#he accepted impulsively but it was a good choice

[whitedarkmoonflower]

Need a ride?

Pairing: Valentin x reader (female)

Authors note: this was not planed, but that scene with Valentin on the bike was just too hot to process. You can officially blame my cat who woke me at 3 am today if this totally sucks.

Warnings: plot? never heard of it. Pure SMUT. Sex in public, Valentin giving quite some Dom vibes, fingering, oral, p in v

Word Count: 3,1 K

Summary: your tire is mysteriously gotten flat and you have no other choice as to accept the offer of a ride home from Valentin - the insanely sexy health mentor you've been eyeing from the moment you started working at The White Lotus luxury resort

“Need a ride?” a familiar, soft voice rich with that insanely sexy accent reaches you over the hum of the idling bike as it comes to a stop beside you. 

For a moment your confused gaze remains glued on the completely flat tire of your moped, as if trying to will it to reinflate by your sheer disbelief only, before you slowly lift your eyes to meet that cheeky smile you’ve been fond of since the first moment you set your foot on the grounds of the luxury resort that was supposed to be you new home for a while. 

It might not have been the most rational decision of your life to drop out of the university for a spiritual self-discovery trip through the East but it was definitely not the worst. OK, you ran out of money after something like one month, but that didn’t mean you were ready to give up on your plans. 

Thailand being your next destination after having left behind the breathtaking temples of Cambodia and incredibly beautiful landscapes of Vietnam, you decided to combine business with pleasure as you stormed the manager’s office of The White Lotus – the biggest and probably most expensive resort in the area – the advertisement from the local newspaper, announcing that the hotel was looking for an English speaking service staff, clutched in your hand. 

You weren’t naive, nor were you particularly experienced or life hardened. Something in between. You were impulsive, stubborn and still liked to believe in stories where the good guys saved the world and won the princess, even if deep down you knew it not to be true.

“I don’t understand,” you murmur with slight puzzlement in your voice as your gaze shifts back to your moped. “Everything was perfectly fine when I parked it here this morning.”

“Let me see,” the smooth, velvety voice makes your stomach flutter as the engine goes silent and a pair of leather gloves land carelessly on the tank as their owner swings off the bike and moves toward you.

“You’re new here, I haven’t seen you before,” there is something in the way he looks at you that makes you feel both – a cold shiver creeping up your spine and heat hitting your cheeks.

New is quite a relative term. Yes, you’ve been here for just three weeks, yet you are perfectly aware who is the handsome owner of the only Harley Davidson for the miles around even if he has apparently remained oblivious to your very existence.

But you also have to admit that it is hard not to notice Valentin – the resort’s infuriatingly handsome health mentor and fitness guru, especially when he remains number one topic of nearly every piece of gossip going around. 

Last week he was spotted sneaking out in the middle of the night from the private villa of that arrogant rich bitch from South Dakota, the one who had been terrorising the whole hotel for weeks already – the pool wasn’t warm enough, the massage table was not comfortable, the food was terrible and God forbid she was served the wrong champagne with the oysters. It seemed almost like a miracle to see her smiling the next morning at breakfast. 

Then there was that rumor that the swollen lip and the spectacularly bruised eye of one of the hotel’s personal trainers had nothing to do with the alleged jump rope accident but rather with an argument about a stolen client, apparently ending with Valentin throwing a punch. Though no one could really confirm if that part was true, some still swore of having seen him leaving the gym with blood on his knuckles.

Ah, and, of course, there was the affair, or at least, that’s what the housekeeping staff whispered about after noticing how the resort owner’s wife, easily twice as young as her husband, by the way, had taken an unusual interest in the fitness center with private stretching lessons,  late-night sauna sessions and meditation practices once of a sudden becoming a regular part of her so called wellness routine. 

Yet, despite all the fuss, you have to admit you’ve never actually seen him be anything but polite and smiling. And you have seen him. Just like everyone else, you find it impossible to look away from that broad muscular chest when he strides through the resort only clad in his yogi pants, heading to greet the new arrivals, or from those flexing biceps when you happen to pass by the training ground with him having a course - not that you’d ever admit to staring or having actually no business around there during that time of the day.

A broad chest clad in a snug dark green t-shirt that does more to accentuate than cover the perfectly chiseled muscles beneath, moves past you and your gaze involuntary drops down and lands on his hand, the conversation from the previous day rushing back absolutely uninvited. 

“Have you noticed how big his hands are?” The question had made you freeze mid-motion, the pillowcase in your hands nearly slipping to the floor. 

“Huh?” You had blinked and raised your brow questioningly, turning to Pam, your coworker, a nice girl you became friends almost immediately. 

“You know what they say…,” she had leaned in, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper and giving you a knowing wink.

You had frowned, not really getting it this time, until Pam rolled her eyes, her cheeks already turning pink, as she cleared her throat. “The ones with big hands have big… you know… big khm…,” she had nodded meaningfully toward the lower part of her body.

It still had taken you a second before it finally clicked.

“Ahhh, you mean his dick,” you had said, watching as Pam practically choked on air, her face turning red as a beet, while you burst into laughter.

Yes, it is big. His hand.

“I’m Valentin,” he introduces himself, extending his hand like he expects you not to already know his name.

You hesitate for a second before shaking it, his grip is firm but warm, his somewhat rough fingers sending an unexpected jolt up your arm.

“I know,” you say, then immediately cringe at how blunt it sounds.

His smirk deepens, amusement flickering in those sharp eyes. “You know?”

You clear your throat, crossing your arms over your chest. “Everyone talks about you.”

“Good things, I hope?”

You let out a short laugh. “Depends on who you ask.”

He tilts his head, as if considering your words, then glances at your moped. “Well, I hate to break it to you, but this tire isn’t going to fix itself.”

You sigh, rubbing your temples. “Yeah, I figured. I just don’t understand – how does a perfectly fine tire suddenly go flat?”

Valentin crouches down, inspecting it. “Sometimes, it just happens. Heat, pressure, bad luck. Or…” He pauses, running a finger along the rubber.

You frown. “Or?”

He straightens, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Or someone let the air out.”

A chill prickles at your skin despite the humid air. “You think someone did this on purpose?”

“I think someone doesn’t want you going anywhere tonight,” his gaze shifts back to you, and his tongue flickers between his teeth as he licks his bottom lip. 

Shit, why does it look so fucking hot. That tongue can definitely do more. Wait, no, stop, you innerly slap yourself but it’s too late, the next thought is already there as you wonder – is it true, that thing about big hands and big… you know…

He heads back to his bike, and leans against it, arms crossed, watching you closely. “So… need a ride?”

Your heart stutters at the way he looks at you – his lips are smiling, but there is something in his eyes, something you can’t quite put your fingers on, something that makes you feel like a mouse before a big grinning cat.

You should say no, you should figure this out on your own, but the way he’s looking at you – the way he’s offering, like it’s not just a ride but something more – makes it very, very hard to refuse. 

Fuck it, we ball, you smile back at him and nod. “Yeah, that would be nice.”

—-----------------------------------------------------

“Take it easy, little doll, relax and enjoy the ride,” the hot whisper against your ear does exactly the opposite, you feel your heart racing even faster, each thumping beat pulsing between your legs, as you struggle to calm your breathing that threatens to spill into moans at any second if those thick fingers don’t stop their slow, torturous movement. 

“I… I can’t… Valentin, please…,” you breathe, your fingers gripping the edge of the table for support but your thighs part just a little wider beneath it.

The bar is dim, only the dance floor flashing in neon bursts, drawing all attention away from the shadowed corners and the shallow booths positioned along the walls with tables and red leather, plush and comfortable sofas - all tucked away in just barely enough secrecy to keep you somewhat hidden. A small mercy you feel thankful for, the sound of the pounding bass of the music  being another one, as it drowns out that moan you can’t bite back anymore as Valentin’s fingers push your panties aside, part from your pulsing clit and glide through your wet folds, to slid inside you with devastating ease. 

“You’re soaking, baby doll, just sitting here, waiting for daddy Valentin to take care of you, aren’t you?” That velvety voice edged with steel is killing you, not that those fingers inside you, curling, stretching, teasing, his thumb brushing firm, controlled circles against your clit, is making it any easier to gather any coherent thought. 

“Mmmmm… mmhhh,” is the only thing that rolls over your lips, your body reacts instinctively, muscles clenching around him, spine arching slightly against the seat as you melt into the sensation and sink back against the cushioned backrest, legs falling open just a little bit more, surrendering. 

Valentine’s other arm sneaks around your shoulders, pulling you closer, his lips brushing against your earlobe.

“Such a good girl, aren’t you?” he rasps. “Want me to ruin you, don’t you? Want me to fuck that tight, greedy pussy of yours, until you can’t walk anymore?”

“Ahh-ahhh,” your moan is barely muffled as his fingers curl against the wall of your core and press into that spot inside you that makes your vision blur and your toes curl. Oh, fuck, he’s good. 

The bar is full, the booth next to you crowded with a group of friends, laughing and clinking their glasses, but you don’t care. You can’t. Your head is spinning, thoughts dissolving, and every last bit of your self-control is fading away, all your senses dulled and consumed by the feeling of his fingers inside you, by that hypnotic voice dripping filth into your ear. 

How did you even end up here? The ride, the bike, your arms wrapped tight around his steel cut abdomen, holding for dear life – the memory is somewhat hazy, swept away in the whirlwind that is Valentin.  You can still feel the wind lashing against your skin, your breath stolen as you tucked yourself against his broad back.

“Wanna go out for a drink? You have a free day tomorrow, don’t you?” The question had sounded so casual but there was something in Valentin’s voice, some slight metallic tone, that  should have been a warning, a sign to you. 

“Yeah, sure! Why not?” words had left your lips too easily, although you couldn’t shake off the feeling like you were a prey stepping into a trap, absolutely willingly – if you wanted to be honest with yourself. 

Because of all the whispers that followed Valentin, one was clearly absent – he never went out with anyone from the staff, never even really flirted. Never. Not that they didn’t want him to. The majority of the serving staff being girls, you knew for sure that most of them would kill to go out with the dangerously handsome health mentor, but he never asked. Not until now, not until you.

And you were certainly not letting this chance slip away through your fingers, to see more of him in real life, outside the resort's controlled microclimate. Was it a Russian roulette you were playing? Absolutely, and you were all in for it. 

“Fuck… yes,... oh shit, it feels so good…,” your whines are swallowed by the pounding music, your body trembling as you feel his fingers move faster, expertly working you toward the edge and then you’re coming undone in a bar full of people, music thumping in your ears in sync with your rapid heartbeat. 

Your eyes are heavy and half lidded, head fallen back against the plush backrest, your panties are ruined, completely drenched, and your hips keep rocking instinctively chasing the pleasure he’s drawing out of you. Was this how you thought the evening would end? Fuck, yes! And something tells you it’s far from over. 

“Breathe, kitten,” Valentin’s voice is a dark purr in your ear and it slowly brings you back to reality, as he withdraws his fingers from you. You whine quietly, your thighs twitching at the loss, and your eyes flutter open, finding his gaze already on you. 

Valentin is watching you, a spark of satisfaction dancing in his gaze, his thumb brushes over your bottom lip, a teasing ghost of a touch, then he leans in.

“I want you to put that pretty mouth of yours to work, sweetheart. Will you do that for me?”

You sit up, straightening your spine as you reach for the champagne glass on the table, fingers slightly shaking. 

“Here?” you ask, turning to him. “You want me to give you head here, where everyone can see?”

“If you are up to it, baby doll,” Valentine’s smirk deepens, amusement dancing on his lips, and it just makes your heart skip a beat. 

“But I think you are very much enjoying this, aren’t you?” He leans closer, taking the glass from your fingers, lifting it to his lips and taking a slow, deliberate sip. 

Then, without breaking eye contact, he pulls you back against his chest, while his hand captures yours, guiding it downward and pressing your palm against the hardness straining beneath his pants.

“Look at what you’ve done to me.” 

Fuck, even through the thick fabric, he feels huge, and you can’t help but smirk as the thought slips in that it must be all true, that thing about the hands and the dicks.

Your eyes wander around the room, taking in how the dance floor pulses with bodies under shifting neon lights, the waitresses weaving between tables, laughter and music filling the air, you swallow harshly as the thought alone of sucking him off here practically in public in the tenuous cover of some shifting shadows sends a fresh surge of heat pooling in your core.

Your fingers already move on their own as the heavy buckle unfastens with a soft clink and the zipper parts beneath your touch. You slide a hand inside, wrapping around the length of him, drawing him out.

Valentin inhales drawing air through his teeth, a low growl rumbling in his chest, as your fingers tease over his leaking tip, his fingers weave through the strands of your hair with just enough force to make your scalp tingle, as his grip tightens and he urges you down, his silent command unmistakable.

You glance up at him, meeting his darkened gaze, the corner of his mouth lifts in amusement, watching you, waiting.

Your fingers trail along his length, teasing, feeling the weight of him in your palm. Fuck, he’s big, thick, hot, pulsing against your skin.

Slowly, you lean in, your lips parting as you let your tongue flick over the swollen tip, tasting the beads of precum gathering there and Valentin exhales sharply, a curse slipping from his lips.

"Good girl," he murmurs, his voice dissipating in the thumping bass of the music.

You take him deeper, wrapping your lips around him, savoring the way his breath hitches as he disappears into the wet heat of your mouth. 

“May I get you something else,” you hear the voice of the waitress through the haze and you freeze, unsure what to do, adrenaline surges through your veins, making your heart hammer in your chest. Panic and arousal clash violently inside you, but Valentin’s hand in your hair firmly keeps you exactly where he wants you and you don’t know what you feel more shame or the intoxicating thrill of surrender. The way he controls you, the way he holds you in place without a second of hesitation, sends a sensation through you that you've never felt before and it's rush is so deep it steals your breath.

“Thank you darling, we are well served,” his voice is smooth, utterly composed as if he weren't sitting here with his cock buried in your mouth. You can't see the waitress, your face covered by your disheveled hair, the footsteps fade away, and before you can even process what just happened Valentin guides you back down his cock, resuming the steady rhythm of your movements, and you can't but moan around him. Your tongue glides along the thick vein running down his length and you hollow your cheeks, taking him deeper, feeling him twitch against your tongue, his groan is low and guttural, barely restrained and that sound alone makes your core tighten with need.

"Just like that, kitten," he rasps, his hips jerking slightly, pushing himself further into your mouth, your own pulse pounds in your ears, matching the rhythm of the music, the sensation of him filling you overwhelming and electric. Your fingers tighten around the base of his cock as you set a steady pace, sliding up and down, working him with eager precision, and you feel his thighs tense beneath your touch, the muscles flexing under your fingers. 

You take him deeper, moaning around him, letting the vibration send a shudder through his entire body.

"Fucking hell…," Valentin’s hand tightens in your hair, his head falls back against the booth, his jaw clenched, his chest rising and falling unevenly, you can feel how close he is to letting go and coming undone right here and now, and that thought alone makes you throb between your legs, but before you can push him over that edge, he tugs you back by the hair, pulling you off him with a slick pop. Your lips are wet, swollen, and you look up at him, dazed, your breath coming in short gasps, Valentin smirks down at you, his chest heaving, his cock still thick and flushed in your hand.

"Naughty little thing," he murmurs, his thumb swiping over your bottom lip, his voice rough with barely-contained lust. "That was good. But I’m not done with you yet."

He drags you up, his mouth hovering just above yours, as he whispers. "Now, let’s see how well you take me when it’s your turn. Do you want daddy to fuck you? I know you do,” and before you can even respond, he’s already moving, pulling you into his lap, his strong hands gripping your hips as his fingers push your panties aside once more, the head of his cock is already at your entrance. 

“You know how to play this game, don’t you?” he asks, his mismatched eyes boring into you. You nod, swallowing hard.

“Your colour, baby doll?” 

You know exactly what he’s asking, your mind is hazy, body burning, every nerve tuned to him but there’s no fear, no hesitation, only raw, unfiltered desire.

“Green,” you breathe, and he pulls you down in one swift motion, burying himself inside you to the hilt.

A sharp gasp rips from your throat, your body shuddering as his thick shaft fills you completely in one go, while one of his hands wraps around your throat and the other digs into the soft flesh of your ass beneath your dress, and with that nothing else exists anymore.

The bar, the people, the distant pulse of the music, it all fades away, the only thing that matters is Valentin and his cock twitching inside you, stretching you just right, the firm grip on your throat owning you completely.

You don’t care about anything, there is no room for shame or doubt in your mind, it’s too overtaken by the indescribable pleasure of that simple feeling of giving up the control, of surrendering to that commanding voice and those mismatched stern eyes.

And then he fucks you, his hips thrust up into you, filling you deeper, harder, while his hand guide you, making you bounce on his cock, while his grip on your throat tightens—not too much, never too far—just enough to make your head spin in the best way, and soon, you're a mess, a drooling, moaning, wrecked mess.

—-----------------------------------------------------

When you open your eyes, the sunlight streaming through the curtains tells you it’s already well past midday.

Your head is heavy, your body sore in all the possible ways, and you have no idea how you got home, but here you are, back in your bed tucked beneath your light blanket.

You shift beneath the sheets, and that’s when you feel it, an arm draped around your waist and a firm chest pressed against your back.

Your breath catches, the memories of last night crash over you all at once, flooding your senses as you jolt upright, a soft, mortified moan slipping past your lips.

"Good morning, sweet baby doll," the voice is rich, smooth – so damn pleased with itself, you turn slowly, and there he is. Valentin, bare-chested, relaxed, watches you with that signature smirk that sends heat pooling low in your belly.

"Can I get you something for breakfast?" He stretches lazily, completely unbothered by your flustered state. "You must be starving."

[regonold]

I love the image that after danny has his appointment with bruce he's left alone with jason and he's just

Danny: jason is there something you want to explain

Jason: no not particularly

Danny who described his assistants likes to bruce who started weeping because it sounded so much like what jason would like and he's now stressing: nothing at all your sure???

The Medium and his assistant

Amity Park was a roller coaster, but after eliminating the GIW, talking to the Fentons, and getting some sort of alliance with the ghosts, Danny felt like he didn't have much else to do. He took Ellie's advice to travel a bit, but tried to make it a little more exciting.

