#hate that he’s like fifty in all other media

[eemoo1o]

Man, I really hope they aged Shadow down in Prime.

[jnnul]

ready for love

PAIRING ▸ lee jeno x fem!reader (ft. tbz's juyeon)

GENRES ▸ fluff, non!idol au, college au, slice of life, friends to lovers but also...it’s complicated?

WARNINGS ▸ uhh swearing, drinking (but legally), mentions of infidelity, there was supposed to be so much more but it just turned into a fluff piece sooo..., y/n is indecisive and jeno is stupid, they're a match made in heaven 🫶🏽, jeno is the loverboy of the century towards the end, they make out and a few allusions to sex but no graphics, is it just me or is that header really blurry

SUMMARY ▸ a boy who has never taken a relationship seriously. a girl who is seriously over relationships. when they end up finding each other, will they let their ideas of what a relationship should be like ruin their relationship before it even starts?

PLAYLIST ▸ ready for love - blackpink, lovin’ me - fifty fifty, siren - taeyeon, island - youha, hate that - key & taeyeon

WORD COUNT ▸ 19.5k words

AUTHOR’S NOTE ▸ oh hey it's that one fic i've been writing since july! which reminds me - if that ending looks familiar, it's because technically, this was supposed to come out right after that timestamp did oops.

as always, feedback, comments, etc. GREATLY encourage writers! if you felt any sort of way (in a good or bad way!) about this fic, pls leave feedback!

far too easy. a couple of lingering stares. a coincidental request on social media. a few well-placed messages. one date later and...done. he was in. hook, line, and sinker.

it was almost getting predictable. at first, lee jeno just wanted to have a little fun. it was never anything serious - and it definitely wasn't always about sex. truly. as distrustful as men had made themselves out to be within the past few thousands of years, jeno truly wasn't thinking with his dick when he got into relationships.

it was just about having fun. he just wanted to get to know people, do sohing romantic just for the experience, and maybe, get to know their body if the relationship felt so inclined.

there was never any delusion about what a relationship with jeno was like. it was two months, if you lasted that long, and every second of it made you feel alive like you never had before. but the honeymoon stage would pass and jeno would lose interest and soon, there would be a heartbroken girl left behind, even though she knew exactly what she was getting herself into.

and it wasn't as though they could really get mad at him. he was a sweetheart through and through and he would continue to say hi if they ever saw each other around and he had definitely saved a couple exes from some ugly encounters. jeno never meant to hurt anyone; it just happened soimes because he was such a good guy.

at least, that’s what you understood of your best friend. from his nights of drunken confessions and the few encounters you’d had with his ‘girlfriends’, you had surmised that jeno lee was just meant to be a serial casual dater.

you, quite frankly, were on the opposite end of the spectrum. after a few too many boyfriends who had turned out to be grade a douchebags, you had effectively sworn off men.

dating was just far too hard. the 'did he notice me?' stage where you dress up a little prettier than normal. and then the internal panic when they request you on instagram. the casual talking stage where you've already accidentally planned out the wedding. the date where you choose to move past all of the blatant red flags you see. and then the relationship, when the red flags become red banners the size of antarctica because goddamnit, how did you miss the fact that this man was a literal freudian case study.

so whenever jeno would introduce his newest girlfriend or go on about his many adventures (including the details about the not-so-family-friendly aspects), you couldn't help but feel a little pang of jealousy because where the hell was jeno finding such amazing relationships? and why the hell isn't he taking them seriously?

you're sure you couldn't even count the number of sweet girls you knew would've been perfect to take home to his mother you had been introduced to before they were gone the next week.

"and that's why i think you're an insufferable brat," you grumble, pointing a stick of celery at him threateningly. jeno snorts slightly, redirecting your celery to the hummus sitting next to where you were perched on his kitchen counter.

"you've been saying that for as long as we've been friends," he says, pouring a spoonful of soy sauce into the rice for the fried rice he was preparing for dinner.

"three years too many," you say, squinting your eyes at him suspiciously. "how have we actually stayed friends for three years when you're so...wishy-washy?"

jeno's roommate, na jaemin, rubs his eyes as he stumbles into the kitchen, saluting you sarcastically as he reaches into the fridge to grab an entire bowl of strawberries.

"what a burn, y/n. wishy-washy. yeah, i'll bet that really did a number on him, didn't it, jeno my boy?" jaemin snorts, pouting when he quite nearly drops the bowl of strawberries on his foot.

he also very nearly escapes decapitation by celery stick, ducking from your brutal aim.

"at least i don't have a mommy kink," you snide, salvaging what was left of your celery snack.

jaemin jabs a strawberry in your general direction with a look of indignant betrayal on his face.

"i thought we agreed to never speak of what was revealed during balkan night," jaemin hissed. "you promised, y/n!"

"i was crossing my fingers," you shrug, placating your best friend with an olive branch of a silly smile when he swears vengence by strawberry assault a second time.

"whatever," jaemin grumbles as he slinks back to the darkness of his room. jeno just shakes his head fondly, tossing in the vegetables the two of you had just chopped up into the fried rice.

"why do you always feel the need to rag on him like that?" jeno says, mixing the vegetables into the rice.

"why do you always feel the need to avoid taking a relationship seriously?" you counter, hopping down from your perch to throw out the now empty hummus container.

"you know, anyone hearing this conversation right now would think that you were the one not taking relationships not seriously instead of me," he says calmly, taking a spoonful of rice. he blows on it before reaching out to you, letting you taste-test the fried rice. you hum, sifting through the ingredients in the fridge as you analyze what the missing ingredient was. your eyes land on a small plastic container with finely chopped garlic inside, the realization clicking in your head.

"just because i'm a little youthful and you have the personality of a grandpa doesn't mean that you have to be the one who takes relationships too seriously," you say, sprinkling the garlic into the fried rice. jeno hands you the wooden spatula and lets you take over the cooking process as he finds three bowls for the three of you.

"whatever helps you sleep at night," jeno says with a soft chuckle.

"speaking of relationships though, i'm not going to be leeching off of you for dinner tonight," you say casually, offering a spoonful to jeno this time to let him taste your shared creation.

he flashes you a happy eye smile, retreating into the hallway to call jaemin out of his room for lunch.

"date?" jeno says, a strange look in his eye as he hands you your spoon (you had a preference for only eating with the singular small spoon in the entire apartment for some reason) with a knowing smile.

"somewhat? it's a double date but i'm only going for jimin because she really really likes the guy and she's afraid she's going to fuck it up if it's just the two of them," you explain, giving him a thumbs up for the successful food collaboration.

"do you know who it's with?" jaemin pipes up, seemingly refreshed after consuming an inhumane amount of strawberries.

you furrow your eyebrows, trying to recollect the name of the guy jimin mentioned that jaehyun was bringing before shaking your head.

"i think his name was jayeon? yeonju? juyeon? i don't know, i don't really remember. all i know is that jaehyun better be head over fucking heels for jimin by the end of the night," you say in between bites.

"juyeon? lee juyeon?" jaemin says suddenly, his spoon clattering as he drops it in his bowl. jeno and jaemin exchange a look that you don't miss and you definitely don't like.

"am i missing sohing here? do you guys know him?" you ask, the worry lines on your forehead having become near permanent. jeno shrugs, pushing his food around in an uncharacteristically hesitant manner.

"i mean i just heard that he was a bit of a heartbreaker when he was in college but i don't really think that it was that big of a deal," jaemin says finally. you roll your eyes, puffing out your chest sarcastically.

"i'm a big girl guys, don't worry. i can handle myself," you say, patting jeno's shoulder comfortingly as you move to wash your bowl. "and besides, i'm not actually going there to find the love of my life; i'm just going there to support jimin."

"just be careful, y/n." jeno gives you a quick little side-hug before disappearing into the living room to turn on some tv. you turn to jaemin but your question dies on your tongue when you see that jaemin is already staring at you with an unreadable expression.

"what's up with him?" you ask, when jaemin sighs, getting up to wash his dishes.

"jeno's worried for you," he says. you huff, watching jaemin put his washed bowl into the dishwasher.

"i get that, dipshit. what i don't get is why!" you exclaim, wincing when you realize that you're much louder than you had intended.

"because juyeon's just like jeno."

it's all jaemin says but it's all he needs to say because now, you finally understand.

+++

"now remember, i'm only coming with you for you, okay? if you ever want to just be with jaehyun by yourself, let me know and i'll be more than happy to head on my way out," you whisper to jimin as you flash a bright smile at jaehyun, who approaches the both of you with a dimpled smile as he tucks his car keys into his pocket.

"y/n! it's so good to see you after so long," jaehyun says, pulling you in for a friendly side hug.

"i know," you say, squeezing quickly before letting go. "can you believe it's already been a month since renjun's party?"

jaehyun furrows his eyebrows, shuffling so that he was standing next to jimin. "no, really? has it already been a month?"

he doesn't wait for you to answer, turning to jimin almost immediately. "it's been a month since i met you? why does it feel like i've known you my entire life?"

it takes all you have to turn to the side before fake gagging, unable to help the cringe that runs through your body from the cheesiness, jimin fighting back a giggle, but you can see that her cheeks are bright red.

"jae, for your sake and the beautiful ladies', i'm gonna have to pretend like you never said that," a deep voice says from behind you. the man steps into the light and you're sure that your eyes are about to fall out of their socket.

juyeon is one of the most attractive men you've ever seen. long, long legs that lead up to broad shoulders, beautiful eyes and lips that would make kylie jenner jealous. his dark hair is slicked back and he holds himself with a humble, quiet confidence that makes you ready to fall to your knees instantly. he turns to you and his cool demeanor is instantly broken when he smiles, his face glowing in the faint lights of the restaurant.

"hi, i'm juyeon," he says, sticking his hand out for you to shake. you stare at it for a moment before taking it.

"y/n. it's nice to meet you," you say dreamily, before coming to your senses and retracting your hand. you were here for jimin and jimin only. juyeon and his beautiful face would have to stay in the friend zone - especially if what jaemin had warned you about was true.

but just because you couldn't purchase doesn't mean you couldn't window shop.

"y/n," juyeon drawls, letting your name roll off of his tongue. "a pretty name for a pretty girl."

jimin can barely stifle a giggle at your dazed expression, elbowing you in the rib cage. you shake your head slightly, composing yourself once more. how in hell were you supposed to confine this man to the friend zone if everything he said threatened your very sanity?

"well, they say that you should never keep a pretty woman waiting," you say with coy smile, gesturing towards the restaurant. "shall we head inside?"

juyeon mock-bows while jaehyun opens the door and says, "ladies first."

you blow juyeon a kiss with a teasing smile, linking arms with jimin and sauntering into the restaurant. juvenile? perhaps. but where was the fun in being adult all the time?

the four of you make your way to where there's a receptionist standing behind a booth, jaehyun stating his name for the reservation.

"right this way, ladies and gentlemen," the receptionist says, gathering a handful of menus and leading you to your table.

"so jaehyun tells me you are a business major," juyeon says, falling in step beside you. you hum, shaking your head slightly.

"i was a business major; i double majored in finance and economics, but i graduated two months ago," you explain, thanking the waiter as you take your seat at the table. juyeon takes the seat next to you and jimin takes the seat on the other side so that you were sat directly across from jaehyun.

you're about to turn to jimin and say something only to find her enraptured by some fascinating conversation that her and jaehyun seemed to be having, turning back with a knowing smile.

"i'm sorry, i was under the impression that you were still in school since it's only march," juyeon says, handing you one of the menus the waiter had left on the table.

"i graduated early because of the overlap between my majors. i was required to keep up my grades for my scholarship anyway so i was able to build up credits fairly quickly," you explain, trying to ignore the spark of electricity that you feel when juyeon's fingers linger on yours.

"oh, so you were quite the academic," he says, running a hand through his hair. you determinedly stare at the menu, forcing down the hot flash that runs through your body when juyeon catches you watching.

"you could say so," you nod, scanning the menu. "how about you? what did you major in when you were in school?"

"i was your direct senior," juyeon begins, smiling when he sees the confusion on your face. "i was a finance major in college."

"no way! that's so interesting. where do you work now?" you ask once you put down the menu to meet his eyes. maybe jaemin and jeno were just being overprotective? it wouldn't be the first time they steered you away from heartbreak but juyeon seemed like such a sweet and genuine guy.

because juyeon's just like jeno.

that statement is enough to bring you back to your senses as you focus on what juyeon is saying, jimin and jaehyun still debating the difference between computer engineering and computer science (their respective majors) and which one was better.

nerds.

"i was at amazon up until last summer but i recently switched to a new company. it's a pretty small company but they specialize in cleaning the ocean of plastic and recycling the plastic for 3D printing. it's very niche but i didn't want to just be another finance bro that just worked for the sake of money, you know? i wanted to work with a good consciousness."

maybe curving juyeon from claiming a place in your already fragile heart would be a little more difficult than you expected. kind, environmentally aware and a chose ethical work? juyeon was already better than approximately 90% of your exes.

"how about you? have you started working yet? the market is pretty brutal for freshly graduated f&e people, from what my friends tell me." you nod, internally composing yourself and steeling yourself a little bit more to keep from falling into juyeon's charms.

just like jeno. the reminder is harsh, but it works like magic as you feel the butterflies in your stomach beginning to dissapate.

"it certainly is a lot more competitive than i think a lot of people anticipated. thankfully, i was able to connect to a sponsor during one of the scholarship banquets and was offered a position for right after school," you explained and juyeon's eyes turn from mild and observing to full of respect as he nods, almost approvingly.

"which company?" he asks, taking a sip of his water.

"i actually am working in the finance department at patagonia..."

+++

the night progresses almost too smoothly. once the food had come out, jaehyun and jimin finally seemed to come out of the bubble they were in and the conversation flowed so well, it was almost as though the four of you had known each other for years.

it was clear that jaehyun and juyeon were close, having met each other at work and instantly clicking. the easy back and forth between them allowed you and jimin relax a little more, allowing the conversation to turn to less formal subjects.

you find out that juyeon has a dog, much to your dismay.

"y/n loves dogs!" jimin exclaims, and you can feel your heart's walls crack a little further. there were many things you could handle - a cute boy with a dog? that was a little out of the realm of control.

"really? oh you'd love ray then - he's a big dog but he's got a lot of love. sort of a gentle giant," juyeon says, his eyes twinkling as he pulls out his phone to show you his wallpaper. it's a picture of him and ray curled up next to each other, sleeping in bed, both of them in the same exact position as they snored away.

"i swear, him and ray are the same soul in two different bodies. i've seen this guy have full on conversations with his dog. which would be weird but it kinda just works for them somehow. i kinda think that ray genuinely does understand juyeon," jaehyun snorts, nodding at juyeon's wallpaper. "that was when ray was still a puppy and he would copy every single thing that juyeon did."

juyeon shrugs, smiling as he tucks his phone back into his pocket. "not much has changed there, if i'm being honest."

you're about to say something about meeting ray when your phone rings abruptly, rudely interrupting the conversation. you frown as you flip your phone open, looking at the contact profile on the screen. jeno?

"hello?" you say as you answer the phone, pointing to the restroom as you excuse yourself from the table. from the corner of your eye, you can see the waiter coming with the bill for your table and you vaguely register the fact that only two cards are being put on the table (jaehyun's and juyeon's) as you make your way somewhere a little more private.

"hellooo? y/nnnn-ie? you stilllll at your, huh, date?" jeno slurs into your phone and you hear someone in the background, presumably jaemin, trying to convince jeno to stop himself from saying or doing something stupid.

"yes, jeno, i'm still at my date. that you interrupted, by the way," you say with a frustrated sigh. you check your watch and realize that it's only 9:30 PM and jeno does not sound like he's been taking it easy on the alcohol. "why are you drinking jen?"

"whattttt, so now i'm a shitty lover and i can't, heh, drink?" jeno grumbles into the phone and it's clear from the sudden silence in the background that jaemin has completely giving up on wrestling jeno's phone out of his hand. you had firsthand experience with drunk jeno - he turned into the hulk.

"jen, if you called me in the middle of my date to go off the rails about how you're a lonely fucker, i'm going to kill you," you hiss, smiling at the lady who comes into the restroom as you weren't threatening your best friend with murder.

"I'M NOT A LONELY FUCKER!"

oh, so this part jeno could say without hiccuping or slurring his words. fantastic. you sigh, switching your phone to the other ear as you wash your hands, getting ready to leave the restroom. there's a pregnant pause where no one says anything but you can hear the top gun theme song in the background so you know jeno's on the line.

"if - if i change, will you not go out with juyeon?" jeno mutters finally, just as you're leaving the restroom. "if i finally start getting serious about relationships, will you not go out with him? will you come home?"

you pause at that. jeno's always been the protective type. for all of his own playboy (even if technically he wasn't trying to be a playboy) charm, jeno genuinely wasn't very happy when you dated people. he wouldn't be rude to them and he certainly would never force you to break up with them but every time he would run into them, regardless of how long you had dated them, he always had something to say.

he looks like he jerks off to weird porn. definitely something about shampoo, a hot girl, and way too much viagra.

he has a small dick.

he makes his girlfriends lose weight even though he has a beer belly.

i'm not even gonna lie to you - i just hate the fact that he's balding.

most of the reasons that jeno gave you were kinda stupid. but ultimately, he was usually right about which people to avoid and even if he said it was because they were ugly and balding, it was usually because he knew that they weren't kind people on the inside.

it was because you just didn't have a great self-image, jeno used to say. if you saw yourself the way the rest of us - the way i see you, you'd never even give some of these assholes a chance, y/n. think of it as playboy experience about how to find the people actually worth your time.

but he had never said anything like this before. for all of the hazy comments and strange strength jeno developed when he was drunk, he had never said anything like this to you before. mostly because jaemin was really good at protecting his roommate from making stupid decisions but it was clear that even jaemin couldn't stop this.

"jen, you sound crazy right now," you say, rubbing your forehead. you step out of the restroom to see juyeon waiting at the table alone, as jimin and jaehyun seemingly already left together. "i don't really know what you're trying to say and quite frankly, i have no clue why you're acting like this. ask jaemin to make sure you're drinking a lot more water and we'll talk about this in the morning, alright?"

jeno doesn't say anything but from the shuffling in the background, you realize that jaemin has finally rose from his slump and was signaling something to jeno. good. maybe jaemin would be able to understand why the fuck jeno was acting like this.

there's an exchange of words, mostly jaemin berating jeno to hand over the phone as you hear a loud thump in the background before jaemin is speaking.

"hey, y/n it's me," jaemin says. it's clear that he's been drinking too but jaemin isn't too much of a drinker so he still sounds pretty levelheaded as he speaks.

"what's up with jeno, jaemin? why is he acting like that?" you ask, making your way over to the table slowly. you realize that juyeon is holding onto your coat and suddenly, you're not really sure about what to do. you don't know what it is about the simple fact that juyeon is holding your coat but the entire thing seems a little domestic. like the two of you actually were on a date.

"y/n, i'm gonna be so honest with you, i think it's best if you have some distance from jeno for a while. i think he's just getting in his head about stuff he shouldn't be and really, i think the only way he's gonna get over it or figure out how to talk to you about it if he has some distance."

how perfect. you sigh, running your hand through your hair as you smile at juyeon, who helps you put your coat over your shoulders, the scent of his cologne filling up your lungs. you decide that if it was distance that jeno wanted, it was distance jeno was going to get. quite frankly, this wasn't the first time jeno had randomly pulled away from you, even if it was the first time he had finally come close to clueing you into why.

it was clear that jeno didn't like you dating people - especially not juyeon. maybe even to the extent of jeno changing his own playboy ways to convince you otherwise of interacting with juyeon.

you had considered the fact that jeno might be interested in you romantically or that maybe he was jealous for your affections. but every time you thought that, jeno would come back from his faraway space with a new girl and a genuine twinkle in his eye and suddenly, everything was back to normal.

jeno simply was an overprotective person, you decided. and he would do whatever he thought was right to make sure that the people around him didn't get hurt.

it really did check out, honestly.

jeno was equally overprotective of everyone in his life because getting that close to him in the first place was a feat within itself. once you made it past that original barrier, however, he would be willing to give his life if he thought it would help even the slightest.

but...even so. this was weird.

either way, juyeon was opening the passenger door to his car and you were aimlessly climbing into it so any and all thoughts about jeno would have to wait until you made it down this slippery slope first. the last thing you needed in the morning was the honest to god gripping panic of doing the walk of shame.

juyeon doesn't seem like the type to expect a lady to put out because he bought her dinner but you can never be too careful. he seems to notice your apprehension because he asks you for your address upfront, raising three fingers in an oath.

"i promise to conduct no funny business and i will take you home safe and sound, y/n," he says solemnly, and the way his eyes sparkle in the light of the moon is enough to make your resolve melt a little bit as you laugh softly.

"alright juyeon. since you promised no funny business," you quip lightly, entering your address on the navigation screen next to the steering wheel.

juyeon squints at your address, which is fifteen minutes away, before looking at you strangely. "are you sure this is the right address? my building is right next door! i would've seen you at some point, and trust me, i'd never forget a face like yours."

"uh, yeah, this is my address. i'm usually never home though, since i'm always either with jimin or my friends jaemin and jeno," you say, watching as juyeon sets the car in reverse to pull out of the parking spot. his arm lifts, as though he were going to put it behind the headrest of your seat to do the classic flirting move to reverse. he sets it back down when he sees you staring at the screen (which had a rearview camera feed on it), realizing that it would be dumb to try and make a move in such a cliché way.

"jeno? jeno lee?" juyeon asks as you guys pull out of the parking spot. you glance at him sideways, wondering if he were going to offer the same cautionary tale that jaemin and jeno had presented to you.

"yeah. he's one of my best friends. do you know him?" you ask, already presuming the answer.

juyeon is silent, as though he's weighing options in his mind. should he be honest with you? should he preserve your feelings?

