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myokk · 6 months ago

Text

clumsy

pairing: Sebastian Sallow x f!MC

word count: 9,1k

summary: sebastian is clumsy

cw: fluff, mutual pining, idiots in love, two really stubborn idiots in love to be exact, sir cadogan guest appearance, anne and imelda are the gremlin best friends every girl needs, smut (18+ ONLY), oral (f. recieving)

a/n: or: two stubborn brats make things more difficult than they have to be. I've been working on this for a MONTH more or less, ever since I drew the sketch that inspired it🫶 (I'm the world's slowest writer)

The first time Sebastian Sallow interacted with her after the fateful events of their fifth year, he fell for her.

Quite literally.

Maybe fell on her is more aptly put - Sebastian Sallow is not one to mince his words or say what he doesn't mean, after all. But, in the years to come, he always insists that he fell in love in that moment.

It was inexplicable. One moment, he was walking around, perfectly content with his loveless, boring life, and the next, his every waking moment was painful. Nobody had ever told Sebastian that being in love would physically pain or consume him so.

It all started like this: one moment, he's walking (well, striding) to Crossed Wands. Fine, he's running. Running late already, for the first meet-up of his last year. But - he isn't to blame for being late. He needed to check on something in the library - during his Transfiguration lesson, he had a hunch about something Professor Weasley had said in passing, and of course he had to go and check to see if he was right before he could even think about besting Leander in the inaugural duel of the Crossed Wands season but now, with how late he is - how many minutes ago had it started? - oh, Merlin, it's already been ten whole minutes and what if they've started without him (not that he can blame them) and -

Sebastian is abruptly pulled out of his thoughts when he collides with a strange obstruction in his way. He was just checking his father's old pocket watch, had only looked away for a split second and he could have sworn that, unless he was mistaken (which he never is), there wasn't a statue in the middle of the suspension bridge. And yet, he has run headfirst into something or someone, and now they are both flying through the air, books whirling around them in a flurry of pages and Sebastian unconsciously puts his arms out to grab her before they hit the ground and now he's holding her tight against him and they land with a loud, ungraceful thud, but at least she's not hurt.

Sebastian shakes his head to clear it after the impact that - miraculously - doesn't seem to have been as bad as it could have been, all things considered, and -

He freezes.

What has he done?

He's pressed up against the most impossibly lovely person he has ever seen quite possibly in his life, holding her tightly in his arms as she glares up at him in indignation, a faint flush spreading across her cheeks, making her face glow. Is this what the muggles mean when they say that they were struck by Cupid's arrow? Her hands scrabble uselessly at his chest as she tries to extricate herself from his grip. It's useless. Sebastian is completely frozen in place as he stares down at her, and he can feel his own face heating up at his inability to get off her. What's wrong with him?

"Sebastian," she repeats, and this time her voice registers in his brain. He realizes she has been talking to him this whole time, and as he stares at her face without comprehending - he couldn't have a coherent thought right now even if he wanted to - he sees her eyes dart quickly down, looking at where their bodies meet before she brings them back to his face, a deeper blush coming over her. "You -"

Oh, Merlin. It's her. He blinks and it's like the fog has cleared from his mind - almost, but-not-quite - and he realizes who he has unceremoniously crashed to the ground with him. The spines of the textbooks they are lying on top of dig into the arm that's pinned under her body and his other hand...he realizes (to his almost-horror) that to any students or professors walking by, it would seem as if they were caught up in quite the scandalous extra-curricular activity because his other hand is actively caressing her breast. Well, that's how it would look to any passerby, anyways.

Because there is no way he would be caught dead in such a compromising position with her.

The two of them haven't spoken since the events of their fifth year - the Year-That-Shall-Not-Be-Remembered-or-Acknowledged - and he had been perfectly content with his plan to continue this strange sort of ignoring that they had played all last year. Both of them pretending that they hadn't become impossibly close after only knowing each other for a few months - a closeness that he had gone and ruined by not knowing when to quit. All he had known to do back then was push push push because why couldn't she see things the way he had? The betrayal he had felt when she had gone behind his back to find her own way to cure his sister, and that one stupid word uttered in the heat of the moment, had caused an irreparable rift in their relationship and he would not allow himself to think about how much he missed her. Still misses her.