Although the money he had been given could last forever (and longer with Vlad's card in his pocket), he wanted to earn his own money. So he made his trip a fun job, turning part of his vehicle into a trailer. Thus was born his career as a medium and fortune teller, traveling around the world, listening to the dead, advising people, etc.

Technically, thanks to Clockwork Danny could see the future, but he doesn't need it, or at least not always. And talking to the dead was practically his day-to-day, so he thought he had chosen well.

During one of his trips, when he passed through Gotham he found a zombie (which turned out to be a halfa!), the poor thing was lost, and wandering, so he helped him and did the most sensible thing possible: he offered him a job. Jason, who hadn't been back for a long time and his memories were scrambled, decided that he needed a vacation anyway, for his own sanity (not seeing the Joker's face was a bonus) and accepted the offer. Of course, he covered his face in case someone recognized him as the son of a millionaire, Danny approved.

Both traveled around the world, offering their services and bothering a certain Constantine who complained every time they had the same client (Danny replied that it really wasn't his fault, but the British man was still upset). A year later they returned to Gotham.

The Batfam assumed that Danny's business was a scam. But Bruce was desperate, he wanted to talk with Jason, to hear about him, even if it was a scam, so he visited them. When Danny asked who he wanted to contact, Bruce replied "Jason Todd."

Danny, who knew full well the identity of his employee, raised an eyebrow and glanced surreptitiously at his assistant, who was avoiding his gaze. He sighed before continuing his 'work', glancing at Jay from time to time.

A few days later, Dick Grayson showed up with the same request, and Danny made sure to kick Jason as soon as he left.

[kashverse]

us and geto having a selfcare day together? haircare, skincare, masks, nails all that good sh★t

wishing all the gays and girls and everyone in between to find a man like this 🙉💗🕺💐 happy birthday getooo <3

self-care sundays with your fiancé suguru are an event. they require extensive planning, a dedicated budget (suguru’s black card), and, most importantly, the unwavering commitment to looking unreasonably good while doing absolutely nothing.

the setup is pristine: warm candlelight flickering on the dresser, a bluetooth speaker playing kali uchis like it’s a sacred ritual, and your bed covered in self-care products. you’re both dressed in matching cow-print pajamas, a last-minute online impulse buy that suguru pretended to be unimpressed with but now wears with a very unserious level of smugness.

“ready?” you ask, holding up a jar of an expensive face mask. suguru tilts his head, arms crossed. “depends. is this the one that tingles and makes me question my choices, or the one that smells like an overpriced smoothie?”

“the latter,” you assure him, unscrewing the lid. “but we’re double-masking today, so you’ll get to experience both.” his dramatic sigh is muffled when you smear the cold mask over his face. suguru, being the effortlessly attractive menace that he is, somehow still looks good—even with streaks of green goop on his cheeks. he doesn’t even flinch. a seasoned veteran.

“i see you got everything from the list,” you say, reaching for the body butter. “of course. do you think i’d let you down?” he grins, stretching out his legs as he watches you. “i was a man on a mission at sephora. dodged at least five aggressive salespeople, flashed my wedding band to scare off a few flirts, and even walked out with my dignity intact.”

“that’s debatable,” you mutter, scooping out a generous amount of cream and rubbing it into your arms. he narrows his eyes. “i’ll have you know i was very graceful.”

“you spent thirty minutes contemplating which cuticle oil was ‘more luxurious.’”

“and look at us now. thriving,” he retorts, wiggling his fingers at you. “unbothered. moisturized. focused. flourishing.” you snort and reach for his hands, rubbing the excess body butter into his palms. he watches you closely, eyes half-lidded, a satisfied smile playing on his lips. suguru loves this part—where you take his hands and carefully massage each finger like it’s the most important thing in the world.

“i still can’t believe you dropped two hundred dollars on a serum,” you tease, reaching for the bottle in question. “oh, we’re still on that?” he chuckles. “you act like i don’t drop that on lunch.”

“lunch feeds you. this makes you glow.”

“and isn’t my glow worth every penny?” he flutters his lashes dramatically. you roll your eyes but can’t fight the smile creeping onto your face. “yeah, yeah. close your eyes.”

he obeys without question as you pat the serum into his skin, gentle and precise. suguru has the nerve to sigh like you’ve just lifted all his worries off his shoulders. “you are so spoiled,” you murmur, rubbing the product into his temples. he hums, eyes still closed. “and whose fault is that?” you smack his arm lightly, and he chuckles, leaning in to press a lazy kiss to your jaw.

once your faces are sufficiently pampered, suguru lounges against the pillows, eyes tracking your movements as you grab the nail polish. “so, what’s the color of the week?” he asks.

“baby pink,” you reply, shaking the bottle. his brows lift. “not my usual black?”

“nope. we’re doing soft aesthetic suguru this week.”

he doesn’t argue. he never does. instead, he stretches his hand toward you with all the regality of a man who has fully accepted his fate. “paint away, my love.” you start with his pinky, carefully brushing on the color, while suguru watches you like you’re the most interesting thing in the world.

“i love you, you know,” he says suddenly, voice soft.

your brush pauses for half a second before you resume, fighting the warmth creeping up your neck. “i know,” you say. “you show me all the time.”

his thumb traces lazy circles on your knee. “i’m gonna keep showing you. every day.”

your chest feels full. warm. like this moment—cow pajamas, kali uchis playing, suguru’s gentle affection—is something sacred.

“good,” you murmur. “now hold still, i’m not redoing these nails if you smudge them.”

he grins. “you're the boss.”

[ceratedfish24]

There are SO many negative nancys this season. Y’all need to cut it out. You’ve gotten so entitled.

“This was a bad wildcard” I don’t know how old you are, but I was in 3rd grade when I was taught how to give constructive criticism, and I was way younger when I learned that most people don’t like receiving unsolicited criticism. All of the players have loved the challenge of each of the wild cards. They have loved staying on their toes. If they genuinely hated it, they would have said something. Changes would be made. If it’s not interesting to you, then you can stay quiet and leave. You’ve gotten way too comfortable disrespecting people from behind a screen.

“The teams are unoriginal” Making sure that the players are having a good time is among the top priorities of this series. They are naturally going to link up with people they’re comfortable with. If you have a problem with that, then maybe you need to be put in a room with your best friends and some people you kind of know and be criticized when you gravitate towards your best friends. I don’t understand why you all are having such a problem with the concept of seeking comfort in a scary and unpredictable environment.

“Pearl shouldn’t be on a team with Cleo and Scott” well, she made her choice, didn’t she. That’s not up to you. She is an adult. She can choose who she hangs out with. Cleo and Pearl have not had significantly more of a rivalry than any other two players on the server. It seems like you’re just paying more attention to them because they’re women. Don’t try to take away from Pearl’s autonomy. Don’t try to conduct who she hangs out with. It’s really fucked up, what happened to Grian and Scar. Don’t let it happen again. Additionally, Pearl doesn’t care if you don’t think her character should be getting along with Cleo and Scott. The lore is made to fit the events of the server, and never the other way around. If you’re not creative enough to come up with a lore-reason for Pearl, Cleo, and Scott to be getting along, then I really don’t know how you’re still alive.

“Scott’s going to kill Pearl” why. Why would he do that. What record do you have of Scott betraying Pearl for no reason. The only reason he didn’t want to accept her as his ally in Double Life was because he just teamed with her in Last Life, and you all have proven just how much you’re gonna whine about a repetitive team. What history does Scott have of killing his own teammates. The biggest concern on that team is Impulse, who is notorious for holding grudges and betraying alliances. And yet your focus is on the catty two who are loyal to the core. Does that not sound like stereotyping to you? Do you even watch their perspectives? Cause you don’t act like you do.

It is a legitimate miracle that Grian is giving us another season. Be grateful, or we’re not getting another. You try coming up with balanced ideas that will last 6-8 episodes with ~15 people. See how many you come up with.

[egoitsharu]

Cheng Xiaoshi is a good protagonist

Cheng Xiaoshi's development is one of Link Click's strongest points. At first, we meet him as someone impulsive, emotional, and even a little immature, which contrasts with Lu Guang's calculating personality. However, those initial characteristics not only make him very human, but also lay the foundation for his evolution.

Past and motivations

The loss of his parents during his childhood deeply marked his character. This turned him into someone who struggles with feelings of abandonment and guilt, which often leads him to get too involved in missions. However, that same vulnerability is what makes him connect so well with the stories of the people he helps.

Constant Evolution

A good protagonist doesn't stay stagnant, and Cheng Xiaoshi continually evolves. He learns from his mistakes, faces his fears, and strives to grow, making his journey interesting and meaningful.

Relationships and emotional growth

Cheng Xiaoshi learns a lot from his relationship with Lu Guang and Qiao Ling. Although at first he depends a lot on them to make decisions, the experiences he goes through, especially the most painful ones, push him to mature. The way he begins to recognize the consequences of his actions, such as when he puts his life at risk for others, shows evident growth.

The Weight of Choices

One of the recurring themes in his development is his difficulty accepting that he cannot change the past without consequences. Throughout the series, we see how he faces that harsh reality, which leads him to be more thoughtful. Even in his moments of greatest pain, he remains someone with a huge heart, willing to sacrifice everything for those he loves.

Strength and Hope

Despite the traumas, Cheng Xiaoshi never loses that spark that characterizes him. He is a person who always seeks to protect others, even at the cost of himself, but over time he learns to balance his desire to help with a greater awareness of the risks.

He represents the internal struggle

The constant dilemma of wanting to help others, even if it sometimes destroys him inside, makes him a very real character. His struggle between doing the right thing and accepting the inevitable is a universal conflict that many can relate to.

Sacrifice and bravery

Cheng Xiaoshi is not a hero who acts out of ego or to gain something. His actions are always driven by a genuine desire to protect others, even if this puts him in danger. That makes him admirable.

In short, Cheng Xiaoshi is not just a great protagonist because he is brave or has interesting skills, but because his emotional and moral journey resonates deeply 💕✨

[shizuturnspages]

hi!! if ur requests are open can be i have a yandere Xiao and kinich or ororon (I'm so indecisive so uhh choose one u think fit most) with a darling who's not from Teyvat? just say they're from another world and doesn't know how Teyvat works! optional but if u want can u make the darling use another name so they just hide their real names like the traveler? tysm!! love ur writings!

Oh, requests for an outsider darling? Hell yes—throwing a clueless darling into Teyvat is like tossing a spark into dry brush. This is such a fascinating idea. Dw about being indecisive. I'll write for all three.

Xiao: The Haunted Protector

Xiao’s attachment starts as reluctant guardianship. You’re so painfully out of place in Teyvat—every move you make screams, “I don’t belong here,” and it tugs at something deep in him. He’s already burdened by his karmic debt, but the thought of leaving you defenseless in a world you barely understand? Unthinkable.

❥ Overwhelming Vigilance: Xiao’s always nearby, even when you don’t know it. You might think you’re safe exploring Liyue, but every Hilichurl you scare off or trap you narrowly avoid? Yeah, that’s Xiao, silently taking out threats before they reach you. And if you wander somewhere truly dangerous? He’ll materialize in front of you, golden eyes blazing with frustration. “What were you thinking? You don’t belong here—it’s not safe.”

❥ Fixation on Your Name: You’ve introduced yourself with a fake name, and Xiao knows it. He doesn’t ask outright, but he obsesses over the mystery of your true identity. Why are you hiding it? Is it shame? Fear? Whenever he’s alone, he finds himself whispering the name you’ve given him, hoping it’ll somehow unravel your secrets.

❥ Territorial Devotion: Xiao can’t stand seeing you bond with others. It’s not jealousy—it’s fear. What if they manipulate your naivety? What if they steal you away from him? He becomes cold and distant whenever you get close to someone, warning you cryptically about trusting others. “People here will lie to you,” he’ll say, his voice sharp but tinged with worry.

How He Snaps: If you ever try to leave Teyvat, Xiao won’t let you go. He’ll argue, beg, and even threaten to bind you to this world with Adeptus magic. “You don’t understand the dangers out there. You’re safer here—with me.” And when he says “with me,” it’s clear he means forever.

Kinich: The Calculating Schemer

Kinich is not the kind of yandere to burst into a room and immediately start causing a scene. He’s a master manipulator who knows how to play the long game. With Ajaw by his side, he’s even more dangerous. His cool, collected demeanor hides a mind that’s always working, always planning.

❥ Patient Manipulation: Kinich’s patience is his greatest weapon. He’ll let you get used to his presence in your life, slowly drawing you in with his charisma and calculated charm. He’s aware that your trust is the key to getting closer to you, so he’ll wait for that moment when you can’t imagine your life without him. “You’re fascinating. I want to know everything about you… all in good time.”

❥ Ajaw’s Influence: Ajaw is not a typical partner for Kinich. Where Kinich is cool-headed and manipulative, Ajaw is impulsive, fiery, and more than willing to be the muscle to back up his companion’s plans. Kinich has carefully cultivated Ajaw’s loyalty, using the power and strength of the Ajaw to keep others in line. Ajaw, for his part, is drawn to Kinich’s vision and power, willingly carrying out orders that Kinich knows will push you closer into his grasp.

❥ The Steady Hand of Control: In terms of the relationship with you, Kinich knows that the best way to control you is to make you believe you have free will. He’ll approach you with an offer, something that seems like it’s your choice to accept. “I’ve been thinking. Perhaps you should stay close to me for a while… we could work together. I can offer you things no one else can.” It’s never truly a question—he’s just making sure you think it is.

How He Snaps: If he feels like he’s losing you—whether to another person or your desire to leave Teyvat—Kinich’s sunny charm darkens. He’ll corner you, his usual smile replaced by a steely intensity. “You think you can just walk away? From me? You’re mine, [Fake Name]. You always have been.”

Ororon: The Brooding Warrior

Ororon’s attachment to you is rooted in a mix of curiosity and protectiveness. You’re so alien to him, so out of place, and yet you’ve managed to survive in Teyvat. It frustrates and fascinates him in equal measure.

❥ Overbearing Protection: Ororon doesn’t trust anyone—not you, not the people around you, and especially not himself. His way of protecting you is blunt and harsh, often scolding you for your ignorance. “How are you still alive?” he’ll growl after pulling you out of yet another dangerous situation. But his rough words betray his concern.

❥ Guard Dog Behavior: Ororon doesn’t care if you’re stronger than him. He still insists on watching your back, even if it means standing in your shadow while you fend off enemies. And if someone so much as looks at you wrong? He’s ready to fight, glaring daggers at anyone who dares approach.

❥ Fixation on Your Mystery: Your otherworldly origins and fake name are a constant source of frustration for him. He doesn’t pry—he’s not the type—but his eyes narrow whenever you dodge his questions. “You’re hiding something,” he’ll say bluntly, his voice low and gruff. “I don’t care what it is, but don’t think you can fool me.”

How He Snaps: Ororon’s breaking point comes when you try to push him away. His voice rises, uncharacteristically emotional. “You think you can survive without me? You barely understand this world. Don’t be stupid—I’m the only one who can keep you safe.” And in his mind, that’s the truth. You need him, whether you realize it or not.

[milkfordragons]

Will Graham's psyche: what's true and what's false.

Empathy disorder? More like killer-empathy disorder, since Will only ever connects with killers, or, in rare cases, with victims who stir something personal in him (like Peter). The show presents Will as highly empathetic, yet this remains one of its greatest deceptions.

Will never truly empathizes with anyone who hasn’t killed or doesn’t possess the latent capacity for it. His empathy is entirely selective, drawn only to those he already perceives as reflections of himself.

What Will actually engages in, more than anything, is Verdrängung (repression in the psychoanalytic sense). He does not lack awareness of his own violent urges; rather, he buries them under layers of moral justification, allowing himself to indulge in them under the guise of righteousness. His role as an investigator grants him a socially sanctioned outlet for his fantasies, transforming them into something not just acceptable but *honorable*. This is why, when Hannibal suggests he quit, Will so forcefully asserts, “I save people!” He clings to that rationale, not because it’s true, but because it keeps his self-image intact.

And yet, why didn’t he quit? He had more than enough reasons—moral, emotional, even physical...but he never did. How much of the blame can we really place on Jack Crawford? At what point does Jack stop being a selfish manipulator and become just another one of Will’s scapegoats? Will doesn’t leave because he lives for this. He is obsessed with the euphoric sensation that his overactive imagination provides when he immerses himself in the mind of a killer.

For those unfamiliar, what Will is actually doing is a form of self-hypnosis. He’s not gifted with it (he is with an active imagination) he has trained himself, evidenced by his use of an induction method (the pendulum). This isn’t some innate ability; it’s a learned skill. He explicitly states that he is well-versed in psychology and “knows all the tricks,” so it’s not surprising that hypnosis is the one thing he allows Hannibal to perform on him. Unlike traditional talk therapy, which he resists, hypnosis is effective in his concept.

Will had likely been fantasizing about killing for a long time, which explains his career choices. Becoming a cop offered him the opportunity to kill while maintaining moral superiority. When he claims he was “unable to shoot” and subsequently quit, the question arises: was he truly incapable because he’s a good guy, or was it something else? A failure to act not out of moral hesitation, but out of something more physiological, as a man who cannot perform sexually when too overwhelmed by the anticipation of actualizing his fantasies?

Observe his expressions as he emerges from his crime scene inductions: rapture, exhilaration. He is high on the experience. His repression is so severe that his desires manifest in his dreams, yet even there, his reactions betray him—he doesn’t wake in terror, but in euphoria. “I’ve never felt more alive,” he confesses after killing Randall Tier. That wasn’t fear or disgust speaking...it was pleasure.

This is why he becomes obsessed with killing Hannibal. Who else could he kill with his bare hands and still be perceived as the hero? The slayer of monsters? But Hannibal is not just any killer, he is the embodiment of Will’s own pleasure in causeless violence, the mirror of his most unthinkable desires.

Will represses (Verdrängt) Hannibal because to acknowledge what Hannibal represents, the raw, uninhibited joy of destruction, would be "too ugly a thought": that beneath the mask of righteousness, Will Graham does not simply understand monsters.

He is one.

When someone embodies a repressed individual's unconscious desires, their presence can trigger a crisis within the repressed person, forcing those buried impulses toward the surface. Freud describes repression (Verdrängung) as a process that doesn't eliminate desires but merely pushes them out of conscious awareness. However, when an external figure appears who openly embodies what the repressed person has spent their life denying, this creates a destabilizing effect.

