smelt like bergamot and pine. Snapping out of my thoughts, I meet with the final nobles of the evening before I drag myself back to my room. It amazed me how so many people could be sleeping under one roof. 

Immediately taking a bath has to be one of the best decisions I've made today. My feet were so sore from those shoes I debated getting rid of all the heels in my closet. Rose rubs lotion all over me while Ivone deals with my hair. Anais is off getting my dinner, which I'm thankful for. I feel like I'm starving to death. 

A slight knock on the door means Anais has returned.

"Come in!" My voice echoed a bit in the space.

"Here you go, Your Majesty! I got your favorite!"

The smell of the food reaches my nose, and I can feel my stomach rumble. My maids giggle, and I huff.

"Not my fault. I'm so hungry."

"Of course not, Your Majesty," Rose says with a smug smile. I stand and walk over to the food before digging into it. It takes me minutes to eat everything and after I relax in my seat. 

"Girls.. What do you think my affinity will be..?"

They all stop what they're doing and look at me.

"Why do you ask, Your Majesty?" Jane's soothing voice asks.

"Well.. it just seems so interesting. Besides, it's such a staple sign of power... Perhaps I ought to go to the palace Affinity Master.." My thoughts pour out.

"If I were to guess, I'd say you'd have a charisma affinity." Ivone notes.

"Really? Why charisma?" My brows furrow in confusion.

"It just makes sense, doesn't it? You managed to charm the ton in less than a week. I'd say that's certainly something.

"Plus, you managed to convince Duchess Victoria to join your side. That was quite brilliant." Rose speaks up. I had told them about what had happened when I took the Royal Seal from my gown pocket.

"Well, I suppose.."

I decided not to tell them about Ellie just yet. There were a few reasons, but the main one was that I wanted to keep her a secret for a bit longer. 

"I think I'm going to head to bed, ladies. Thank you for your help."

Standing and making my way to the bed, I yawn. Rose turns off the lights as the others finish their tasks, and one by one, they leave the room. 

The moon hung low in the sky, casting a silvery glow across my room. It was one of those rare, quiet moments when everything just felt peaceful. Soon, I drifted off, thinking of all the good I wanted to do now that I was Queen.

╰┈➤Masterlist ⨾ଓ Next ↠

[dapper-lil-arts]

i saw you talk about how you hc applejack as trans so im very curious (and also sorry if youve stated this before ^^;), what are your lgbt headcanons for the rest of the mane 6 (and any other ponies you feel like mentioning lol)? and do you have any other specific headcanons for applejack or nah?

Eh my headcanons are kinda boring tbh. I might have answered an ask like these before too

Twilight - Bi, cis - Althought the entire world draws twilight sparkle skinny, i like to imagine she could easily be chubby and rock the look. itd be adorable.

Sunset - Bi, trans - I think Sunset Shimmer should have a six-pack. I think her overachieving entitled nature should have had her be pretty damn strong phisically as like. a form of asserting herself onto the rest of the pompous royalty, like 'yeah I trained under celestia and i can crush you windpipe with my biceps. AND i'm a girl. disrespect me and you're dead"

Pinkie - Pan, trans - Pinkie Pie should be fat. pinkie pie shouod be fucking fat and its a crime when people dont draw her as such!!! wtf!!! She should be fat and be able to do backflips and dress up however she fucking wants!!!!

Applejack - Lesbian, trans - Should be built like a fridge and proud of her strength (its what she uses to protect her family and work, after all) but on rare times like in higher class social circles, she could be made to feel disphoric or inadequate for her body shape. Then she crinkles the perpetrator like a soda can. Also AJ has big dick energy.

Rarity - Bi, cis - Out of all of the mane 6, she is the defacto 'big titty energy' for me. No other woman exudes the aura of hourglass queen more than Rarity in canon to me, tbh.

Rainbow - Lesbian, Cis - Athlete body but pretty short, and smelly. Should be like, unable to beat any of the mane 6 in arm wrestling despite her six pack lol

Fluttershy - Lesbian, Trans, maybe ace? I like tall and lanky fluttershy as much as I like soft and pudgy fluttershy tbh. I have no horse in this race, shed be cute no matter what.

and here's a few freebies

Trixie - Lesbian, Trans - She should have 0% body fat or muscle tbh. You open the car window and she blows away like a napkin and yet she thinks shes the hottest shit to walk the earth

starlight - bi? maybe? idk? but maybe trans too? Ngl im wishywashy on her. I don't think about her that much. could be cis so she can breed trixie. Also I think she should be fat too! would look nice.