Just like he will not think about the fact that she is pressed beneath him in a compromising position, her chest rising and falling rapidly as she glares up at him in indignation. He continues to stare at her. Maybe his mouth is agape. She's stopped trying to get out of his grip and is resting her hands on his chest, seemingly waiting for an opportunity to push him off of her.

"Sebastian. Your hand," she repeats. "You're -"

Finally his idiot brain decides to wake up and Sebastian realizes with horror just how aroused he is at the moment and how did he never see her like this before? He gets up in a flash, pushing her back against the pile of books they're lying on top of, wondering if he can subtly adjust his robes without her realizing and then he makes the very grave mistake of looking down at her and she's still very much red-faced, propping herself up by her elbows and she looks so disheveled and lovely lying on top of the pile of books.

His idiot brain has now woken up completely, and how is it possible for one hormonal, eighteen-year-old wizard to be so embarrassed? He knocked her to the ground, pushed her further back in the books in his desperate attempt to get away from her, and now all he can think about is how to hide his arousal. Shameful, really. Sebastian quickly crouches down to help her pick up all of the books but she shoves him away and glares at him with an annoyance that he's never seen before.

"I can do it myself, thank you very much," she says with a huff, gathering everything they spilled up into her arms. She grabs the book Sebastian is holding out of his hands and he inhales sharply at the touch of her fingers grazing his.

Did someone - Garreth, maybe - spike his pumpkin juice with Amortentia during lunch? It's the only explanation he can think of as he stares blankly down at her. How else would he find her so beautiful, so breathtaking, when the last time they had interacted, Ominis and Anne had had to act as intermediaries for the two of them?

"Well," she says finally, slinging her school bag over her shoulder once all of her books have been unceremoniously shoved inside of it, "it's been...nice seeing you again, Sallow. I hope you had a good summer holiday."

And with that, she quickly turns and walks away in the direction she had been coming from, leaving a very confused Sebastian behind. He watches her as she walks away and her long, swishing braid is the last thing he sees before the door closes behind her at the far end of the bridge.

Eventually, he gathers his wits and wanders away.

He does not go to the first Crossed Wands meeting that afternoon after all.

She has not had a full-night's sleep since he somehow cursed her mind and her thoughts a week ago, and she can feel herself slowly slipping into insanity. A curse is the only answer that makes sense, the only thing that gives a conceivable answer to all the wicked dreams she has been having since that moment, dreams that cause her to wake up sweaty and breathless and needing him in the middle of the night in a way she has never felt before. She has been an absolute mess, a disastrous version of her normally quite put-together self, and she is not happy about it.

He's sitting next to her now - they were partnered up by the evil Professor Onai in their first NEWT Divination class of the year - and she's holding herself rigidly, arms tight across her chest, in an attempt to not accidentally touch him. Lately, every single time they make fleeting eye contact across the table during breakfast, or when they pass each other in the hallways, a shiver runs down her spine at the unfamiliar look in his eyes and she has to avert her eyes before it's too much.

Divination has never been a favorite subject of hers - too impermeable for her tastes. She is only taking it at the NEWT level because, during her career counseling with Professor Ronen at the end of her fifth year, he had said that if she wanted to be an Unspeakable she couldn't just work with logic (a preposterous thought, but as a sixteen-year-old she hadn't seen any recourse in arguing with the Ministry's requirements). She supposedly needs to get comfortable with the intangible as well. It doesn't mean she has to enjoy it, though: she doesn't, and never will. The Divination classroom is dark and stuffy, tucked away in one of the highest towers of the castle, and the nauseating smell of incense always coats her nasal cavities long after the class has finished. She finds her thoughts getting muddled in the haze of candle smoke and swirling orbs on the shelves around her - magic somehow always feels thicker up here - and the presence of a certain someone whose knees keep brushing hers under the tiny table they're sharing, a certain someone who has - improbably, inconceivably, impossibly - hit a growth spurt that summer and now towers over her and had encompassed her completely when he knocked her to the ground, isn't helping her concentration at -

"This week, we are going to review everything we learned together last year," Professor Onai says, after the class had rearranged itself based on her instructions. Sebastian shoots a look at her as she shakes her head in an attempt to clear it and sits up straighter. She hopes that Onai's lecture will help her concentrate and clear her mind a bit. If she has something to focus on, to try and think of and remember, it will be better than him. Anything would be better than Sebastian. Onai gives an appraising look to each table before continuing her speech. "As your NEWTs are at the end of the year, we need to make sure you are as prepared as possible. Open your books to page two-hundred and thirty. Today we're going to review the art of palmistry. I should hope that you do not need the aid of your textbook to help interpret the lines in your partner's palm but in the case that you do -"

She chances a glance at Sebastian before getting out her copy of Divining the Undivinable from her bag and wishes she hadn't. He looks uncomfortably big sitting on the tiny tea chair across from her, barely any hints of the boy who had completely swept her away two years ago visible on the sharper planes of his face. When had he - had they - grown up?