"i know of him. i don't know him all that well," juyeon says finally, and you know that juyeon has decided to take the third option. neutrality. and while you're tempted on asking him to expand, you really don't know him well enough to do that.

so you just leave the topic aside and wait for him to start a different conversation.

he does soon enough, but you know that his heart isn't in it anymore. you engage in polite smalltalk until he pulls up to your apartment complex. you thank him for driving you and are about to step out of the car when juyeon suddenly touches your wrist gently, afraid to make rude or rough gestures.

you pause, half out of the car as you turn to him with a quizzical smile.

"i had a good time getting to know you today, y/n. and i know that it was just an excuse for those two to go on a date without making it weird but i really did have a good time getting to know you. i hope that i didn't make a bad impression at the end." his eyes are shining under the dim lighting of the few rooms that are still lit up in your apartment complex.

you smile at him gently, shaking your head to assure him. "you didn't make a bad impression. i had a good time getting to know you too."

you're ready to step out of the car once more when juyeon's fingers on your wrist wrap around them, this time a little bit more firm on claiming your attention.

"i - i want to see you again. i've honestly never connected this well with someone before. would you be open to that?" juyeon asks. you pause for a moment before giving in. how could you say no to him when he was looking at you with such big, brown eyes with so much hope hidden in them?

but even as you give juyeon your number, you can practically hear the bright red warning signs in your mind - and for some reason, jeno was the one screaming every single one of those signs.

"good night y/n," juyeon says, his smile every inch as heartbreakingly charming as the moment you knew he'd be bad for you.

you offer a tight, cautious smile in return. "good night juyeon."

+++

for someone who was fiercely overprotective of his friends, jeno had a strange tendency of self-sabotaging his relationships with them. not all of them - mostly just you. he didn't know what it was about you but somehow, he always just seemed to be saying the wrong things at the wrong time.

jaemin seems to think that it's because jeno has feelings for you (which he most definitely does not) (at all) (for real).

it wasn't as though jeno didn't like when you went on dates. in fact, he liked to think that he was rather supportive. it was just that you had a tendency to pick out all of the shittiest men in seoul to date and quite frankly, jeno hated it.

and you knew that. you'd been dealing with jeno's strange tendencies for three years now. he knew that you knew that he'd call you by next week and everything would be back to normal. that's usually how it went when you went on a particularly serious date on any level. strange set of coincidences that jeno only seemed to fuck up the worst right before or after a date you were raving about.

huh.

"i'm telling you jeno, you have got to tell her the way you feel about her," jaemin says, tossing a water bottle at jeno. they're sitting on the floor in front of the tv, watching money heist halfheartedly. terrible show to be their 'let's talk about our feelings' show but jaemin and jeno never could have a conversation like that without some level of violent scheming occurring in the background.

"i don't feel any way about y/n, jaemin. honestly, it's getting really fucking annoying that you keep saying that i do," jeno says, digging his chopsticks into his chinese takeout food. jaemin rolls his eyes, sitting down next to jeno with his own box of takeout.

"i swear to god. why did you call her then? why did you call her on her date last night?" jaemin asks. jeno shrugs, setting his food down before sighing.

"i don't know, okay? i just...you know what happened with juyeon. i just can't imagine her going through something like that," jeno says softly. jaemin looks at him before clearing his throat, forcing jeno to look at him square in the eyes.

"look, i know that you and juyeon don't have the greatest past but you have got to let her find her person. who knows! maybe juyeon's changed in the last three years. you literally don't know him anymore. and besides, this isn't about juyeon and you know it. you did this when she got with daniel, and then sunghoon, and then even doyoung." jaemin shakes his head, trying to get jeno to understand his own feelings. "you're blind to it but every time she actually feels good about someone, you somehow need to take a break from her. why?"

jeno doesn't actually have the answer to that question. why, indeed, is the question of the night.

later that night, when jaemin has turned in (or rather, announced that he was going to sleep, only to sit in bed and occupy their shared netflix account for hours), jeno pulls out his phone and searches up three words.

we need space.

he searches in his messages and cringes when he sees the number of outgoing texts that have space (as in the number of times he's broken up with someone over text) in them. he filters all of the other people out except for you and it pisses him off that jaemin is right.

may 2020. the first time jeno had asked you for some space, when you'd asked daniel to be your boyfriend.

august 2021. the second time you guys had taken some space, when you'd gone on your first date with sunghoon.

september 2022. the third time that you had had to take a break from each other. when jeno had introduced you to doyoung with his own hands.

realistically, jeno knew that jaemin was right. and with the evidence staring at him so incriminatingly, there was no way to refute the accusations.

but as much as jeno had dated around, he still didn't know what or who he was looking for. sure he was attracted to you as a person and your, uh, physicality - but that didn't mean that you were the one for him. and if jeno were to pursue something with you that made him realize that you truly weren't what he was looking for after all, not only would he be losing you as a partner but he'd be losing you as a best friend too.

so he continues in the toxic cycle of taking a break from you every time he feels as though his feelings are getting too high in his chest for him to contain them and never giving you or jaemin an explanation of why.

jeno knew it was wrong. he knew that his life would be so much easier if he just came clean and you fell one way or another on the scale of 'already dated' and 'haven't dated yet' like most of the girls on campus. but it was different with you.

it'd always been different with you.

so jeno rolls over, and goes to bed, dreaming of you and juyeon holding hands on your first date alone. he's never had such a restless night of sleep in his life.

+++

you know that you're being a bad friend to jimin when she's pouting at you swirling your straw in your macchiato instead of listening to her rambles.

"come on, y/n. it's been three days. you know that jeno gets like this - it's not like this is new right?" jimin says, covering your hand with both of hers, blinking at you curiously.

you smile and shake your head. "yeah. i'm sorry. this is supposed to be about you and i'm just getting in my head about this shit."

jimin tuts, eyebrows furrowing in mock anger. "that's not what i mean and you know it. i'll talk about jaehyun whether you're listening or not and you and i both know that. i just - i guess i'm not sure why you're always so hung up over jeno doing this when you know that he's gonna do it."

"you're right. it's not new. and i'm sorry that it keeps coming up when i really hate that he does this but i just wish he would talk to me instead of shutting me out every time that something like this happens. it's just him and jaemin cooped up and talking to each other for a week before they go back to being normal. and i get it. they're guys. they need a break and they need to do guy things and take a break from girls or whatever the fuck straight boys do. but this is getting out of hand and ridiculous."

but you catch yourself, shaking your head once more as you focus on jimin. "thank you for letting me get that out of my system. now tell me what you were saying about jaehyun. i feel like i've lost my best friend to some random guy for the past three days!"

jimin eyes you for a moment longer (and you know that she's not going to let this go) but decides to take mercy on you.

"well, jaehyun and i have been doing really well, honestly! we've seen each other every single day for the last three days - which isn't that hard considering that we've been having sex all day in every square inch of his apartment." jimin sees the scandalized look on your face before laughing. "don't worry, he lives alone and we've actually been going on non-sexual dates too. we connect in more ways than one if you get what i mean."

you slap jimin's arm incredulously, looking around the cute little café that you were sitting in to make sure that no one was listening. no one was, of course, given that it was 11:30 am on a monday but that was besides the point.

"oh my god. so are you guys going to make it official or what?" you ask, leaning forward on your steepled fingers. jimin shrugs, leaning back in her chair languidly.

"i don't know. i mean, i really like our chemistry and i like where this is going but i'm not going to label it. i'm definitely not going to be the one to pop the 'what are we' question - that's gotta be him," jimin says. "even though i am so incredibly head over heels for him. so i would like to be his girlfriend. for realsies."

she adds on the last part almost as an afterthought when she sees your unbelieving face.

"i mean it! i really want to be more than just a situationship but i really can't be the one to initiate that. i'm tired of always having to express interest in others. i attract; i don't chase," jimin says with a catty smile and you can't help but grin at that.

maybe jeno was really onto something. girl time was amazing. maybe that's why jeno needed some space from you.

"i agree. and you know what, i don't want to knock it but that honestly doesn't seem all that strange, considering that your location has consistently been showing that you're at jaehyun's place for the past 72 hours," you say, laughing at her mischievously when she returns the favor with a slap to your arm.

"i don't know. yeah. anyway. speaking of jaehyun, or not really him, but his friend - not the point! jaehyun mentioned that you gave juyeon your number? and that you've been kinda talking?" jimin says, and now it's your turn to blush.

"no - i mean, yes. i did give him my number but it's honestly not like that. he seems great and all but jeno and jaemin seemed really spooked when i mentioned him. i trust them when it comes to boys. especially with my shitty taste in them," you say thoughtfully and jimin can't help but agree with that.

she checks her phone and groans, starting to shuffle her things together as she prepares to leave. "this has been so good but i have to get to class and you know how much of a pain in the ass professor joo is."

you also start to gather your belongings, slurping down the leftovers of your macchiato. "yeah. i think that my early lunch break is coming to an end anyway. i've got a meeting at 6 pm but we're still on for dinner and drinks this friday, right?"

jimin nods distractedly as she checks her phone to see if jaehyun had texted her. he hadn't. in the past four hours. she clicks her phone shut and looks at you with a determined look in her eyes.

"yes. for sure. you and i have a date this friday and i don't want you to cancel, you hear me? and do not let those investors keep my baby from me like they did last time," jimin says, wagging her pointer finger at you threateningly. you roll your eyes, pressing a kiss to her cheek as the two of you make your way out of the café.

"i hear you. no more investors past 7 pm on a friday," you say, raising your hands in surrender when jimin squints her eyes at you. she side hugs you before checking the time once more (therefore realizing that professor joo wasn't above calling her out in the middle of class) and scurrying off to snu, a block down from the café you were previously in.

you sigh, shaking your head fondly as you turn in the opposite direction to head to work.

+++

turns out, friday seems to be a very popular night. not only do you have back to back meetings from 4 pm to 7 pm, but juyeon and jimin have texted you multiple times to confirm or (try) to make plans for friday night.

and honestly you didn't really want to go out. in between the radio silence between you, jeno, jaemin (who only really communicated in really stupid tiktoks back and forth), juyeon's suave maneuvering you into agreeing to a raincheck to saturday for the date, and jimin lamenting the fact that jaehyun hadn't brought up the 'what are we' conversation, there was so much going on.

all you needed were your friends, chinese takeout, and a little bit of jane the virgin. or other soapy dramas to take your mind off of everything.

but you had promised jimin and you'd be damned if you were going to bail on your friend when she was already not feeling well.

and besides, you refused to be a corporate slave who canceled on her friends because she was married to her job. that's not why you had chosen this job. and that's definitely why you had decided to reject pre-med as a sophomore in college.

so you find yourself taking shots with jimin in her kitchen and...jaehyun and juyeon.

when you had walked into jimin's apartment with nachos and shooters of pink whitney to pregame, you really weren't expecting to be face to face with juyeon - or jaehyun, honestly, given that jimin had been so heartbroken over the fact that jaehyun hadn't initiated the conversation yet.

not to mention the fact that she had made sure that the two of you were going out in the first place because of the whole jaehyun fiasco. so when you come face to face with the last person on the planet who should be in jimin's apartment, you're more than a little confused.

"oh, hey y/n. long time no see," jaehyun says with an easy smile, dimples showing that he had no clue that you knew that your best friend was waiting on a kind of serious conversation with him. you manage a tight smile before pulling shooters out of your purse, putting all four of them down on the counter in front of you.

"yeah. i thought it'd be a little longer though. jimin, i thought we were having a girls night?" you ask, eyes flashing at her when you turn out of view from jaehyun and juyeon. jimin just shrugs helplessly as juyeon steps in.

"don't blame her. i was the one who asked if we could tag along for the night. i promise we won't cause any trouble," juyeon says, and you turn to look at him, only to see him looking straight at jaehyun. his eyes dart between jaehyun and jimin before finally landing on you and you take the hint.

"oh. no worries. yeah, no worries at all, actually. hey, you know what i actually wanted to confirm something about tomorrow's plans with you if i could steal you for a couple seconds?" you say, leaving no room for denial as you wrap your arm in his and walk the both of you to the balcony, closing the door behind you.

"thank you for understanding - jaehyun wants to talk to jimin today about making things official but he's been so nervous about it that he's been putting it off. i figured that it would be better for me to come with him to make sure he doesn't chicken out. and catch you guys before you leave so that he doesn't sit and ferment in his feelings any longer," juyeon explains slowly, sure to refrain from turning around to see how things were going inside.

you lean over the metal bars of the balcony, the cold sinking into your skin in a refreshing way, the april air finally warming up enough to go out without needing a literal winter jacket.

"ahh. good idea. don't tell her i told you this but she was worried that he really wasn't into her," you say. juyeon snorts, a sound that's almost unbecoming from a man so handsome.

"isn't into her? he's head over heels for her. i don't think it's taken him more than thirty minutes to get into a relationship with someone if he wanted to. the fact that he took over a week to figure out his feelings means that he's serious. more serious than i've ever seen him." juyeon seems thoughtful as he trails off, letting his words sit on his tongue in a way that almost feels like he can truly feel the weight of the words.

"hm. or is just unsure of how he feels," you say, and juyeon looks at you strangely, turning so that he was leaning on the railing, his gaze fixated on you.

"are you really that cynical about men?" he asks chidingly, and you shrug.

"yeah. i mean. i don't know. i'm best friends with two of them so i know first hand how fucked up men can be. trust me, i pray to god every day for more patience before i fuck jeno or jaemin up for good," you say, and you can feel juyeon's presence grow cold at the mention of your best friends.

when you look at him though, he has nothing but warmth in his eyes and he smiles at you. "i will admit that there are a lot of messed up things that guys have done but it's not fair to categorize all men due to the faults of a few."

"uh-huh. and when men turn into heartbreakers after getting fucked over by one girl...it's okay?" you say, raising an eyebrow and you can feel juyeon trying to physically retract his statement.

"no. no. it's definitely not okay to hurt other people because you've been hurt. but give us some credit, okay? some of us are trying our best," juyeon says, and you watch as his eyes fall to your lips before dragging them upwards again.

"some of us are just trying to find our other half."

you're silent for a moment, and the moment is all you need to push off of the railings and turn to juyeon with a sad smile. "look juyeon, you're a great guy and i hate to nip things in the bud - especially with someone i get along so well with. but my friends are the most important people in my life. so i don't know what happened between you, jeno, or jaemin but i know that if it really came down to it, they take precedence."

juyeon nods, like he'd been expecting you to say as much. how, you don't understand, given that your reasoning had come out of pretty much left field. and for no real reason too. but men are predictable, easy to read, and all it takes is one moment to understand their intentions.

"yeah. i know. i figured you'd pick them. not that i'm trying to guilt you for that or that i expect you to pick me or anything but i still tried my best, you know," juyeon says casually, giving you a thinly suppressed heartbroken smile. you melt slightly as you turn to him, giving him a half shrug.

"i'm sorry. i'm sure your other half would be so lucky to have you," you say gently. you look at your phone, where jimin has texted you saying that she's going to have to bail on girls night as her and jaehyun had decided to stay in for the night. juyeon seemingly gets a similar text because when you look back inside to the apartment, jaehyun is holding hands with jimin, who uses her free hand to wave sheepishly at you as they recede backwards where the bedroom was.

"i guess we've overstayed our welcome," juyeon says with a laugh, opening the balcony door as the two of you make your way back inside to grab any personal belongings and leave before you witnessed something that would end up scarring you forever.

you eye the shooters and then exchange a look with juyeon.

“i know we’re not - whatever but honestly, i think that you’re good company and this kind of night doesn’t deserve go wasted,” you say, grabbing the shooters and juyeon’s hand and dragging him out of jimin’s apartment when you hear the very telltale sign of a bedroom door shutting down the hall.

juyeon takes one look at the shooters in your hand and the glint in your eyes before taking the two of the little bottles you offer to him.

“i can’t believe i’m doing this right now,” juyeon mutters under his breath, but his smile is lighthearted.

“what, grown men can’t drink pink whitney?” you ask, throwing a shooter back and immediately regretting the fact that you don’t have chasers with you. you may not be an amateur on the night scene but alcohol still always needed a chaser.

“no,” juyeon says, knocking back both of them a little too smoothly. “i meant taking shots with the girl who rejected me in front of her best friend’s apartment where her best friend and my best friend are fucking.”

you look at him, searching for any sense of genuine discontentedness but the way that juyeon’s eyes curve into teasing crescents convince you otherwise.

it would be so easy to choose him. so incredibly easy. but jeno’s face flashes through your mind and you find yourself taking a step back, shaking your head when juyeon looks at you questioningly.

“to the club!”

+++

there are two things that you learn about juyeon by the time you’re another two shots deep: a) he is an absolute gentleman - not just to you, but to the other people around the two of you as well. b) he is a very flirtatious drunk.

in fact, he manages the very big, very linebacker looking bouncer to let him into the club even though his name wasn’t on the list with nothing but a charming smile and an absolute inability to keep from flirting with everything and anything in sight.

which is funny to watch, especially from the other side of the bouncer, because every time juyeon says something particularly risqué, you can see the bouncer’s ears go bright red before he finally relents and lets juyeon in.

but it’s somehow less funny when he’s using those lines on you. it somehow makes your head dizzy and it makes you forget why you turned him down in the first place. you’re half-convinced that this had been juyeon’s plan all along. to turn on the charm to the max so that when you’re under the lights (that honestly might invoke epilepsy; why the fuck were they flying around the place like that), you forget all about jeno.

it’s a bad decision, you repeat to yourself as you watch juyeon make his way through the crowd to where you’re standing in an isolated, somewhat calmer corner. jeno and jaemin warned you against him for a reason. protect your peace, y/n.

and even while you repeat that to yourself over and over again, when juyeon’s hand holds yours precariously as he pulls you into the growing mess of bodies, you find it harder and harder to convince yourself that that was the truth. god, he looks good.

his hair has fallen messily across his forehead, contrasting the way it had been carefully gelled back before. he’s rolled up the sleeves of his button up to reveal his forearms, and you feel no matter than a man as your eyes trail the depths that planes of his chest promise from where they peek out of his half unbuttoned shirt.

you’re vaguely aware that there are various people waiting for you to either make a move or to push him away once and for all. it felt like every single person in the club was fixated upon the two of you - do you want him or not? because you’re holding up the fucking line. for you and your friend.

and so you take the plunge.

you move his hand from where it was innocently resting on your wrist and place it on the small of your back, smiling when juyeon takes the hint and draws you closer to him so that your chest is pressed against his.

“hey beautiful,” juyeon breathes as he looks down at you, almost in disbelief. “what are you doing here?”

you know, even tipsy, that he’s looking for a real answer. and you don’t want to play him - you don’t want to add to the list of heartbreak.

“i’m looking for someone to keep me company tonight,” you say and look up at him through your lashes, a coy smile playing on your lips when juyeon’s breath falters as you do so. “just for the night though. you know anyone who might interested?”

juyeon pulls you impossibly closer and you register the copious amounts of men (for you) and women (for him) that are turning away from the two of you, more than a little disappointed.

“yeah, i might know someone.” 

and with that, he spins you so that your back is pressed against his front, his arms caging you in protectively when he sees that a man is looking at you like he genuinely wants to eat you up.

you can feel your self-control slipping further and further away from you as the two of you just let the music fill you up, forgetting about your inhibitions as long as you had this music and him.

it’s too perfect though, and you realize as much when you make eye contact with jeno fucking lee across the club. right before he dips his head to whisper in some girl’s ear.

jaemin is right next to him, his arm laying casually on another girl and you can see the sheer panic in his eyes when he sees you, and then the confusion when he realizes just who you’re pressed up against. you watch as he leans over to whisper (yell; you’re sure that no one can whisper in an establishment threatening to break the sound barrier) something in jeno’s ear but he’s firmly shut down when jeno waves him off.

you scoff at that, turning around the pair of you around so that juyeon’s back was to the two idiots that you call your friends, now facing the dj booth.

the song switches to a much more upbeat song that you don’t recognize and you take it as your cue to push any and all thoughts of your friends out of your mind. you choose to give no apologies for the way that you spend your time - especially if your friends chose to give you no explanation for their behavior.

if they didn’t need to explain themselves, neither do you.

and it works for a while. for a while, all you can think of is the warmth that fills your body. from the alcohol, the heat of juyeon’s body pressed against yours, or even the excitement of the atmosphere; all if it is just so intoxicating.

you forget all about the fact act jeno and jaemin are just a few feet away, actively avoiding you (and doing a poor job of doing so) until juyeon spins you around, looking deep into your eyes in a way that makes you feel, heat rising to your cheeks as you watch his lips move.

“i know that you don’t want - honestly, whatever it is that you don’t want - but jeno and jaemin are here and you haven’t pushed me off of you. so i’m going to shoot my shot for one last time, y/n. and if you reject me this time, i think that we should go our separate ways,” juyeon says, his voice soft and gentle and yet somehow, you can hear every word he says with perfect clarity. 

you honestly don’t know what to say. juyeon had caught you in a bad moment with jeno and jaemin. more specifically, jeno. you didn’t want that to cloud your judgement though. you had known juyeon for a total of maybe a week. you had known jeno and jaemin for years and for those years, their opinions on the men in your life had very rarely been wrong. 

and yet, the boy that they had warned you against was pressed up against you and those two were on the other side of the club, arms wrapped around girls you knew they would forget about by the morning.

you sigh, stepping back from juyeon, the sheer ridiculousness of the situation making you sober up more than you want to. you hear the beat drop to ‘kiss me better’ by rihanna in the background building up and it seems like everything in the universe is just pushing you to give juyeon a chance.

but juyeon understand what you mean when you step away from him and he gives you one last, longing look before smiling, gently tugging you forward so that the two of you can make your way to a less crowded area.

“you wanna go home?” juyeon asks. you know that he’s asking for his own sake, almost as though he was asking for permission to get with someone else to nurse him through his rejection if you wouldn’t. but he’s a gentleman and he wouldn’t leave you for the wolves and so he asks you if you want to go home instead.