[irenadel]

And if the devil... 2/10

Making a banner for this finally for the grand finale coming soon. Excuse to rb. Credit for the Aemond screencap goes to the wonderful Liv @barbieaemond Smut at last, you have been warned Aemond Targaryen x Maid!Reader

Chapter 1 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10

“It won’t always be like this, ya know?”

It is very late at night, and you are only shelling chestnuts because your eyes cannot darn clothes under an oil lamp, no matter how good quality it used to be when it was new. Angus does this often, hang around, lugging his big, awkward arms, thinking he is being subtle and moody about it. A little romantic. Deep thoughts and smart plans. But more often, he ends up looking like a very large, very sullen wardrobe. It would have been endearing if it didn’t make housework so bloody hard all the time. You hand him the other bag and he sits down to work with you. Shells for the chickens to peck at, one bag as a dinner treat, the other for your cousins Bree and Delma to roast and sell. Leftovers from a castle kitchen were often generous.

“I’ll be done with the apprenticeship in no time,” he says, voice still cracking a bit when he’s nervous. You scoff, perhaps unkindly, because he has just started the damn thing, and the gods know if you’ll be able to finish paying for it, but he continues on bravely. “I’ll be bringing in good coin and Delma and Bree will marry and you’ll find a fat, old man who’ll keel over and leave you his shop, and you won’t ever have to work for royal cunts again.”

You cuff him over the head once, and he is more surprised by the meanness of your glare than the blow. You are surprised too, try to soften it by sneaking him a shelled chestnut and cleaning his neck for him. He’s gotten sloppy about washing it since he stopped living at home.

“They’re not so bad,” you say after some time in silence. Angus fidgets but keeps shelling, always a bit uncomfortable when you withdraw to think.

“Is the princess pretty?”

You stop for a moment. You can’t really see him in the dim light of the sputtering lamp, your cousin, near grown now, the pimples still doting his chin. You wish it would go both ways and that he didn’t have to see you either.

You try not to think about the prince and princess when you’re at home. They do not belong here, in the smelly yard, with the scraggly chickens rummaging among the trash and your mud-caked feet. The girl you are around them has no place here either. She’s too wild and headstrong to be kind to Angus when he offers you a cage like he’s offering you a gift.

You try not to think of knives and sapphires and hair so soft and heavy it’s like bolts of white satin.

“They’re all pretty,” you answer disdainfully.

Angus smiles a little meanly, satisfied in your eye-roll and apparent exasperation with royalty. He does not see the fondness come to your face or the way it softness the edges of your mouth and the cast of your eyes.

“You know how to fight.”

He’d cornered you outside the laundry, after dumping Helaena’s morning ewer of water and hauling down half the princess’s laundry. Your eyes were infuriatingly fixed back on the floor. Your head exasperatingly lowered back into submission. He was almost amused to discover your courtesies were just as bad as the first time he’d seen them.

“My prince.”

And Aemond Targaryen did not let himself mistake the dismissal for an honorific as you tried to slither past him, ignoring the question that had not been asked. It was your stubborn push against his body, thrilling and oddly satisfying, stopping immediately after you’d heard the whistle of his Valyrian steel dagger, just a few seconds before he buried it in a beam of aged wood right beside your ear.

A few seconds but not before.

He regarded you with a cock-sure tilt to his head. Stranger and stranger you were, perfectly still now with a handful of prince shoved against your front, trapped against the wall, with Helaena’s porcelain ewer laying in pieces at your feet, and your chest heaving like it had that day at the fountain. Aemond was only vaguely aware of his own stirring arousal until you’d looked up to glare at him with eyes red as fresh blood.

“But you don’t fight well,” he’d said to you and laughed at your indignant flush when you’d been unable to help yourself and faced him at last. “You should be quicker than that. You let things go by you that you don’t have to. A punch.”

He’d given himself the luxury of touching the fading bruise on your cheekbone, both sick and delighted at your shiver of fear, the squirming of your trapped body.