The repressed individual may react in several ways:

Fascination and Obsession: They may feel inexplicably drawn to this person, seeing them as magnetic, intoxicating, or even fated. The unconscious recognizes a mirror of its own buried desires.

Rationalization and Projection: Instead of admitting their attraction, they might intellectualize their feelings, attributing their obsession to external factors ("I need to stop them," "I want to help them", in Will's case Abigail) or projecting onto the other person the very desires they refuse to own ("They're trying to manipulate me").

Moral Struggle and Hypocrisy: They may position themselves as morally superior or in opposition to the person, as if their role is to tame, punish, or save them. This dynamic allows them to engage with the repressed content while maintaining a socially acceptable self-image.

Compulsion to Destroy or Merge: In extreme cases, the person may oscillate between wanting to destroy the "other" and wanting to become them. The embodiment of the repressed can be seen as both a threat (because they expose the truth) and an object of desire (because they represent a forbidden completeness).

Will's relationship with Hannibal is a textbook case of this. Hannibal embodies Will’s repressed desires: violence without guilt, freedom from moral constraints, indulgence in his own darker nature. Rather than directly acknowledging this, Will frames his obsession as a battle between good and evil, between law and chaos. But his actions betray him: every choice he makes pulls him closer to Hannibal rather than away. His repression ensures that he cannot admit his true motives, even to himself, so he continually recasts his pursuit of Hannibal in socially acceptable terms—justice, survival, necessity—when in reality, he is drawn to him because Hannibal is his repressed self made flesh.

[taexual]

sleepwalking ● 19 | jjk

pairing: jungkook x fem!reader

summary: due to unfortunate circumstances, you ended up managing your ex-boyfriend’s band. you thought you’ve both made peace with it, but suddenly he’s very eager to prove to you that first love never dies.

genre: rockstar!jungkook / exes to lovers

warnings: explicit language, ANGST & FLUFF (i mean it, watch out), SLOW BURN

words: 14.5k

read from the beginning ○ masterlist

chapter 19 ► so dig two graves, ‘cause when you die, i swear i’ll be leaving by your side

When the tour bus arrived in Glasgow, you realised that you had slept perhaps a quarter of an hour in total tonight. Discomfort and Regret had become unwelcome companions that kept you up.

Last night, you had planned to talk to Jungkook, but he flipped the script and did all the talking instead. And if you had to describe your choices from then on, you’d have to accept that, essentially, you had run away without saying anything.

You realised now, through tossing and turning in your bunk the whole bus journey, that this was your recurring pattern.

When you and Jungkook first broke up, you’d barricaded yourself in your apartment and only ventured outside when it was unavoidable, like to go to work. Or when your friends forced you out of bed. They tolerated your need for silence in moderation—a few days of self-imposed isolation were okay. But two consecutive weeks was a little excessive.

In Stockholm, the impulse to run away had gripped you right after your conversation on the bridge sank abruptly in the waters below. In Oslo, you had actually run away after you’d almost kissed. You could still feel the shivers on your skin from the cold night air on the rooftop terrace. And, of course, you’d also planned to avoid him when you arrived in Manchester.

It was a pattern that was doomed to end in failure every time, yet you stubbornly refused to give it up.

You wanted to escape the feelings that frightened you, but they only ran faster. They chased after you like daunting shadows. They caught up with you. They engulfed you.

This perpetual cycle wasn’t just futile, it was also unfair—to you and to Jungkook. And to Rated Riot, too.

It had gone on for too long.

You were determined to redeem that today.

While Jungkook and the boys were doing an interview on a local radio station after the soundcheck, you chose to stay at the venue to work. Initially, you only intended to answer internal company emails and update the label executives, but unsurprisingly, that morphed into more tasks that needed your immediate attention.

Seated at your laptop in the band’s dressing room, you spent a good couple of hours finalising Rated Riot’s schedule for the rest of the week, emailing back journalists and verifying their credentials before issuing backstage passes for upcoming interviews, and humming along to a tune playing in your headphones.

It was then—during the chorus of an old Bad Omens song that was loud and messy enough to keep your mind alert and focused—that Seokjin decided to tap you on the back.

You jumped up as high as it was humanly possible and pushed your laptop away as if to protect it from intruders—which was what your mind assumed Seokjin to be, apparently. He took a step back, shocked and very entertained by your violent startle.

“Shit, sorry,” he said, attempting to suppress a smile. “You’ve been—you’ve been working here by yourself for hours. I’m taking a coffee break. Want to join me?”

With one hand pressed to your chest, you slid your headphones off and checked the time on the corner of your laptop screen. “Uh, sure. Coffee sounds nice.”

The two of you found a quaint café a few blocks from Barrowland where Rated Riot would be playing later that evening. But despite the cosy setting, you chose to grab your coffee to-go. It was a warm, sunny day outside. Seokjin thought you could use some fresh air.

“So,” he said eagerly, as soon as the café bell tinkled, announcing your exit, “what’s on your mind?”

You met his question with surprise. “What do you mean?”

He maintained an air of nonchalance, sipping his Americano and observing casually, “your pupils are massive. You look like you’re planning a revolution. Or a massacre.”

You took a sip of your drink and regretted not stirring the caramel in better. You wondered what it would be by the end of tonight: revolution or massacre.

“I was—well, it’s nothing much,” you said. “I was just thinking that things might be different when we got home.”

“How so?”

The two of you crossed the street towards a small, vibrant green space—not quite a park—with a tree-lined pathway in the middle and an old blue police box nearby, reminiscent of Doctor Who.

“Well,” you said, “I hear Brazil is really nice that time of year.”

“You’re thinking of going on holiday?” Seokjin asked, surprised. He’s known you since you joined the company, even before you started to manage Rated Riot, and he was well aware of your lack of holidays. The HR department, however, remained blissfully ignorant about it.

You shrugged. “For starters.”

“And then?”

“And then we’ll see.”

The ambiguity in your response wasn’t worrying in itself, but combined with your reluctance to meet his gaze and the intense concentration on your coffee—even though you winced every time you took a sip—it was certainly alarming.

“You’re not… going to quit, are you?” he asked hesitantly. “I’ve heard about Reconnaissance.”

Of course, he’d heard. At this point, enough people knew about it for the news to have a ripple effect and circulate backstage.

“No,” you said, trying to dispel the tension with an airy laugh. “Of course not.”

He nodded. “Okay.”

“I’d find a replacement first.”

Seokjin’s casual stride came to an abrupt halt. A few steps ahead, you realised he’d stopped and turned around.

“No,” he said.

His firm declaration made you stutter. “Th-that—that wasn’t a question.”

“And that’s not an option,” he argued. “You can’t quit.”

“I’m not saying I’m leaving for sure. I’m just saying that if I did leave, you wouldn’t even notice the difference,” you said. “I’m a very good teacher.”

With that, you started to walk away, leaving him little choice but to catch up.

“And I love all of you guys,” you continued while Seokjin grunted next to you. “I wouldn’t leave you with someone I didn’t personally trust to take care of you and the band.”

He shook his head, his determination unwavering. If he had known about the band members’ conviction that no one would blame you if you left Rated Riot due to the alluring offer from Reconnaissance, Seokjin might have been tempted to express his disagreement with his fists.

Of course, people would blame you—Seokjin was the people in question.

You belonged here. You were an essential part of the team.

He was convinced of this, and he was going to be annoying about it.

“Okay, I appreciate that,” he said, his tone tinged with incredulity. “Except, what the fuck are you thinking? Of course, we’d notice the difference! You’re you. We love you.”

“That means a lot—”

“But not enough?”

You hesitated, caught off guard by the intensity of his anger. “No, it’s—”

“Alright, look.” He stopped walking again, the paper cup of coffee in his hand more of an accessory than a beverage. “Is this about Jungkook?”

An unexpected heat surged through you and a cascade of excuses immediately raced through your mind. You scanned the pathway, reading the names of the bands imprinted into the pavement with colourful stripes—artists who’d performed at Barrowland before, you assumed—so you wouldn’t have to look at him.

But this was Seokjin. If there was anyone who knew everything that was going on in the band, it was him. You didn’t want to give him pretend reasons.

“In part,” you admitted.

“Well, if that’s the case, then it’s an even more definite no,” he asserted, his resolve unyielding.

You sighed and attempted to smile, but there was a hint of awkwardness in your expression. “I’m not taking votes, Jin. I’ll talk to Jungkook about this, and—”

“You can talk to anyone you like. All the gods you can find, even,” he interrupted. “But you’re not leaving.”

“Jin—”

“Look, when you accepted this job, the fact that you and Jungkook used to know each other didn’t matter,” he stated, tactfully omitting the word ‘relationship’—a nuance you appreciated. “What difference does it make now?”

As you bit your lip and lowered your eyes, Seokjin sensed that there was a difference, after all. It occurred to him that perhaps he wasn’t entirely up to speed on everything that was happening on the tour, after all.

“Okay, you don’t want to talk about it, and I’m not asking you to,” he said, his words gentle, but his tone strict. “What I’m saying is that nobody cares. You can date, you can break up, you can—I don’t know. You can pretty much do anything as long as you don’t kill each other. No one cares.”

“The label cares,” you blurted, the words unpolished and agitated. “I care.”

He waved his free hand dismissively. “The label cares about profit. We’re making a profit from you both. Maybe even more when you’re together because you’re both less annoying that way.”

Your eyebrows furrowed. “How are we annoying?”

“Are you kidding? All mopey and sulky?” He stuck his tongue out and pretended to gag. “You make me sick and miserable.”

You snickered softly at the dramatic display. “Fair. Sorry. But fact is, it’s still a good opportunity.”

“Well, sure,” he conceded. “But is that really the reason you want to leave? Or is it because you think that what you’re doing with Jungkook is wrong? You think others will disapprove or think less of you. You think this is highly unprofessional, and it would make more sense to work elsewhere.”

It felt oddly incongruous to hear him articulate—so easily, without a moment’s hesitation—everything that you had been thinking.

“Well, that’s a factor, too, of course…” you said, your voice faltering.

“I think that’s the main factor.”

Taking a sip of your coffee, you mumbled, “I think you think too much.”

“I think you don’t think enough,” he countered. “You can’t leave, not even for Reconnaissance. You’re part of the team, our team. We all are.”

You looked at him, and he raised his eyebrows expectantly—waiting, clearly, for you to admit defeat.

While you didn’t technically need his consent to quit, the sheer determination in his stance made you feel as though his approval was, indeed, a prerequisite for anyone choosing to leave.

“Now you’re making me feel guilty,” you said.

“As you should!” he said—nearly bellowing in his frustration. “But you should feel guilty about mistakenly thinking that you should leave. Not about being in love with him.”

His words struck a deep chord and your heart began to rattle violently in your chest. “I’m—right. Yeah. I need to talk to him about—about everything.”

His tone softened at your reaction.

“I think you should sit down for ten minutes and gather your thoughts before you do that,” he advised. “You should sit and accept that we don’t care if you go out with Jungkook. Whatever you decide, we’re all cool with it. As long as you are, too.”

Afraid that your eyes would betray your thoughts, you shifted your gaze to the silver barks of the graceful birch trees around you. “Do you know about the bet?”

Seokjin took a slow sip of his coffee to allow more time between these overlapping conversations.

“Yeah,” he said. “Is that... uh, have you two worked it out?”

“We’ve—I think we have. I think the bet wasn’t even the main issue, actually, it just—it sort of highlighted all our problems,” you admitted. “We—we’ll have to work through the rest.”

“Right. Okay,” he said. The sun rolled out from behind the buildings, casting a golden glow on the trees and the empty path ahead of you. He squinted and took a sip of his coffee before speaking. “Well, then I can safely tell you that everyone backstage knows about it.”

The disappointment on your face was absolute. “Oh. That—that’s lovely.”

He smiled sympathetically as the two of you continued down the faintly coloured path. Despite the sunshine, the cool breeze toyed relentlessly with the edges of your jackets.

“Don’t worry about it too much, though,” he said. “It’s nothing more than a silly joke backstage. We’re not judging either of you.”

You did worry about it. “What… do you mean by ‘silly joke,’ exactly?”

The two of you arrived at a large sycamore tree with leaves that glimmered in emerald hues under the sun, and Seokjin stopped, grateful for the shade.

“One of the roadies started it,” he explained. “It was just a game. A bet, actually! Funny.” He chuckled at the irony, but stopped himself when he noticed your stoic expression. “Anyway. Someone suggested that Jungkook’s friends were trying to sabotage your relationship by making this bet with him. So, we bet on Jungkook fighting his friends for you. Which—that cost me money, actually. When he showed up at the airport in Cologne with a black eye, I lost fifty euros.”

It took you a minute to process this, and you felt so uncomfortable that your fists itched with an urge to fight someone, too.

“You—so, you bet that he wouldn’t fight his friends?” you clarified, almost hopeful.

“No. I bet that he would,” he said. “But I got too big-headed and bragged about how he wouldn’t miss a single punch. So, everyone claimed that I lost and took my money. Really, I thought he knew how to fight. And he was doing it for a noble cause.” A dramatic pause ensued, and then Seokjin smirked. “I mean you, by the way.”

“No, yeah, I got that,” you said bitterly. “But you didn’t even know the actual—everyone just assumed he had a black eye because of me?”

He pulled his lips together to stifle a chuckle as he moved his cup of coffee away.

“Can you blame us?” he asked with a leisurely shrug. “He’s in love with you, and his friends are complete idiots. And then he shows up with a black eye! The dots connected themselves. Although, personally, I thought Luna or Maggie could have socked him in the eye, too. You three are very protective of each other.”

You tilted your head, your posture a warning. “I see. So, we’re a telenovela to you. Did you bet that I would knock someone out if I found out what you were up to?”

“Not yet,” he said, clearly delighted by the prospect of this happening in the future.

“Did you get your money back at least?”

“Yeah. But then I lost it again.”

The leaves of the sycamore tree rustled impatiently as you groaned. “How?”

“Another bet,” he said. “Some people—including Jimin, by the way—thought that Jungkook’s friends would never come to another Rated Riot show. In the UK specifically. We were very specific about the details in this bet.”

“Right, of course.”

He smirked, unapologetic about the amusement he derived from this. There were all sorts of games happening backstage at any given point in the tour; nearly everything became a joke here. And Seokjin hoped to show you that yes, people did know about you and Jungkook. But unless they could find ways to make it funny, they didn’t care.

He could tell that the more he talked to you about this, the more you started to recognise the absurdity of it all, too.

“Right. Well, Jimin won that round. I actually—I thought Jungkook would change his mind and bring his friends back,” Seokjin confessed. “Serves me right. I should have trusted him more.”

You raised your cup in his direction.

“Yeah,” you said. “Serves you right for making bets about this. He blacklisted Sid.”

“He—oh!” Seokjin seemed very pleased to hear this. “Well, that was worth my money, then.”

“Hmm.”

He grinned, the mischief still lingering in his eyes.

“We have another bet going on,” he said.

“Anoth—well, of course.” Your teeth dug into the coffee lid as you tried to take a sip, but reconsidered. “So, what? Who’s getting a black eye this time?”

“It’s whether you’ll get back together.”

Your irritation wavered in surprise. A rustling stirred inside you as though you had swallowed the wind and carried it within.

“Well,” you said. “Where’d you place your bets?”

“Drink your coffee,” he said. You did. It had cooled and turned unpleasantly sweet as the caramel settled. “I haven’t bet on that yet. But if you told me if you’re considering going back to him, I could win my money back.”

You made sure to swallow before looking up.

“That’s not solely up to me, though,” you said, sensing an obvious defensive undertone in your own voice. You didn’t make much effort to conceal it; he would have read right through you anyway. “A relationship typically involves two people. I can’t force him to be in it.”

Seokjin offered a patient smile.

“Please,” he said. “Everyone knows he’d burn down half of Europe for you.”

You swallowed again.

It was just you. The only one still fighting it.

“Well, in any case—” Seokjin said, distracted, suddenly, by a particularly cheeky pigeon that kept flying up to your ankles, then to your knees. “That bird is going to steal your coffee.”

You glanced down, and the shift in your position frightened the pigeon into flying a few metres away. Seokjin nodded in approval.

“Anyway,” he said. “What I meant to say is that I don’t know how much my opinion is worth, but if the only reason you’re considering quitting is because of this, then that’s nothing. You sit down, you work through your problems, you get back together, and you’re good to go. Well, good to stay. It’s up to you. No one else cares.”

You raised your eyebrows. “Everyone’s talking. They’re making bets about us. We—we’re a joke backstage. And yet you think we should get back together?”

“Yeah.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Give us something else to bet on.”

Exasperation flashed across your face. “I’m thinking I’d like to sic that pigeon on you a little bit.”

“Oh, but what would you do without me?” He was grinning in a manner so endearing and genuine that you felt your lips stretch into a defeated smile as well. “You know we’re family. That is what we do. And you said it yourself – everyone’s already talking. And no one’s truly bothered by it. You might as well do what you want.”

You took a big gulp of your coffee to finish it.

Some of the humour faded from his eyes while he watched you. He looked around—to make sure the pigeon hadn’t returned and to gather his thoughts.

“Just think about it, okay?” he said. “You know how they say ‘measure twice, cut once’? Why don’t you measure three times? Four, even. Five. Or, I don’t know, as many times as it takes until you realise that there’s no need to cut anything. Everything’s great as it is.”

Your face felt warm. “That’s very profound.”

“It is.” He nodded, his exaggerated confidence faltering a little when he saw the gratitude in your eyes and suddenly found himself timid. “I’ve also got a few carpentry jokes if you’re in the mood for those.”

Laughing finally, you shook your head. “Maybe later. But thank you for this.”

“You’re welcome,” he said. “And notice how I’m not saying ‘anytime’? Because there can’t be another time that this happens. In fact, the next time I see you, it’ll be as if we never had this conversation.”

Still smiling despite his threatening tone, you put your palm to your forehead and extended your fingers in a salute. “Sir, yes, sir.”

He nodded, content with your response.

“Now go back to that café and bring me a scone,” he ordered, his expression bright again. “I got distracted by your misery and forgot to buy one.”

You snorted and nodded—you did owe him a scone, at the very least. Seokjin stepped deeper into the shade by the tree and waited while you jogged back towards the café. He looked up to see your lighthearted expression reflected in the window across the street and felt himself exhale in relief.

He’d done his job—you knew everyone needed you here.