“yeah. i want to go home.”

juyeon nods, already pulling out his phone. “let me call you an uber. and y/n? i’m not upset. i’m just glad that i know i did everything i could. jeno’s a lucky guy for you to care this much about what he says and thinks.”

you want to disagree with him. he’s my friend. of course his opinions matter. sorry. it’s not personal. i actually liked spending time with you.

but even as these thoughts battle in your mind, you find yourself unable to say any of the words out loud. 

jimin was your friend but that stopped you very rarely from doing whatever you wanted to do in the end. jaemin would often yell at you for your terrible affinity for working yourself to the bone and you brushed his concern to the side every time. but it was different with jeno. it had always been different with jeno.

you’re too drunk to think about the implications of any of that though so you just smile once again, leaning up to press a chaste kiss to juyeon’s cheek.

“you’re so good, juyeon. regardless of what anyone says.”

and with that, you step into the uber that has reached the club in record time and head home.

+++

you’re not surprised by the text you get from jimin in the morning. or the one from jaemin. in fact, there are only two texts that surprise you when you manage to finally look at your phone with clear enough eyes.

jiminy cricket: OMG i’m so sorry abt last night love!! heard you went out w juyeon tho ;) we need to debrief fr

jaejaeminna: sorry i didn’t get a chance to say hi before you left

juyeon lee: did you get home safe?

ur mom (jeno): can we talk?

you respond to jimin with a quick for sure, girlie! before stepping into the shower, electing to ignore the rest of the messages in your phone. your roommate, jessica, a girl that you barely interacted with, given that she was usually at her boyfriend’s place or you were at jeno’s or jimin’s had kindly left extra pancakes that she had clearly made before she dashed out of the house.

you munch on them slowly, sending her a message of profound gratitude as you try to digest the events of last night (as well as the delicious pancakes), making sure to tousle your hair every so often to get it to dry faster.

first, jimin and jaehyun had clearly made things somewhat official (or at least were on the same page) which meant that you probably wouldn’t have to try and help jimin decipher what that entire situation was. a win, really. second, you and juyeon had gone clubbing together and had shared more than one or two intimate moments. third, you shot him down once and for all. fourth, he still called you an uber and made sure you made it home safe. fifth, you saw jeno and jaemin at the club and neither of them said anything to you.

this was officially the longest that you had gone without speaking to jeno - or even jaemin. 

even the stupid tiktok’s had faded away to nothingness by the end of last week from jaemin, which meant that something was so incredibly wrong, it wasn’t even funny.

also, jeno never said can we talk. 

it was usually a much more casual wanna get chinese? or even a bring your stupid ass over here cause jaemin misses you. that was more his speed in his form of apology or trying to make it clear to you that the two of you were back to normal now. he’d never acknowledge the two or three days of radio silence, electing to just pretend that they never happened in the first place.

so going from not talking at all to suddenly such a loaded question was new and kind of surreal for you. not to mention that jaemin’s last text to you was also indicative that something was seriously off between the three of you. the text before that had been a tiktok of a man sitting in a car yelling, “it’s the way you act!” and now it was that he didn’t say hi at the club.

you sigh, debating all of your options carefully. 

you were obviously going to have to talk to jeno about the situation at some point. and honestly, you were going to have to have a serious conversation about the fact that he would do this every so often because it’s getting way too much for you to handle. it wasn’t as though you were doing something wrong - jaemin would call you out on your behavior, even if jeno didn’t. 

you were left to decipher what exactly it was that had jeno in such a pissy mood and you would have to try and figure out what it is on your own because he’s a grown man that doesn’t know what communication meant. for someone who always warned you against the toxicity of men, he was doing a pretty great job of showing you exactly why to avoid them. 

pushing all thoughts of jeno and everything else to the side, you decide to take the day as a self-care day for yourself. lord knows that with everything you had going on, self-care was the one thing you desperately needed. of many things, really, but taking a walk and soul food was going to have to do.

you’re just putting on a face mask (one of the korean ones that you had had to sell your left foot to pay the shipping for) when your doorbell rings and you hate the way that you already know who’s at the door even before you step to the entryway, where the monitor is to see who is buzzing for you.

you’re greeted by jeno’s face, alone, looking worse for the wear as he ruffles his hair, shifting from foot to foot as he waits for you to either let him in or at least press the intercom to speak with him. you’re trying to make a decision and you know that decision, as trivial as it seems, would be what would set up your friendship with him in the future.

were you really going to give him another chance? even as he continued to mess up this hard?

you don’t say anything in the intercom but the faint buzzing noise that echoes in the monitor is response enough as jeno opens the door that has opened once you pressed the button, effectively solidifying your decision.

he was jeno. your jeno. you couldn’t just not listen to what he had to say.

the time that jeno takes to make it to the fourth floor where your apartment was seemed to have stretched on for eternity. you weren’t sure the last time that jeno had been in here (last weekend) but suddenly everything in the apartment was just too messy.

you panic and rush to clean everything in sight before you pause awkwardly. this is just jeno. the same boy who had come over and thrown up on your birthday after drinking too much at your party. the same boy who would be sitting in his room screaming into his headset as he played video games, having no regard for you and jaemin spending quality quiet time together. 

and he was also the boy who asked for space when you needed him the most.

so you put down your weapon of choice (a swiffer mop) and wait for the eventual knock at the door that finally comes about a half second later. you take a deep breath before opening the door, coming face to face with your ‘best friend’ of the past three years. 

the little monitor had done the damage little justice. the eyeballs under jeno’s eyes were deep and purple, with his cheekbones protruding a little more than you remember them to, and his gaze deep and sorrowful. 

but somehow, you could look past all of that because your gaze is caught by something else - the purple and very telling hickey on his neck. he’s clearly made an attempt to cover it up with what you assume is whatever foundation you might have left at their place on the nights that you’re too lazy to come home before work. the attempt isn’t all that successful, given that your foundation is about three hundred shades too dark for his skin (which is as pale as a ghost around this time of year) but you appreciate the effort.

not really.

jeno looks uncharacteristically shy as he stands in the living room, having switched out his shoes for his slippers that he bought specifically for your apartment once him and jaemin started coming over more often. they usually fought over ‘jeno’s’ slippers (they had peaches on them while ‘jaemin’s’ had ducks) but jaemin usually conceded to jeno.

usually, he’d be sprawled out on the sofa with little more than a half-hearted ‘hey’ and bags of chinese takeout on the kitchen counter but you see none of that now. now, he looked like a lost puppy, shuffling awkwardly to stand next to the couch.

it would almost be funny if it weren’t for the fact that the two of you haven’t spoken in a week. or the hickey.

“has it ever occurred to you that we might act like more than friends?” 

the question is sudden, breaking your nostalgia and bringing your train of thought to a screeching halt.

“excuse me?” your voice is calmer than you thought it would be in your head as you spin on your heel to look at jeno in the eye. he licks his lips, a nervous habit that he’d picked up from you, but his eyes don’t shift from yours, decidedly steady. he’s thought this for a while, you realize belatedly. it was just a question of how long and what that really meant.

“i mean you leave your foundation at my place and i buy slippers for yours. i can’t stand olives but when we get pizza, i get olives anyway so that you can pick them off of my slices and eat them. you don’t know your left from right but you still drive forty-five minutes down and back to the bakery to get iced lemon poundcake every time i’m upset.

“i can’t stand it when you meet a decent guy for once in your life and i go off the radar but we - i can’t spend more than a few days away from you. so, i’m always showing up at your apartment with chinese food when the last thing i want to do is hear about you raving about your new date who has a job at amazon and wears real rolex watches while i’m still eating instant ramen and trying to get a grip on life.

“the worst part is that i think i’ve always known. even last night, i was falling into my old pattern of using people to get over you, y/n. in between trying to figure out why i couldn’t click with anyone else besides you and trying to figure out why i feel so empty every time i feel like you’re slipping away from me, i think i figured it out. sure, i hate juyeon because of who he is and what he’s done in the past but i hate him even more because he used to be just like me. and now he’s changed so much and become such a good person. the fact that he’s the bigger, better, older, stronger version of me with his life together freaks me out so much because what if you replace me with him? and then i lose the one person i think i’ve ever properly fallen for and one of my best friends all in one go? and it’s all so selfish but when i have ever tried to hide myself from you, y/n?”

your mind is spinning. jeno is heaving by the end of his rambling. you can’t seem to find your grip on reality. everything is just wrong. it’s all wrong. everything is wrong. what?

jeno lee. playboy extraordinaire. mr. couldn’t be tied down. the boy who came home with a new broken heart in his jar of hearts that he hid deep inside his mind so he wouldn’t have to think of the unintentional consequences of having an unavailable pool of love.

and here he was, standing next to the couch in the living room, looking at you with so much anger, confusion, and sheer love in his eyes that you’re almost upset with yourself that you hadn’t seen it sooner. had he always looked at you like that?

you don’t know what to say though. you can’t even tell if he’s still talking, by the way that the blood is rushing in your head like an unforgiving tsunami has broken loose. you can’t hear anything, much too preoccupied with your own thoughts to even think of listening to his. 

you vaguely register the fact that you and jeno are somehow sitting on opposite ends of the couch, a good entire seat away from each other. that was good, at least. you’re sure that your legs would’ve given out on you at some point if you had remained standing.

“why do you hate juyeon so much?”

the question doesn’t seem to faze him as much as you wished it would. what was it with men and not being stunned by the most random questions or thoughts you can come up with? it somewhat frustrated you that you couldn’t stun them with the same shock factor that they seemed to utilize on you.

jeno sighs, raking a hand through his messy hair as he struggles to come up with the right words to say. or honestly, any non-stupid words.

“juyeon was actually one of the reasons why i came to snu in the first place. he was kind of like my mentor - a guy that i looked up to a lot in high school. he was one of my older friend’s roommate so when i came to check out snu, he toured me around and showed me his entire lifestyle. i was a senior in high school back then and he was just a sophomore but i swear, i’d never clicked with someone that fast before.

“he’s always been super smart and incredibly charming. and back when i met him, as a stupid senior in high school, i thought that everything that he had was what i wanted. he had a new girl at his apartment any time he wanted and always seemed like he had the entire college wrapped around his finger.” jeno gets up, looking frustrated as he starts pacing back and forth between the walls of the living room of the apartment.

“long story short, i caught him making out with my girlfriend at the time over the summer between high school and college. and it all came crashing down. in hindsight, maybe i shouldn’t have hated him nearly as much as i did but the fact that i couldn’t see that he had no qualms of getting with anyone who wanted to get with him hurt me. everything i had idolized came crashing down when i saw the two of them.” 

jeno stops pacing, looking down at his hands, rough and raw from the biting winds outside. “it just - it just hurt y/n. and it made it so incredibly easy to just not believe in love anymore. and then i met you and you came into college looking for the one and it was just so hard not to believe in love. when you said you were going out with juyeon, it took me back to the darkest parts of my past mentally. ridiculous? weak? yeah. i know. but i couldn’t help it.”

“it’s not weak or ridiculous, jeno,” you say gently, finding your voice once more. “i’m just hurt that you didn’t tell me before. i mean, i thought i was your best friend!”

jeno laughs drily, a grating sound that tugs at your heart strings. “but he’s gone clean, y/n. he’s everything that i couldn’t be and so much more. he’s near perfect. i couldn’t stop you from finding ‘the one’ that you’ve been dreaming about since i’ve known you. even if that meant that i finally had to let the past go. even if it meant that i had to give up on being able to love you.”

you can’t help the tears that spring to your eyes. “jeno…”

jeno shakes his head, looking at you with watery eyes, dragging his red hands across them roughly. “stop. i don’t need pity. i just…i just wanted clarity. have you always thought of me as a friend? was i making up everything in my head? did - did i imagine that we could’ve had something this whole time?”

you’re at a loss for words. jeno wasn’t wrong. you’d gone to the ends of the earth to make jeno happy. any time he was upset, you’d drop everything to go get that goddamn lemon cake. you couldn’t go more than a week without him. even if the entire world went to shit, you’d always thought that you and jeno would go down together, fighting side by side. if it really came down to choosing between your friends, some part of you knew that you’d always choose jeno before jaemin or jimin.

and some part of you wonders if you’d always had that much affection for him.

“i don’t know,” you say honestly. jeno’s face falls, and an awkward silence falls between the two of you, with his feet pointed to the door and muscles tensed to move. you know that if you don’t come up with the words to say something that’ll convince him to stay, you’ll have given him no reason to. you know he’s going to leave.

no matter what, you cannot lose jeno, you realize. he’s the one part of your life that cannot leave. he’s the person that buys slippers for your house. he’s the boy who can’t stand when he has to compete for your attention. he’s the man who’s shoulder you cry on when your heart suffers even the smallest scratch. 

he’s your jeno.

“i don’t know,” you begin, rushing to continue when you see jeno’s crestfallen expression. “but it’s all so sudden, jeno. you’ve been thinking about your feelings for a long while. i’ve honestly never considered the possibility of - of us being more than friends. of being together. maybe i’ve had feelings for you this whole time without knowing. maybe my ‘one’ has been you this whole time. maybe we’re better off as friends! i don’t know anything.”

jeno’s breath catches as he realizes what the hidden implication in your words is.

“but i’m willing to find out if you are.”

+++

after the enlightening conversation that you’d had with jeno that morning, you’d made plans with him to go on a proper date on wednesday, a day that you had nothing but boring meetings and jeno only had two classes. the two of you had decided to first go on the date and then try to figure out how you felt about each other from there. 

you’d also taken it upon yourself to curve juyeon once and for all. he was a great guy and you were sure that he’d be a great person to whoever he’s meant to be with but after reminding him that you were distinctly uninterested (and apologizing if you’d insinuated that you wanted to see him as an anything after that night), you’d deleted his number and all thoughts of him from your mind.

jaemin had been equally easy to make up with. you understood - after all, jaemin was jeno’s friend first and foremost. even if he didn’t necessarily agree with jeno and his tendencies, being his friend first meant that he had to prioritize jeno and his feelings. he was relieved to hear that jeno had finally grown the balls (verbatim) to confess the painstaking secret that he had been holding onto for the past three years.

“three years? he’s liked me since he met me? and you never said anything, jaemin?” you say incredulously, thanking the barista with a quick smile before grabbing your coffee, rushing to beat the morning sidewalk traffic as you walk to office.

jaemin’s face on your screen is mostly covered by his covers - a sign that he’s either skipping a class (ancient world history) or avoiding some work that he has to do. it was both, but he would concede neither to you.

“it wasn’t my place to say anything,” jaemin says finally, and you finally look at him properly through the little facetime box, watching him drag his hand over his face. he looks as though he’s aged about ten years in the time that you haven’t seen him - which was only a few days ago, technically. 

“and besides, you saw us at the club. did it look like jeno was exercising any type of common sense? clearly not. he wasn’t ready to listen to the truth, no matter who was delivering it. so there was no point in trying to make him to his senses,” jaemin continues, wrapping his blanket around himself a little tighter. “it didn’t help that his coping mechanism thus far has been to just run away from his issues, forget they exist, and then use a distraction to pretend that he was never affected by it in the first place.”

you sigh. this much was obvious to you as well. the day that jeno had come over, that had been one of the first things that you had confronted him about. he had presented a similar explanation then as jaemin was now but even if he didn’t say anything, you knew that was the truth.

“that reminds me - jimin texted me this morning asking if you were okay. have you talked to her since friday night?” jaemin asks and you groan. in all of this mess, you had completely neglected to debrief jimin and fill her in on everything that was happening.

“oh shit, i completely forgot to call her,” you say, swiping into the company building, smiling as you pass a familiar face. “i’ll talk to her tonight.”

“yeah. she seemed kinda worried. apparently juyeon told jaehyun that you two had cut it off for good and told him about you seeing jeno and i at the club. i guess jaehyun went and told jimin,” he says sullenly. you roll your eyes at his dramatics.

“just because you’re the only one getting no action doesn’t mean that you have to be jealous of jimin,” you say.

“no - what? no! it’s not that. i’m single by choice, thank you very much. i could have a hundred girls lining up for me if i wanted,” he says, clearly miffed. you stifle a laugh; it was so easy to rile men up. “but it’s like a violation of bro code. jaehyun knows that jeno doesn’t fuck with juyeon and he also knows that jimin is one of your best friends. like what did he think? that jimin wouldn’t tell jeno and i or that she wouldn’t talk to you about it?”

you blink, completely lost. “i swear to god, i think guys have more complex interpersonal links than girls do. i followed like maybe 20% of what you said.”

jaemin sticks his tongue out at you childishly. “whatever. don’t you have a job to do?”

“don’t you have a class that you’re paying thousands of dollars to take to go to?”

“touché.”

with that, jaemin ends the call but even as you finally sit down in your little glass office, you know that he’s absolutely not going to go to that class. it didn’t help that you’d taken the class last semester and had handed him your notes. at this point, he basically only went to take the tests - after studying your notes for maybe 10 minutes right before.

you’re about to call jaemin again to make sure that he actually gets up to go to class when there’s a knock on the glass of your office.

“y/n? someone’s ordered breakfast for you,” haerin, an underpaid and quite frankly undervalued intern at your office, says. she’s holding a little pastry box and a straw without any coffee. “the person who dropped it off said that he figured you’d already have coffee but you probably forgot the straw.”

you don’t even need to hear the name of your mystery courier boy because you already know who it is.

jeno.

+++

“he brought you breakfast? to your office?” jimin asks incredulously. you had called her soon after haerin had handed you the breakfast (with your favorite pastry inside the box). you seriously needed to hear a girl’s perspective on all of this, even if it was coming from the most romantic person you knew.

“yeah. i mean he’s done it before - like during my first couple of weeks of working, remember how stressed i was? he bought me lunch and dropped it off at the office, back when i was just an intern running around and didn’t have time to go and get it myself.” you blink, looking at jimin worriedly. “that’s not weird, is it?”

jimin ponders for a moment before shaking her head. “i mean you guys were best friends. i’d do it for you. but i don’t know. i feel like guys and girls who are just friends are more like siblings and i feel like girls who are really close are basically like a married couple.”

“why do you and jaemin always say weird shit that confuses me?”

“no - it’s like…like with a truly platonic set of girl and guy friends, they’re always doing sibling-like things. for example, i think i’ve seen you nearly give jaemin a black eye for taking a bite out of your pizza. but if i wanted a bite of your pizza, you’d probably honestly give me the whole slice. i don’t know, but it’s a dynamic that i’ve seen with all of my female friends compared to my guy friends. but you and jeno have never been like that.”

“i have most definitely tried to fight jeno over pizza. i’m sure i’ve fought him over much less, to be honest,” you say and jimin shrugs.

“i’m not here to make you feel one way or another about him. your feelings are yours to figure out. but as an outsider looking in, even if you were to fight him about something stupid like that, it was because that’s how you guys talked to each other. it’s not like you’re actually going to rip that pizza away from him. in the end, if he really wanted it, you’d concede to him. you don’t really do that for siblings. it’s charged in a different way.

“i’d give up my life for my older sister. but if she even looks at me the wrong way, i’m ready to pull out her hair. or my younger brother? he genuinely gets pleasure out of making me have to redo my entire skincare routine because he switched around all of the labels. would he send me breakfast to my office just because? fuck no. would he give me his kidney in a heartbeat? hell yeah.”

jimin looks down before looking up at you once more. “and even if none of that was true, you don’t look at jeno like you look at jaemin.”

this startles you out of your own attempts of running parallels between what jimin was describing and how you and jaemin were or how you and jeno were.

“what do you mean? how do i look at jeno?” you say, your voice coming out shockingly soft and confused.

“you know how you were kicking yourself about not realizing how jeno looks at you? yeah. that’s how i feel looking at you looking at jeno. i didn’t want to say anything to you about it. honestly, mostly because i hated seeing you get down every time he would just disappear from your life. i don’t know that as your friend, i should be encouraging you at all. but he makes you more happy than i’ve seen anyone else make you,” jimin says. “and that’s reason enough for me to be happy for you. to tell you what you don’t realize yourself. even when you dated other people, you always looked at them differently than you looked at jeno.”

“how do i look at jeno, jimin.” it’s not a question and both you and jimin know that you know the answer to what you’re truly asking.

“you look at him like you’re finally ready to love. like you’re realizing again that maybe jeno was the one you’d been waiting for every time.”

+++

your first date with jeno had been a full course of a dumpster fire with a side of natural disaster.

after your (jimin induced) realization that maybe you’d actually had feelings for jeno longer you’d thought, you find yourself going through the day as if you were on autopilot. jeno sends you breakfast on tuesday and wednesday morning as well, although he doesn’t mention a word of it when the two of you are texting.

at least nothing had changed there, thus far. he still sent you those stupid reaction memes that he found on pinterest and never failed to make fun of your typos in the group chat with you, jaemin, jeno, and now jimin. 

you hadn’t seen him since friday night but by the time wednesday rolls around, you wish that you had a little bit more time. you’re still reeling from your newfound enlightenment and some childish, hidden romantic side of you wants to bask in the uncertainty and the almost juvenile way that your heart beats a little faster whenever you think of the date tonight.

the two of you had decided that you were going to try and approach it as a truly romantic date, rather than the quick food runs that you were used to with him. which meant you were going to have to clean up and put on a dress - a sight that you’re sure jeno was truly not used to seeing after so long of you lounging around his apartment in sweats all day.

since this was the first proper date you were going on (you insisted that the date with juyeon didn’t count, since you had only gone with the intention of being a good friend to jimin.) in a good while, you’d called in the big guns for reinforcement. the only reinforcements you had, but that was besides the point.

“i still don’t get why you’re curling your hair. it looks so pretty naturally,” jimin laments, setting down the section of hair that she was working as she moves onto the next.