“A dagger.”

He’d wrenched the lovely, deadly thing out of the wooden beam and used the hilt to tilt your oddly pointed chin back towards him. Long hooked nose. The deep set shadow of your eyes. He was missing something in your features, some clue that was there, barely eluding him, distracted as he was by how pink your albino lips were this close up.

He’d offered the hilt of the dagger to your slack, sweat-slicked hand.

“Go on. Try it. You’re quick but I’m quicker. Give me your best shot.”

Aemond had never had much of an idea of how one went about bending serving wenches over furniture, the way his brother would endlessly brag about. Had preferred it that way. Had done his best to forget those few unsettling visits to the Street of Silk besides Aegon. But now he wondered. He wondered too if there was something as rotten and festering inside of him as whatever hid within his brother, because he liked this better. Your racing heart. Your shuddering breath. The impossible to follow train of emotions darting across your face as your hand closed around the offered dagger.

Would you strike?

Would you be too scared?

Unable to?

“You can’t see,” Aemond had whispered the secret he’d guessed against your ear, savoring the broken sound you let out. “At least not well. Here, let me help you, my heart is right here.”

And he’d known he’d made the right choice in you because when he’d placed your pale hand against his equally pale chest, leather doublet opened for a truer strike, your stubby kitten nails had buried into his skin and his prick, half-forgotten in the heat of the moment had twinged in sympathy with your sudden, grimly determined look.

Do it, Aemond Targaryen had thought wildly, do it, do it, do it.

And you did. Dagger clattering to the floor, your knee coming up between his legs and he was on the ground laughing through the pain as you tried to make yourself scarce. Brave enough to knee a prince in the groin, still too scared to stay to face the aftermath. But you did turn around before disappearing into the kitchens. You spat into the ground, glared at him and mouthed something, no doubt a vile insult, something Aemond remembered long afterwards, sometimes in a fury, sometimes in warm satisfaction. Ifak, you had called him between clenched teeth, with a click at the back of your throat that no Westerosi girl could have ever produced and that defiant toss of your hair, like an unbroken wild horse. Walker, in a strange tongue from across the sea, that Aemond had encountered once in an old dusty book and would now eagerly seek out again.

“I’m not a whore for you and your ifak chiftik brother to pass around.”

Aemond had laughed again, rejoicing in the pain. He laughed because he hoped you had kneed Aegon too, thrown a chamber pot his way for good measure. Because you would know better soon. He would teach you better. You would know the difference between a snake and a dragon.

After, he dreamt about you often.

Alone at night. When Ser Criston told him about piety and decorum and the way he would be expected to treat the ladies at court. When his mother spoke of his duty to his future lady wife. Always to him, never to Aegon who could bloody use it. He hated each admonition as much as he treasured it. Knew his mother harped on him only because he would listen, unlike his brother. He would strife for it, the perfection she longed for in any of her children, if only to please her, even though he saw the way the court looked at him. Girls afraid. Women pityingly. Too strange and disquieting if he ever removed the eyepatch. Too intimidating when he kept it on. Always he knew it was better to be fearsome than fearful.

His brother and nephews had taught him that lesson well and he was loath to part with it, even for you.

Still, he dreamt of you instead of simpering ladies. He dreamt of you and shuddered at the visceral memory you conjured, of that first time in the Street of Silk, when Aemond had thought fear long gone from his life only to have his brother bring it back. Strange sounds and smells and hands on him and the faintly nauseous pleasure of the first time a woman had touched his cock, he too young and unready to know what to do or say, she too used to obeying Prince Aegon’s orders to do anything other than her job.

He dreamt of you in those silken sheets, the proud toss of your coarse yellow hair, the odd cast of your red eyes, between his legs, telling him to relax, layback and enjoy himself.

My prince, you would call him as you took him in your mouth the way Aegon’s prostitute had and he swore in his bed, far away from the incense and the oils of that moment, taking himself in hand, thinking of your clenched teeth and angry words. As he fucked his fist in a hurry, angrily chasing the memory of your hissed insult, he would think of every time he had encountered you near Helaena’s room, eyes no longer lowered, feet firmly planted on the stone floor to face him. 

You, too ready to fight him if he moved towards you. He, too ready to rip the bonnet off your head to wrap the heavy length of your braid around his hand. You, too ready to let him pull you into an embrace you knew to be sheer madness.