You returned to the venue with enough scones for the whole staff, and as you passed them out, almost everyone on the team regarded you with a mix of curiosity and anticipation. It was a nice change from their earlier concerns about your health, but you still felt uncomfortable.

There was an obvious reason you enjoyed working backstage: here, you successfully evaded the spotlight. You did your work quietly and got to spend time with your friends.

But lately, you’d been feeling everyone’s eyes on you and, naturally, your instinctive reaction was to flee. Really, this had to be inherent; you wondered if your brother shared a similar flight-or-flight-never-fight response when confronted with an uncomfortable situation.

And still, you forced yourself to wait.

Following your conversation with Seokjin, you decided on the key points that you needed to discuss with Jungkook. And they were simple: share your thoughts with him and make a decision together.

You’ve never really tried this with him before; open communication was a recent development for the two of you. But you meant what you told Seokjin: a relationship involved two people. And regardless of what -ship you and Jungkook were currently in, your decisions still influenced his, and his influenced yours.

You had hoped to speak to him after he returned from his interview, but it was almost funny how time worked against you today.

After the band returned, you went to help Jungkook with his bandages, and the company executives decided to respond to your email with a phone call. And so, you were forced to stay on the phone with the label the whole time before Rated Riot went on stage.

That was okay. You figured you would talk to Jungkook later.

But later just wouldn’t come.

After the concert, you waited for the band to finish taking pictures with their fans before you took them to another interview with several more radio hosts. And when you returned to the bus, the curtains on Jungkook’s bunk were drawn. You didn’t want to wake him in case he was asleep.

The only time you finally had direct contact with Jungkook was on the plane to London. He surprised you by approaching you from behind and casually lifting your carry-on to the overhead compartment. Then, as though he hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary, he turned around to return to his seat.

“Wait,” you called out. “Can I—can we talk? Yoongi said he’d switch seats with me.”

Jungkook stopped, his stomach sinking. He was the undefeated champion of misinterpreting situations—he hadn’t forgotten how your conversation had ended last night, but he still thought this was about Sid.

Because while you were beating yourself up about your avoidant tendencies, Jungkook was grappling with a different problem.

Since this morning, he had been bombarded with incessant text messages from an unknown number that ranged from vaguely bothersome (“UR SO DUMB LMSAO”) to genuinely threatening (“DNOT THINK THS IS OVER YOU FUCKVING CUNT”). All texts contained a certain distinctiveness: full capitalisation, typos, and a disturbing scent of wounded ego.

It was Sid, Jungkook was absolutely sure of it.

He seemed to be in a white powder induced frenzy, which wasn’t particularly unusual—Jungkook didn’t think he could remember the last time Sid had been completely sober—but the frequency of the texts was a little unsettling. Jungkook thought the bet was over now, even if Sid wasn’t satisfied. But clearly, Sid was craving something more.

Jungkook wasn’t sure how you would know about this or why you would bring it up now, but he felt his phone vibrating in his pocket again, and he thought this had to be the reason why.

“Sure,” he said, trying to mask his apprehension. He turned on airplane mode on his phone and looked up. “What’s, uh—what’s going on?”

You gestured at his seat. He sat down with bated breath—as if his life was about to change and he needed to brace for it—and waited for you to settle beside him.

“I wanted to, uh, explain myself,” you began as the plane filled. The rhythmic sound of people shuffling across the aisle was oddly soothing. Jungkook, however, appeared perplexed. “And to thank you, actually. For being there when I—well, when all of that happened. I’m sorry I caused—”

“You’ve already thanked me,” he interjected. “And you better not tell me that you’re apologising for fainting right now.”

“I’m—well, I’m just saying, you were right,” you said, disheartened by the disbelief in his eyes. You placed your water bottle on the fold-out tray and shifted in your seat. “I should have known better. Rested more. I guess what I’m saying is that I’m sorry I didn’t listen, and it all led to... that.”

He sighed. This wasn’t about Sid; this was about something worse.

“That’s who you are, though,” he said. He should have known this would be something you would blame yourself for once you recovered. “You always have to get everything done, or you—you can’t sleep. You need to, uh, work on that, but you don’t need to apologise for it.”

You looked down, tracing a shaky finger over the armrest between your seats.

“And,” he added before you could speak, “to be fair, a lot of things that happened on tour were actually out of your control. You had no choice but to put in extra time and effort, I guess. The stage constructions collapsed, the venue was flooded—”

“Right, but these—well, anyway,” you cut yourself off, reverting to your original train of thought. “I’m sorry you had to drop everything a-and worry about me. Well, not just you; the whole thing ended up being a big scene that disrupted everyone. But I—I wanted to say this to you, first of all.”

He observed you for a long moment. Between the truce you’ve decided on in your hotel room, the conversation he’d overheard about your meeting with Nick, and the disturbing messages from an unknown number, Jungkook was having a hard time comprehending what he’d done to warrant an apology from you right now.

Then, a troubling thought occurred to him: what if this was your way of saying goodbye?

He had let you go last night. What if you had decided to leave, and this was the prelude to the end of your time together?

“I’m—I didn’t have to do it,” he said. “I did it because I—well, I mean, you were passed out. Of course, I wanted to make sure you were okay.” He leaned forward in his seat. “It kind of sounds like you’re forgetting that you’re not just the manager here. You’re also my—uh, y-you’re our friend. We all would have acted the same way if it had been anyone else. It’s an ‘all for one, and one for all’ situation with us. You know that.”

He was right; your team had grown so close that none of you would have hesitated to help each other. Your unease simply stemmed from the fact that you were the one receiving help this time.

You swallowed. You thought you owed him an explanation about everything, but you haven’t even really gotten to it yet.

“Thank you,” you said. “For what you said and—and for what you did. I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

He gave you a hesitant smile. “Was I really so terrible at taking care of you that it made you change your workaholic ways?”

You raised your eyebrows, surprised by the gentle teasing in his words.

“No, you di—you were great. Except for the fact that you didn’t need to do that,” you said, shooting him a look that he promptly rolled his eyes at. You added, “I say that with gratitude, of course. But, um, I felt very uncomfortable just lying there while everyone else—well, can’t let that happen again. Anyway, this isn’t—”

“I hope it won’t happen again,” he interrupted. “But it’s—well, you’ve spent your whole life taking care of... everything. Your brother, your mum, uh, e-even me. It’s second nature to you, I don’t know how else to—you can’t help but actively try to fix things. So, I-I don’t mind being the person who reminds you to take it easy sometimes. I just want you to listen.”

He’d said something very similar to you last night and you dug your teeth into your lower lip so you wouldn’t argue.

You thought you weren’t doing a very good job of fixing things—nevermind that you’ve subconsciously turned absolutely everything around you into your personal responsibility, and it was simply unrealistic to take care of it all.

“Thank you,” you chose to say. “I just, um—I don’t want you to think I’m talking to you so you’d make me feel better. You don’t need to do that. And it’s my turn to expla—”

He whipped his head to look at you so suddenly—an almost offended expression on his face—that the rest of your sentence got caught in your throat.

“Wh—why do you always think that?” he asked. “That I do something for you because I feel like I have to?”

“I don’t—I know you’re not—ah.” Leaning back in your seat, you attempted to rearrange your thoughts as if you were shuffling stubborn cards in a deck—trying to find the one you needed to win a game against yourself. “That’s not even the main thing I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Okay,” he said, a little worried. “What is the main thing?”

It took you a moment to find your breath.

“The conversation that we had last night—well, not just last night, actually, it’s been happening for a while. But, uh, last night specifically—it wasn’t supposed to end like that,” you said. He lowered his eyes. “That’s what I wanted to, um—to bring up. Because we’re not talking again, you know? I mean—okay. That’s not true. You are talking. But I’m not. I-I think it’s still new to me that we’re—that we’re actually talking about things. About everything. I’m sorry I haven’t said much to you in return.”

You exhaled when you finished speaking—finished stammering, really—but you didn’t feel relieved. There was a lot more you had to say.

Jungkook, on the other hand, felt his thoughts drift back to Amsterdam once again, when he had entered your hotel room to apologise, and you told him you forgave him and apologised in return. He remembered the pained, laboured beating of his heart as he listened to you—thinking, all the while, that he had no right to want you all for himself.

Now, he had some additional time to think about how to respond, because the flight attendant started the safety demonstration at the front of the plane, preparing for take-off.

He fastened his seatbelt, relieved by the silence on his phone—but the quiet pause between you as the plane lifted off the runway felt very loud in his head.

“You know,” he said after a few minutes, “you find the weirdest things to feel guilty about.”

You furrowed your brows while Jungkook idly twirled the onyx signet ring on his index finger.

“You’re never obligated to respond to what I tell you,” he said. “I didn’t say any of those things to you in Manchester in exchange for your immediate forgiveness, or for some similar stories, or for—anything, really. You don’t owe me anything. I just wanted to tell you everything, and that’s it.”

“I-I get that,” you shifted in your seat, restricted by the seatbelt, “but I’m your manager. And I-I left you in a confusing, stressful situation by yourself when I refused to talk to you right away. That was—it was unprofessional at best, and cruel at—”

“You’re more than that to me, though,” he cut in. You gripped the armrest tighter. “You know that. And you didn’t… leave me in that situation as my manager. You left me there as my ex-girlfriend. You have that right. You were confused and stressed, too.”

Your gaze slid over his black and grey flannel and the t-shirt with a Rated Riot logo underneath. The plane cruised at the designated altitude, but you still felt pushed into your seat like you had during take-off.

“I don’t—I’m not sure those two roles can be separated any longer,” you admitted.

Oh, whispered an alarmed pang of his heart. And, oh? echoed the multitude of shivers rippling underneath his skin.

“What are you saying?” he asked.

You drew in a breath. You didn’t want to start from the beginning because you had a feeling that he might not let you get to the end, so you decided to start from the explanation—the one that you’d come here to give him, but kept getting sidetracked as he responded to you in ways you weren’t anticipating.

“People on tour,” you began, “are very invested in our, uh—situation.”

Jungkook arched an eyebrow. “They’re invested?”

“Apparently, we’re a popular topic backstage.”

Quickly enough, he thought he figured out your implication: if he hadn’t played along with Sid, the staff on this tour might have been having very different conversations.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“No, that’s not—well, it’s not just your fault,” you replied. “It takes two, right?”

“Right, but I was the one who made the bet.”

“You—okay. But this isn’t about the bet—” you paused. Reconsidered. “Well, alright, the bet sort of kick-started a lot of things, but it’s not—that’s not the problem from my point of view right now.”

Oh, once more. And then, ah.

You were talking, he realised, about the things you didn’t want to talk about in your hotel room in Manchester. The things you’ve affectionately labelled as “a confusing, stressful situation.” The things you were supposed to discuss later, when the time was right. Except he had succumbed to the terminal case of nothing-matters-anymore-if-you’re-leaving-the-band and got drunk instead.

“Okay,” he said. “That’s… fine with me.”

“Alright,” you said. “So, here’s our problem: I’m your manager.”

Jungkook raised his eyebrows and pulled his chin back.

“If that’s our only problem,” he said, “we are very lucky people.”

A brief smile flickered on your face.

“It’s our biggest problem,” you clarified. “But we definitely are lucky.”

Encouraged by the amusement in your eyes, he grinned. “Because we have each other?”

Your smile grew and even the plane itself seemed to shake a little when his heart rate accelerated at the sight of it.

“Because we can solve this problem,” you said.

His face fell. He thought he could guess where you were going with this.

“How do you mean?” he still asked, his voice a low murmur.

You thought you could have used some of the whiskey that Jungkook had sought out last night.

With a measured breath, you said, “I leave the band, and—”

“Wait,” he cut you off. “Is that supposed to be—”

“Hear me out first—”

“No, listen—if the problem is that you’re my manager,” he said, “then you leaving Rated Riot is not the solution.”

Jungkook sounded a little like Seokjin had earlier—a stark contrast from the way he’d spoken to you last night by the bus.

“Are you suggesting that because people are talking about us backstage?” he pressed.

You turned away. “It’s not just that. I mean, they’re already talking and that’s—well, it’s not great. But we can’t stop the wheel from turning now, or however that saying goes. What we can do, however, is stop it before it gets worse. And by that I mean, you know—we need to decide what the hell we’re doing.”

That was what he wanted, he thought. But now he was confused.

You seemed to want to make a decision about your relationship together. Yet you also seemed to believe that leaving Rated Riot was the best option. He failed to see how both of these things were possible at the same time.

“So, you’ve made up your mind, then?” he asked. “About leaving?”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” you said. “I don’t want to leave the band, but—”

“Well, that’s the thing, then,” he said sharply, unfastening his seatbelt. Turning to face you, he stumbled over his own confusion, “I’m—I don’t want to hold you back. I told you. But I thought you—I thought it would be—I thought you wanted to leave. I thought—but you want to stay. So, stay.”

Stay.

It was very simple, really, very concise. But it carried a lot more weight than his words last night when he had caught you off guard. When he had let you go.

You wanted to stay. You just didn’t think you should.

Your response wasn’t particularly verbal. “Hmm.”

“Is it me?” Jungkook asked. “Am I the only reason you’re thinking of leaving?”

He didn’t sound accusatory, even though you were prepared for it. He sounded apologetic instead—almost guilty—and you were completely unprepared for that as a million tiny needles pricked at your heart.

“You’re not the only reason,” you replied. “You’re part of it. And I don’t—look, I-I don’t want to leave. But that sounds reasonable when you look at where we are right now.”

He heard nothing of what you’d said.

“That’s not reasonable in the slightest,” he insisted.

“Jungkook—”

“You have to stay. If you—”

“But if that’s the choice that would make more sense for us,” you interjected, exasperated, “then I don’t mind leaving. If—if we weren’t working together anymore, then maybe we could try to finally figure our shit out.”

Now he heard it.

He had a vague awareness that the other passengers behind you had turned off their screens and removed their headphones, choosing to listen to your conversation instead. But he was too stunned by the look in your eyes to care.

So, that was what you were trying to say: you were prepared to leave Rated Riot to fix your relationship.

He opened his mouth to speak, but it took another minute for coherent words to come to him.

“We can—we can figure our shit out while working together,” he said. “Why do you have to leave?”

“It’s—you have to understand,” you said, “that I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m pretty sure neither do you, but that’s how you usually function.” Jungkook sobered up enough to offer a noncommittal shrug. You continued, “but for me—this is freaking me out. I don’t—I don’t know what’s going to happen and what we should do, and—leaving the band sounds—it seems reasonable. It seems safe. Smart. And that’s what I’m clinging to.”

He swallowed, not trusting himself to move. “But that’s—”

“Please, it’s—this is what I wanted to say to you—what I should have said to you last night.” There was a pleading tone in your voice. He nodded, quiet while you continued. “If I stay with Rated Riot, and we try to solve our problems… there are only two ways that can go, right? We both know as much. Either we get back together, or we don’t.”

Jungkook was mesmerised by how glaringly simple this was, in principle: either you used a label on your relationship, or you didn’t.

He knew he was going to love you either way, but he couldn’t breathe, suddenly, at the thought of this other choice in this dilemma—the choice where you didn’t get back together, and he spent the rest of his life deliberately going crazy, so he could return—at least in his mind—to that day seven years ago when he first met you.

“Well, uh, yeah,” he managed to say. “That’s pretty much the choices that we’ve got.”

You reclined in your seat, lifting your gaze to the light control buttons overhead.

“If we get back together…” you began, exhaling. “Then, we might have to face a lot of problems from the label. But we might be alright in the end. I don’t know.”

Jungkook tightened his jaw. He attempted to formulate a response that would be logical and appropriate in this situation. But really, his head felt too small for his thoughts and his tongue too big for his mouth.

“That’s… that’s good to know,” he eventually said.

“Mhmm,” you replied distractedly. “But see, what if we don’t get back together? Or we do, but it doesn’t work out?”

That was what worried him, too—but for different reasons.

He knew that you were looking at this from a pragmatic perspective. A logical, what-would-make-more-sense perspective.

He didn’t think he’d ever looked at it this way. For him, this was simple: he loved you and wanted to be with you. He didn’t care how inconvenient and illogical it might seem to those around him, and he refused to think about what would happen if this love didn’t work out. It would have to. How could it not?

But he recognised his privileges; he knew he didn’t have as many responsibilities as you did. And, alright, fine, he thought about it—realistically, if you broke up again, he’d probably drink until he turned into a puddle of whiskey, while you’d flee across the globe to get away from it all.

And yet—was that all there was to this? Just rationality and calculated decisions?

Jungkook cleared his throat and asked the question that he believed really mattered here.

“Do you love me?”

Someone on the plane gulped audibly and held their breath. He wondered if it was him.

The colour of your eyes deepened, then blurred. “I-I—that’s—that’s not—”

“Answer me,” he whispered.

You tried, but no words came out. This moment resembled the nightmares that haunted you lately: you opened your mouth to scream, but silence stifled every sound you tried to make.

“T-that’s—” you began and stopped yourself before you could stutter any further. You took a breath. “That’s not important right now—”

“How can it not be—”

“Because I do love you,” you said quickly—the words slurred into one desperate Idoloveyou, a hopeless Idoloveyou, a how-can-you-possibly-expect-me-not-to Idoloveyou. “But I don’t think I should. I don’t think you should, either. We’re a—we’re a fucking mess.”

Visibly frozen, Jungkook found himself thinking that if this was the sixteenth century, and the two of you just happened to have this conversation in some public square, the townsfolk would have surely accused you of witchcraft.

It was uncanny, the way you cast a spell on him with just four words—all four of which he heard with perfect clarity: I do love you. Granted, he wasn’t sure if he heard the rest. He felt like he was already burning in your place.

“Right,” he thought he said. He couldn’t feel his face. “But we’ve always—”

“I’m—I have to—I do owe you,” you said. He watched you, his expression oscillating between mild confusion and outright bewilderment. “You said I don’t, but I do. I could have told you what was going on in my head like you told me. Honestly, all this time, whenever I talked to people, they all told me to speak to you. To talk it out. And I closed up in my head instead. If I don’t talk about it, I don’t have to deal with it. You know?”

He blinked, finally. “That’s—”

“I’ll explain it, though, okay?” you said. “Please?”

You gave him too much power—as if he could ever say no to you. As if he could stop listening. As if every fibre of his being didn’t ache to stay close to you.