“i know. it’s kinda silly but i wanna feel cute - like i wanna look feminine and feel cute when i see jeno. it’s stupid and i swear it goes against everything feminism has taught me but i just want to feel and look like my inner girly-girl has been begging me to,” you explain, pouting when you catch jimin laughing through the reflection of the vanity mirror where you were sitting.

“baby, that’s not silly at all. and it doesn’t go against feminism to want to dress up and look cute! reminder: feminism is about empowering other women and helping everyone have the freedom to choose what they want for themselves. whether that’s dressing up cute or being a stay-at-home mom or being a working woman or some combination of all of the above and then some,” jimin says and then there’s a wicked glint in her eyes. “it’s also very feminist to get men to do your bidding, i think. and hey, if you have to put on a little black dress to do that, then i’m all for it.”

“you sound absolutely ridiculous,” you scoff, but a little smile tugs at the corner of your lips anyway. 

“speaking of little black dresses, you’re wearing a matching set underneath, right?” jimin teases. you swat at her with your free hand that wasn’t applying glitter to your inner eye. “i’m holding a hot iron, you psycho!”

“jimin! i’m not going to have sex on the first date. not that i’m above it but jeno is different,” you say and jimin unfortunately catches the underlying longing tone in your words.

“oh he’s different, is he? girl, where having you been hiding all these feelings for so long?” she says and you find yourself not being able to come up with a rebuttal. honestly, you didn’t know how either of you had been so blind to your feelings for each other. and suddenly, a cold rush of fear runs down your spine.

you twist in your chair, ignoring jimin’s protest that she was almost done with your hair. “wait. you don’t think that this is a mistake, right? like what if he thinks that he has feelings for me but it’s been the chase this whole time. or what if we just don’t click like we think we will? what if i lose my friend and the person that i think i’ve liked for longer than i’d like to admit in one go.”

jimin’s expression turns serious at that. “y/n, you’ve only had a week to figure out your feelings. it’s okay if you want to raincheck and then go on the date when you’re more sure of how you feel, if that’s what you want.”

“that’s not what i want. i think that i actually have liked him for longer than i think. it’s just been so hard to realize that because he’s always been with someone and i’ve always been waiting for the one. it just scares me to think that maybe the one that i’ve been looking for is someone who actually doesn’t think that i’m the one, you know? i don’t know if i could live with losing him.” you blink furiously, willing yourself to not let a single tear fall and ruin all of your hard work for the past couple of hours.

“trust me, y/n, if you’re sure about your feelings and if he really is the one, then everything will work out. have a little faith in the universe.” no sooner does jimin say this, the buzzer rings and you and jimin look at each other in panic.

“it’s still 5:50! he said he was coming at 6:00!” you exclaim and jimin rushes to finish your hair. “you have to distract him! i still have to put my dress on!”

“oh my good lord, i forgot about that. okay, you focus on getting ready, i’m running!” jimin says, cursing when she trips over the cord to the curling iron as she’s running to open the door for jeno.

you shimmy out of your pajamas in hurried movements as you hear jimin say that jeno could come up but that the elevator was broken so he’d have to come up by stairs.

“there’s no sign that says the elevator is broken though,” you hear jeno say as you’re caught in one of the legs of your pajamas, shaking it off wildly as jimin tries to come up with a random explanation on why exactly the elevator had no sign.

“yeah, it actually just broke. like right now. like it was so recent that they didn’t have a chance to put a sign up yet. in fact, i bet that we’re in a space-time pocket and time just moves faster for you and slower for people inside. maybe this building is narnia or something,” jimin says. the room is silent for a moment before you hear the sound of the elevator dinging and you wince, your movements no doubt mirrored by jimin.

you can already see jeno’s amused smirk as jimin says that the elevators must’ve been repaired by the aliens in the space-time pocket. but they were living in a speed that was faster than human senses.

you’d seriously have to buy her a drink when this date was over, you think to yourself as you struggle to zip up the back of the dress. you don’t think that you’ve heard jimin pull out that much utter bullshit in one breath before.

you have heard jaemin say something similar before though, so it made sense that jeno was neither fazed nor taking her seriously. not that anyone could take that seriously, anyway. 

you’ve finally managed to contort your body in the right position to zip up the dress when you hear the door open and jeno saying something to jimin.

“i know i’m early. and i know she’s definitely not ready. but i found these earrings in my apartment and i figured that she’d want to wear these. if i know her at all, she’s wearing black and she always says that she loves to wear these earrings with her black outfits.”

you open the door just slightly for jimin to slip into your bedroom and deposit the earrings in your hands. 

“how do i look?” you whisper, waiting for jimin’s reaction with bated breath.

jimin smiles at you and wraps you up in a tight hug, careful not to wrinkle the silky fabric of your dress. 

“like a dream.”

that works for you and you take a deep breath before opening to door to see jeno. it’s just jeno, you remind yourself. and although it’s not just jeno because you don’t know if he’s ever been just jeno to you, the words serve as a good reminder.

he’s jeno. your jeno. not someone to be afraid of. someone who’s seen every side of you and still wants to see more sides.

you walk into the living room, where jeno is sitting on the couch, scrolling through his phone (tiktok, as you can tell by sounds of football highlights). there’s a bouquet of flowers, gardenias, laying across his lap and he’s clearly cleaned himself well. he’s wearing a black button down and rolled up the sleeves to reveal the tattoo that he’d gotten halfway through freshman year.

it’s a tattoo of jeno’s favorite quote from his favorite movie, chappie. you are made for good.

he introduced you to the movie early into your friendship, and had been thrilled when he realized that you liked as much as he did. in fact, the same quote that he had gotten tattooed on his forearm was the one that you had custom-made for your phone case. huh.

how long had you and jeno been doing things like this? since the very beginning, you balk.

“you look beautiful.” jeno’s voice is low, softer than you remember and your instinct is to counter him and say that you always look beautiful but he looks a little too sweet under the light of skylights for you to find it in yourself to do so. 

“thank you.” you lean closer, eyes crinkling into a smile when you recognize the cologne that jeno was wearing. “is that the cologne i got you in sophomore year?”

jeno nods and smiles with you. “jaemin said that my normal one was too…fuckboy.”

“the sauvage one? hell yeah, it is. i think that most girls have a trauma response to that cologne at this point,” you say, and suddenly everything is so simple again. it’s your jeno, after all.

“it’s a good thing i listened to jaemin, then.”

you cock your head and you’re vaguely sure that he means more than just his cologne choices.

“yeah, i guess it was.”

+++

pretty much everything from there went completely wrong. for one, jeno’s car (which was infamous for coming up with the most random issues at the worst times) had decided to blare with just about every warning known to man almost as soon as the two of you sit in the car. 

by the time that jaemin arrives to where the two of you had pulled over to take the car to the car dealership, jimin offering her car instead, the two of you were already about thirty minutes late to your reservation. 

it had taken a lot of persuasion on jeno’s end to convince the restaurant to let the two of you sit and eat anyway, although you were past half an hour late for your reservation. as if that weren’t enough, the restaurant refused to accommodate for your dietary restrictions (even though they promised that they did on their website!), causing you to only be able to order an overpriced caesar salad with maybe three vegetables and too much vinegar.

then, as you were leaving, you found out that the valet had parked pretty much on the other side of the country. and it was pouring rain. to the extent that your phone had gone off about three times with warnings that there was a flood watch in seoul.

which meant that jeno had had to book it to run to get the car and pull it up to the front of the restaurant, where you were waiting, shivering even with jeno’s jacket around your shoulders. and due to the layout of the restaurant’s front, you were forced to run in the run in the rain anyway to dive into the passenger seat of jimin’s car. 

and yet, even with all of this, you couldn’t help but laugh. the date was perfect. every time something occurred, jeno handled it with ease, allowing you to just turn off your brain and let him take care of everything for you. he would always turn to you with a silly smile and another story of how the two of you always seemed to find yourselves in the most unbelievable situations.

through all of this, you finally understand what you had been thinking that you wanted this whole time in your wait for the one. not someone who made sure that everything was perfect and that the date was always planned out to the t.

no, it was someone who made you feel like you were having a good time, even when everything was going to shit. 

you look at jeno, recounting some story about how jaemin and him had snuck into a wedding once to eat food after days of cooking instant ramen in their dorm in freshman year, laughing so hard that you could barely hear the pelting rain outside. and seeing him smile like that, feeling yourself smile like that, just because you knew that he was smiling, your heart finally felt at ease.

definitely not a platonic type of love, you decide.

“hey, you okay?” jeno asks, eyes trained on the road in front of him as he navigates to your apartment. “you seem kind of checked out.”

you smile, shaking your head. “yeah. i’m all good. i was…i was just thinking about how stupid i’d been to think that i’d been looking everywhere but right in front of me for ‘the one’ when i didn’t even know what i wanted.”

“yeah? what do you want?” jeno says, his grip on the steering wheel growing tighter as he waits nervously for your answer. you look at him and jeno has to fight himself to keep looking at the road when he wants nothing but to look at you and commit this vision of you to memory.

your glinting earrings and your twinkling eyes under the seoul night sky. your drenched dress and jeno’s jacket across your lap. your wet hair that still somehow looked sexy as you flipped it over your shoulder. your soft smile and seeing you finally look at him the way that he’d been looking at you this whole time. he wants to capture it all within his mind and never forget the way you were looking at him now.

“i want someone to make me feel like that even the stupidest situations were easy to overcome when i’m with them,” you say softly. 

jeno pauses at that, heart beating a little too fast to be good for him. a smile tugs at his lips, no matter how stoic he tries to look. “oh? does this mean you think this date was a success?”

“i think this date was an utter flop,” you say drily and jeno rolls his eyes at that. “but i think my date was pretty great. i’m not going to lie, i’m still a little hungry though.”

“i still can’t believe that they gave you a bowl of lettuce and charged like $30 for that,” jeno says, shaking his fist dramatically. “i’m going to write a scathing yelp review.”

“i mean i didn’t have to pay so that yelp review’s all yours,” you say before turning to him with a sly smirk. “aren’t you going to ask what i’m hungry for though?”

“what do you mean? what are you hungry for?” he asks, turning onto your street. 

“ramen. wanna eat ramen and go?”

jeno has to use all of his self-will to keep from hydroplaning as he pulls into your apartment complex. “y/n. you want me to eat ramen and go?”

“yeah. i meant that literally though. you wanna eat ramen and then maybe ramen?” you ask, batting your eyelashes innocently at him as he parks jimin’s car in your designated parking spot.

“uh, isn’t jimin at your place?” jeno asks, feeling his heart skip a beat when you shake your head no. 

“jaehyun’s apartment is like two complexes down so she just walked over. why? you don’t want to eat ramen with me?” you say, faking a sullen pout. jeno rushes to correct himself, resting his hand on your thigh gently.

“look, y/n, i think that you’re incredibly attractive and i really like you. but that’s - that’s my issue. i like you so much that i don’t want to make you feel like i was trying to get in your pants and then do something that you or i regret. and i know that you’re probably just saying that to get a rise out of me but hear me when i say that i want to take things slow. for your sake, not mine.

“i’ve been thinking about my feelings for so long and i’ve been thinking about how in love with you i am for longer than you might think. to me, sex would kinda just be the next step in taking our relationship to the next level. but i know you. you’ve really only been thinking about this about us for the past week or so. i don’t want to make you feel like you’re obligated to like me if we sleep together. i know that sex isn’t just sex for girls; or maybe it is but isn’t for you, no matter how much you tell me otherwise. and i honestly don’t know where i’m going with any of this but y/n, my feelings for you are true.

“i want to take things slow because if we take that next step, i want it to be when you’re sure. when you’re sure of how you feel for me. maybe i’m not the one for you, y/n. and as much it kills me to say that, it’s a very real possibility. you deserve someone who’d bring down the moon and gift it to you if that’s what you wanted. and i know that i would do that for you. but i need you to believe that too. wholeheartedly. i’ll wait for you for as long as you need. you’re my person, y/n. i’ve waited three years - granted, three very controversial years - for you. i’ll wait three more if that’s what you need.”

you’d said the ramen thing very jokingly, only half-serious about your proposition. but hearing jeno now, you’re happy that you had. you’re not sure that jeno would’ve told you how felt about you and just how deep his feelings ran for you if you hadn’t. he was right, of course. he knew you better than anyone else, after all.

so you kiss him on the cheek good night and open the passenger side door.

you’re about to close the door behind you, ready to bid him goodbye for the night when you lean down to say something to him.

“thank you for waiting for me, jeno.”

+++

turns out, romantic jeno is just like just friends jeno. mostly because you don’t think that you’ve ever truly been just friends. he’s quiet, teases you at any given moment, and listens to you recount even the most boring stories about work.

you went on a couple more dates with all of the formalities before slowly growing more casual with each other once more. neither of you had brought up the topic of physical touch after that night but lately, it was getting harder and harder to find places on jeno’s face to kiss besides his lips.

not to mention that you’d caught jeno’s lingering gaze on your lips (among other things) more and more often. so, just like everything else in your relationship, your first kiss was completely unexpected.

jeno had come over with chinese takeout, since the two of you (honestly, you had made the decision and jeno was just along for the ride) had decided to start the indiana jones franchise together. 

you didn’t know what it was. the tousled hair? the way his arm was casually tugging you into to his side, covering your entire side as you cuddled closer into him? the way he was only a breath away from you? the look in eyes when he tears his eyes away from to look at you with the sweetest gaze?

everything. all of the above. you lean up to peck him swiftly on the lips. 

jeno freezes, eyes going round as his entire face turns bright red. it was hard to think that just two months ago, jeno had been walking around with a girl on either side of him at a frat party, the promise of a good night hidden in his smile when he looks like a deer caught in headlights at the slightest sign of physical touch.

“did - did you just kiss me?” he stutters, and you shrug playfully, looking back the movie in front of you. he shifts you so that you’re facing him, unable to look away as he turns to face you.

“i thought we’re taking it slow?” he asks and you smile coyly.

“a month and a half of dating wasn’t enough to convince you that i actually like you the way that you like me, jeno?”

that’s all jeno needs to hear because no sooner do you say this does jeno dip his head to press his lips to yours, gentle and undemanding. he’s soft and careful, almost as if he were afraid that you were going to disappear if he chased after you too hard.

but you’d been waiting long enough and this was jeno so you pull away from him, a horde of butterflies settling in your stomach when he chases after your lips, eyes still closed, as if he couldn’t bear to part from them.

“jeno, i’m going to do something and you have got to tell me if you want me to stop, okay?” you whisper against his lips softly and jeno nods, opening his eyes so that you can see the look of absolute love and trust in them.

you get up and hook your leg over both of his so that you were effectively sitting on his lap, poised dangerously so that you could part from him at the slightest sign of discomfort. it never comes, though because as soon as you do this, jeno pulls you in closer so that his chest was pressed flush against yours.

“are you sure?” he says, confirming for the last time as you see the last strings of his resolve snap.

“god, jeno, i love you. now please just kiss me.”

his lips are pressed against yours the second the words leave your mouth, a little rougher and more insistent than last time. his arms are wrapped around your back and waist, eyes closed and you lose yourself in the feeling of being so close to him.

needless to say, that night had been a long night.

+++

“i look like an idiot,” your boyfriend complains, checking himself out in the mirror of your vanity anyway. you giggle, pressing a kiss to his temple so that you don’t mess up his make-up, carefully dodging the stray glare that he offers you.

“you look beautiful, jeno. and besides, this is for a good cause, remember?” you remind him as you make sure that your costume looks good as well.

“i don’t remember what me dressing up as a spandex wearing animated character has to do with changing the world, but alright,” jeno grumbles, shifting uncomfortably as his ‘uniform’ seems to cling to all the wrong places.

“you say that now but you and i both know that the moment you see those kids at the hospital, you’re a sucker. tell me you aren’t going to practice your mr. incredible in the car,” you say cheekily, and jeno is unable to refute that. ever since you and him have been dating, you have often dragged him to events such as these.

at first, they were rather simple things, almost as if you were testing the waters with jeno. for example, when the two of you went on a date to a zoo in the beginning of your relationship, you casually mentioned that many zoos that didn’t treat their animals with love and respect.

then, soon after, you asked him to sign a ‘take down unethical zoo practices!’ petition. and then from there, jeno found himself at a protest to rally for the rights of beluga whales. 

not that jeno had anything against whales (he actually came to be quite passionate about the mistreatment of them the more he went to these events), but the fact that you took the world’s issues to be your issues was simultaneously your biggest character flaw and strength.

and he loved you all the more for it.

“you know who you are?” jeno says, swiveling around in the chair to mean mug you. “you’re woo young woo from that one kdrama. and i’m that poor unsuspecting boyfriend who wants to spend time with his girlfriend but ends up at a whale protest anyway. that’s what cute girls like you and her do; you get our attention, make us fall in love, and then ba-bam! you use us as a bodyguard and backpack carrier at protests and rallies!”

you roll your eyes, leaning down so that you were now eye level with jeno, the both of you lovingly aware that the banter between the two of you was not a symbol of actual annoyance but rather, mutual appreciation. you, for having so much empathy. jeno, for being so patient.

your heart swells when jeno looks at you with such loving eyes, trust and admiration swimming behind his façade of annoyance. you lean forward, pressing your lips to his, involuntarily smiling when you feel jeno’s lips curve upwards as well.

he hums softly, pulling you close so that you’re practically sitting on his lap. gentle and strong. a little callous, but only so that the butterflies in your stomach seem to be rebelling against the confines of your stomach, as if they too want to be showered in the love of your kindhearted and wonderful boyfriend.

you want to melt into his embrace, as you usually do whenever you’re near jeno, but your phone buzzes and you sigh, pulling away from your boyfriend reluctantly.

“that’s jaemin. he’s asking, and i quote, ‘what the fuck are you guys doing i’ll whoop your ass if you don’t come soon i hate this fucking gru costume and the kids keep asking where you are’. you think we should get going maybe?” you say, raising your eyebrows at the series (of rather graphic) of emojis that depict you and jeno conveniently being pushed off a cliff.

jeno snorts at his best friend’s antics, his touch lingering on your waist as he leaves to go start the car. he waits for you to finish responding (with a threatening message of your own) before extending his arm without even looking, waiting for the comforting weight of you clinging to his arm as the two of you leave your shared home, walking into the buttery evening.

it truly couldn’t get much better than this.

[zweiginator]

give us more of forbidden love au patrick!!!

here is the link to the last part, in case anyone needs their memory refreshed!

cw: talk about unwanted pregnancy, abortion

patrick lifts his head from the dashboard; it feels like all his blood rushed to his brain but he still can't think. doesn't know what to say or how to make you feel better. because he feels like shit. and he feels awful because you're going through this too, and so much worse than he is--but how could you keep this from him for so fucking long?

his temples ache, and patrick rubs them with the pads of his fingers. his palms are clammy so he wipes them on his legs.

"are you serious?" patrick asks. it's all he can think to ask. maybe just to get it out of the way. for him to realize he isn't dreaming and this is real and here you are with his baby, gestating in your body.

"yes, i am." you want to yell at him. but you know it wouldn't do any good. how could he ask you that? why doesn't he fucking care to hug you or tell you it's going to be okay? it's hard to look him in the eye, but you do it.

"do you want to keep it?"

there isn't a bite to his words and you can tell he's genuinely asking. he doesn't know what to do, how this will look. well, he knows it will look fucking horrible. given how adamant both your and patrick's fathers have been about despising the other. it was ingrained into you, programmed from a young age, like a chore that didn't make sense but had to be done nonetheless.

it's either a scandal for patrick knocking you up out of wedlock, or a scandal when they find out you chose not to keep the baby. there's only a tiny sliver of a possibility that it can stay completely out of the public eye. and, maybe it's possible, given how both sides have an interest in keeping it hushed. except the media doesn't. and neither of you are even sure they're not there now, snapping pictures, or waiting to ask for inside scoop, sliding the woman at the front desk a fifty dollar bill.

"i don't--no."

"you don't know?"

"no, i dont want to keep it." you say, softly. meekly. patrick has never seen you look so helpless.

he looks at your stomach. obviously, it doesn't look any different. but a tinge of melancholic guilt stings his chest like an electric shock. to think about a baby, his baby growing inside you.

but you're both too young. stupid to think you were immune to the natural order of the world. why didn't patrick use a fucking condom?

"this shouldn't have happened. the baby." you mutter, looking up at patrick. a tear falls onto your nose and patrick wipes it with his thumb.

"i know, i'm sorry." he mumbles.

"what do you think we should do?"

"it's not my choice to make."

it's frustrating to you how patrick isn't taking a stance. isn't being a fucking man and telling you how he feels, what the plan should be. you roll your eyes.

"can you just--say something? you're acting like a fucking robot."

"it's--" patrick groans. "i'm not going to tell you what to do with your body. i know it's my baby too--but i don't know. i think if you don't want to keep it then don't."

but you weren't so sure. neither of you were. you had been ready to talk to patrick about abortion, gung ho about not wanting a baby at this point in your life. but a sadness hung in the air that wasn't there before you brought up that word.

"maybe we think about it. for a little longer." patrick tucks a strand of hair behind your ear.

you sniffle and nod your head.

"your family will hate me."

"yours already hates me."

and weirdly enough, you both felt as if you could take a full breath after admitting maybe you did want the baby. the hard part would be hiding it, and eventually, finding a way to break the news not only to your family, but to your whole fucking city as well.

[thenightfolknetwork]

Hello,

I’ve found myself entangled in a bit of a situation, and I’m hoping you can help me make a decision.

I am what is known as a boroboroton. I am, specifically, a twin sized pale coral futon, of quality make with silk innards, if you can believe it. I’m not a full set, I’m ashamed to say- lost my mattress - but I get by. I manifested some fifty years ago (roundabout the time of my mattress’s loss) and since then have changed owners a handful of times.

I like to learn new places thoroughly so I don’t often smother my sleepers right off, but I was getting bored and there was a shop down the street that did second hand and my owner was getting on in age, you know how these things go.