Because it wasn’t idle curiosity anymore.

It wasn’t simple lust that made Prince Aemond near double over from the strength of his arousal every time he saw a bruise on your blotchy sun-burnt face or an angry red mark around your pale wrist. It was more than desire he felt the first time he saw your split lip and cornered you against a wall again, brushing with his thumb the scab that just hours ago had been seeping blood, breathing too heavily, manhood too hard to think. And this time you had been caught by surprise by his tenderness, unable to summon outrage and false pride to throw him off you or even the common sense to acquiesce to whatever a prince of the realm could demand of you.

No. Prince Aemond’s hunger had awakened in you demands of your own.

You had taken his thumb into your mouth and  bitten down so hard you heard him hiss a breath in and felt him fall into your arms. He had kissed you, his royal Valyrian blood still fresh on your lips, and your tongue had sought his out, even as his hands, one still bleeding, had wrapped around your hips, yanked them towards him, your legs off the floor and around his waist. You hadn’t known what it would be like to fuck a man you wanted so much but Aemond seemed willing to learn with you, ruffling desperately through your thin petticoat and your smallclothes until his cloth-trapped erection had finally rubbed against your heat. Wet, gloriously, smolderingly wet. And he had seen you grimace like you were in pain, a graceless, hungry sound escaping your throat, and he had known Aegon had fucking robbed him. Because this was the way it was supposed to be, and not whatever poor mummery had befallen him in that brothel.

Your mouth sloppily trying to devour his, your arms around his neck, holding on while he pushed his hips into yours, better, sweeter, harder than he had ever fucked any of Aegon’s painted girls. It was impossible, as he let your mouth go and panted against your ear, a deep hungry growl that he had not known he had learnt from Vhagar escaping him, it was impossible to reach for anything more. He wanted inside you, inside the wet, hot promise of your clothed cunt, but would not suffer a second away from you and knew, without a shadow of doubt, that he had been right to refuse, because he felt your hips meet his, you grinding against his throbbing prick, head thrown back against the stone wall and heard, in your desperately muffled cry, heard the first of your peaks. And he had not known anything else after that, except the savage joy of the hunt. Of pushing you against the wall and grinding into your core hard and fast and brutal, chasing after your pleasure, panting harshly, teeth-grittingly determined to fight his own throbbing desire, until you bit your lip to keep from crying out your next peak. Again and again, his hips driving madly into yours as he promised you anything, everything if you would just come for him one more time. He came on your third, because you snaked one trembling hand between your bodies, shoved it inside his laces and wrapped it around him, tight and merciless, looking at him straight in the eye, patch askew, sapphire glinting in the low candlelight, yanking on his prick, once, twice until he was coming all over your hand, legs near failing him as you both toppled unto the cold stone floor, a tangle of limbs and clothes.

You’d wiped your hand gods know where and let him rest his forehead against your racing heart, until his own would stop hammering madly in his ears. It was the way you looked at him after that destroyed him, that trapped him forever in the ribcage that held your own wildly beating heart. Because you looked at him like it pained you. You brushed his white hair out of his face the way you did Helaena’s, tenderly, kindly, the way you had never touched him before. You thumbed the edge of the scar on his cheekbone, and let the words escape your mouth: “You’re beautiful.”

And when you said it like this, like you were fighting a losing battle, like it hurt coming out, then Aemond could believe it.

[sunjaesol]

A GIFT GIVEN BY THE SKY, FALLING LIKE A SUDDEN SHOWER

soljae | royalty, arranged marriage au | fluff

তততততততততততততততততততততততততততততত

The kingdom appeared in the distance, popping up from the horizon. Cool wind lapped at her skin, though it didn't ease her hot skin and clammy hands. She rubbed her palms against her dress. The skirt was probably wrinkled by now.

Princess Im Sol of Jeju Island had never left her land until now. First time on a ferry for weeks. First time leaving her friends behind. First time… meeting her future husband: the prince of Gyeonggi-do. She'd only seen one small, drawn image of him, but she still had no clue about his actual countenance.

A shuddering breath left her. It was for the good of her people. For political power and security and for the heritage of Jeju and Gyeonggi-do. With this marriage, the trade between Jeju Island and the mainland would be solidified.