Warm—so unbearably warm that it felt like he was in the middle of exploring the landscapes Dante depicted in Inferno—Jungkook wiped off the sweat from his palms on his dark jeans.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, okay.”

“It won’t take long,” you assured. “Really, I don’t even have much to say. I’m fucking scared. That’s all there is to it.”

Jungkook seemed to be practising the lost art of swallowing his tongue. He wanted you to continue and you were biting your lip in a way that suggested that this was not all there was to it. You only wished it was.

You took a trembling breath, and your lungs followed—quivering, it seemed, as they tried to provide you with the oxygen necessary for all that you were about to say.

“I spent the first fifteen years of my life watching my parents break up and get back together again,” you began. “And do you know what I felt every single time they broke up? Actual rage.” You laughed wryly here like this reaction was absurd. “But when they got back together, I was fucking—I was hopeful. I refused to speak to them, of course—I was a teenager—but I was… Inside, just like my mum, I also hoped that this would work. That this time would be the one.”

You swallowed and lapsed into a silence so long and heavy that Jungkook worried you might never speak again.

Fifteen years, he thought. And all this time, he’d assumed that your dad left for the final time when you were twelve. That was already bad enough, of course, but Jungkook hadn’t realised that the back-and-forth between your parents that you’d mentioned back in Tilburg had taken place after that. He hadn’t realised that you and your brother had gone through three years of almost having a father—and your mum through almost having a partner.

“I knew they were a tragedy together,” you continued. Jungkook didn’t know how to raise his eyes to look at you. “It was obvious that it wouldn’t last. I always knew it, and I always said that to my mum. But deep down, I still fucking hoped that they’d get together and it would work.”

You shook your head with a cold, unforgiving smile.

“How fucking stupid,” you concluded. “All hope does is bring misery and disappointment.”

“You were a child,” he said, his brows drawn together—sad and a little scared for your younger self. “You just wanted your parents to be together. You wanted a family.”

“Yeah,” you said with a sigh. Then again, “yeah.”

A minute passed without either of you speaking. Flight attendants crossed the aisles, offering complimentary snacks, but missing you—either by mistake or because there was no one in your seats on the plane. The two of you were somewhere else.

“I think,” you said once the commotion around you quieted, “that I wasn’t just angry at my mum for trying again and again, even though it never worked. Or for never losing hope that maybe they could be happy together. I think I was also angry at myself. Because I never truly lost hope, either.”

Jungkook hung his head, his lips tight in silent contemplation.

“So that’s what I’m afraid of,” you said. “I’m scared that this—us—will turn out to be like that. I’m scared that we’ll let wishful thinking take over, and we’ll get back together even though we shouldn’t. Even though it’s obvious that we won’t last.”

Right away, he wanted to insist that you would defy those odds. That there was nothing obvious about the two of you whatsoever. He wanted to promise all that and more, but it wasn’t right—not after you endured fifteen years of broken promises between two of the most important people in your life.

“You, um—” he started to say and coughed suddenly, caught off guard by his dry throat, “—you told me before that you admired your mum’s courage. F-for trying again.”

You handed him the overpriced airport water bottle that you had bought earlier. Jungkook nodded in gratitude.

“I did,” you confirmed. “And I do admire that about her. But I don’t have any of her courage.” You brought a shaky finger over your forehead, not quite scratching it. “I always say that I don’t believe in second chances, but the truth is, I think I do believe in them. I’m just debilitated by my fear that these second chances might not work out.”

Jungkook lowered the bottle. He’d emptied almost half of it in a single gulp, but an anxious undercurrent inside of him had absorbed it before he could feel any relief.

“Is that, um,” he tried to ask, “is that something you feel in general or—or because it’s us?”

You thought about that for half a second and shook your head.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation where a second chance held so much significance,” you said. “This isn’t a mistake that you can fix. It’s not a human error. It’s you and me. And it’s so—it’s final. There won’t be another chance for us, it’s now or never. And what if it’s never?”

You lowered your gaze, your fingers restless as they toyed with the sleeves of your black shirt. Every now and then, you’d lift your hand to your bare neck—you still hadn’t found any of your necklaces—as if seeking a distraction from the weight of the moment.

“Y-you are—you’re my—” you tried and couldn’t. Finally, you looked at him, and the words you couldn’t voice were right there, shimmering uncertainly in his dark eyes. “You’re my first thought in the morning and the last one at night. I don’t think my heart could take it if I started to have hope for us again, but we didn’t work out in the end.”

Jungkook felt his heart trip over several beats—

Stumble down his ribs—

Crash into his stomach—

Roll around the hollow cavities somewhere at the very bottom—

Rise suddenly, all the way back to his chest—

Expand—

Expand—

Expand—

And explode, it seemed. In a flash of light so vivid and intense that for a minute or two, his blood stopped running and he survived on nothing but the words you’d just said.

“And so that’s what I meant,” you finished, and he struggled to hear your next words over the loud pounding in his chest. “If I stay here and we don’t get back together—or we do, but not for long—then what? We see each other every day, we try to act like nothing’s wrong, we learn how to go back to being professional, and then four years later, you make another bet?”

Jungkook found the end of your sentence so utterly unexpected that he wasn’t sure if he had even heard you correctly. His response was half of a gasp and a fractured “I—” before you cut him off.

“I’m joking,” you said with a gentle smile—one that managed to feel both, very fitting and completely out of place in this situation. “That’s—well, that is why I think it’d be more reasonable for me to leave. That way, I think, we could figure it out without some dramatic, tragic consequences in case it, uh—in case something goes wrong.”

“R-right,” he said. A warm haze settled on his face in a delicate shade of pink. It appeared almost soft to the touch. “I… I understand. I-I don’t—I don’t know if there’s anything I can say that would take that away. All of your fear.”

You swallowed and nodded. “Yeah. There might not be anything to say at all.”

Jungkook hurriedly ran his tongue over his lips. He wasn’t thinking about you leaving right now. He was thinking about you staying and fighting through it.

He wanted to say something more, but he didn’t think he could mend these particular wounds in your heart. They ran deeper than his love could reach.

It wasn’t him that you should have talked to about this. It wasn’t him that could help you reach an agreement—or, at least, an understanding—with your own self.

“You should talk to your mum,” he said.

You looked up from the floor of the plane, surprised. “What?”

“Talk to her,” he repeated. “Just to hear what she thinks about everything. To hear her reasoning. To understand why she made the choices that she did. I think that would be good for you both.”

Your surprise deepened and gained an edge. You looked alarmed, as if the notion that a caregiver could ease your hurt rather than deepen it was new and foreign.

“I’ve—we’ve never—my mum and I have only talked about her relationship with my dad maybe once in our whole lives,” you said. “I have never even talked to her about my own relationship. You know I haven’t.”

He nodded solemnly. “I have, though.”

“What?” you asked. There was a ringing in your ears. “You have—you’ve talked to—to my mum? About—”

“I’m sure she’ll tell you everything.”

For a good minute, you watched him with an expression that held more questions than possible ways of asking them.

“I—I’m very confused right now,” you managed.

He nodded again, understanding, but still not offering any explanations.

He’d told you most of everything, really—he’d called those bits of the story “Haunting” and “Cursed.” But the rest of it had to be something you pieced together on your own.

For a long time, he had imagined this to be something that would hit you years later, perhaps when you would accidentally hear an old Rated Riot song. You’d think no, it can’t be, and you’d rush home. You’d pull out the albums, the track lists, and the lyrics.

And you’d know.

These conversations with your mum were his far side of the moon—invisible, but still present, still heavy.

These conversations were his thoughts and hopes and countless fears.

They were everything he brought to Rated Riot and everything he expressed in the recording booth, in Namjoon’s studio, and on stage.

They were his past and his present, and someone else’s future.

They were him without you, but still searching for you every morning when he woke up.

They were you, you, you.

Everything he’d ever talked to your mum about had been his songs. And all his songs had always been a tale about you—in every banal, every impossible narrative he could find within himself.

They were about seeing you and growing wings.

About kissing you and coming home.

About losing you and bleeding out.

About forever and five minutes that don’t mean anything once they’re over.

“I’m sorry,” he said, not capable of much else. “I needed her help with something. I didn’t really tell her anything, uh, directly, so to speak. But she—she knows. She’ll tell you everything. It’s just, um—you have to talk to her, too. You have to tell her what you told me.”

Airplanes, you realised suddenly, made it very easy to force yourself to stop running away. There was nowhere to escape—you could see the clouds reflected in his eyes and you were already falling in them anyway.

“I’ll talk to her,” you said.

Jungkook gave you a small nod and scratched his knee absentmindedly.

“I want you to stay,” he stated. “With the band. It’s—it’s selfish, but it’s the truth. I’ve always tried to encourage you to stop thinking so much a-and just do what you wanted, and this—this is what you want, despite your fear. You want to stay.”

You looked at him with a forlorn expression and he felt his hands twitch at his sides.

“But what will we do?” you asked.

“We’ll figure it out,” he promised. “I mean, we’ve gotten this far, right? So, give us a chance. We’re not completely hopeless. We can... talk our way through it all, step by step.”

You’ve talked your way through a lot and you have gotten this far, that was true. Even if the journey hadn’t been pleasant.

Seokjin had told you earlier today that as long as you stayed with the band, no one would care about what happened next. And, really, no matter how you looked at it, this was what it all boiled down to: it was just you.

Only you—afraid of what others will say, afraid of getting hurt and hurting him again, afraid of doing too much, and afraid of not doing enough.

“I’m—” you tried, “w-we don’t know what will happen. That’s why I’m—”

“I know,” he said. “And you’re right. We don’t know what will happen. That’s fucking terrifying. I’m scared, too.”

He did look a little scared, but he licked his lips and successfully collected himself.

The two of you were so close to meeting in the middle and taking that first step together—just a little more strain between your shaking, outstretched hands.

“And I-I know that the bet is another thing that—that might make it harder for you to believe that we can—that we can work it out,” he added, spinning his ring around his finger twice more. “But I want you to know that it—the bet was a fucked up thing to do. But it gave me a reason to talk to you about everything that I already wanted to talk to you about. I’m—even without the bet, I would have approached you, eventually. It just—I was fucking scared, so it might have taken me longer.”

It wasn’t just you.

Fear was in the epicentre of everything you were saying to each other. It was like the wind in every city you visited on this tour—inescapable, uncontrollable, persistent.

He was afraid, too—of trying and failing. Afraid of getting his heart broken and breaking yours. Afraid of never finding the forever that he desperately wanted with you.

“My point is,” Jungkook finished, “I think this is inevitable, because—well, let’s be honest,” he chuckled softly, trying to lessen the gravity of his confession, “all I’d ever wanted in my entire fucked-up life was you.”

Your breath trembled.

Something very deep inside of you wanted you to believe that inevitability was meant for the two of you, too.

“It’s been four years, though,” you said with a faint shake of your head. “What if it takes us another four to find a way to make this work?”

“It—well, I don’t really care how long it takes, to be honest,” he said. “I’m going to die yours.”

He said that and your heart stopped beating for a moment to listen.

To wait.

To make one thing very clear for you: you would never survive losing him again.

And you were scared—completely petrified—to find yourself in a situation where losing him was possible. Where it was likely.

Jungkook saw it on your face. He saw everything—the anguish, the pain, the doubt, the fear.

But he felt a little exhilarated to find the fight in your eyes, too. This fight was the reason you were talking to him about things that you’ve never talked about. It was the reason you were here.

“We’ll decide everything else when the idea of—of trying again doesn’t scare you so much anymore,” he said, keeping his voice steady. “When you hear your mum’s point of view, and you can make a, uh—an informed decision.”

He noted that there was something softer in your eyes when you looked at him again, but he could still discern the lingering edges of doubt.

“You think that’ll help me make an informed decision?” you asked, touched by his choice of words.

“I hope it will,” he replied. “But we can work it all out, either way. I just think you need to talk to her. It’s been so long.”

“Right. It has been.” You clasped your hands around your neck and tucked your chin between your palms. “It—it probably won’t be an easy conversation, though.”

“Nor will it be short, I imagine.”

“Hmm. Probably not.”

He sensed the growing distance between you as your eyes ran over the back of the seat in front of you. He knew you well enough to understand what you were doing: you were mapping out the rest of your story in your head.

He didn’t like that. Your stories rarely had happy endings.

“You don’t—don’t start planning it ahead, though,” he said hastily—before you reached the unhappily ever after in your mind. “It’ll be late when we land in London. You need to sleep. Talk to her after that. When you—when you’re not working. We can wait. We have time.”

Finally, you allowed your gazes to meet again—and to linger a little longer this time.

You took a moment to note that, despite knowing Jungkook for so long, every time you looked at him, you still needed a minute to will yourself to keep breathing. You remembered thinking, after your first few dates, if that would ever go away—logically, it should have.

But you watched him now, seven years since you’ve met, and the beating of your heart still felt backwards.

I’m going to die yours

I’m going to die yours

I’m going to die—

“Okay,” you finally said. “I’ll call her as soon as possible.”

He nodded twice and closed his eyes for a brief respite—but hesitated, suddenly, before opening them again.

He wondered, for a suspended moment, what it would mean for you—this ‘as soon as possible.’

Then he looked at you and decided to tell you what he wanted it to mean.

“Before that happens, though—before you talk to her, I mean—I-I want to still be able to see you,” he said and did so assertively, using the phrase I want, but really meaning, I must. “I don’t want to not talk to you.”

You felt your frosty expression crumble effortlessly into a soft smile.

“We’ve agreed to a truce, right?” you said easily. Lightly.

His heart soared.

He was smiling, too, but with caution—his lips were pressed together as he bit into his lip ring to contain his smile to a level that he thought appropriate.

His shining eyes gave him away, however, and you wondered—the thought sudden and overwhelming—if there was a point in your life when you weren’t in love with him when he smiled.

“Let’s try a friendship,” he proposed.

“Oh—” Your smile abruptly turned into laughter as you remembered trying this once before. It had lasted for about two days. “You know we can’t be friends. We don’t know how.”

The gentle cadence of your laughter made him weightless.

“What are you talking about?” he teased—so high that he was certain the flight attendants were going to ask him to take it down a notch because it was dangerous to float on the ceiling in the middle of a flight. “We can be whatever the fuck we want to be.”

Your laughter grew bolder, strengthened by the relief that you’ve had this conversation, that you’ve decided on your next steps, however uncertain they were—and his smile spread.

You could see him beaming through your half-closed eyes, and there was absolutely nothing—no matter how big or small, significant or not at all—that you wouldn’t have done for him when he looked like that, and no amount of fear could have stopped you.

He'd burn down half of Europe for you, Seokjin had said.

You were worried you’d burn all of it for him.

“Honestly,” you said, “we’re such a mess that I have nothing else to say. Sure. Let’s try being friends again. Why not?”

“For the time being?” Jungkook asked. There was a tentative glint in his eyes. “Until we figure out if—until we decide what we’re going to do with us?”

It was very considerate of him to say ‘we’ here, when you knew that you were the one who needed to get it together in the end.

“For the time being,” you confirmed.

“And you’ll stay?” he asked once more. “With Rated Riot?”

Last night, he had told you he was letting you go, and you needed to hear it—not just to see how much he’s grown, but to fully understand yourself. To stop jumping from possibility to possibility. To accept that it was okay to do what you wanted sometimes.

The past few days were like flipping a coin and realising, while it was mid-air, which side you were hoping it would land on.

“I’ll stay.”

Jungkook thought that this flight was going to be the most thrilling part of his day. But a miracle happened as soon as the plane touched down in London.

His grandmother called him.

It wasn’t an accident like he had initially assumed when he saw her name on his phone. She called because she missed her favourite grandson and wanted to wish him good luck at his concert (and chastise him a little for not wearing “enough clothing” on stage).

Jungkook wasn’t sure if the tears in his eyes were because she’d remembered who he was, remembered what he did for a living, because she’d called, or because she’d confirmed his long-held suspicion that he was her favourite grandson.

Perhaps, and most likely, it was all of these things.

He was so excited that he stared at his phone even after the call had ended, ignoring the influx of more unintelligible, frantic messages from the same unknown number. He probably would have spent the rest of the night fixated on the screen if his battery hadn’t run out by the time everyone settled in the hotel.

At that point, there was nothing Jungkook wanted more than to tell you about the fifteen-minute phone call. However, he couldn’t call or text with his phone off—and waiting for ten minutes until he found the charger in his suitcase seemed like half of an eternity.

Unaware of the lateness of the hour, he lingered outside the hotel, thinking of a plan.

In the end, he decided he didn’t want to draw more attention to your friendship—he hiccupped on the word even in his thoughts—and approached the decorative garden at the front entrance. Ficus plants (artificial, as it turned out) rested in a bed of pebbles (real, for some reason) and Jungkook grabbed a handful of those before heading back to the south wing of the hotel.

He counted down the windows until he identified yours, then took half a dozen steps back from the wall and tossed a pebble at your window. It hit the glass with a gentle thud and dropped onto the grass four floors below.

Jungkook waited for a minute—or what felt like a minute—and tossed another one, making this one bounce against your windowsill before it slipped into your room through the crack of the open window.

He waited again and, finally, your curtains fluttered. A moment later, he saw your puzzled face as you opened the window and covered your squinting eyes with your hand, peering down into the darkness.

“Jungkook?” you called out. “What—what the fuck are you doing?”

“Trying to get your attention!” he shouted with an elated lilt in his voice.

You picked up the pebble from the windowsill and lifted it. He couldn’t see it very well from the ground, but he could see your confused expression.

“By throwing rocks at my window?”

“Yeah!”

“How—are you—for what—”

You stopped. There wasn’t a singular question you wanted to ask, because nothing about what he was doing made any sense whatsoever.

You leaned over the windowsill to get a better look at him, but it didn’t help much. The light from your hotel room made it difficult to discern his expression in the pitch-black night. And the garden lights adorning the exterior of the hotel only highlighted his white sneakers.

“I’m sure there were a lot of steps you could have taken before you had to resort to this,” you shouted into the night. “Most people text. Or knock on the door.”

“My phone’s dead,” he explained, lifting a black block that you assumed was the dead phone. “And I didn’t want anyone to see me going into your room. Can you come down here?”

“Wh—hold on a second.” You retreated into the room to put on a robe over the t-shirt you had worn to bed. The night wind felt a little less frigid when you leaned out of the window again. “Can you just come up here? It’s nearly six in the morning, no one will see—”

“Come on, we finally have a few days off!” he shouted, implying, clearly, that you’d have time to catch up on sleep later. After days of him forcing you to rest, this was very unusual—but, really, quite welcome.