Anyway! Once I was in the shop I was purchased by a young man from the United States. It’s been quite the exciting move, to be honest- I don’t get slept on nearly as much as I used to save for the family cat, but I do get used for television and games, so I’ve come up to date on all sorts of media, and I’ve even gone outside for a picnic! It was lovely.

None of that’s why I’m writing, though. My new sleeper is, as I said, a young man. He was in Japan for a religious trip, a- a mission. He was a missionary, from- I believe they’re called Mormons? And to each his own and all that you have to take a long view of things when you’re half a sentient futon with a bent for murder, but I don’t think it’s good for him.

See, he keeps looking up information about leaving, and then deleting the searches. There’s another person who messages him often and I think it might be his lover. His lover’s name is Steven, which I am certain that these Mormons- and more importantly his parents- would not approve of. They keep making noise about sacred duties and marriage and temple sealing and someone named- Crystabeth? Crystal Meth? I can’t quite tell, I learned English rather on the fly.

It would of course be much easier for my sleeper to leave a religion that no longer fulfills him if his parents were out of the way and it wouldn’t be hard, just a nights’ work. I might be sold again or put in an attic but I have my ways and I’m an adventurous sort. Only I’d hate to interrupt all the researching he’s doing.

I could smother him, then he wouldn’t need to worry about what might happen if he left, but where would that leave Steven? Steven sends the loveliest late night texts.

Is it any of my business? Do I just let it lie? He’s been a good sleeper, brought me across a whole ocean AND looked up the best way to keep me clean! I hate that he’s so miserable.

For what it's worth, I think you're quite right in your assertion that your owner would be better off out from the clutches of people who are stifling his sexuality and pushing him to place duty to their church over his own freedom.

There is a reason many people consider Mormons to be a cult. They are a high-control group which expects – and enforces – an unhealthy degree of power over their members, using the threat of ostracisation and punishment to curtail their liberty. I'm not at all sure I would apply the otherwise admirable sentiment of “to each their own” to such a group.

With that said, I'm afraid I can't agree that leaving the church would necessarily be easier for your owner if his parents were to suffer some kind of tragic, nocturnal “accident”. Rather, I worry such an emotional blow would in fact leave him more vulnerable, and give others in the church leverage to use against him – the phrase “it's what they would have wanted” looms darkly upon the horizon.

Your suggestion of smothering your owner himself is also rather wanting in nuance. The goal here is to support him to make his own choices, not to remove the question of choice altogether. I can't help but wonder if your perspective might be a little limited by your form. To a man with a hammer, everything's a nail. To a sentient murder futon, everything's a potential futon murder.

Fortunately, it sounds as if he might be well on the way to making this difficult decision for himself – which is, after all, the only way this change can come about. If he's already doing his own research about leaving the church, and developing a support network separate from his church contacts, then it seems only a matter of time before he takes the plunge and leaves for good.

I'm afraid there's not much you can do right now to help him come to that point any faster. He needs to find his own path, and to find it in his own time. The best thing you can do for him right now is offer him just what you've always offered – a safe, supportive place where he can take a breath, research his options, and relax. The rest – so to speak – is up to him.

[For more creaturely advice, check out Monstrous Agonies on your podcast platform of choice, or visit monstrousproductions.org for more info]

[randomwelcomehomestuff]

Unfinished Business: a Welcome Home Corpse Puppet AU fanfiction

A/N: Just here to let you know that I'm not creative. Like, at all. This is a fanfic of a fanfic inspired by a fan-made AU of a completely unrelated work, but I couldn't get it out of my head so maybe now my brain will be at peace so I can work on my original story (or it will come up with fifty other fanfic ideas because that's more fun than editing).

Anyway, Welcome Home belongs to Clown/partycoffin, the Corpse Puppet AU belongs to @sketchquill, and the fanfic this is based on is a Corpse Bride/Nightmare Before Christmas crossover fic called The Undead Groom by moviefan_92 on Ao3.

Spoiler Alert for all of that media, plus a little for the novel The Pumpkin Queen just because there's a reference here and there, but not too much.

Also C/W: There's a lot of major character death in here.

I may add more to it later if inspiration strikes. Let me know in the comments if you are interested in that.

Okay, I'll shut up, now. Here's the fic.

The carriage jostled down the muddy dirt road. You wrung the handkerchief in your hands as you gazed out the window at the grey sky, occasionally distracted by the raindrops trailing down the glass. Try as you might, you just couldn't cry. You wanted to, but no tears would come.

At least the dreary weather was appropriate for a funeral.

Howdy was watching you. He wasn't one to judge his spouse's appearance, but he did decide that funeral black did not suit you particularly well. Not when he'd seen you in so many other bright, cheerful colors, when you had been happy. When you were like this—mourning—the sparkle in your eyes was gone. He thought you were beautiful when you were happy, somehow still hauntingly so when you were sad, but he would be lying if he said he didn't prefer seeing you smile or laugh.

“Are you alright?” he asked. “I know you and Eddie were close.”

You sighed. “I'll be fine. This isn't my first time dealing with grief.”

Yes, Howdy knew that all too well. The first several days of your marriage had been more awkward than they probably should have been for... obvious reasons. Any time he caught you staring despondently out the window, he knew deep down that you were thinking of Wally.

That didn't have a negative impact on your marriage, though. You were strong and optimistic, and Howdy shared many happy memories with you. You taught him how to play piano, and he in turn taught you how to garden. You even started a small orchard together. Howdy couldn't think of many more signs of a happy home than the smell of apple blossoms in the garden and hallways filled with the sounds of music and laughter. You were comfortable, and your fortunes were secure, (that was the most important thing to both of your parents, and neither of you could ask for much more than your parents' satisfaction).

Most of all, you and Howdy loved each other. Howdy had accepted long ago that yours was a love built off of friendship and mutual respect rather than romance, but it was enough for him, (considering what he grew up witnessing from his parents, he counted that as the greatest success of them all). You recently celebrated your copper anniversary, which baffled Howdy. How could seven years fly by so quickly? Thinking back on everything, he knew that he was completely satisfied with where his life was, as long as you were by his side and happy.

Which is why he hated to see you so sad. He wouldn't rush you through your grief, but he could at least help lighten the load. “Would you like to talk about it?” he asked.

You looked down at the handkerchief in your hands, wadded up beyond recognition, but still as dry as it was when Howdy handed it to you. You smoothed it out over your lap and stared at Howdy's initials embroidered in green in the corner.

Howdy watched you, patient. A deep rumble of thunder rolled through the sky outside.

“I just... hate how somber it was,” you said.

“Funerals typically are.”

“I know, but Eddie wouldn't have wanted that. He was so much more cheerful and... and colorful than that. He'd want people telling funny stories about him and celebrating his life, not... just standing in silence while the dirt is thrown over his casket.” Your shoulders stiffened. “I should have said something.” Now you could feel the tears building up, but they simply would not come. I should be crying. Why am I not crying?

Howdy leaned forward and took your hand, and you finally looked into his eyes. He was smiling. “He's in a better place, now.”

You smiled at that. Seven years ago, those words would have felt like a hollow attempt at consolation, but now they were a real comfort. Howdy was there when the dead came up to the Land of the Living. He witnessed Eddie and Frank briefly reunite. Now they would never be separated again, and he knew it as well as you did.

Perhaps that was why you couldn't cry: you knew that good things were waiting for Eddie on the other side.

The tears finally spilled over and rolled down your cheeks, but they were not tears of sorrow. You were happy.

Howdy used two of his free hands to cup your face. His smile was soft and understanding as he thumbed away your tears. You stood and shifted over to the seat across from you so you could sit beside him, and his four arms wrapped you up into a tight hug. He pressed a kiss into the top of your head, like he had so many times before. “Everything will be alright,” he whispered.

“I know,” you mumbled into his shoulder.

Lightning flashed outside, followed by a loud clap of thunder. You gripped at Howdy's coat as he leaned forward to look out the window. “That storm is getting much worse.”

“Should we stop somewhere?” you asked.

He nodded. “Most likely.” He reached up to knock on the ceiling of the coach. “Johnson? How are the roads looking?” he called.

Johnson, the driver, shouted something back to Howdy, but his voice was drowned out by a deafening crash. A blinding white light flooded the carriage and the horses whinnied outside in terror. You tried to lean forward to look out the window, but the horses bolted and the momentum sent you crashing to the floor of the coach. You could hear Johnson yelling. Howdy grabbed your arm and tried to haul you back into the seat, but when you looked out the window, what you saw made you freeze.

Lightning had struck a nearby tree. It was on fire. Johnson seemed to have lost the reins, because you could see them flapping in the wind by the window. Howdy was calling your name. Johnson was screaming at the horses to stop.

The carriage was passing the flaming tree right as it started to crackle and groan.

You jumped back into the seat and grabbed Howdy. One of his hands grasped the back of your head and his body tensed around you as if he was bracing himself.

It only took a few seconds—three at most—but it felt like an eternity.

Wood splintered around you as the carriage shattered. A heavy weight came down on you and Howdy, and for a brief, macabre moment, you were amazed by how fragile your bodies really were.

Then everything went black.

There was nothing but darkness for a long time. You tried to move, tried to call out for Howdy, but nothing happened. You were just... nothing.

That thought scared you. There was so much more than that. Light. Color. Noises and smells. Life. You couldn't be nothing, that just wasn't possible. You had memories and goals. You had a spouse and a family. You had an estate to attend to you. You couldn't just... not be.

Panic twisted your stomach into knots, clawed its way up your throat, and came out of your mouth as a scream: “Help! Help me!”

“Alright, alright! Calm down!”

You stopped. That voice sounded familiar, but you couldn't quite put your finger on who it was.

Then you heard another, timid voice. “Is it always like this?”

That one you did recognize, because you had just heard it a few days ago. It was Eddie. Your instinct was to gasp, but you couldn't. I can't breathe. Oh, God, I can't breathe.

The first voice spoke again: “Often, yes. It all depends on the person and how at peace they are.”

There was a shuffling nearby. It was odd, despite the panic coursing through you, your body was strangely... calm. You expected your heart to be thumping fast and heavy in your ears and for your palms to be sweaty, but there was nothing.

The space above you shifted with a low creak and light stabbed your eyes. You flinched, blinked, then stared at the two faces above you blurring into focus.

Eddie and Frank were leaned over, looking down at you. They both offered you sad, soft smiles.

Your neck was stiff as you looked around. Your were laying in some sort of bed. It wasn't comfortable; even though it was all silk, there was no cushion, and the pillow at your head was much too small. Your mind was sluggish like you had just woken from a long nap. You had to blink several times and crane your neck to the left before you realized that Frank was holding open a lid.

You were in a casket.

Your tongue felt like cement in your mouth as you stammered, “Am... am I d-dead?”

Eddie gave you a pitying look. “Oh, Y/N.”

“Come on,” Frank said, “the sooner you get on your feet, the better you'll feel.” He and Eddie grabbed you under your arms and hoisted you out of the casket, which was sitting on a table. They helped you find your footing and Frank instructed you through some stretches to shake off the rigor mortis. You took a moment to look around.

You were in a sort of cavern, full of other caskets sitting on tables. Some looked new, others old and decayed.

“Where are we?” you asked.

“The Land of the Dead. Specifically, an offshoot of our village, just below the graveyard where you were buried,” Frank said.

You felt dizzy. “So... the crash... I didn't make it.”

Eddie put his hand on your shoulder. “No one made it except the driver. When the tree fell, he got thrown off, but he survived. Poor man blames himself for what happened. Thinks he should have kept better hold of the reins or suggested you leave sooner to avoid the storm.” He squeezed your shoulder. “They say you and Howdy died in each other's arms.”

“Howdy...” Your stomach was churning and you wondered if you could still get sick even if you were dead.

Eddie nodded. “Frank had to break a couple of rules, but we went to the Land of the Living to see your funeral—”

“From a safe distance, of course,” Frank interrupted.

“Of course. Your parents spared no expense. They got you a big, beautiful gravestone and there were flowers everywhere. You and Howdy were buried next to each other in the outfits you got married in.”

You glanced down at yourself for the first time and realized he was right, you were wearing the outfit your mother had picked out for your wedding, complete with your wedding band on your left hand.

Not only that, but you were also wearing the other wedding band on your right hand. Wally's wedding band. It was the same ring Wally had worn all those years ago, after you had practiced your vows in the woods. You ended up keeping it for myself since Howdy's mother insisted that you purchase new rings for your next attempt at getting married, (”I'll have no cursed rings at this ceremony,” she said). You could never bring yourself to get rid of it, though, and eventually fell into the habit of wearing it on your right hand while you wore your actual wedding ring on your left.

You were surprised that you had been buried with it, considering everything. Perhaps your family decided that since you wore it all the time, it held sentimental value to you and you'd want to keep it. Or, you shuddered to consider this, your hands were too swollen to get it off.

You shook those thoughts away and looked back to Eddie. “Where is Howdy?” you asked. “If he was buried next to me, shouldn't he be here?”

Frank and Eddie exchanged a glance. “We aren't sure where he is,” Eddie said.

“We've been keeping an eye out for him, but we think he's gone to the upstairs,” Frank added.

“The upstairs?”

“Heaven, Paradise, Nirvana, whatever you call it. You can go to whatever version of the afterlife you choose once you pass on. Unless you're someone like Julie.” They frowned. “Someone like that who has caused suffering for others doesn't get a choice. She's downstairs.”

“So, if there's an upstairs and a downstairs, where are we? The ground floor?”

Frank's mouth twitched into a smile. “Something like that. The people who end up here usually either can't make up their mind where they want to go or have unfinished business. You could join Howdy upstairs, if you wanted.”

You considered this, but the idea made your head spin. Where exactly did Howdy go, and how would you go about joining him?

Frank nodded to a nearby hallway. “We can talk more about this, later. Come on, the others are waiting to see you.”

The others. You perked up a bit remembering them. Sally, Poppy, Barnaby, even your old dog, Scraps. You followed Frank out of the cavern, and Eddie fell into step beside you, whistling a cheery tune as you walked.

The bells were already ringing by the time you reached the village, and as you got closer to the old tavern you could hear a chorus of voices all calling out, “New arrival! New arrival!”

Eddie chuckled beside you. “Poppy is up to her ears in cooking. They just had a Welcome Feast for me the other day.”

You tried to swallow, but your mouth was too dry. God, Eddie's, funeral was just the other day, and now here you were. You weren't sure if you could take part in any kind of feast; your mind was still reeling from everything that had happened.

You entered the tavern and were immediately greeted by Sally, the tragic Shakespearean actor, who gripped your hand and was roughly shaking it as soon as you stepped through the door. “Well, it's about time you showed up!” she said.

“Easy, Sally. Y/N is still adjusting,” Frank said as they came in beside you.

“Yeah, yeah,” Sally said as she tugged you across the room and sat you down at a bar. “So how'd it happen?”

You cleared your throat. “Um. A carriage accident.”

She whistled. “Wow, that's a rough way to go. Do you remember any of it?”

“Not really. I got knocked out pretty quickly.”

There was a loud thud beside you as a familiar, tall blue dog plopped down in the seat on your other side. “Welp, that's good at least,” Barnaby said as he handed you a frothing mug of beer.

“Sure is. Not remembering violent deaths makes the transition a little easier.”

Barnaby leaned over, his eyeball rolling into his right socket, and peered at you. “And judging by all the schmutz on your face, I'm guessing it wasn't a pretty sight.”

“Schmutz?” You gently touched your face and realized that you had a very thick layer of makeup on.

“Oh yeah! We need to get that off you right away. It looks awful.” Sally stood up and cupped her hands around her mouth. “Poppyyyyyy! I need a mirrooooooooor!”

“One moment, please!” a high-pitched, crow-like voice squawked from the kitchen. “Goodness me, I'm going to start molting again from all these feasts.” Poppy walked into the space behind the bar, wiping her wings on her apron, and she looked up at you. “Oh, my dear Y/N. I heard the rumors, but I didn't know if they were true. I'm so sorry.”

You couldn't help but smile at Poppy, remembering the way she comforted you when you first came here and were scared out of your wits. “I'm fine. It's good to see you again.”

She smiled back at you before digging through her apron pocket. “Let's see, I think I have a mirror in here, somewhere. Ah!” She withdrew a tiny hand mirror and handed it to you. “Please don't be insulted, but whoever did your funeral makeup certainly did you a disservice.”

You looked into the mirror and blanched when you realized that they were right. The makeup didn't match your skin tone and made you look horribly discolored, and they seemed to try and make up for that by applying huge splotches of rouge to your cheeks and lips. You grimaced at your reflection.

“Uh huh. Here,” Sally said while handing you a rag.

You went to work cleaning up your face and neck, scrubbing the makeup away. You froze when you glanced at your reflection again and noticed just how much you had changed. Your skin had taken on a bluish tint, and you had massive stitches across your neck and down your right temple. You gently prodded at your temple and flinched when a fraction of your skull shifted under your touch. No, the accident wasn't pretty at all.

Sally noticed this and took the rag and mirror from you. “Here, I'll finish,” she said.

“You'll get used to it,” Barnaby said as Sally got to work. “Imagine how Poppy was when she first got here and saw that half of her face was missing.”

Sally finished and nodded with satisfaction. “There. Now you look like one of us!”

“The stitches are a nice touch, too. Makes you look like a pirate,” Barnaby said.

Sally gasped. “Oooo. We could do a production of The Pirates of Penzance! Are you a good singer?”

“Me? Well, uh—”

Barnaby laughed then stood up. “Care if I go ahead and audition?” He started singing “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” before anyone could protest, going out of his way to use a silly voice and make larger-than-life funny gestures.

Eddie took Barnaby's seat beside you and helped himself to the drink that Poppy put down in front of him. “So, what do you think you're going to do now?”

You pondered this for a moment. “I'm not sure. What can I do?”

“Whatever you want, really. You could move on to another afterlife upstairs, or you could stay here. Take care of whatever unfinished business you have.”

You shrugged. “I guess that's why I'm here, huh? I just can't make up my mind?”

Poppy leaned against the bar and giggled. “Oh, no. I think you do have unfinished business.”

You tilted your head. “What?”

Sally's attention was brought back to you and she propped her elbows on the bar, giving you a sly smile. “Oh, yeah. And I bet we all know what it is.”

“I'm confused,” you said.

“Oh, come on. Do we really need to spell it out for you?” she said with a groan. “How about the guy you almost drank poison for?”

Your eyes widened. “Wally?”

Sally and Poppy both nodded. Barnaby gave up on his performance when he realized no one was watching him juggle three empty beer mugs and approached you again. “Sounds about right,” he said.

“But that's not possible. Wally, he... he's gone. I saw him disappear.”

Frank approached you from behind and placed their hand on your shoulder. “He's not gone. Souls don't just disappear like that.”

“Yeah, and he visited us a couple of weeks ago,” Barnaby added.

You felt something deep within you—your heart, maybe? even though it wasn't beating anymore?—jump up at the revelation. “Where is he? Upstairs?”

“Nah, I think Poppy would have let us know if he was living in the attic.” Barnaby laughed when Frank gave him a sharp glare.

“Not precisely. Last I heard, he's residing in another in-between kind of place. It's a little bit harder to get there since it's separate from our world, but he's figured it out well enough that he still visits us from time to time,” Frank said.

Your throat clenched like a fist and your eyes were stinging. You pressed your hands against your mouth and sniffled.

Poppy grinned. “I knew it.”

“Please. We all knew it,” Sally said.

“How do I find him?” you said.

Frank put a hand to his chin. “Well, he told me that there are a couple of ways to get there, but for most of them you have to know what you're looking for. I haven't been able to go there, myself, so I won't be very much help, there.” They tapped his jaw and hummed a bit in thought. “I suppose I could give you the spell I gave Wally before. It's a bit of a gamble, but I'm sure it won't be much of a problem for you. It's a spell to help you find your heart's desire. I gave it to him when he first got here in case he ever changed his mind about that unfinished business of his, and he kept it with him for years. Didn't use it until that day in the Land of the Living.”

You remembered that moment vividly, when you watched as Wally's body dissolved into hundreds of blue and grey butterflies. “That was a spell? I thought he was gone.”

Frank shook his head. “I think once he decided that he was satisfied, he needed something to help him move on. He's happy where he is now, if not a little lonely.”

You hugged yourself. You had never considered the possibility of seeing Wally again, and now that you were told that it was possible, your heart seemed to sing at the idea. But something was holding you back.

“What about Howdy?”

Frank sighed. “I can't help you with that. I'm afraid that's a decision you'll have to make on your own.”

“If it makes you feel any better,” Eddie said, “you're not limited to one place. You can visit each afterlife whenever you want. I visited my parents in the upstairs the other day, but I'm staying here to be with Frank.” As he said this, he took Frank's hand and gave them a sweet smile. “So, uh, if you want to see Howdy again, you can. But you don't have to stay anywhere. You're free to do what you want.”

That seemed to loosen some of the tension in your chest. You took a deep breath and let your heart take over. “Okay. How do I use that spell?”

Frank smiled. “We'll need to get some things out of my office.”

You stood and followed Frank out the door. Sally whooped behind you, “Woo hoo! Lover boy's getting his partner back!”

“We'll have that Welcome Feast another time, alright?” Poppy called.

Barnaby just hummed to himself, considering adding another verse to “Remains of the Day” so that the story would have a happy ending, after all. Then again, he'd probably have to sacrifice the catchy instrumental part in the middle so the song wasn't too long, and he wasn't willing to do that.

You and Eddie stood in silence as you watched Frank dig through his various supplies. He scrutinized their spell book as he carefully measured and combined the ingredients. When they were finished, he handed you a small capsule the size of a marble.

“This is it?” you asked.

He nodded. “It looks unassuming, but it is a very powerful spell. All you have to do is crush it in your hand and you'll be sent to wherever your heart's desire is. Though, you may need to try and focus on one thing, or else you may get sent to the wrong place.”