Her hands wrapped around the railing of the ship to stop her quivering fingers.

Behind her, the footsteps of her mother neared. She wasn't queen of Jeju yet, but with Sol's grandmother's health deteriorating, the succession would be sooner than later.

“Do you want a cup of tea before we arrive?” Mother asked. “There’s still time.”

“No, thank you,” Sol said. “I'll be fine.”

“You need something in your stomach before you meet the prince,” she argued. “You cannot be looking pale or gaunt.”

Everyone in Jeju had round faces and fat cheeks, warm skin and stocky physiques. The more one ticked off these boxes, the more beautiful one was considered. Though Sol was short, her cheeks weren't fat—as much as she ate, she kept her odd, angular face.

Now, it annoyed her when her mom mentioned it. “I’m fine,” the princess reiterated. “I'm sure the crown prince has prepared a banquet for our arrival.”

Mom harrumphed, but let the squabble go.

An hour after the conversation with her mother, the ferry slowed down as it neared the port of Gyeonggi-do. It was lined with grande ships, far more modern than hers, and her nerves instantly spiked again. To the people of Gyeonggi-do, she was probably seen as some servant girl; a woman ill-prepared for a life on the bustling mainland.

The place smelled different to Jeju as well. As fresh and sweet as the air was on the small island, as dull it was here. Sol swallowed thickly. Stay calm, she ordered to herself. You're a princess. Act like it.

As the crew dropped the anchor, Sol noted the royal staff standing on the dock. They donned cobalt blue hanboks with linen parasols and silk hats. Belatedly, she realised she should've studied more. Their colours clashed horribly with her yellow and pink hanbok.

Curling her arm around her mother's elbow, they descended the boat.

The royal staff held a deep bow. "Good afternoon, Crown Princess Im Boksoon and Princess Im Sol. I am the royal secretary of King Ryu Geundeok. Him and his son are very excited to meet you. May we assist you to the palace?"

Sol's mother bowed back and nodded, gesturing at the secretary and staff to move to the carriage. Their luggage would follow them afterwards. Sol was hung up on the man's words though; his son. The son. The crown prince. The man she'd marry. Her soon-to-be husband that she had never met nor spoken to.

Sol felt ill. She was a mere nineteen years old. Older than most before they were wed, but still so so young. Just before she boarded the boat, she'd been plucking oranges in the palace's orchard with her ladies-in-waiting, juice smearing her fingers and dirt on her cheek. Free. Happy. There were no orange trees in sight here.

Taking a deep breath, she followed the entourage.

*~*~*

Like everything in Gyeonggi-do, the palace was big. The people were tall and the houses were tall and the stores held imported goods from the entire continent and there was noise everywhere. By the time the gates opened to the palace, she couldn't even muster surprise or awe. Sol was tired from the long travel and all the new sights. She knew she'd be able to properly appreciate the luxurious architecture in a day's time.

Leaving the carriage, servants instantly moved towards Sol and her mother with parasols to protect them from the sun. Another thing she'd need to get used to: the people disliked the sun. For a fleeting moment, she allowed her hand to stretch and reach out to the sunlight just beyond the parasol, but then a servant moved closer to her side and the moment was stolen.

"Chin high, chest forward," mom whispered in the Jeju dialect. "And smile. Please."

"I'm scared," she uttered back, shaky. Fear glimmered in her eyes as she met her mother's gaze. The woman pursed her lips and held onto Sol tighter; for reassurance, or to make sure she didn't run away. Maybe both.

The trek to the agora of the palace felt like forever. All the while, Sol felt like throwing up. Perhaps she should've followed her mother's advice and had something to drink and eat prior to the meeting. But alas…

Turning the corner, Sol came face to face with the royal family of Gyeonggi-do. Just like that. Had her mother not been holding onto her, she would've frozen on the spot.

An older man about as tall as her mother, a slightly younger lady with rather exotic features, and there, beside her: a young gentleman towering above them all. The crown prince: Ryu Sunjae. He seemed to be almost a meter taller than Sol.

"Welcome," the older man bowed. "I am King Ryu Geundeok. This is my mistress and my son, the crown prince, Ryu Sunjae." His eyes slid to Sol. "And you must be Princess Im Sol… my future daughter-in-law."