You realised that something important must have happened for him to do this. However, his buoyant voice—and this whole situation in general—also made you wonder if he was drunk.

“I meant that it’s cold outside,” you said. “Wouldn’t it be warmer to—”

“I can—it’s not that bad,” he ended up saying after quickly surmising that his offer to warm you might lead to you throwing that same pebble right at his forehead. “Please?”

You were well aware that this could go on for a while, and it probably wouldn’t be long before your Romeo-and-Juliet-esque conversation attracted the attention of the hotel staff, who would politely ask you to find a different accommodation. The manager already didn’t seem especially pleased when he found out that a rock band would be staying at his hotel.

“Alright. I’m coming down,” you said. “Put the rocks back where you found them.”

He snickered and watched you close the window, disappearing inside of your room.

By the time he returned the remaining pebbles back to the garden, the sky was already beginning to paint itself red. The clouds obscured the rising sun, but Jungkook turned his head just in time to see you walk through the hotel door, and he felt like it was the middle of the day already.

“What’s going on?” you asked, a little concerned about the size of the grin on his face.

“My grandma called me,” he said. “She’s having a good day. She remembered me.”

“Oh, my God!” you gasped. All of your irritation about leaving your warm hotel room at this hour vanished in an instant. “That’s great news! Did you talk to her?”

“Yeah!” He nodded, nearly laughing in pure, beautiful euphoria. “The whole call, she was okay. Even scolded me for breaking the glass on her favourite picture frame when I came to say goodbye to her on the last night before the tour.”

You laughed, infected with his bright mood. “Jungkook, that’s—that’s fantastic. I’m so—”

Instinctively, he pulled you to him by wrapping his arms around your waist. For just a moment, he tightened his embrace and lifted you up slightly, laughing breathlessly when you gasped in surprise.

“I know,” he murmured into your neck as he lowered you to the ground. “I still can’t believe she really called.”

He held you close to him with one hand around your waist, and another one on the back of your neck—and you were stunned for a split-second. Then finally, muscle memory roused you, and you wrapped your arms around his neck, resting the side of your head against his.

“I’m—I’m so happy to hear that,” you whispered, feeling his breath on your shoulder and the goosebumps that rose on your skin as a result.

“I am, too.” He slowly pulled his head back to look at you, and the sight of the smile on his face was enough to pierce your heart with something that you could never remove. “You’re the first person I wanted to tell this to.”

Wordlessly, you pulled him back into a hug. You could feel the stretch of his cheeks against yours as his smile widened, and you realised you’d never want to run away from this. You’d always want to stay.

You were going to stay.

No. That wasn’t right.

You wouldn’t just stay with Rated Riot, determined to destroy every ounce of your fear for him. You’d have mopped up whole oceans for him. Captured shooting stars and stuffed them into jars. Flooded the entire world with an endless sea.

You’d have done anything to have him here like this: smiling so much that he could barely speak while his chest thud-thud-thudded against yours.

You felt so much of it—this vast love that refused to die no matter how much it was beaten—that you didn’t know what to do with it all.

A minute later, you pulled back slightly—a little dizzy from the intense whirlwinds inside your chest.

“T-thank you,” you stammered. “For telling me. I’m really—I’m so happy for you.”

His hands lingered on your waist, extending the moment to the very end.

“Thank you,” he replied, taking a reluctant step back. “She, um—she asked me to say hi to you. You know, from her.”

You were surprised that she remembered you—and brought you up!—and your smile returned, encouraged by the bashful look in his eyes when he said this.

“Give her my best the next time you talk to her,” you said.

“I will.” He nodded eagerly, then slowed down. “Although, I, uh—well—I don’t know when that’ll be.”

“That’s okay,” you replied quickly, not wanting to lose the lightness of the moment so soon. “The important thing is that she’s having a good day today. And she called you!”

You raised your voice at the end of the sentence, and it was enough to rekindle his excitement.

“She did!” he sang. “She said I was her favourite grandson, by the way. So I was right.”

“Oh—hmm.” You remembered pretending to argue with him about this in Stockholm and couldn’t help yourself. “Well, alright. I guess that makes sense. Remember that stray orange cat that she used to feed every night? Reginald?”

“Reggie,” he said, grinning. The cat was one of the first things his grandmother mentioned when she called tonight; it had stopped coming to see her, but continued to take up a large place in her heart. “What’s he got to do with this?”

“Well, I mean, she loved him so much, even though he scratched her every time she got too close,” you explained. “Clearly, she always had a soft spot for troublemakers.”

“Okay, now,”—he clicked his tongue—“my grandma did actually love that cat a lot, so I’ll take that as a compliment.”

You snickered and he laughed, too, and for a moment, he thought his chest might have exploded if he felt any happier than he did right now.

Then he noticed you clutching your robe closer to your body. Whatever you’d worn underneath wasn’t enough to keep you warm now that the initial excitement slowly began to fade.

“Do you, uh… want to go back inside?” he asked, gesturing at the exposed skin of your wrists. “You’re shivering.”

You looked down at your hands. “I’m okay. But maybe we could sit?”

You turned to look around. There was a bench right at the edge of the garden, next to a bronze-coloured flowerpot that was placed in the pebbles Jungkook had used to “get your attention”.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

You shivered all over again when he sat down next to you, and the bench turned out to be smaller than it had appeared. You could feel every bounce of his restless legs.

“So,” you said, “what did you two talk about?”

He brightened at your question, and suddenly, you didn’t think he was anywhere near close enough.

“Oh, so many things,” he said. “She told me she’d like to see us perform. Can we make that happen when we go back?”

“Absolutely,” you promised.

“Yeah?” His smile widened and his bouncing increased. “She’ll probably hate it. Mosh pits aren’t her thing.”

“We’ll put her in the balcony seats,” you suggested. This conversation felt so ordinary that it was hard to imagine you could be talking to him about anything else. “She’ll love every second of watching you on stage.”

“She said she saw pictures from the tour,” he added, giddy. “My cousins showed her Maggie’s Instagram profile.”

“Did she see your pirate cosplay?”

Jungkook displayed a remarkable resilience to the pirate jokes after that first concert—you and Jimin suspected that the response from the audience played a big part in his newfound immunity—and he chuckled at it now.

“She did,” he said. “She said I reminded her of Kurt Russell in Escape from New York.”

You pulled back a little to get a better look at him, even though he no longer needed to wear the eye patch. Most of the discolouration around his eye had already faded and you’d managed to cover up the scratches with a few smaller, skin-coloured adhesive pads.

“Well, shit,” you said. “Maybe I do kind of see the resemblance. You’ve got the hair.”

“I don’t know who that is,” he admitted.

You widened your eyes. “Jungkook. You don’t know Snake Plissken?”

“No, but my grandma said all her friends had a crush on him after the film came out,” he said. “Except for my grandma, of course. She insists she only ever had eyes for my grandpa.”

You both chuckled at this with a childlike glee—the thought of a love that spanned decades felt exhilarating and very possible as the sky awakened above you.

“My mum liked Kurt Russell, too, after the film,” you said. “And she was nine at the time. She snuck into the theatre with her brother and his friends.”

Jungkook inclined his head thoughtfully. “Maybe that guy’s not so bad, then.”

“He’s a classic,” you corrected. “But your taste in films isn’t.”

“That’s actually exactly what my grandma said,” he remembered. “She told me not to come home until I watched it.”

You could hear his grandmother saying this exact thing to him and felt yourself smile again.

“I think you’d love it if you watched it,” you said. “So, it’s not much of a threat.”

“Really?” He looked at you, but only for a fraction of a moment. “Would you—I mean, it’d be cool if we could—”

You knew what he was asking. And your response—like most of everything else tonight—came as a reflex. “I’m sure we can rent it on Amazon.”

“Okay,” he said, his shoulders slumping against yours in visible relief. “That—I’d like that.”

Unwelcome, the raw breeze of the late hour caught up with you, and you felt your body shudder involuntarily once more. Determined to ignore the chill, you opened your mouth to continue the conversation, but Jungkook suddenly leaned forwards.

“Here,” he said, slipping out of his dark flannel. “Put this on. It’s not much, but—”

“No, no—” you tried, but he drew closer to drape the flannel over your shoulders. “You’ll catch a cold.”

“I’ll be fine,” he insisted, pulling back. To further reduce the significance of the gesture, he added, “it’s what friends do. And I’m warm anyway.”

You clutched the collar of the flannel tighter to prevent it from sliding off. Or just to have something to do with your hands. “Well—thanks, friend.”

A powerful waft of his cologne permeated your senses, and you closed your eyes, preserving the refreshing blend of woody and citrus notes that already took up a significant amount of space in your memory.

Every time you inhaled, his scent mixed with a different moment from your life—and it all flooded your mind in an unstoppable sequence.

Meeting Jungkook—

Kissing him for the first time on that rainy night in the park—

Hugging him hello every morning before class—

Borrowing his clothes when you stayed at his dorm—

Losing your mind when you found yourself alone and his scent returned to you, uninvited.

Jungkook appeared to be sharing your memories in real time as he inhaled sharply and tapped his fingers against his shaky thighs.

“Friends,” he said, swallowing, “probably don’t kiss each other.”

His words ignited a fire in the pit of your stomach without any matches.

You glanced at him from the corner of your eye. “Yeah, uh—t-they probably don’t.”

“Hmm. Right.”

“As your friend,” you said, sitting up straighter and letting his flannel settle around your shoulders while you lowered your hands to the wooden bench underneath you, “I’m pointing out that you’re on a high because your grandma called. That’s why you’re thinking about—”

“I’m on a high because I’m with you,” he stated. “My friend.”

The fire inside you spread rapidly, wildly, uncontrollably.

The way you were starting to lose feeling in your fingers from gripping the bench so tightly, yet you refused to let go of it, should have probably been studied scientifically.

“Well, then,” you said, “let’s look at it this way: have you ever kissed friends before? Sid maybe?”

Jungkook snorted. “God forbid.”

“Minjun, then?”

“No,” he said. “Do you think I should?”

You snickered. “No. But if we’re friends, too, then we probably shouldn’t do that, either.”

He looked at you, his lips puckered in thought. Unconsciously, you had started to scrape at the dark paint of the bench.

You hadn’t meant a word of what you’d said. He suspected as much.

“Probably not,” he agreed. “But we’re such a mess, though, right?”

The echo of your own words on the plane brought a smile to your face again—a reaction more rooted in easing the sudden surge of anticipation rather than genuine amusement.

“Yeah,” you said quietly. “We’re such a mess.”

Jungkook felt a little afraid, which was something that he always felt when the world around him blurred, and he found himself incapable of looking away from your lips.

It was dangerous, this tunnel vision. This singular focus. This impossible, magnetic pull that defied all reason, that made the whole universe tremble with a silent—

He leaned closer.

For a fleeting moment, the space between you was filled with nothing but your echoing heartbeats and silent memories.

For a fleeting moment, time itself held its breath.

You remembered Oslo and the way Jungkook had pulled away. You remembered how worried you were, how horrified—he was drunk, and he’d pulled away. He’d done the rational thing.

Funny thing, rationality.

You thought you were perfectly rational when you closed the remaining distance and your lips brushed against his—hesitant, uncertain, tender. A permission, a question, and his unequivocal death, all in one.

Jungkook inhaled—as if checking if he was alive or just pretending to be—and reached up to touch your cheek. He pulled you closer and stole the remnants of your breath with his kiss.

It was fair, he thought. You had stolen his entire soul.

The touch of your lips lasted for less than a minute—not nearly enough time for the trees around you to exhale in clandestine relief—but the softness of his mouth, the slow, intoxicating smacking of your lips against his, and the faint notes of mint on his tongue did irreparable damage to your pulse.

He stole that too, he supposed, because when he pulled away, his heart seemed to beat with enough strength to support the lives of half the population.

“Do friends discuss what it means if they kiss?” he asked, winded. His chest touched yours every time it rose in an attempt to recover.

Your laughter was breathless, too. “I’m thinking no.”

“I like what you’re thinking.”

Something very tranquil and very happy was inscribed into the contours of your features.

Soft red feathers spread across the sky above you as the city slowly stirred awake.

For the first time in a long time, everything felt like it was supposed to.

“I have a free day tomorrow,” you said. “Well, today.”

Jungkook was a bit puzzled by the shift in conversation but went along with it nonetheless. “Yeah?”

“Mhmm. The girls and I made plans, but I’m, uh—I’m going to call my mum before I go. I set an alarm for it and everything,” you said with a self-conscious chuckle. “I’m going to talk to her.”

“Oh.” He was shaking a little, he realised. He hoped you wouldn’t notice it and decide to give him his flannel back. “Well, that—that’s good. You should do that.”

You nodded, lowering your gaze to the grass and the pebbles below. “Yeah.”

“I’m going to kiss you again,” he decided. “For good luck.”

Your surprised smile overshadowed everything else he wanted to tell you.

“Oh,” you said. “Is that what friends do?”

“Yes,” he replied. “You didn’t know? It can’t be just one kiss, that’s bad luck.”

“Actually, I heard even numbers are bad luck.”

He gasped theatrically. “Oh, but that’s terrible! I’ll have to kiss you three times, then. To be safe.”

You smiled and shook your head. He died a little then, because everything was here, just like in his worst nightmares and his favourite daydreams: your scent, your eyes, your smile. All of you.

“You’re always such an idiot,” you said with so much affection that the wind crept away miserably, defeated by the warmth in Jungkook’s gaze when he looked at you. When he felt your hand on the side of his face—gentle and careful so as not to touch the healing bruises on his cheek.

“Hmm.” He wasn’t sure if he’d ever remember how to breathe again. “You said you love me, though.”

“I do,” you said, beaming, as you ran the tips of your fingers over the edges of his wolf cut. “It’s a burden I have to live with.”

He shivered from your touch and leaned in—impatient, all of a sudden. His lips met yours with a soft, rehearsed touch, and he thought he died all over again when you pulled him closer.

Your heart brought back the memories of sensations that you’ve tried to bury; it revived them and set them loose in your chest when you kissed him back and felt the smile on his lips.

Your heart threatened to quit it, to burst into flames and take you down with it when you felt his tongue slowly glide over your lower lip.

Your heart settled right against his when you parted your lips. When you felt his warm breath mingle with yours. When you held onto him with everything you were feeling, and he held onto you.

He kissed you in every way that a friend wasn’t supposed to, and groaned softly when he touched the back of your neck and felt the relentless roughness of goosebumps under his fingertips. Your body reflected everything he was feeling.

Every time your lips met—gentle and feverish—every time he pulled you closer—frantic and heated—every time you inhaled when he exhaled—sharp and eager—you were setting fire to something that once was and building something new in its place.

There seemed to be small fragments of a foreign nature inside of you both—fragments that had danced with each other long before your first kiss and would continue the lively, eternal swaying for years and years after your last.

Maybe it was dust from two neighbouring stars, drawn together by a force stronger than them, but forced to crash somewhere on earth and settle and quiver and wake up inside of you both.

Or maybe it was something less grand. Maybe it was just luck. Just coincidence.

“See,” you whispered, pulling back. “I told you we don’t know how to be friends.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he replied, kissing the corner of your lips. The sparks inside him were fierce and relentless when you smiled in response. “I think friends can decide what sort of friends they want to be.”

“What sort of friends are we going to be, then?”

“This sort.”

You could see the northern lights and the tails of comets in his eyes before he leaned in to kiss you again. You could taste the longing for the Milky Way and the whispers of timeless meteors on his tongue.

And it all solidified this for you: the two of you were not luck and not coincidence.

You were something much more.

chapter title credits: bring me the horizon, “follow you”

prev ○ next

[judespoets]

THE PROPHECY

summary: Surely moving to a whole other country to get away from your ex would give you a chance to restart, right? But that’s apparently not what was planned for you.

You came to Madrid to start off completely new, new job, new friends and no seeing familiar faces- until you do, but that’s not Jude is it? Surely that’s not the Jude Bellingham you knew oh so well as a kid, or is it him?

What happens when you see your childhood best friend after so many years again? Does he remember you and is the connection as strong as it was back then? What does the prophecy say for you?

chapter one | new

The air in Madrid was warm, the rays of sun shining through the little amount of clouds in the sky making the tiny amount of freckles on your face visible. But the comfort you usually felt during the summer when the sun was warm and the birds were chirping, wasn’t there. Instead you felt a weird sense of emptiness, a feeling of not belonging made its way through your body as you wandered through the streets of your new home.

Home. You said that word so often, every time you came to the house you lived in to be exact but have you ever felt like you were at home? Definitely not in last few months of your relationship and that was what made the situation you were in even weirder.

You were never single and an adult at the same time. All you have ever known was being in a relationship and you thought it would be like that for the rest of your life. But being alone, in a new city, without knowing anyone so suddenly was very new and you’d be lying if you said it didn’t scare you.

But you didn’t have any other choice. You couldn’t go anywhere in London without seeing his face. Everywhere you went, you’ve been there with him. As long as your relationship was, it was almost impossible to find a spot you haven’t been together. So you took the first opportunity you were given, which was accepting the promotion that was partly the reason of your breakup. Away from his face, away from your family, your friends, and away from the pain you felt every day after he said he didn’t want to try and you saw him with another woman. Honestly, everything was falling apart long before telling him you had to try long distance. But sitting there, looking into the eyes you once knew so well, was all the confirmation you needed in that moment.

So running away sounded like a good plan but right now you weren’t so sure if it really was. If you could ever make this place feel like home, if you could ever find something that felt like home.

Now standing in the empty living room which was filled with unopened, brown boxes made you feel exhausted, desperate even. How on earth would you do this? How on earth did you ever believe you even could? You were never this impulsive before and it scared you. It scared you to get to know the person you were, because as long as you’ve known, you never had to. He knew you, but did you?

A sharp ,loud ring pulled you out of your thoughts. Your phone which you were absentmindedly clutching in your hand was ringing.

“Hello?” You answered, you didn’t even look at who was calling you, too wrapped up in your own little bubble.

“Y/N!” A loud, high pitched but familiar voice rang through the created silence of your new living room. “Girl, when I said “do something unexpected” I didn’t mean just run away to a whole other country.” The girl, who was known as Ellie, also as your best friend, stated from the other line of the phone.