“But don't worry. If you get lost, just find a graveyard and enter a crypt to go underground, and you'll find a village associated with that grave yard. You should be able to find your way back from there,” Eddie said.

You nodded, staring at the capsule in the palm of your hand.

Without warning, Eddie pulled you into a hug. “Take care of yourself, okay, bud? And you'd better visit us all the time, or I'll come find you, myself.”

You smiled and leaned into his hug. “I will. I promise.”

Frank sniffed and cleared their throat, trying to hide the fact that you reminded him of themselves when he was young and fell in love with Eddie for the first time. “Alright, go on before Eddie decides to make you stay here.”

You turned to Frank and gave him a hug, too. “Thank you,” you whispered.

They awkwardly patted your back. “Of course.” He led you out to his balcony that overlooked the village. “I will warn you, it may be a bit of a bumpy ride.”

You walked to the edge of the balcony, looked back over your shoulder at them as Eddie put his arm around Frank. You took a deep breath—just out of habit at this point, and it was an odd sensation to feel your lungs stretch for the first time in a while—then turned your face up. You closed your eyes and pictured Wally, wherever he was, then you squeezed your right hand until the capsule burst and a fine powder spilled out between your fingers.

Nothing happened, at first. You opened your eyes again and looked down, wondering if you'd done something wrong.

But then you felt another strange sensation: an unraveling, like your body was falling away from you. A gust of wind swirled around you, your feet and the tips of your fingers tingled, and your body transformed into hundreds of butterflies.

Just like Wally.

Normally, you would have been frightened. You weren't. Your heart jumped up in your throat with excitement. You almost laughed, but your face and mouth had been transformed by then.

You were jumbling, fluttering, riding on the wind current, spread out in a great cloud of delicate wings. You tumbled through the air, trying and failing to grasp what was happening and where you were going. The world flew past you in a blur. You felt free.

You jolted when your feet suddenly met solid ground. You blinked, held your hands out in front of you and found them whole again.

You were in a circular clearing in the middle of a grove of trees. You spun around in a circle, taking in your surroundings. The trees were all tall and dark, and each tree on the edge of this clearing had a door carved into it. A four-leaf clover, a big red heart, a Christmas tree? An Easter egg? These were all symbols associated with holidays.

“Oh!” a quiet voice sounded behind you. You turned to face them and stared, slack-jawed, at the person who met you. She was a tall, slender woman standing at the edge of the grove. Her skin was made of a blue fabric and she had long, red hair and wore a colorful, patchwork dress. A small basked was hanging from the crook of her arm, stuffed with sprigs of lavender. Her round, glassy, babydoll eyes blinked at you. She smiled and dipped her head down. “I'm sorry. I wasn't expecting to find anyone else here.”

You struggled to find your words as you were still wrapping your head around the concept that a giant rag doll was talking to you. This was all a lot for you to take in one day. You coughed and said, “No, I'm sorry. I'm just... looking for someone.”

The woman tilted her head. “Is that so? Who are you looking for?”

“A man named Wally Darling. He's a...” You hesitated, unsure how foreign this would be to her.

But she finished the sentence for you. “A corpse? Like you?”

You smiled bashfully. “Yes.”

The woman grinned even bigger. “Then it's a good thing I found you. He's from the same town as me.”

That jolt of excitement shot through you again. It seemed like the spell that Frank made for you worked like a charm. “Really? Can you take me there?”

“Of course.” She walked up to you, her stride small and with a noticeable limp, thought she didn't seem to be in pain. She held out her hand. “My name is Sally, by the way,” she said.

Another Sally, you thought. You shook her hand and introduced yourself. She nodded, then motioned to the side toward a tree with a door shaped like a jack-o-lantern in it. “We'll be heading to Halloween Town. This is the fastest way there,” she continued. She limped to the tree, turned the knob that was disguised as the jack-o-lantern's nose, and the door swung outward. You cautiously approached it and looked down into the hollow tree. There was nothing but darkness, and the door opened to a steep drop-off that you couldn't see the bottom of.

“I find it easiest to just close my eyes and jump,” she said. “I know it can be a bit intimidating sometimes, but I promise, it's perfectly safe. My husband and I come through here all the time.”

You swallowed, grabbed hold of the doorway, and shut your eyes. A gentle breeze blew through, carrying the comforting scent of fallen leaves and caramel apples. A smile crept onto your face, and you pulled yourself through the doorway and jumped.

There was only a second of free fall before you landed smartly on your rear end in a giant pile of leaves. You grunted and clambered to your feet.

Sally appeared beside you. “Are you alright? That happens a lot for first-timers.”

You straightened up and said, “Yeah, I'm fine. Not like I can get much worse.”

She giggled at that and motioned for you to follow her. You walked together down a dirt path that cut through the woods and she asked you about where you came from and how you got here. She was a good listener as you told her everything.

“How do you know Wally?” she asked.

“We, um...” Your face heated up and you found yourself fiddling with the band on your right hand. “It's a long story. Let's just say we're... old friends.”

“I see,” she said with a knowing look that made you blush more. But then she looked forward and said, “Here we are.”

You both crested a hill and looked down on an archway with “Halloween Town” spelled out in black, iron letters. A large town bustled with activity down below. The architecture was conflictingly made of a combination of twisting, curving lines and jagged, sharp angles, and the citizens seemed to enjoy and monochrome color palette with occasional splashes of bright color. You followed Sally down the path and entered the town.

You had to keep yourself from gawking when you saw the first couple of citizens gathered in the town square: a wolf man dressed in tattered flannel chatting with a bulking man dressed in overalls with an axe stuck in his head. They both gawked at you, though, when you came into a view.

“Look! Queen Sally has brought in someone new!” the wolf man exclaimed with a gravelly voice.

You glanced at her. “Queen Sally?”

She blushed. “Ah, yes, I didn't mention that. I'm the Pumpkin Queen.”

“Oh!” You fumbled and started to bow, but Sally stopped you.

“Please, don't. That's exactly why I don't go around announcing that to everyone. Just treat me like you would anyone else.”

You nodded. “Sorry.”

“And don't apologize, either.” She hooked her arm around yours and said, “Now, let's go find Wally.”

She led you away, but not before you noticed that a trio of women, (witches, you guessed, based on their clothes and pointed hats) had gathered around the wolf man and were whispering conspiratorially.

You hadn't gone far before you stumbled upon two more citizens: a man wearing a long trench coat and tall, thin top hat, and an even taller, thin, and gangly skeleton dressed in a pin-stripped suit with tails on his coat and a bat bowtie. They were both leaned over something on a table.

Sally perked up a bit beside you. “Oh, that's my husband over there. He may know where Wally is.” She waved her free hand and called, “Jack! Jack!”

The skeleton looked up and his face split into a wide, toothy grin. “Sally! Perfect timing! Mr. Hyde and I were just testing out his newest creation. Would you care to see?”

She nodded and walked to the table, where Jack presented her with a large, orange bowl of candy with a small sign taped to the front that read “Just Take One.”

“A seemingly normal bowl, yes? Perfectly welcoming to trick-or-treaters.”

“Of course,” she agreed.

“Go and take a piece. Just one.”

Sally did as he said a delicately picked up a wrapped piece of butterscotch. She waited a moment, then raised a brow at him. “Is that all?”

“Precisely, because you were good and only took one. Now, pretend you are a greedy trick-or-treater and try to grab a handful.”

Sally nodded and drove her hand into the bowl, grabbing a large handful of candy, when a ghostly hand jumped from within the depths of the bowl and grabbed her wrist. She gasped, startled, then laughed. “What fun!”

Jack clapped Mr. Hyde on the back. “You see? A brilliant idea! I knew you were an excellent choice for the knew town scientist. Well done!”

Mr Hyde chuckled, pleased with himself. “You flatter me, Jack.”

Sally gently tugged at Jack's arm and whispered to him. He looked at you and his eyes lit up. “Oh, my apologies! I was so caught up in my work, I hadn't noticed you there.” He swept into a low bow. “Jack Skellington, Pumpkin King and Co-Representative of Halloween.” He stood upright and draped an arm over Sally's shoulder. “And you've already met my wife and partner, Sally.” He looked you up and down, then beamed. “We don't get very many new faces, but you seem like you'll fit right in, here.”

You cleared your throat and said, “Actually, Mr. uh, Skellington—”

“Please, Jack is fine.”

“Jack,” you corrected, “I'm actually looking for someone. Wally Darling?”

He raised a brow and glanced at Sally, who only smiled up at him. “Your name wouldn't happen to be Y/N, would it?”

Your eyes widened. “Yes. Why?”

“He talks about you all the time. Oh, he'll be over the moon when he sees you!”

You could have sworn that your heart thudded hearing that, but that couldn't have been possible, could it?

Jack tilted his head and hummed. “I just saw him a moment ago. I may know where he is. Follow me!” He let go of Sally and strode away. You glanced at Sally and she nodded to you, urging you forward, then you jogged to follow the skeleton.

Jack led the way down a twisting cobblestone path that led out of the town and into farmland that mostly consisted of pumpkins. He led you through a graveyard and up a steep hill, and his long strides took him up the hill faster than you could keep up with. You couldn't run out of breath, anymore, but that didn't stop your muscles from aching as you hiked after him. As you reached the top of the hill, you could see another hill in the distance that made the shape of a spiral. As you took in the view, your gaze wandered from the massive spiral and down to the bottom where another there was another pumpkin patch.

You froze when you saw him. There was no mistaking him with his blue, patchwork skin and signature hair style. He wasn't wearing the wedding tuxedo anymore; now he donned a simple white shirt and blue striped pants. He was seated at a stool in the middle of the pumpkin patch with an easel in front of him, hard at work on a painting. You would have gasped if you still had breath, and your body moved before you completely comprehended what you were seeing.

Wally.

As you came closer, you could see that he was recreating the view of the spiral hill on his painting. His back was to you, and he hummed quietly as he worked, so deep in thought that he didn't notice you and Jack approaching until Jack called his name.

“Wally! I thought we'd find you here.” Jack leaned over Wally's shoulder and looked at the painting. “Ah, is this my commission? It's coming along swimmingly.”

All you saw was Wally's side profile as he smiled up at Jack. “Thank you. I'm just touching up a few details, right now. It should be finished in a day or so, when it dries.”

“It will be a wonderful anniversary gift. Sally will love it!”

Wally turned back to his painting, and Jack glanced at you like he'd just remembered you were there. “Actually, Wally, I needed to speak to you.”

“Hm?”

“It seems,” Jack said, putting his hand on Wally's shoulder, “that someone is here to see you.”

Wally gave Jack a confused look, then turned.

His eyes widened, and the paintbrush fell from his limp fingers.

Neither of you moved. His eyes trailed up and down your body. He stood, took a few hesitant steps forward, and said, “Y/N?”

You smiled. “Hello, Wally,” you said.

Jack was beaming.

Wally blinked, then shook his head. “I'm dreaming.”

You almost laughed. Your hands were shaking. “No, you're not.”

“I am. You... you can't be here. It's not possible.”

“Wally...”

“I'm going to open my eyes, and you'll be gone.”

You approached him, took his hand, and pressed it against your face. His eyes dilated and his mouth fell open.

“I'm here,” you whispered.

He studied your face, and his fingers trailed down your jaw and to your neck, where they found the stitches. He glanced at them, and his mouth opened wider. “Oh...” His other hand found your neck and he gently traced the stitches. He gently turned your head from side to side as he looked you over like he was just noticing the bluish tint your skin had taken, and his gaze fell on the stitches on your temple. “What happened?”

“A carriage accident.”

He covered his mouth. “Oh, no...”

You took his hand again. “It's alright. I don't remember anything.”

You noticed tears forming at the corners of his eyes. “I'm so sorry.”

You cupped his cheek. “Don't be. I'm alright.”

Jack coughed. “I believe you two will be wanting some time alone?” He leaned down and whispered to Wally, “I recommend the top of Spiral Hill. Very romantic spot.” He winked, and Wally started to blush.

“Thank you,” he mumbled before he gripped your hand tightly and led you toward Spiral Hill. You trudged to the top together, hand in hand, and you looked out over the view of the graveyard and pumpkin patch, grey and black with dots of orange.

Wally turned to you and took a tight hold of both your hands. “Tell me everything.”

You didn't speak, because with him holding your hands I noticed something for the first time. When you had met before, when you were still alive, whenever he touched you his skin was always freezing cold. Now it wasn't. You realized it was because we were the same temperature. It made you want to hold him closer.

“I already told you, I was in a carriage accident.”

“No, no. I mean... tell me about your life. What happened after I left?”

“You want me to tell you all of that? Right now?”

He nodded. “We have all the time in the world, now.”

You grinned, and then you did just that. You told him about your marriage to Howdy, the relationship you had formed, the good and bad times, and you told him that during those seven years, you never forgot him. You were afraid that he would be upset or sad when you told him about your marriage, but he seemed to be the contrary.

“I'm glad,” he said. “I was hoping I was making the right decision. It's good to know that you lived a good life after I was gone, even if... even if it was a short one.”

He had looked away, and you gently cupped his cheek so that he would look at you. “The others in the Land of the Dead said that the reason I stayed behind was likely because I had unfinished business. At first, I didn't know what they were talking about, but I think I do, now.” Despite building up to that, you suddenly became bashful and couldn't quite find the words.

Wally touched your hand on his face and leaned into it. “You were looking for me?”

You nodded. “The thing is... I missed y—”

He interrupted you by pressing his lips to yours.

He had only ever kissed you once before, that night on the bridge. You weren't sure if that even counted since you fainted when he did. You remembered being terrified back then, your stomach swirling and your heart thumping so hard and fast you thought you were about to have a heart attack. You remembered how cold his lips were, and how dizzy you were from the fear.

This was different. Obviously, you weren't afraid, now, but it was more than that. It was rushed and passionate, not the formal seal of the vows that Wally had done before. And it was warm. You still felt dizzy, though.

When he pulled away, you stared into each other's eyes for a moment, then you took his shoulders and pulled him back to you for another kiss. Your hand went to the back of his head and your fingers tangled into his soft hair. His hands trailed up and down your back. You gripped each other as if the second one of you let go, you'd be lost forever. You finally pulled away again when you heard the sound of an applause in the distance.

At the top of one of the nearby hills, a small crowd of monsters and ghouls had formed, and they were whooping and cheering. Jack and Sally stood at the center of the crowd, smiling up at you as Sally leaned into Jack's shoulder.

“So much for alone time,” you muttered. You turned back to Wally to see him beaming up at you. His eyes sparkled.

He wrapped his arms around your waist and lifted you up into a twirl. You yelped in surprise and gripped his shoulders. He laughed heartily as he set you back down, then he leaned his forehead into yours, and for a moment you simply relished in each other's company.

“Thank you,” he said. “I've missed you, too. I know that I was selfish before, but I really am glad that you came to find me.”

You were surprised to feel your heart melting a bit when he said that—it seemed that even if your heart didn't beat anymore, it was still capable of swelling and melting with emotion.

The ring on your right hand glinted in the moonlight. A knot formed in your throat. “I think... I think I know what my unfinished business is, now.”

Wally tilted his head, curious.

You took the ring off your finger and held it up to him. “I want to try again. Properly, this time. Nothing in our way, and no interruptions. I want to give you the wedding you deserve.”

Wally's eyes widened a bit, then he chuckled and shook his head. “It was never just about the wedding, you know. I wanted true love. A happy ending.”

“Exactly,” you said. “I want to give you that. A big, beautiful ceremony to celebrate true love, and a real happily ever after.” You cleared your throat, suddenly nervous. “If you'd like that, I mean.”

He broke into a wide smile. “Are you asking me to marry you?”

You nodded. “Yes. Will you marry me? Again?”

He laughed again and pulled you into a hug. “Yes. If you will have me.”

You closed your eyes and leaned into the hug. “Of course I will.”

You finally pulled apart once again to slip the band on Wally's finger, right where it belonged.

A/N: Yes, I already know I'm cringe. Don't look at me.

[p-redux]

Hey lovely. Do you think when Sam gets a girlfriend she will be attacked by some fans for being his girlfriend?

Oh, you sweet innocent lamb. The sad answer is YES.

Every woman Sam has dated, including his longest girlfriends, Abbie Salt (1 year 2015) and Mackenzie Mauzy (2 years 2016-2018) have been mercilessly attacked and bullied by Extreme Shippers, who still think Sam and Cait should be, or are together. Extreme Shippers' modus operandi has always been the same when a new woman enters Sam's life: leave hate comments on her social media, create fake accounts attacking her on social media, contact her family, friends, employers, ex-boyfriends and harass them, make up lies, pretend to be someone from their past, and then say horrible things about them. It's LITERALLY the same thing every time. It's like they have a blueprint or something...or they share the same demented brain. Extreme Shippers will deny this, but it is well documented on my blog and other blogs, with CONCRETE PROOF, that identifiable Extreme Shippers have engaged in this terrible behavior. Not to mention, it is also illegal to engage in cyber bullying.

Soooo, given that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, I'd say it's 100 % guaranteed that if Sam gets into another serious relationship, they will both be harassed by Extreme Shippers. Luckily, Sam's SANE fans support him, and the women he dates. And we have no problem calling out the assholes in this fandom aka Extreme Shippers.

And I don't hold out hope this assholery will change even after Outlander is over. If you look at other fandoms that have shippers, for example the Fifty Shades of Grey and Twilight fandoms, they still have shippers pining over Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson. And Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, when all four of them are in long term relationships not with their costars. And the Damie and Robsten shippers are STILL being jerks even years and years later.

At least the numbers will dwindle once Outlander is over because there won't be anymore Outlander related events to "swoon" over Sam and Cait being in the same room. But, the truly delusional will never give up. Never. Sad, but true.

Thanks for stopping by, Anon!

[queerholmcs]

hbomberguy's thesis is Flawed. also i don't remember him ever mentioning gatiss

LITERALLY!!! he spends an hour and fifty minutes complaining about how he hates moffat like he's the only person responsible for the show and his entire beef with the show comes down to "i have only engaged with the material on a very surface-level reading and i think they're clever little detective stories and i want any adaptation of the material to be a detective procedural done as a serial with isolated episodes. how dare you call the show SHERLOCK (in all caps) and then spend the majority of the runtime showing us the characters and not the crimes. also john watson literally serves no purpose and sherlock himself is just an absolute asshole all the time, we know this because he says he's a sociopath and also here are three clips of him being a pedantic dick, i am very good at engaging with media. tsot was a stupid episode because it opens with an insanely overproduced and high-effort scene for the sake of one stupid joke about how sherlock is thoughtless about other people's lives and then most of the episode is just sherlock standing in a room talking, he's not even solving crimes." and i'm like. literally What Are You Talking About shdkshdkdhdk. did we watch the same show. i have never watched someone be so wrong about so many things with such conviction.

[mdhwrites]

Im sorry if im annoying, is just I really love Tmnt, specially Rise, and I also enjoy reading your analysis and stuff.

So, if is bothering you, you can delete this ask, is cool 👍

Now, my question is, character wise, like in a quick grande, idk if makes sense- IMPRESSIONS.

What would it be your first impression of the characters?

*bops you on the head* Stop apologizing. I've said before that if I had nothing to say, I'd just answer it privately. However, I LOVE discussions and I always appreciate asks so you're never annoying me with these. Please, don't worry about it so much.

As for the characters for Rise of the TMNT, I can't comment on everyone as I've only watched so much, like I have no real grasp on April yet besides liking her, but I actually want to start on the major thing that I think both allowed Rise to stand out and what made it so divisive at its inception, especially since talking about stuff like that is kind of going to bleed into what I think of the brothers. After all, I think whether you love the show or hate it, we all recognize that the brothers are very markedly different in this incarnation than literally any other, even if you can point to ones in the past for inspiration.

Most TMNT shows are MNT. Mutant. Ninja. Turtle. Those are the elements that they care about. Rise cares about TMT and goes about SHREDDING the fantasy that is the turtles as ninja. Not that they aren't ninja but like... What do ninja who TEENAGE MUTANT TURTLES like?

This actually even goes to Shredder's change which I'd never heard about before now: He's kind of a washed up loser. Again, I don't know everything but he's just as playful as the boys, he watches television, he goes on joyrides, he loses his mind when he's sick. He's not some grand wise mentor... And I get it. This is a man, going off normal canons, who lost his master, got thrown away, ended up halfway across the fucking globe and lives in a GOD DAMN SEWER. Not some pristine dojo. Not some high tech. Not even a cozy lair repurposed out of a sewer because none of that shit was around. All he had was a dank ass sewer. To say he hit rock bottom would be an understatement.

And mind you, it's not that her turned cruel because of this. He still passed on what culture he could but without stealing really expensive imports, what of his culture does he even have? He can't go to the library to check out books for the new family he wants to make. He can't buy home school programs to help him teach them. He has nothing. And he's old. He was already a man when shit went wrong for him in most canons so by the time the turtles are teenagers, he's at least fifty. Usually he's depicted as WAY older than that, like 70 or 80. Instead of that meaning he's some mystical figure, he's instead the cooky old dude who's maybe not all there all the time. That's a really neat reinterpretation of the character that's genuinely more realistic while befitting the tone of the TMNT franchise where yeah, it's still kind of cranked to eleven.

This is also your warning that I fucking love these characters.

So what about the brothers? If they aren't privileged but underground but instead genuinely stuck slumming it, what happened to them? Well, a core change seems to be not so much a want to belong, they actually don't seem that interested in being accepted by society, but a desire to covet society. To be able to watch and be a part of the concept of society. That's why they're totally at home watching a wrestling match. They aren't wishing they could be in the ring, they're just happy to be part of the crowd with the best seats in the house. They don't have to mind that they have to fight in costume, they're gonna rock it because they're in fucking costume and someone challenged you to a dance battle? You respond with a dance battle. They are MORE content with being outcasts than the turtles normally are because they live vicariously through media like many people do. This is with ONE exception that I'll get to.