Sol's reflexes kicked in at that point. Years of training aided her in talking right and smiling right and bowing right. She addressed everyone correctly and kept her gaze demure. No long eye contact. The perfect vision of a lady. If she even allowed one second of consciousness, she'd be a bumbling, fumbling mess stuttering and tripping over her hanbok.

And it worked. The king seemed pleased by her countenance and attitude. The crown prince, however, hadn't spoken yet. All he did was stare. It unnerved her a little, but she supposed it was normal. He was also meeting his bride-to-be for the first time.

Ryu Sunjae was handsome. The little drawing she'd received didn't do him justice. He was tall and statuesque, with broad shoulders and long limbs. His skin tone was even and his jaw was rather sharp, sort of like her own. The gentle smile stuck on his lips was kind if not impersonal. He was the total opposite of a Jeju local. If he wasn't a prince, he'd be considered a curio in her region.

After that, the hours flew by. Her mother and Sol received a tour and history lesson of the palace grounds. Afterwards, they ate a meal in the dining hall. Infinite bowls of banchan covered the low tables. While her mother and Sunjae's father discussed their upcoming nuptials, the two in question stayed silent and focused on the food. (Or, rather, Sol did. Sunjae's gaze was burning into her.) Words like, 'etiquette', 'lessons', 'norms and values', 'trade' and 'political affairs', went in one ear and out the other.

By night-time, they were chaperoned to their quarters and bid goodnight. Finally, Sol allowed her posture to slacken.

"You did well," Mom murmured. Without their ladies-in-waiting, mother maneuvered her to the vanity and began unpinning the complicated hairstyle. "The king approves of you."

"I know," Sol replied. "I hope the prince does too."

"His approval doesn't matter," Mom said. "Just stay as you are and everything will go smoothly."

*~*~*

A month passed by like that. Every day at the first light of dawn, she was awoken and dressed to go to her first lesson of the day. She was taught the dialect and socio-cultural norms of Gyeonggi; how they ate, how they bowed, in what hand they held the parasol and how she ought to reply to certain phrases. After which she attended the women's quarters to learn about the arts of the region, from weaving to writing to music. At the end of the day, she meditated in the palace's temple to better understand the country's history and spiritual procedures.

Sol barely had time to breathe. She was sleeping, eating, learning. Every so often, she saw glimpses of the crown prince. A passing figure in the hallways. Meanwhile, her mother prepared the wedding alongside the royal staff. After the wedding, she'd return to Jeju and aid her grandmother in her final months. Then Sol would be all alone.

One afternoon, she was at the royal seamstress for her royal wedding dress fitting. It was a blood red, ornate hwarot with a blue underskirt. The headdress she'd be wearing was heavy as well. Her hair was usually in a simple braid down her back held together with a yellow ribbon, but this… this was a whole different ordeal.

The woman placed a pin in the hem of the hwarot. "You're shorter than I thought," she commented, not unkind. "Are all Jeju folk like you?"

Sol smiled, peering at the lady seated on the wooden floor. "Mostly, yes. We're rather short. We believe it's so we're closer to the soil. It helps us give life to food."

"How romantic." Another pin. "The crown prince also goes on tangents like that. I guess it's a thing among you younger people."

That made her perk up. A detail about the crown prince whom she hadn't spoken to. "The crown prince is a romantic? Does he read?"

"Of course. Though he does have a penchant for sports, I must say. He's a bit peculiar."

*~*~*

Every day, her fate ticked closer and closer. When she stitched the final embroidery on the wide sleeves of her robe, it felt like Sol had finalised her future. There was no turning back. Every day, her mother reminded her of their political standing, of the betterment of their people, of how proud she'd make everyone.

And Sol wanted all of that. All her life, she'd wanted what was best for everyone. That was how she was raised, what she was trained for.

But now, on the eve before her wedding, she felt sick to her stomach. What about her? What about what she wanted? She missed her island and her people and the orange trees and the smell of fresh fruit and she missed her grandmother and their special tea ceremonies and she missed, she missed, she missed.

Tears trickled down her cheeks as she laid in bed, her mother soundly sleeping beside her. With trembling hands, she removed the thin sheet from her body and pulled on her slippers. Her hair was undoubtedly a mess and none of the staff had seen her without make-up, but she couldn't care right now. She needed air. She needed space.