“Oh. Well yeah.” You answered, not having planned about telling her about your big move.

“What do you mean “well yeah”? You’re in Spain, Y/N! How long do you plan on staying anyway?” She asked, sounding sure of you using this as a trip, a trip to just get away. But she didn’t know it was so much more than that.

“Uhm, you know. It’s a one-way ticket so.” You said, silently hoping that you didn’t have to speak the truth out loud. Especially not to Ellie.

“A fucking one-way ticket? Y/N, what the hell is going on?” She spoke, softly but also demanding, not sure about how to react to the news.

“Well I told you about the promotion.” You said, still not getting to the actual point.

“Yeah, a promotion as a physiotherapist for a football team- no way! You’re not serious.” She said, interrupting herself, slowly catching up on what you were trying to tell her.

“Yeah. I’m gonna stay here for a while, see how it works out, you know?” You asked, unsure about her reaction.

“So you moved to Spain? Where exactly?” She asked, sadness clinging to her words.

“Madrid.” You answered shortly.

“Okay. What about Toby?” Boom. Toby. The reason you even ran away, the reason this was all even happening.

“Uhm, we- he- uhm, well you know, we broke up.” You stammered. It was the first time you actually said the words out loud, and it hit you harder every time you thought of that.

“You what?!” She almost screamed, completely shocked about the news. “Why? When? And why haven’t you told me, babe?”

“Uhm, two weeks ago.” You said, the emotions slowly creeping up to your eyes.

“Oh babe, what was the reason?” You heard her ask carefully, scared to touch the sentimental topic.

“Uhm, it was a few things. The promotion, he didn’t want to try long-distance and, and he uhm- he cheated.” You breathed out, choking on the last word, the tears prickling in your eyes.

Your position changed too. You were sitting down, down on the cold floor in the center of the empty room. It was almost a beautiful scene if the topic between you two wasn’t so depressing.

“Oh my god. I’m so sorry, y/n. I don’t know what to say, i wish i could hug you.” She stated, a weird silence ringing through the line.

“It’s okay.” You sighed, not knowing what to say either.

“Look, if you want to talk about it, you know i’m here, right? I will always be, even if you’re this far away.” Ellie told you reassuringly. She had this talent of making you feel heard and not alone even if she wasn’t in the same room as you.

“I appreciate you so much, El. I gotta go tho, gotta unpack all of my stuff, I’m starting tomorrow.”

“Yeah, okay. Please call me, okay?” She asked, the fear of losing you because of this distance pretty evident in her way of talking.

And just after you assured her you would call the second you could and hanging up the phone, everything came crashing down. Every emotion you were desperately trying to hold in the last two weeks. The pain of being cheated on, the fear of moving away completely alone and the hiraeth to Toby. You were curled up on the floor, the tears no intention of stopping and the sun outside slowly setting, marking the end of the day that you so desperately wanted to end.

A gasp escaped your lips, as you quickly sat up, feeling the outcome of sleeping on the floor in your bones.

Your heart was racing, the sun was out, but one glance at the clock on your phone and you could calm down. It was 6 in the morning so you decided against another session of sleep and for slowly getting ready.

So you got up from your uncomfortable position on the floor and started rummaging through the boxes that were still unpacked, in need of your beloved coffee machine and a mug.

So there you sat, on the floor in an empty apartment in the middle of Madrid, coffee machine plugged into the nearest power outlet you could find, hair still messy from your rather uncomfortable night of sleep and bags under your eyes like you didn’t close them for a week.

This whole thing was wearing you out and you were just hoping it was all worth it.

Two hours later and you were sitting in your car on the way to the location of your new job. You felt weird, looked put together tho, that was all that counted.

It was funny, because you yourself didn’t even know what you were walking into in just a few minutes because the only thing you knew about this new job is that it was for a football club, you didn’t know which one neither how professional it was, you would continue your work as a physiotherapist, that was what you knew. That at least was what your boss told you just a few weeks ago when he said you would be promoted within the company. And when he told you it’s in Spain you immediately agreed, no further questions, so here you are, car parked at the exact location that was given you.

Turning off the car and stepping out, you finally looked up and greeting you was nothing other than the big, silver, shining badge of Real Madrid right at the entrance of the facility.

The disbelief was probably more than evident in your face after you checked the location three times, in fear that you typed it in wrong, but this was it. So as scared as you were, you opened the doors, walking up to the register where a nice woman greeted you and told you your ways.

And just as you were walking down the corridor towards the head coaches office, you bumped into someone, making the stack of papers in your arms fall right down to the floor.

“Y/N?”

——

thank you so much for reading this! please let me know what you think!

[alewritesfics]

Bridging realities

ℑℑℑ.- 𝔅𝔯𝔦𝔡𝔤𝔦𝔫𝔤....𝔫𝔢𝔴 𝔭𝔞𝔱𝔥𝔰

Pairing: Anthony Bridgerton x fem!reader

Word count: 2.1k

Tags: unedited, slow burn, eventual smut/ spicy scenes, some angst but happy ending, playful banter

Summary: in which Y/N's slight actions start to- or you'll see on your own.... His POV

⏮️ ⏸️ ⏭️

The night air was cool against Anthony’s skin as he stepped onto the garden, a welcome reprieve from the stifling confines of the ballroom. The distant hum of laughter and music filtered through the open doors, but out here, the world was quiet. Peaceful.

He leaned against the balustrade, running a hand through his hair and exhaling sharply. The evening had been relentless—a parade of bright-eyed ladies and their overly enthusiastic mothers, each vying for his attention, each more determined than the last.

And then there was her.

Anthony’s brow furrowed as his thoughts returned to Miss Featherington. She was unlike the others—sharp, playful, and entirely unpredictable. Most women he encountered were eager to flatter, eager to please, but she… She teased him. She wasn’t afraid to speak her mind, and for reasons he couldn’t quite understand, it both infuriated and intrigued him.

He could still feel the warmth of her hand in his, the way her gaze had met his so boldly, so unflinchingly. It had been a long time since someone had looked at him like that—not as a title, not as a prize to be won, but as a man.

Anthony shook his head, trying to dismiss the thought. He couldn’t afford to be distracted, not when his responsibilities weighed so heavily on him. His family’s future depended on his choices, and his choices had to be logical and calculated. There was no room for impulsive emotions, no room for the kind of connection Miss Featherington seemed to inspire.

And yet…

He closed his eyes briefly, letting the cool breeze brush against his face. He’d always prided himself on his control, on his ability to compartmentalize his feelings and focus on what truly mattered. But tonight, something about her had unsettled him.

“Bridgerton!” his eyes opened as he was called, he turned his name to see a gentleman he was acquainted with (Honestly I forgot the names of them and am too lazy to search so they’ll be man 1,2 and 3)

He sighed, annoyed his alone time was interrupted but walked towards them nonetheless. “I owe you a drink” man 1 said

“Whatever for?” Anthony asked, looking between the three of them

“With you as the prize catch of the season, the rest of us shall receive a respite from the marriage minded mamas this season indeed” man 1 smirked

“Enjoy your freedom while it lasts” Anthony responded “You, too, will soon submit to this ridiculous rigmarole of courtship,” The doors opened a few feet away, a young beautiful lady walking out without their knowledge. “Squiring every eligible miss around town until you’re barely able to see straight”

“Is one lady unlike any other?” man 2 asks “Simply pick the least objectionable and get her wed, bed and bred. Then you can turn to more pleasurable pursuits”

“And more pleasurable partners” The lady walked down the stairs, quietly walking behind a big bush to listen more closely “You may be cavalier, but if I must leg shackle myself in marriage, the lady in question should have more to recommend her”

“Do not tell us you are hoping for a love match?” Man 1 jokes

“Love is the last thing I desire,” Anthony denied “But if my children are to be of good stock, then their mother must be of impeccable quality. A pleasing face, an acceptable wit, genteel manners enough to credit a viscountess” Anthony was surprised as the words left his mouth, remembering a questionably intriguing redhead said that was what he was looking for. His lips twitched slightly but he composed himself “It should not be hard to find, and yet, the debutantes of London fall short at every turn”

“You want the best. Perhaps the queen will finally name a diamond. Save you some trouble, at least of choosing her, wooing the piece is a different story indeed” Man 2 stated

“I should have no problem there” Anthony crossed his arms smugly, making the men laugh

Man 1 patted himself, “Smoking room, gentlemen?”

“I Shall be there anon” Anthony told them before the three men left, leaving him alone.

Anthony was about to leave when the sound of someone bumping into something stopped him “Is someone there?” he asked, looking back. He walked down the stairs, curious to see what it is “I can hear y-“

“You” He said with a smile as he stared at the mysterious woman he encountered days ago

“Pardon me, my lord” The woman sighed without emotion

“I never got your name” Anthony approached her “I was wondering if we might meet again” he crossed his arms behind his back, giving the woman a glance over

“So you might discern if my wit is acceptable? My manners genteel?” she said with annoyance

Anthony’s smile faded “You were eavesdropping?”

“It was hardly an effort, seeing as you were proclaiming your many requirements for a wife loud enough for the entire party to hear-“

“You take issue with my requirements?”

“I take issue with any man who views women merely as chattels and breeding stock” The lady said angrily

“None of that was meant for-“

“Viscount Bridgerton, yes?” the woman interrupted him, taking a step closer towards him “When you manage to find this paragon of virtue, whatever makes you think she will accept your suit? Are the young ladies of London truly so easily won by a pleasing smile and absolutely nothing more?”

Anthony was about to respond when he stopped, taking in her words before chuckling, remembering the same words said by a blue eyed, red headed beauty, some minutes ago, completely ignoring the young lady before him, finding humor in the coincidence.

“You are laughing?” the woman said offended

“no, no,no” Anthony apologized “my apologies, it is just someone told me the same thing before” his mind went once again towards the redhead. Seems like there is more women that share her particular ideals. If they are friends, then he can see why Y/n gets along with Eloise, both a pair of strong opiniated women.

“Then, seems like that person is someone you should listen to” The woman said

Anthony breathed out a chuckle, something indescribable in his eyes “yes…. yes, perhaps I should” he shook his head before looking at the lady again “If you excuse me…. I shall bid you goodnight” he bowed his head before walking away from the young lady

He’s starting to think balls were his thing (hehe balls). Or maybe balls where you were present that is. Although he will never admit that. Or the fact that as he was currently stepping down the stairs behind his mother and sister, and his brother talking beside him, all his eyes did was search around the ballroom, in hopes of seeing a particular lady.

“Anyone here you’ve not yet rejected?” Benedict spoke beside him

Anthony turned to look at his brother, clearing his thoughts “You’re the artist,” His eyes went to the crowd once again “Do you see anyone remotely inspiring?” He cannot help the small smirk that showed on his face as his eyes caught sight of you next to Penelope “We shall have a diamond tonight and I’ll shall choose my wife”

He followed his mother as she brought Eloise in front of the queen, tuning out their conversation as his face unconsciously turned slightly to keep the redhead in sight. He turned back towards the queen, bowing in tune with his family before they left.

“If the queen, in fact, names Eloise the diamond, who will you marry then, brother?” Benedict asked

Anthony turned to look at him “Hush you” He left before benedict could respond as he saw a certain lady leave Penelope’s side and head towards the refreshments table.

Anthony approached the refreshment table with an easy stride, his gaze lingering on you as you delicately poured yourself a glass of lemonade. The crowd around him faded into a dull hum as he drew closer, his curiosity piqued by the way you seemed so at ease, yet entirely detached from the chaos of the ballroom.

“Miss Featherington,” he said smoothly as he stopped beside you, reaching for a glass himself. “I see you’ve discovered the most sought-after corner of the evening.”

You glanced up shocked before a flicker of amusement showed in your eyes. “Lord Bridgerton,” you greeted, your tone polite but teasing. “I wasn’t aware the refreshment table was the highlight of the night.”

Anthony chuckled, swirling the champagne in his glass. “It’s simply a strategic choice. Much safer here than braving the dance floor—or the relentless matchmaking.”

“Ah,” you said with mock seriousness, turning your body to face him “The infamous Bridgerton charm, evading mamas and their daughters alike. I imagine you ae a master at that by now.”

He raised an eyebrow, his lips twitching in amusement. “I might say the same about you. I don’t see you dancing with any suitors of your own”

You tilted your head slightly “Sorry to disappoint you but I do not have any suitors” You state

Anthony frowned “How can that be? You’re beautiful” He blurted unconsciously. Your eyes widened at his words, a blush filling your cheeks

His eyes widened as well as he processed what he said “I-I-I mean.” He cleared his throat “I meant that you- you have a charm to you that men cannot deny that you are pretty”

You smiled “Thank you, my lord” you said, hiding your glee at his compliment “Oh, I- I’m sure you have matters to tent to. I wouldn’t dream of monopolizing your time. Surely, there’s a line of young ladies waiting for their turn with the Viscount.”

Anthony shrugged, a glint of humor in his eyes. “Oddly enough, the only company I find myself seeking at the moment is yours.”

You blinked, caught off guard by the sincerity in his voice, though you quickly recovered. “You clearly know how to flatter a lady, Lord Bridgerton. Is this how you court a lady?”

“Flattery?” He placed his glass down with an easy smile. “Not at all. I simply speak the truth.”

“Well, then,” you said, your tone light but edged with curiosity. “If this is the truth, then I wouldn’t dare to say otherwise”

Your gaze held his for a beat too long before you broke the moment with a small laugh. “Well, I hope tonight proves memorable for you, my lord.”

“Oh, it already has,” he said, his voice low and laced with something you couldn’t quite place.

Before you could respond, the trumpets sounded as the queen stepped down to make an announcement.

“Your presence is noted, and your queen most appreciative,” the queen started to say “Allow it to now be my honor to present to you the season’s diamond” she looked around at all the guests

“Miss Edwina Sharma”

You let out a small smile before turning towards Anthony “There you have your new wife” you teased

He turned to look at you “What?” he looked confused

“Was it not the lady that the queen chose the one that is going to be your wife?” You asked

“Where on earth did you hear that?” Anthony said confused

“I have my ways” You shrugged “But anyway, go introduce yourself”

Anthony frowned “I- “

“Go” You urged him “I’ll see you later” Anthony gave you one last look before heading towards the new diamond

“She is a lovely diamond, dearest” Anthony’s mother approached him after the dance with Miss Edwina.

Anthony would be lying if he said he wasn’t a little worried after finding out that the woman he made such a bad impression on was Miss Edwina’s sister, making things just a bit difficult. Miss Edwina was nice, answering all of his questions with sincerity, awareness and intelligence. She is exactly what he wanted if he was going to marry out of duty.

But surprisingly, he cannot help but think back on the featherington girl. You were…different, you challenged him and you weren’t in awe of him like every other lady in London (If only he knew)

“Anthony?” His mother called out when he didn’t respond

He turned to look at his mother, shaking away every thought of you. No matter how much he enjoyed talking to you, how refreshing he found you to be.

You incited things in him he didn’t dare to pursuit more or acknowledge, things that went against everything he said he would never do, surprising considering you’ve spoken, truly spoken, not small greetings like the ones you gave each other whenever he came across the featherington family or when you accompanied Penelope to her meetings with Eloise, but full conversations for a total of like two times.

It unnerved him.

“She is nice” Anthony agreed with his mother, looking down.

He had to put duty above everything else.

“She is…who I shall marry” Anthony stated, his eyes catching a flicker of red hair from the corner of his eyes, he gave his mother one last glance before walking away

⏮️ ⏸️ ⏭️

*those in white are blogs which don't have their mentions on and thus I couldn't tag them*

Taglist:

@heyyitsreign

@imafangirlofeverything

@stopeatread

@smartiepants217

@magical-spit

@ifilwtmfc

@kitkat27

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@electronicexpertshark

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[thewritetofreespeech]

What the Future Holds

Pairing: Aemond Targaryen x Reader

Summary: Aemond & the Greens have returned victorious, but at what cost? [before all this: X XX XXXX]

-------------------------------⚔️--------------------------------

"Aemond, tell me true. Did you do this to Aegon on purpose?"

Aemond stared at you for a long moment. Seeming to debate lying, but you knew he would never truly lie to you. "...not entirely on purpose..."

"Oh Gods Aemond...." You felt the air sift out of your lungs. Thinking back to Aegon's burnt, mangled body in the bed. The maesters not confident in his recovery to the point that they had all but stepped aside to let the septons have him. You needed to sit down.

Aemond rushed to your side, kneeling in front of your seat, his hands on your knees. "You have to believe me. This wasn't my intention at the start."

"Aemond..." He was getting perilously close to his first lie ever towards you.

"I was being careful, like you told me." You scoff ruefully at his explanation. It sounded a lot like blaming. "But Rhaenys and Aegon were..." He paused then. Seeming to think back on that moment and he did not look happy on it. "I did what I had to. Aegon got caught in the crossfire."

"Literally?" You don't mean to be glib but Nine Hells this was a lot to process.

Aemond's expression looked worried. Fretful. He took your hands in his and held them tight. As if scared you would run away if he didn't hold them. "With Meleys and Rhaenys gone, the Blacks have lost one of their dragons and decidedly best council. Rhaenyra is not educated in war. Daemon is as brash and impulsive as my brother. They will never recover from this. Aegon was...a necessary sacrifice for the greater good."

"Aemond, this isn't like you push him off a bridge or cut his arm off in a duel. You set him on fire!"

"If he can't stand a little dragon fire, then he's no true Targaryen." He reasoned. Sitting back on his heels but still focused on you. "Don't you see? With Aegon out of the way we can end this war and be done with it. No more loss. No more bloodshed."

"No more King?"

You knew Aemond was being honest with you, but you also weren't stupid enough in love to not realize his intentions weren't all pure. "You said it yourself. We must think of the line. Of our future." He grasped your hand again, only this time one for one. Your binding hands. "Mine and yours."

You take a deep breath and look around. Trying to make sense of this, but Aemond rose up on his knees to take your face in his other hand and focus on him. "Westeros deserves a king who will lead it to glory. Who will appreciate it. Not a man, a child, who has squandered everything in his life. Who didn't even want it. And Westeros deserves a Queen who will guide them. Not a meek eyed doe like my sister. Not a zealot like my mother. You. Together we can make this kingdom better. Because we will be better. The Gods may not have chosen us first, but we are the right choice." Every word from Aemond rouses your heart. You knew of his passion, but who knew he was such a wonderful orator. "Tell me you feel the same. Tell me you believe in this."