I also like, just as a side note, that just because they are normal amongst mutants biologically, they still have no fucking clue what they're doing. They're genuinely caught between two worlds with double the naivety because of it and get screwed over by both halves because of it. Just a fun touch.

OKAY. Enough preamble. Let's actually go from the least to most bold changes of the brothers, at least from my perspective. I've never been huge into TMNT, just never really found a show I managed to watch consistently but I've liked most of what I've seen including the first Michael Bay Turtles movie, so I may not know how radical these alterations are or how safe they are except in a few small cases. For this though, the first one to talk about is pretty easy:

Michelangelo: *stares at how spellcheck just wrote that name* No wonder people fuck up mine. ANYWAYS, the reason I say he's the least bold is because adding artistic to your quirky, comedic heart of the group is not really so much a change as just a small pivot in trope. He's still more inclined towards recklessness, he's still the one who can broach the gaps between his brothers and he is the... Well, he is the one who is telling the most genuine jokes. Again, we'll get to him. But yeah, I like him but he's not actually that interesting to discuss, yet, for me because he is the one who is the most what you would expect.

Donatello: I bet some of you expected him to take the top slot but hear me out: I actually recently did a blog contrasting Big Bang and The Owl House for their depictions of nerds. The point of it was really to say that TOH tried to claim their nerds were some groundbreaking, brave representation but that they were 'good' nerds besides the one uncomfortable nerd who got in the way and that no one liked. The difference between a nerd who never brings up their interests at dinner unless prompted versus one who MIGHT ask "Hey, am I bothering you with this," thirty minutes into a rant about a niche issue with their favorite media that they brought up because you mentioned the wrong time. Say yes and you are going to be there the rest of the fucking night. THIS is what I see with Donatello. Donnie is usually just the tech dude and by that we mean he's conveniently the one who can spit technobabble out and fix things. He is nerdy but he'd never be someone you really question spending time with. This Donnie refuses to spend time with YOU and he will let you know it. He is the brutal honesty, amongst other things, of being autistic, alongside the fact that when they say he "Does machines" in the intro, I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't foreshadowing him making himself a girlfriend out of his one true love. Now, that is going a little far. Donnie does love his brothers but of the three, he struggles the most to know how to deal with them in a human way, to the point where this is addressed very early on with him trying to fix what he finds most annoying about them and how that's wrong. This is not literally the opposite of normal, Mikey is usually the heart of the brothers after all, but Donnie usually gets along because he doesn't really have enough personality to clash. This Donnie has enough personality to perform a heel turn for someone taking shit from him. It's great. However, he is still the tech dude and still somewhat removed from his siblings, both of which are pretty normal even if the execution is different, so it's not as radical a change as the next two.

Now for the two that actually play into why I did all my preamble.

Raphael: I haven't gotten backstories yet but if it turns out Raph looked around himself as he was growing up and realized NO ONE was the adult, I wouldn't be surprised. He doesn't seem traumatized by this fact by any means but he does give the impression of having grown up faster than the rest. He's not just physically more than them, he's mentally more. He's taken a step they all will eventually need to follow him... But he's not going to drag them kicking and screaming with him unless they're being genuine dumbasses. I actually love EVERY part of how this comes to play out. Raph doesn't have his hotheadedness, he has something much closer to cold fury which implies he knows that he can't lose it the way old Raphs did but that anger is still there. He is the one who actually has plans and most often presents worry over how something might go wrong, or sees through the rouses set by his brothers, meaning that he's taken the role of guardian over them (which makes his power being a form of shields technically chef's kiss). HOWEVER, by contrast, he has what feels a bigger blindspot to people outside of his family when it comes to tricks, likely because he's been focused on his brothers for long enough that he has become more naive than even many of the others of the world outside their home. This is probably why he has some of the bigger hero worship amongst them, especially since he's trying to live up to nobler ideas, or at least more adult ideals. That's ironic due to-

Leonardo: The choice to give him the voice Randy Cunningham is pitch perfect casting. This is EASILY the biggest and most jarring change but for the me the most welcome. Leo was never really a straight man from what I could tell comedically, Raph or Donnie usually did more of that, but instead was meant to be the rock of the group. Instead, he just came off as many bad adventure leaders: No personality. He's a nice enough guy and he's good at what he does but that's what you say about your mailman, not the leader of your ensemble cast.

This Leo is anything but this. He does not covet society, he wishes for society to covet him. He has taken celebrity worship to its natural conclusion of wanting to be a celebrity at all costs. He sees himself as the hottest shit out there and you bet your buns he's going to let you know it. He will do anything for recognition which is hardly surprising for a kid who grew up in the sewers watching stuff like Kung Fu movies. He wants to be that level of awesome and you better believe he knows the phrase "Fake it till you make it." Of course, he doesn't think he's faking it which makes when he gets punched in the face all the more satisfying. But... This does come with some wrinkles. He does not look upon the world favorably. If Raph is too innocent, he's cynical. Everything is quid pro quo. If you show him why you're giving him praise, even if it's shallow or a lie, he'll believe you because he is easily manipulated but you show him nothing? You say you JUST want to help without even being family? Yeah that doesn't fly because it's not what he would do, often times even with his own family. It makes for an interesting version of awareness. All of this does beg a simple question though: Is there any connective tissue between old Leo and new one? Is this like Teen Titans Go where they entirely scrapped the old character just to make him some shit eating idiot?

Confidence, wit, and spirit. Raph's greatest problems as a leader is that he isn't quick on his feet, he can't get people to listen to him and when he does have a plan, he doesn't have as much confidence as he needs to make sure everyone follows it. Leo genuinely has everything and than what Raph has a leader. He is smart, that's why he's a snarky bastard. He's confident to an extreme fault but that means when he pitches you an idea, it sounds legit just because of how much he seems to believe in it. And hey, even after he gets punched, he gets back up. He will make you say he is the best or die trying (which from my understanding is essentially the fuck up he makes at the beginning of the movie but with nobler intentions). He is missing two key components from being a genuinely great leader and ninja. The ability to see outside of himself and maturity. He needs to grow up and remember there's no I in team. That it doesn't matter who got the final hit, what matters is that the job was accomplished at all. He needs to stop wanting to be a celebrity, an icon to worship and trudge behind, and instead be a leader who is shoulder to shoulder to you. Who says that anything he'd ask of you, he'd ask of himself.

That is a fucking INCREDIBLE pitch for your main character as a starting point. All the things he needs but a radical wake up call that will force some HARD change if he wants to realize his real potential. Even better, his real potential is what he wants to be seen as, just that so long as the image is what he cares about, he'll never be what he wants to be. It's pitch god damn perfect and the fact that he is a delightful asshole who gets everything he deserves coming to him, constantly, from all angles, while he works on himself makes for a very entertaining character even as you wait for this arc to potentially happen. He is a good cartoon character either way and not everyone call pull that off.

In fact, even the most shallow of them makes for someone who you know will at least make you smirk if you give them eleven minutes. To me, that's a pretty good sign for a good character if one of your main goals is to entertain. And man... These turtles are entertaining. See you next tale.

======++++++======

Also, small note: I finally hit 200 followers! And I'm announcing this on a blog most of them probably aren't going to read. XD

I have a public Discord for any and all who want to join!

I also have an Amazon page for all of my original works in various forms of character focused romances from cute, teenage romance to erotica series of my past. I have an Ao3 for my fanfiction projects as well if that catches your fancy instead. If you want to hang out with me, I stream from time to time and love to chat with chat.

A Twitter you can follow too

And a Kofi if you like what I do and want to help out with the fact that disability doesn’t pay much.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Women's march

* * * *

Harris and Walz shift the vibe!

August 19, 2024

Robert B. Hubbell

As we look ahead with hope and anticipation to the Democratic National Convention, the Harris-Walz campaign continues to surprise everyone with its effectiveness and nimbleness. On Sunday, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz took a bus tour through Pennsylvania—a complete “vibe-shift” from the enthusiastic crowds at packed stadiums that fueled the campaign over the last four weeks.

The bus tour was terrific! It highlighted Kamala and Tim in “normal” situations that voters can relate to—buying chips (Doritos) in a convenience store, talking to a high school football team, and chatting up the employees at a restaurant. Both joined a local field office’s phone-banking efforts! Kamala Harris even petted a firehouse dog after delivering pastries to the firefighters! (Can you imagine Trump petting a dog?)

There is no way in the world that Trump or JD Vance could have negotiated those situations with anything other than awkward stiffness as they pretended to know how to talk to everyday Americans in normal situations. Both Trump and JD Vance are stuck behind podiums with dwindling or non-existent crowds, while Kamala and Tim turned the “small group” interaction into a show of strength and normalcy.

That is a feat that Trump and Vance cannot replicate. The GOP nominees are comfortable among billionaires and sycophants but not among people who are feeling the pain of Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires, assault on personal liberties, and culture wars.

Harris also asked reporters questions at various stops on the tour. Those reporters—perhaps local reporters(?)—asked the Vice President substantive questions about her economic proposals released last week. No notes, no teleprompters, no “hand-picked” reporters who are afraid of Kamala Harris. Her answers were “okay” to “good”, but they were orders of magnitude better than Trump's meandering words-salads. She answered the questions head-on; not everyone accepted her responses, but that’s politics! Kamala Harris is speaking to voters, not to pundits.

While dwelling on Trump is becoming tedious, he made things worse for himself and JD Vance on Saturday with another unhinged speech that focused on pettiness, grievance, and hate. In the speech, he criticized Kamala Harris for her laugh, dating history, and “looks” before stooping to call her a “communist.” See Trump zigzags between economic remarks and personal insults at rally in critical Pennsylvania. In a sign of supreme insecurity, Trump repeatedly said that he was “better looking than Kamala.” Geez! What kind of person does that?

And then Trump proceeded to have an epic meltdown on social media on Sunday, posting at least fifty-two (52) times, with each post worse, more offensive, and delusional than the last. Trump posted fake “photos” of “Swifties for Trump”, and posted doctored photos of Kamala Harris holding a sign that said, “I am a moron.”

Below is one of Trump's most unhinged posts

Again, apologies for repeating Trump's post, but it is important to understand what the media is not reporting about Trump's descent into madness. At the very least, let your eyes graze over the Unabomber-esque quality of the prose:

We had to turn away lots of people yesterday in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, but Comrade Kamala Harris’ Social Media Operation showed empty seats, long before the Rally started, early in the afternoon when, in actuality, we had to turn away 11,500 people! She’s a Crooked Radical Left Politician, and always will be! Everything she touches turns bad, just like California, and San Francisco before it - as is the case with all Marxists. She should have never been Vice President, and had to stage a COUP of Joe Biden, with her America-hating friends, Barrack Hussein Obama, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, and the rest. Comrade Kamala is a STONE COLD LOSER, she will FAIL and, if she doesn’t, our Country will cease to exist as we know it, turning into a Communist, Crime Ridden Garbage Dump.

As Trump is off message in the worst possible way, Democrats are heading into their convention more united than ever. Are there potential problems? Of course! Protests over Gaza will give the media a counter-narrative to dampen the enthusiasm that will greet President Joe Biden, First Lady Jill Biden, former presidents Obama and Clinton, Secretary of State Clinton, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff. Then, the main event will be Tim Walz and Kamala Harris.

The convention will be historic. It will serve three purposes:

It will lift and inspire a formerly weary base who can finally celebrate with a sense of confidence and optimism.

It will help unify Democratic messaging—finally!

It will extend the period of enthusiasm that has propelled the campaign thus far.

If the unprecedented enthusiasm continues into September or October, it will solidify the momentum that Kamala Harris is building among the electorate.

Joe Biden’s speech alone is reason enough to hold a convention that has already elected Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee. It should be Biden’s finest hour in his half-century of public service.

I resolve to not allow the media’s desire to deflate Democratic enthusiasm to interfere with my enjoyment and appreciation of a historic moment.

And a special note to readers who will be attending the convention: I would love to hear from you about what it is like to be “in the room where it happens.” With your permission (and not for attribution), I will share comments with other newsletter readers who are not at the convention. Feel free to post in the Comment section or email me at rbhubbell@gmail.com.

Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter

[nekoannie-chan]

Auction

Title: Auction.

Ship: Pre-Serum!Steve Rogers X Multimillionaire!Reader.

Word count: 572 words.

Rating: Mature.

Square: N5 “Bachelor auction”.

Summary: Steve can’t believe someone chose him in the action.

Warnings/Tags: Steve is auctioned, Bachelor auction, reader is super rich.

A/N: This is my entry to @allcapsbingo. AC1078.

You can read it on Wattpad and Ao3 too.

@saiyanprincessswanie

My native language is Spanish so I wanna improve my writing skills in English if you notice any mistakes, please let me know and I will correct them.

I don’t give any kind of permission that my fics to be posted on other platforms or languages (I translate myself my work) or the use of my graphics (my dividers are included in this), I did them exclusively for my fics, please respect my work and don't steal it. There are some people here who make dividers that anyone can use, mine is not this type, please look for the other's people. The only exception is the ones I gifted 'cuz now belong to someone else. If you find any of my works on a different platform and are not one of my accounts, please let me know. Reblogs and comments are always welcome.

DISCLAIMER: I don't own Marvel's characters (unfortunately), except for the original characters and the story.

Add yourself to my taglist here.

My other media where I publish:  Ao3, Wattpad, ffnet, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter. 

If you like it, please vote, comment, and give me feedback to improve my skills and reblog.

Tags: @sinceimetyou @unnuevosoltransformalarealidad @navybrat817 @angrythingstarlight @shield-agent78 @charmed-asylum  @pandaxnienke @real-fbi @smokeandnailz  @white-wolf1940 @tenaciousperfectionunknown @xoxonotme @bluemusickid @leyannrae  @harrysthiccthighss @marvelatthisone @caplanbuckybarnes @sapphire-rogers @lizzieolseniskinda @notyourtypicalrose  @hallecarey1 @nana1000night @talia-rumlow @writingshae @alexxavicry @azulatodoryuga @daemonslittlebitch @chaoticcollectivenightmare​ @endlesstwanted  @chemtrails-club  @marigoldreamer​ @whiskeytangofoxtrot555​  @here4thefanfics​ @theestorm​ @patzammit​

Steve sighed, he hated the days that were auction days, he knew he would never get picked, who would want someone as useless and sickly as him?

Yes, both Bucky and he had offered to participate, rather, Bucky had dragged him to that place and now he was alone there, obviously, Bucky had already been chosen, but he... he was still "trapped" in that place, maybe the next time would be the last time he would be there because he was sure that soon he would be kicked out of the place.

One of your friends recommended the place to you after you told her that you would like to donate to charity.

You watched the first man that came up, you weren't interested in him, he seemed too "common", you were beginning to hate your friend, it seemed more like he sent you to a place to get a date instead of what you really wanted to do.

It wasn't until he got on stage Steve that you paid attention, you smiled, of course, no one knew about your other plan and he was perfect. You knew it would be easy, no one was bidding on him, but that didn't mean you couldn't make it enjoyable. The opening bid was exceedingly low, or at least for you, fifty dollars.

“Five thousand dollars," you raised your voice although it wasn't necessary, nevertheless, you didn't hesitate to show confidence.

You felt the stares on you, as well as the murmurs behind you, you even though you heard comments about it being too much money.

Steve looked at you in amazement, no one had ever even dared to bid a dollar more than the opening bid.

“Are you sure? “The presenter questioned nervously, afraid that it might be some joke since probably in all his years working there, he had never heard such a high bid.

You nodded, after all, if you were doing a share of good works for charity.

“I think he was wrong," Steve whispered as you drove to their new home.

“Shut up, I wasn't wrong, I have a lot of plans with you," you replied. As soon as you got home you would make a few phone calls.

Steve swallowed hard, unsure if you meant what he thought you meant.

“I need that serum! “you spat, annoyed, you didn't even care what it cost. Colonel, I already told you that I have enough money to pay for it, I can even donate for our army, I promise you that if you give me the serum in return I will give you the best super soldier you could have ever dreamed of.

You continued talking for a few minutes, and when you hung up you smiled, you had achieved your goal, next week you would take Steve to the place where you had been instructed, but first, you would gain his trust.

Steve had not moved an inch from the room where you told him he would stay, although he had looked around the room, he turned to the door when he heard it open.

“Steve, is there something special you like? “you asked.

“Pai-Painting," Steve whispered.

“Tomorrow I'll take you to buy everything you need," you said.

“Steve couldn't look at you, he didn't understand why you were so generous with him.

“Oh, Steve, I have big plans for you," you replied, putting a hand on his cheek.

[palant1r]

you disagree with buying hogwarts legacy on moral grounds (fair), but also think that nobody should be tainted by their association with ‘problematic’ media. how does that work?

i am going to choose to take this anon ask in good faith and assume you have legitimate interest in my thoughts on the distinction. under that framework, this is an interesting question i have a lot of thoughts on, so thanks for asking!

first, we need a definition for "problematic." In my post, i was specifically referring to fiction that depicts things that would be morally objectionable in real life — rape, incest, abuse, pedophilia, murder, etc. because that's most relevant to the proshipper/anti issue i was addressing in that post. however, that's certainly not the only kind of definition one could come up with. when we talk about immoral or problematic media, there are so many ways that could apply and so many things that could be talking about, each with their own ethical concerns. so let's offer up a few different kinds of "problematic" media.

fiction which depicts things that would be ethically wrong in real life -- think game of thrones, dead dove fanfiction, hannibal, lolita, etc

fiction which depicts things that would be ethically wrong in real life, but through a lens that misrepresents or romanticizes these things in a way that reflects poorly on the author's understanding of these real-world issues -- think fifty shades of gray

fiction where the content isn't the focus, but that content was produced by or with the involvement people who are, shall we say, unsavory -- pirates of the caribbean, enders game, harry potter

fiction where the production of the content involved breaches of ethics, and the art exists because immoral things were done -- the shining

and there are many more categories! we cannot have the same conversations about all of these kinds of media, because they each demand their own ethical and critical framework to assess how they affect their consumers and environment, and what constitutes responsible and thoughtful engagement.

if we view media consumption (a term i hate, but it serves our purposes) through the lens of harm reduction, then it's clear why category 1 and category 3 are different. im watching hannibal on tubi right now. this is not harming anyone. similarly, no one would be harmed and no harm would be enabled by me reading some dark fic on ao3. the objection to buying hogwarts legacy is one that's founded on political principles and harm reduction — that is, that monetarily participating in jkr's intellectual property directly enables her to use her influence and money to continue her anti-trans crusade in the UK. and that's a very specific objection. it's not just dependent on what kind of media hogwarts legacy is, but on who benefits from it and what those benefits will result in. i don't even have the same objection to fiction in the same category — i dont feel as strongly about people like, buying a PoTC dvd or a copy of enders game.

to elaborate a bit more on my objection to hogwarts legacy...my thoughts on hogwart's legacy aren't that anyone who buys it should be shunned and isn't a real ally. in fact, it's something im still grappling with, and i havent really pinned down my true thoughts. on one hand, i feel a great frustration with leftists who still buy harry potter media. but on the other hand, i also recognize that HP is still a massive cultural property, and many people in the real world simply do not recognize this concern — and that one person's purchase of a video game isn't going to singlehandedly run JKR's empire. the way i think about hogwarts legacy is far more akin to how i think about chic fil a than how i think about fifty shades of gray — it's part of the debate over ethical consumption under capitalism more than the debate over media. of course, that's not the only objection to hogwarts legacy. from what i've heard, it's pretty damn antisemitic, so i'd certainly side eye anyone i heard gushing about the plot or arguing it contains no bigotry. but that's not part of why i object to buying it, because i think that consuming bigoted media with a critical eye is a crucial part of learning how to dissect the underpinning ideologies involved.

this is part of why i reject the proshipper/anti framing, because so much of the argument seems to be based on the presupposition that a single critical framework can apply to literally every mode of engagement with every single work of art ever made, when my favorite part of media analysis is forming opinions and thoughts about specific works. like, the position of "no one should be tainted by their association with problematic media" is really only accurate to my opinion on category 1, and even then not unconditionally. part of media literacy is meeting each piece of art where it is, and forming thoughts and opinions based on that specific art and how it interfaces with reality, rather than applying a generalized template. for instance, i do actually think that how people engage with and think about art can reflect on their real world morals — but i draw conclusions from how they engage with a work of art, not the mere fact that they engage with that art.

TL:DR: the reason that i have different opinions on different things is because those things are different. nuance baybeeeeeeee

feel free to ask any follow up or clarifying questions!

[calissarowan]

Dark Past, Bright Future, Insane Present Character Aesthetics!

So, I’ve seen other people make character aesthetics, and they just look so cool, so I tried making some of my own for the characters in my fic! Most of the pictures are off Pinterest, which is where I’ve seen other people get their pictures from, so I hope that’s okay. So, without further ado, here we go!

Naomi Hunter:

I struck really lucky with that picture; it looks just like her. I think this is my favourite I did. My goth girl! For context for anyone who hasn’t read the fic, Naomi is the adoptive daughter of the Wizards of the Black Circle, and the Fairy of Form. She’s snark and sarcasm personified, with a quick wit and a quicker mouth. She’s whip-smart, but doesn’t always think her decisions through, usually based off trust issues or her temper.

Roxy Wilde:

Took ages to find hair that looked like Roxy’s, but I’m really happy. And those boots! They’re so totally her! Roxy’s the only one here that everyone knows from canon (Manuel is from the comics, but I’ll be impressed if anyone knows him, and also knows anything about his personality beyond ‘love interest’.) In this story, Roxy’s still much the same as in canon. She’s finding her feet in magic, and being dragged into chaos by Naomi is not what she was expecting, but hey, the best way to learn to swim is just to jump in, right?