Opening the doors of their chambers, Sol instantly marched down the hallway. Her hemp shorts and blouse were entirely unproper, but she just- she needed- she wanted- she wanted-

There it was: the doors to the gardens. Her slippered feet slapped against the wooden floors as she descended the steps and finally pushed herself outside to breathe in the night air. The tears clung to her skin. There were guards patrolling, but none dared to step in and chaperone her back to her room.

Stepping further into the dark gardens, she plopped down on the grass with a sigh. Her head fell into her hands, fingers weaving into her loose hair. Another sob left her lips. Sol didn't want any of this. It was so shameful to admit, but it was true: she wanted to be in her halmeoni's arm and never face reality again. She wasn't ready for this life.

"Princess?"

Startled, Sol looked up with tearstained cheeks to the voice in question. She thought it'd be a guard, but it was far worse. There, with his face partially illuminated by the moonlight, was Ryu Sunjae.

Jolting up on her feet, she stumbled back to ensure enough distance was between them. Rough hands wiped away the tears on her cheeks. It was already embarrassing enough he found her in this state of duress, he didn't need to see that she cried because of their nuptials. What if he found her weak-hearted and called it off just like that?

"Your highness," she squeaked. "I'm- I-"

He held up his hand. A strange look crossed his face. It silenced her in a snap. Nervous, she tucked her loose hair behind her ears and wished for lightning to kill her right then and there. But then he surprised her: "Would you like some tea?"

Her jaw fell slack. "T-tea?"

"Yes." His head tilted. "You seem cold." His voice was lower and kinder than she had expected. Melodic in a way, but perhaps her emotions were making her hallucinate.

Meek, she nodded. "That would be nice, Your Highness. Thank you."

The prince smiled, curt and brief. "Wait here."

Stunned, she watched the prince, her husband in twelve hours, turn on his heels and walk through the servant's door back into the palace. Tea. With the crown prince. In the dead of night. Sol blinked profusely and pinched the skin by her elbow, but she didn't wake up in her bed. This was really happening.

Soon, the crown prince returned with a thick quilt and a tea platter. He handled the items as though a commoner in a past life, though the elegance with which he poured her a cup betrayed him. Without a glance, he handed her the quilt and the cup. "Keep this around you," he ordered. "Otherwise you'll catch a cold."

"Thank you…"

And then he sat beside her, just like that. Staring into the darkness of the gardens, he whispered: "Why are you outside, princess?"

She blew on her tea. Aromatic steam filled the air and a hint of oranges teased her nose. Her chin wobbled. Sol felt small and sad and angry and this stupid, silly question wasn't helping at all. For the first time in the 40 days she was here, she spoke from her gut: "We've never spoken and this is the first thing you ask of me? Why I'm outside?"

His lips pressed together. "What question would you prefer, Princess?"

She didn't know. Instead, she poured him a cup as well and handed it to him. Their fingers briefly met. A first touch. It was then that she realised he was also not dressed to standards. He wore loose silk trousers and a linen shirt. His hat was gone, revealing a mop of messy black hair. Boyish, in a way, like the guys in Jeju. Neither of them looked like they'd be marrying in twelve hours, much less as part of a royal affair.

"May I ask you what you think of this… arrangement?" she eventually asked.

"What I think?" His brows raised. "Does it matter?"

"You're marrying me, so yes." She willed herself to seem even a little bit confident. "Are you pleased with this union?"

Slowly, he nodded. But that strange look in his eye didn't disappear as their gazes met. "It'll help both our nations. We'll secure our lineages. Our economies will flourish. And…" His eyes flickered up and down her frame, shy. "We'll figure out our arrangement with time."

Sol didn't know what she had expected. A heartfelt, romantic answer about weathering the storm together? Ryu Sunjae wasn't a poet; he had more pressing things to worry about. And so she nodded. "Of course."

"Does my answer suffice?"

"It does." She swallowed. "I, however, am scared. I'll just admit that. So if you see me look faint tomorrow, you'll know why." The words left her in a rambling mess, not at all focused on honorifics. She was messing up badly.

For some reason, Sunjae smiled at that. "Okay. Thanks for letting me know." And then: "I'll make sure to catch you when you fall."