You look upon Aemond and think on his words. "I'm not going to help you kill Aegon."

He sat back down on his heels and frowned at you. "I wouldn't ask you to."

"But I won't stand in your way." You finish.

If he dies, you will accept it. If he lives, Aemond would have to accept that too. This was the coin toss the Gods had offered all of you.

The prince thought on your answer, then nodded. It was the best you could offer and the best he could hope for. "Alright." He rose back up again, tentatively this time, and wrapped his arms around you. "You believe me, right? You do not hate me, do you?"

"Never." You might not agree with what Aemond was doing, but you could never hate him. It was done now anyway. "Promise me you will remain careful though."

"I will try." He had promised you that before, and here you were.

You held Aemond close, and he clung to you. You want to believe that this was all a mistake. An accident of zealousness born from wanting this war over and peace to come to the land. A necessary sacrifice, as Aemond had said. There was no denying he was right. The Blacks would never recover from a blow so hard, but what of the Greens?

There is a nagging feeling in your chest, however, that for the first time Aemond was lying to you. Or perhaps he was also lying to himself.

There was still much uncertainty on what the future holds for the two of you, but all you knew was that you held your future right here. With Aemond in your arms. Even if you didn't agree with his motives.

[emo-trash101]

Hiiii! I would absolutely love if you did an arcane women x asthmatic child! Maybe Jinx, Vi, Caitlyn, Mel, and Ambessa?

Oh yes ofc I would love to do that! I am moving Ambessa over to another ask (from Nina ml 🫶) since there's gonna be multiple parts of these and I'm low-key getting lazy

Jinx, Vi, Caitlyn, and Mel x Asthmatic! Child

Pronouns: second person

Tw: SEASON 2 SPOILERS

Jinx (Season 2) -

- She knows what it's like to be abandoned, and to feel like it's more work for you to be taken care of than it's worth.

- I think she knows better than anyone else.

- That's why when she takes you in, it isn't just a simple impulsive act, it was a promise.

- It was a promise to you, to Isha, and most importantly, to herself.

- In general, she enjoyed the company you brought her. You gave her more creative input for her weapons, and gave her a new hobby.

- She suddenly developed a slight addiction to making you new and more colorful masks.

- By the first month you've lived with her she's made you at least 10 more.

- But she's a good mom, even if she can't see it herself very much.

Vi -

- She would honestly probably be one of the few people who sees tiny kid who like can't breathe and is just like, "Oh shit, normal lanes behaviour." And just walk away

- Like she isn't exactly the person to take a kid under her wing, especially cause she has this whole self deprecated mindset of how she isn't good enough for really anything

- But you likely end up following her, considering that it's probably a better choice than suffocating on the cold and dirty ground, and eventually, she just accepts that you're following her

- She brings you surprisingly to Jayce to figure out if one of your face masks can be built, and bro has such a soft spot for kids you get like 10 in one sitting made for you

- She has no specific opinion or worry about your illness, aside from the constant fear of you dying

- Her abandonment issues kick in an oddly large amount when you have coughing fits, and she can't keep herself from worrying if this is gonna be the last time she'll hear them

- But even when she's worrying like that, she tries to focus on just caring for you

- It makes her feel like when she used to take care of Powder

- And it makes her feel like she got a second chance.

Caitlyn (season 1) -

- So when she finds you on the streets during one of your patrols, her bleeding heart causes her to almost immediately leap to action.

- She immediately tells Marcus she's taking a break (whether he wants her to or not) and takes you to the best doctor she can find

- She holds your hand when you get diagnosed

- She may not really know you, but she doesn't really care, she just wants to help people, even if it ends up just being you who she helps

- After that, the doctor gives you your mask and she presumes you'll go on your merry way, doing whatever else it was in Piltover before she basically disrupted your life.

- But even months after she had met you, you both seem to run into each other much more.

- Whether it's you following her while she's on patrols, or just potential coincidence, you both seem to run into each other more and more.

- Eventually this leads to the conversation about where your (lack of) parents are.

- And this is when she decides to take you in.

- Her mother obviously lectures her about taking in stray children, and how hard it is to raise a child, and more

- But after that you basically just became a Kiramman from that day forth.

Mel -

- She never expected to meet you (but then again neither did literally any of the others), but it was especially not gonna be today

- it felt, odd to find a small child alone in Piltover, usually they would be with family, or at least some semblance of a caregiver

- But you were just sitting there, propped up against a wall, coughing your poor little lungs out

- So, regardless of her inhibitions, she takes you to a doctor.

- She feels a twinge of guilt when you receive a diagnosis, like she could've done something to prevent it

- But a part of her feels connected to you

- She knows what it feels like to be cast out from family, to have no one to turn to in your time of need.

- And right now she feels a need to be that rock for you to rest upon

- So you stay with her, after she convinces herself it will only be until she can find you a suitable family.

- She talks to Jayce and Victor about how to handle your illness, the mental and physical support that is required, along with just generally everything

- Before she knows it, she has an adoption certificate for you, and you're officially her child.

- And on that day, she makes a silent promise that she will be better than her mother was

Ik this took forever to come out, I've been low-key kinda mega depresso, but I promise that the final part with the rest of the characters will be coming out soon 🙏🙏🙏

Make sure you eat food and drink water

[theredhairedmonkey]

What Dark Callum Means

And what it doesn't.

So, I think it's worth discussing what the appearance of this particular guy at this point of the series means and symbolizes, as I'm sure many people are going to have a field day with his.

And by "this particular guy," I mean Dark Callum.

Who, funny enough, is actually still more reasonable and moral than the psychopathic gremlin known as "snake boi callum" found across the fandom (as he acknowledges that he loves and cares for more people than just Rayla and Ezran), but I digress. In particular, I think what some fans are zeroing in on is that the show confirms (and it actually does confirm) that there’s always been this part of Callum that is willing to abandon his sense of right and wrong for the sake of those he loves.

But...that actually plays to the larger part of this season's themes in a way that ends up enriching Callum's position as the show's moral center. Let me explain why.

Book Dark (i.e. season 7) is about the loss of innocence, told not just through symbolism (the Garden of Innocents being where Unicorns went to die being a bit on the nose) but directly by Aaravos:

Aaravos: All children have a true heart. But as we grow up, we are forced to take choices, sacrifices, compromises. And they change us forever. Childhood innocence gives way to something...complicated.

The fact that Ezran is shown here as Aaravos speaks is not a coincidence - no matter how pure, life wears all of us down.

Then Aaravos' next speech contextualizes this further - not having a dark side isn't an attribute of goodness, but innocence. Eventually, all of us develop a dark side, and inevitable outgrowth of being forced to make compromises, harsh decisions, and sacrifices.

Aaravos: The true heart is a gift of childhood. For a few wonder-filled years, we each have innocent eyes to experience the world's beauty in a simple way. Terrestrius, you were lucky and held that innocent wonder longer than most. I have seen generations of humans and elves accept the darkness that lurks inside all of us beside the light. There is no black and white, only shades of gray. We must all carry complexity. But please believe me that there is beauty in this burden. Your heart will be a little heavier. But now, there will be no more half-truths, Terrestrius. Together, we will do what must be done. However dangerous. However vile.

It is worth pointing out how many people are shown together with the quote about "humans and elves accept the darkness that lurks inside of all of us." So when Callum meets Dark Callum, who tells him he's always been inside him even before he used dark magic, we shouldn't be surprised.

But his appearance actually tells us something different - that Callum had not yet accepted him. That the Callum we have been seeing throughout the show is not the one who would do whatever he had to for his loved ones "however dangerous, however vile."

And that is the critical part here, and why despite seeing the world as Aaravos does, understanding the need for compromises, Callum nevertheless opposes him - being good isn't about lacking the capacity for darkness, but about choosing what to do with that capacity. Callum's strength isn't that he never feels the pull to abandon principles for love, but that he develops the wisdom to channel that impulse in ways that ultimately serve good rather than evil.

In short, he sees the world as Aaravos does...yet chooses differently.

Consider how this differs from Aaravos's prediction. Aaravos sees this willingness to compromise for love and assumes it must lead down the same path of progressive moral erosion that he took. What he misses is that acknowledging this capacity doesn't mean surrendering to it entirely. Callum shows that you can recognize this part of yourself while still choosing how to express it.

This makes Callum's role as a moral center more complex and meaningful. He's not a moral center because he lacks dark impulses or the willingness to break rules for love - he's a moral center because he shows us how to acknowledge these aspects of ourselves while still making choices that serve rather than destroy our principles.

[i-am-a-fan]

I saw a post talking about how there’s a deep mischaracterization of Mk in the fandom specifically about his monkey form and I’m here to dissect it. (WIth doodles!)

Tldr: Will Mk end up hurting his family in season 5 due to his new Monkey form? Most likely no, but it is possible that he indirectly hurts them by not understanding the limits of his power.

First things first let’s collect a list of attributes that we know Mk has from past seasons. This will serve as a spine or checklist to see if certain actions are possible. A thing to keep in mind though is the ranking of each attribute as the writers of LMK wrote there are characters as complex and sometimes abandon certain character values if their center value is threatened. 

Mk’s character value list (in my opinion) is as follows: 

-Family 

-Strength 

-Freedom 

-Dependability 

with family and strength being so close to each other, so sometimes strength ends up as Mk’s main concern. Of course, all of these end up mixing at times and in the first seasons we see the mixing of these values gets him in trouble 

Desiring the freedom of choice over listening to Wukong (Pig Pong Panic). Wanting to be dependable but overestimating his strength (Duplication). Wanting to be strong but forgets his family in the process (shadow play). Eventually, he gets his priorities in check and has ended up sticking to this list for most of seasons 3 and 4. 

Now his flaws (in no particular order): 

Impulsivity 

Forgetfulness 

Stubbornness 

Blind devotion 

He’s overcome a lot of these when he was forced to learn them in season 3. His stubbornness to not tell anyone what was happening with the LBD got people hurt. His impulsivity with his actions ended up crashing the ship, and almost sold his family to a goldfish demon.

(Text: Mk's Fault, Good Intentions, Trying mentor)

So he’s had to come up with methods of working around that. Mk’s blind devotion to Wukong almost got Mei killed, and we see how he changes because of it. At the end of season 3, Mk doesn’t explicitly say that he sees Wukong in a new light but he heavily implies it with the metaphor of a bowl of noodles. 

So… Will Mk go crazy and end up hurting his friends? 

I highly doubt it. While I toyed with the idea, Mk is a lot smarter than the fandom usually gives him credit for. He knows Wukong is flawed, and he still trusts in him because he knows Wukong is trying. Mk has faith in Wukong’s strength and the fact that Wukong also heavily values family, even if his isolation makes it a lot harder for him to do so. Just rewatch the ending of season 3 where Wukong apologizes to Mk and watch as Mk comes to the realization that Wukong is trying so hard to make up for his past. (They also drive this point home in season 4 with how disappointed Wukong sounds at himself for not finding Mk in the scroll in the season finale.) 

(Text: He's flawed and trying, Has to accept harsh reality, Dissociating Coping mechanism)

So what about Mk’s impulsivity? I doubt that’d be something that directly harms his friends. He’s worked on his impulsivity by working with others (Redson in season 3 and Mei’s planning in season 4) to help fill in the gaps in his plans. In order for his impulsivity to harm others, you’d have to break that family value first or raise that value of strength and freedom. Most likely this flaw can manifest in Mk overdoing his Monkey form ™  and sending a shockwave that accidentally hurts the people around him.  Probably manifesting either in training or while having fun with Mei (think about how Mk was in the Bad Weather episode). 

Okay, what if Mk is tricked into it like he was in Season 4 (back to the flaw of blind devotion)? Mk has spent every season backstabbed by someone he trusted. We see him snap at Azure after he finds out that he was going to keep Wukong in the scroll. He snaps at Macaque in season 4. It’s safe to say that he’s learned, at least partially, to not trust others so blindly. Mk is also supposed to have gotten the “skill of self-reflection” in “Revenge of the Spider Queen” but his reflecting has mostly just impacted the other flaws. 

(Text: Side note, Monkey Mk doesn't have a nose)

But there is one possibility I toy with, bottled up emotions. Mk has extremely big emotions but hates showing any emotion that can be seen as negative. He loves being happy and he’s not afraid to show it, but as soon as those emotions turn to doubt, anger, or sadness he bottles them up fast. He knows he can rely on his family, but he’s stubborn and thinks that his emotions aren’t worth that hassle. Take the ending of season 3 where Mk states that “he tries not to think too hard” about his own place in the universe, which could be due to a fear of losing the value of freedom if he has a specific role to play in the universe.

(Text: Guys He's so avoidant, forced to think about his identity, 18-early 20's and Identity crisis)

It’s worsened by the fact that every. other. character. avoids. their. emotions. No other characters in this series are open about their emotions except Tang and Sandy. And from season 3 (and a bit of season 4) we know that Mk doesn’t view Tang in an extremely positive light.

Not exactly negative, but his admiration lies more on the rest of the team. Macaque points this out in season 2 stating in “Shadow Play” that Mk should talk out his insecurities, but no one else does that. 

That being said Mk isn’t entirely forgetful either. Macaque was a season 1 villain with his betrayal going through season 3. Mk’s high value of family, and flaw of blind devotion, make him want to give him a chance as Macaque’s past is connected with Wukong’s. HOWEVER, Mk is also stubborn and hasn’t forgiven Macaque’s actions. That’s why he snaps, plus the fact that Macaque is terrible at direct communication. Like I said before, Mk won’t directly hurt anyone he cares about, but if his monkey form is highly connected with his emotions (as most magic tends to be) having those bottled-up insecurities might accidentally cause Mk to unleash more power than he means to.

(Text: Normal, Fed up Meter, rage (on jar))

I have no idea where season 5 is going to go, but I’m so excited about the possibilities. 

(Text: Terrified of his actions hurting his family. UNSTABLE!!!)

[beyonddarknessintolight]

My Skeleton Crew finale SPOILER thoughts!

...I am so fascinated by Jod. I was kinda right that he doesn't get a full blown redemption, but I was also proven wrong about my reaction to him from last week: he's not a completely evil bastard.

I will say, that I still think he's not a good person, but I won't call him 'evil.' He doubled down on his choices and his philosophy right up to the end, and he still kept using gaslighting language on the kids: blaming them for things getting this bad, claiming if they just obeyed him then things would be fine, etc. That's all abusive language.

But yes, now that we know his backstory, his actions all make sense as a trauma response. He was deeply messed up by watching that Jedi die in front of him, and it made him cynical.

It's very interesting though, that in his rant he still acknowledged that there is good in the universe, and it makes me think he sees himself as a monster. If he is at least aware of what is good and bad, and he still chooses to be bad... that makes him someone who, by default, probably hates himself and doesn't think he deserves to join the side of good.

It's psychologically so fascinating, and I see parallels with Darth Vader and Kylo Ren too. They too on some level knew that they were doing evil things, but had no hope for themselves. So much to unpack. I love characters like this!

So, while I think he still counts as a 'bad guy' in this, the way it ends does leave open the door for, someday, after a lot of work, he could redeem himself. But right now, he's still too much of a scoundrel. Also important to note how self destructive he is: his choices are very impulsive and poorly thought out, and he honestly could have just stayed with the kids until the very end and been able to get away with a giant reward, and be a lot better off.

But he chose to betray them for no good reason other than his own pride, and not wanting to be indebted to these kids that he finds annoying. He caused his own downfall by giving them a villain to overcome their own differences to defeat.

God this is such good writing!

It is interesting that they don't let us see what happened to him, they left that very open-ended. I know his final expression is being hotly debated, and I personally saw it as him accepting his defeat with dignity, but also.... there might be a tiny bit of him that's proud of the kids for defeating him and proving him wrong, that there are good guys who sometimes win. But it's very up for interpretation.

I also love how Wim's dad got to be a hero too! He's such a giant nerd lol. 'Son, you're looking at a Level 7 Analyst,' or whatever, and he says it like its the most badass thing in the world.

In general, this finale lets the adults learn to trust their children and defy the strict rules of that society, which is a good message.

And I LOVE that bit where Fern tells her mom about how, no matter where they went, even in the really bad places, they still met people that were kind and helped them. It's mirroring what Jod was saying, about pinpricks of light. The difference is that Jod lost faith in those pinpricks, while Fern found it (faith).

Yeah, I would have preferred we got a brief epilogue, to just show how the planet adjusts to now being part of the galaxy again, but it's honestly a minor nitpick. And part of me is ok with it not answering every single question, it allows our imagination to blossom. And also gives the writers wiggle room for Season 2...

Oh! Also: I love that, even after everything, Wim wanted Jod to come with them. He didn't want to abandon him. That feels so much like Luke. And I love that Jod just gives him this small smile, like he's saying, 'nah, kid, you earned this, get going.'

I loved this show so so so so much, it's just classic Star Wars fun, but it still felt fresh and different. Bravo!

[mooshedts]

traitors s3 ep5 thoughts/full on rambles i talk way too much about this

- i know i said they'd kick tyler out the clique for being the only person whose name doesn't start with L but i actually didn’t expect that.

- and it was such a clique as well i'm glad leanne and leon (he really tried not to get involved bless him) saw sense.

- also dan's eyerolls are the funniest thing ever he's defo becoming one of my favourites.

- i do feel bad for him though because minah's basically the only one he trusts and it's highkey reminding me of molly and harry from s2. if the traitors recruit again he'd be a really good choice (mostly because i can't deal with these divas going against each other).

- i really thought anna was going to accept the recruitment offer since she's quite impulsive and headstrong but i'm glad she saw their motives. if i was a faithful i would not have given them the satisfaction.

- the two new additions are going complete opposite tactics i feel like alexander has slipped COMPLETELY under the radar while fozia's getting quite involved which is honestly such a queen move but it's putting her on the chopping block straight away.

- the heat is probably going to be on linda tomorrow because people already thought it was either her or lisa and now that lisa's revealed she's a priest i doubt people will suspect her.

- but i think linda's getting a bit better at being a traitor and actually contributing her own ideas.

- i swear each season gets more and more dramatic because not only is everyone so mean this season but they keep crying as well. no hate but it's surprising me how emotional they're getting.

- less dire news but how do we feel about queen diane on uncloaked tonighttt?