Aidan Ross:

He’s my beloved golden retriever. The loving puppy of the group, who just so happens to come with energy whips and genius-level intellect. Aidan is Naomi’s not-yet-boyfriend (but he’ll do a happy dance when that happens), and honestly, if people defined him as just ‘Naomi’s love interest’ in the fandom, he’d be cool with that. But he’s also the group’s tech expert. He’s from Zenith, but the cool, logical mindset of his planet has always evaded him, and he’s got seriously cute puppy energy. Most good occurrences are met with a celebratory dance, and his smile is seldom dimmed. He’s just…an all-around nice guy.

Manuel Vergara:

That picture looks so much like him. His was way easier than Aidan’s; he just has a more defined style. Manuel is the newest addition to this odd little group, and he’s quickly trying to take charge. Raised on Aria as the son of an elite guard, he lives very firmly in a military mindset that he applies to most situations. This makes him effective, if sometimes a bit oblivious or insensitive. He’s one of the best pilots at Red Fountain, even though he’s only a freshman. Aria is mostly built on clouds, so he’s familiar with flight.

Olivia Silvers:

She’ll rise to main-group status later, so she gets an aesthetic. That, and she was just so fun to do this for. Olivia…is not currently on the best terms with the others. Manuel’s girlfriend until he finally wises up and ends it, she’s trying to be Alfea’s queen mean girl, asserting herself in rude and hurtful ways. She thinks Manuel has feelings for Roxy, so she’s jealous of her, and Naomi she just hates since they had an actual fight on the first day of school. She’s social-media obsessed, and something hasn’t happened to her until it’s got fifty likes. She’s actually pretty smart, she just doesn’t tend to apply herself. Used to be a playful sweetheart until she decided to reinvent herself for Alfea.

[wri0thesley]

so sorry to be that guy ack but the corset talk has really reminded me how modern media has ruined people's perception of corsets and women's clothing in general... Corsets are ye olden day equivalent of bras! They provide support, give the impression of a smaller waist silhouette (when it comes to structured corsets) and help with posture! Some enthusiasts of older articles of clothing have taken up to wearing corsets daily and are actually pretty satisfied with them, since they can be unexpectedly comfortable. Some people even wear them during sports!

If a corset is hurting you, or you notice you have trouble breathing while wearing it, then either it is a badly made one or you're wearing it wrong, so always be mindful! Your comfort and safety come first.

Back on the yandere based talk though... How utterly intimate the act of them helping you put it on can be... Someone like Jean or Lisa, oh so kindly agreeing to tie it for you, carefully lacing everything together. Jean would be so careful and patient, making sure everything is laced perfectly and that you're comfortable, while Lisa would watch. She'd run her hands up and down your sides, admiring Jean's handiwork once she's finished. See, you look so good like this, aren't you a beauty? Lisa was right to pick out this pattern, it looks wonderful on a sweet little thing like you!

On the other hand, Kaeya would be more interested in taking it off... It's been a long day, you want to get out of this, so of course Kaeya is here to help you out! Nevermind that you specifically said you don't want his help. He'd be so mean, taking his sweet time with it. And uncharacteristically silent, enough to make you uneasy, frustrated with him. He has a way of toying with your nerves without uttering a single word.

Diluc would ah. Yeah he wouldn't really have experience with this. Leave it to the maids. Maybe you can tease him by asking him to tie it for you, make him all flustered, but in the end the joke's on you bc it would take him half an hour just to make a mess :( Such is the complicated life of Diluc's darling.

oh anon, you absolutely do not need to talk to me about corsets! i wear an underbust corset semi-regularly (i wear fifties repro fashion and it works for the silhouette!) and have talked about it quite a bit here! i get needlessly angry at media about how Corsets Are Bad or scenes about 'oh i hate wearing a corset so much'. the newest bridgerton has a scene where a character says like "my corset is made of whale bones. whales died for me to wear it" and AAAAAGH. it's not. whalebone corsets arent made of whale BONES!!! tell me you did no research without telling me! also that recent news about the bbc/netflix/etc 'banning' corsets over health and safety concerns - JUST MAKE YOUR ACTORS WEAR WELL-FITTED CORSETS? STOP TRYING TO MAKE THEM AS SMALL AS POSSIBLE, JUST GET THEM CUSTOM MADE TO FIT CORRECTLY. ARGH. historical costumery my greatest foe . . .

(i also find mine super helpful for grounding and i know that's very common! i have shitty posture and it helps with that but also the feel of it being there holding me makes me feel a lot more Present! i will also always be an avid Shouter Of Not Buying Shitty eBay or Amazon corsets and supporting a creator or small business!)

ANYWAY

lisa . . . ack. miss lisa. lisa and jean talking about how pretty you look in what they picked out!

i simply think that there is something so much sexier about darling slipping off their gown and being in stockings and chemise and corset . . . so intimate, but still so covered up. diluc is having a breakdown.

[cowpokezuko]

At the risk of actually having an opinion on the anti/proship fandom wank, something that I see often and would just like to take a moment to refute is the idea that propaganda and transgressive content have the same effect. 

I often hear the argument that “media affects reality, i.e Jaws made people afraid of sharks”. Yes. Some people are afraid of sharks because they saw the movie Jaws and that made them scared of sharks. HOWEVER, you are forgetting that humans have been afraid of sharks for centuries. Jaws was made because people have always been afraid of sharks. There was a market for that type of thrill. Horror movies are supposed to scare people, and had Jaws not been made, people would have been scared of sharks all the same. Jaws is a product of a fear, not a cause. 

This same idea goes for fear mongering propaganda against marginalized people. People in 1920s Germany were already anti-semitic, whether they watch Triumph of the Will or not didn’t make them hate Jewish people more, it just made them more confident in this belief. This kind of hateful propaganda is something that gets whipped up by news media, artists, and interpersonal relationships and is built off preconceived biases. It’s the kind of things that permeates the entire world of people who are already more susceptible to this sort of confirmation bias. They get so consumed by their hate because they literally never experience anything outside of it. However, that still doesn’t mean the fictional content they’re consuming caused this hate. New stories, misinfo or not, social biases, upbringing, and pseudo science are more often the culprits for making people into bigots than film or literature, though it does play a part. 

This is not taboo/fetish content though. This is targeted hate at an already marginalized group. They are not born from the same stock and they do not serve the same conversation. There is a very real and legitimate conversation to be had about the effects of propaganda and the damage it does, but that conversation does not carry over to incest porn or whatever. 

Taboo content is oft created because it is extremely interesting to the creator as either a storytelling device or as jerk off material or even because of something suffered in their past and now they make weird art to vent about it. None of these motivations have nearly the same end goal as the men who created Birth of a Nation. Sometimes transgressive content is made to make people afraid, uncomfortable, horny, or all three at once, and that’s okay. It’s important to make weird shit that shakes up the rather drab status quo. 

It’s also important to remember that there are better and worse ways to handle dark topics in fiction, but for that conversation, I would like to direct you all to Folding Ideas video “A Lukewarm Defence of Fifty Shades of Grey” as he is a better writer and presenter than I. 

Also please remember to block any tags that make you uncomfortable, shit talk things amongst friends, and bear in mind that not everything is for you and that’s okay. You don’t have to like taboo content, I truly don’t care, but it’s not worth it to bother other people about it. If you feel the need to rb something that makes you uncomfortable with mean words, please go outside and touch some grass, listen to some birds, and go for a walk. 

TL:DR please stop using racist propaganda to justify your discomfort as shitty false equivalency. They are not the same at all actually and both deserve more nuance than just comparing them. Block things liberally. 

[kitkatopinions]

New rwby ep dropped V9 ep6, my thoughts, praise, and criticisms (as well as obvious spoilers) beneath the keep reading.

Praise:

I'll give it to rwby, the twist that Alyx had a brother was not expected! I'm proud of them, actually, the two falling lights and the guy in the portrait, and even the footprints in the sand, that was all well done foreshadowing! Good on them.

The blink and you'll miss it reflection of Summer in the water is well done, not a lot of attention drawn to it.

Might hate that Jaune is here, but his line delivery of things like "I was the Rusted Knight" is well done too. Perfectly captures Jaune having wanted to be that, it captured his old feelings of pride that he must've felt, while obviously still bittersweet.

The thing is that I'm half-convinced that Jaune is going to be a secret accidental antagonist, and that his story about Alyx is him being an unreliable narrator, and if that's the case then to me the scene where he talks about Alyx seems - as of right now - pretty good!

The animators are once again knocking themselves out of the park on Blake's facial expressions.

I've already said it in another post, but it deserves repeating that after ten years, rwby confirmed main characters as queer. No matter how it's done (and I talk about my problems with it below) and how badly it's been handled before, it's a point blank period good thing and every bit of rep we see on screen helps normalize it and encourage it as expected for future media.

Again, I have very little praise.... Um, the sound effects remained good? That's all I've got tbh.

Criticism:

Me seeing even a moment of Jaune's POV going through a similar thing to Ruby in the beginning of ep1 was a curse. I am sincerely starting to hate him, and that's such a sad thing because I'm one of the few rwby critics who ever liked him at all (mostly as a concept, he's been used so badly,) but I just get so sick of seeing him and now me at Jaune is like:

Honestly they really just wanted Jaune to get a time-skip and be super old but needed an excuse for why the same thing didn't happen to Team RWBY so they went with special time fruit that he picked that sent Jaune back in time in the Ever After and created himself as the rusted knight he knew from the story in a time-loop worthy of Doctor Who. But I think it's stupid as hell. Sure Jaune jus yank a clock-fruit off of a clock-tree, that sounds like a good idea. /s Sure writers, just make a clock-tree that sends Jaune back in time, that sounds like a good idea. /s

Little is still an annoying intrusion.

Weiss being into Jaune is a bad choice.

I know it's hard for these writers because Jaune fans make up like fifty percent of their most loyal fans (the other fifty are bees shippers,) but if they could stop trying to convince us that Jaune is hot that would be great. Especially because let's not forget that Jaune was a total nice guy to Weiss, bothering her when she'd made it very clear she wasn't interested and I know 'times change' or whatever but it's a bad look to have her thirsting after him now and again it's just gonna feed the more misogynistic Jaune fans.

They cut away from Jaune actually telling Team RWBY what happened of course. Why would the audience want to see characters react to things when we can just understand they had emotions off screen? /s This is just like Yang's story about landing in the Ever After, we just brush it aside, but it makes the emotions so shallow and lacking.

Ruby: "We lost Atlas and the Relic." Blake: "But we got everyone out safely." NOOOoooooo babygirl, you did not do that. Not only were tons of soldiers sacrificed to try and hold her back, but Cinder attacked citizens on that bridge and apparently they were dead in the explosion, and also the Mantle and Atlas citizens were tossed into the middle of a sandstorm and got attacked by Grimm and that last one might not something the girls know, but they know the rest and nobody protests that Blake and Jaune both just think everyone is safe? This is especially weird to me considering that they don't know that Qrow, Robyn, Maria, and Pietro are safe (and they might not be!) And Penny is literally fucking dead. Like no, you guys are just delusional tbh and at this point I legit feel like the writers are trying to manipulate their fans into thinking that what they watched wasn't actually what they watched.

Ruby: "What good is saving anybody if Salem just destroys the world anyway?" Yang: "That's how Ironwood thought." So that's boiling down the volume 7 problem to being incredibly simplistic and tbh in not a very fair way (this is acting like Ironwood didn't want to save anyone in volume 7 and it's acting like Team RWBY had any real plan in volume 7 themselves,) but it's also.... Not wrong. If Salem gets all the Relics, the world could end and kill literally every person alive, Ruby is just saying 'we should've prioritized her not getting a doomsday key because not doing that could lead to Salem KILLING EVERYONE ALIVE ON THE PLANET. Yang is acting like being slightly realistic for two seconds is being on the path of villainy!

Blake's like "Hope the Cat is okay." I understand that the girls are processing a lot, but some of them didn't even think about the Cat risking itself, risking death, after having been freaked out by the Jabberwalker, and now the most they can muster when they remembered it existed at all is "yeah hope it's okay." Shouldn't they be slightly more worried about the life of an ally?

Jaune needs to take a million chill pills. Mr. Trauma he may be but if it's a choice between him or the Cat... I'm taking the cat. And he needs to not pull a "team RWBY" and draw his weapons on people. What was he gonna do, kill the cat? Nice thought, that Jaune might want to be a cold-blooded out-of-anger murderer as well as a it's-what-she-wanted out of kindness murderer.

Weiss: "We've been following this story the whole time and it's not even true?!" Okay, let's review. They arrived in the Ever After and a couple of things that happened to Alyx also happened to them so they assumed that they were going through the story in the same way as her - which is why they played the game with the Red Prince - but then when they beat the Prince's game same as Alyx, they got wildly off track without any of them mentioning it while none of them recognized the Cat right away and encountered a whole character who didn't exist in the book and then said they were off book, and then they went to a market to get a growgurt with none of them even sort of saying Alyx had done the same iirc, And now Weiss is insisting that they have been following the story? No, they stopped doing that like two episodes ago, right? The only thing they've been trying to do in the story is just go to the Tree, and they've been relying on the Cat for that since they ran from the Prince, not the book. So why is Weiss now acting like they've been following in Alyx's footsteps the whole time? They already know the Ever After contains lots of things that weren't in the original book - like the concept of Ascencion and the Caterpillar and other things they act like they don't know about like the loop, so why are they now acting like the story not containing everything in the Ever After is new?

So because of people being mad at the Cat, either the Cat or Ever After itself put everyone in a "punderstorm" (stupid name,) which is a "physical manifestation of a mental or emotional problem" (It's implied the Cat did it, but I'm unsure.) This is another thing that isn't in the Ever After book based on the reactions of the girls, and it immediately punishes Weiss for saying its the pits? Implying that the Ever After itself is an entity with enough consciousness to be offended? Also the gag where Weiss falls through the hole and then reappears falling on her back is very Marvel, very Spongebob. Oddly enough Weiss is just like "yep my bad lol" and doesn't say something like "omg did the Ever After itself just punish me for insulting it?!"

Jaune says the only way out is to fix the problem or 'wait for the storm to pass' before he directs them to keep moving before saying that Blake and Yang must've had 'something bigger' to work out. Here's the thing with that. Yeah, Blake and Yang did have their feelings to talk to each other about, but the Ever After forces them away from the others to talk about their emotional problem, and didn't like, force Jaune and Ruby into a place where he tells her he killed Penny? It doesn't force Ruby to stand across from her teammates and tell them she can't take everything anymore and it isn't fair that she's carrying them on her shoulders? The Ever After doesn't trap Weiss until she works out her clear emotional problems about losing Atlas? The Ever After doesn't put Jaune across from the Cat until they make up again over the situation with Alyx and Lewis? Why is it that Blake and Yang get singled out? Oh yeah, because the writers are singling them out. They might as well have had the RWBY writers appear on screen and shuffle Blake and Yang away from the others while breaking the fourth wall to tell the camera Office-style that they just can't write for characters to do things naturally so please stick with 'em for this brief intermission.

Blake and Yang need to get to the platform in the middle!

It's too bad that they aren't hunters who can launch themselves into the air or have weapons that help them with that!

Yang earlier: "Wasn't Alyx bad? She lied and cheated her way through the whole book." Jaune now: "She wasn't just a little petulant, or inconsiderate. She was selfish, cruel." Either Jaune misread Alyx in the book or Yang did, lol. 'A little petulant' is a minor character flaw (and every character ought to have at least one character flaw,) being a bad example for little kids on what not to do and a liar and a cheat through the whole story is something else entirely! This is hilarious, Jaune and Yang would've been out there accusing the other of being brainless antis who didn't read the same story. XD

So Alyx poisoned Jaune and he died? He says "I was dead" So... how did he come back to life? Is he alive?

Also it's worth noting that Blake and Yang don't even call for Weiss, Ruby, or Jaune and don't act worried about them at all despite the fact that "punderstorms" and their role is clearly also not part of the book. That's not helping the 'no they do care about other people' argument tbh.

Yang: "I like that you've never been intimidated by me." No lie, when I heard this, I burst out laughing. Blake has never been intimidated by Yang? She acted like Yang would hit her because Yang chose to go on a separate mission! Blake has been animated to make worried faces all season long while she tries to patiently coax Yang into not losing her temper like one would talk to a five year old. Blake has acted hesitant to express her worries with Yang - heck, throughout most of season six, Blake was acting like she was waiting for Yang to hit her, and their 'triumphant' moment in volume six was Blake sobbingly trying to assure Yang that she wouldn't ever leave her. Again, these characters are acting like they're delusional. Yang claiming that Blake has never been intimidated by her when Blake as recently as three in-universe days ago at least was ducking her head with a sad face and hunched shoulders while she waited for a scolding looking like she feared being hit because Yang had left her... It just makes Yang look like she doesn't pay any attention to Blake really, and during their love confession, that's a very bad look!

I would so much prefer a love confession where Blake and Yang naturally just told each other how they felt or kissed in the heat of a moment or something rather than having them forced into it, not only is it very fanfic in the worst way but it's also.... Cutting it kind of close to uncomfortable. If I was forced to confess my attraction to another girl, then no matter how sure I felt about my own feelings or how sure I felt that she felt the same way, I'd be pissed off. The fact that Blake and Yang are just like "aww I think we have to tell each other how we feel uwu" and not being like "god the Ever After doesn't even know if we're out and they're forcing this on us?" is weird lol.

Blake and Yang start telepathy communicating with each other?? I think??? And neither of them reacts to it????

Also here's the thing, being completely honest when I don't ship something, the attention and focus the ship gets and the shipping scenes are annoying to me. It's the same thing with Arthur and Gwen in Merlin, it's the same thing with having to watch Aragorn kiss Arwen. It's a complaint that I don't expect or even want to be adhered to because I'm not the only person in the world and I do think Blake and Yang needed the confirmation they got (though with most ships I don't ship my problems usually extend to not thinking they're super well done,) but it did lessen my personal enjoyment of the episode that such a large chunk of it was devoted to this ship that I honestly don't really like. This would be a skip on every watch through tbh.

Jaune: "Feels like I've been waiting forever for that." Buddy, when have you talked to Blake or Yang for more than a minute? Jaune is not only like twenty years removed from this situation but has very little established closeness between either girl involved. I feel like this would be like if I went back to my hometown in ten years and saw two friends of my sister kissing and I was like "I've been waiting forever for that!"

At first I thought I liked the Celtic Women style song that plays when Blake and Yang kiss, but on my second watch of this ep, I feel like I don't.

Anyway, those are my thoughts.... 2/10 episode. Pretty bad generally.

[respectthepetty]

I am currently hooked on Past-senger. I don't know how possibly may have a happy ending but I am enjoying its lightness and humor. Did you notice Bamee house is the house of Tonhon in TonhonChonlatee?

I have tried Love syndrome III because I like its protagonists but it's terrible. How can the acting be that bad? I know from other series they are not that bad.

How the Koreans manage to give us such a steady string of wonderful stories such as Unintentional love story and The eighth sense? They always leave me with a nice aftertaste I don't get anywhere else.

Anon, Taiwanese BLs are my favorite, but I appreciate Thai QLs because so many are produced compared to the ZERO I've gotten from Taiwan in 2023. ZERO! The last BL Taiwan offered was HIStory 5: Love in the Future, which shared the time travel theme with Past-Senger, and as much as I love Taiwanese BLs and the HIStory franchise, I think Past-Senger did a better job with it.

Quantity does not equal quality, so Thailand having over fifty QLs a year doesn't necessarily equate to great stories or production value, but, much like Vietnamese and Filipino QLs, there is always a solid foundation with some heart at its core. Also, Thai series are easily available, for free. I haven't nor will I watch Love Syndrome III because I will hate it, and not in a fun hate-watch way, but some who watched it liked it because that's the beauty of variety; we have more to pick from based on what we like and there is something for everyone.

Past-Senger, with its Tonhon Chonlatee house, has its issues, and there are plenty including spotty sound, a clumsy final quarter, and odd pacing, but as you mentioned, it does humor well, and it takes the time-traveling aspect seriously compared to HIStory 5. When Kiew lands in the future, he is constantly reminded that he is out of place and not meant to be there, while HIStory 5 spent the first episode on that idea, then quickly moved along.

Korea tends to go back to the past (Tinted With You and Once Again) or for reincarnation (First Love Again and The Director Who Buys Me Dinner), but there is always in underlying melancholy to these since the narrative makes it clear these are "right person, wrong time" stories. Korea loves a time skip like Japan loves to make its guys run. But the issue most people as well as I have with Korean BLs is they are too short to properly develop the plot, the characters, and the resolution. For me, something is always rushed or lacking.

Yet Our Dating Sim has done the best "left him because I love him" plot out of all the QLs I've watched, and I think Star Struck might do well with it also. Both also demonstrate the Korean staple of "right person, wrong time" with time jumps that I just complained about, yet they are done well here.

As much as I stay rooting for Taiwan, I appreciate a range of queer media because every show is doing something different; therefore, each show has the possibility of doing it better.

Gameboys and Hello, Stranger, both Filipino offerings, gave us love stories about the pandemic DURING the pandemic, but unlike my Taiwanese See You After Quarantine?, I feel like some dismissed them simply because they were Filipino even though Gameboys was one of the biggest BLs of 2020 with its mask-off scene.

I have trash taste. I didn't like Bad Buddy overall and I have intentionally never watched a MAME series, so you don't have to trust one word I wrote here, but all of this is really to tell you that as great as Korean dramas are, I encourage you to continue dabbling in other countries' offerings every now and then. I'm a HIStory 4: Close to Me whore first, and a human second, but I loved being surprised by how Bed Friends handled healing from trauma through a sexual relationship, how Moonlight Chicken presented generational and economic differences through a queer lens, and how Kabe Koji and My Beautiful Man showed how distorted views of self-worth can drastically harm the people who love us.

Gems are everywhere. We just have to be willing to shuffle through some dirt to find them. Consider Love Syndrome III your dirt, but perhaps a Mame series will be your gem.