Sebastian Sallow was - is - charming, and that had been her downfall. She had successfully avoided his charms the year before, and she wasn't going to let that happen this year, no matter how much her body rebelled against her mind and resolve. Because, as she reminds herself, Sebastian Sallow is also manipulative, and cold-hearted, and selfish.

"Well," she says archly, opening her book. She will not look at him. "I suppose I am still quite ignorant of the practice of Divination, so do forgive me if I have to double-check my readings in the textbook."

He says her name as she opens the book, and she ignores him. He says her name again. She continues to ignore him. He grabs the book from her hands and puts it the correct way for her. She was looking at it upside-down. Her cheeks heat up and she continues flipping through the pages, as if nothing has happened. She finds page two-hundred and thirty. She pretends to be interested in what she sees.

(Divination is unfortunately not interesting.)

Oh, fine.

"Do you want to start, or should I?"

These are the first words she has voluntarily spoken to him - not including the events of last week, which do not count as they were most decidedly not voluntary - since he called her ignorant a year and a half ago. He somehow looks surprised to see that she has addressed him, and for some reason this fills her with rage and a strange sort of confidence. Why shouldn't she be able to talk to him?

"Here," she says, putting her hand out towards him, palm up, ignoring the strange fluttering feeling in her chest when he gently grabs it with one of his. Sebastian looks up at her, waiting for her to continue speaking, and were she not looking at him so intently she would have easily missed the bob of his throat as he swallows nervously. "Show me how it's done."

Her breath catches in her throat at the small, mischievous smirk he shoots to her before he bends over her hand and gently starts tracing the lines on her palm with the fingers of the hand that's not holding hers in place. His touch is feather-light and somehow soft, despite the roughness of his fingers as they drag over her palm. Every nerve in her body seems to have moved to wherever he touches and all of the bravado and anger she had just felt is quickly melting away. When she finally finds her voice, she hates how soft and breathy it sounds. She can't look away from the sight of his larger hands caressing hers.

"Well? What do you see? Do you remember the different lines? Because I -"

She falters. The murmurs of their classmates blend together in the background and the dim lights of the candles...the hazy, thick atmosphere and his proximity and the barely there touches of his rough fingertips on her sensitive palm are altogether too overwhelming and she needs to get out of there. She's supposed to be angry with him. Furious, even. Holding this grudge has been the only way she has been able to have any sort of power over him this past year, and yet...all she can think about at the moment are the sinful dreams she's been having lately where he presses her against a wall, desperately kissing her lips, her neck - even she knows that there has to be more to it - but what?

Sebastian blinks as she snatches her hand away like it's been burned and - oh, Merlin - she shoves the textbook back into her schoolbag and almost knocks the candle on the table over and wouldn't it be awful if she had started a fire? But she can't think about any of that now in her haste to just get out of the claustrophobic Divination tower.

Vaguely, she can hear Professor Onai asking her if everything is fine and she's not sure but she thinks she mumbles something about needing to go to the Hospital Wing - that's a good enough excuse to leave, isn't it? - but then she hears his voice, deep and cutting through the fog in her mind -

"Don't worry, I'll take her and make sure she gets there fine." A muffled response from their professor and then his voice, just as clear as before. "No, I don't know what happened..."

She hears him calling her name as she flees down the spiral staircase, almost tripping over her feet in her rush to get away from him, but he catches up quickly, reaching out to grab her arm in an attempt to slow her down. She stops running immediately - she supposes her traitorous body wants to see what he has to say, or maybe it just wants to bask in his intoxicating proximity. He crowds her space, and she sees that unfamiliar look in his eyes again. So very different from the cold disdain she had seen the last time she had been this close to him, during the argument that had ended their friendship.

"Let go of me," she whispers, but there's no conviction in her voice as she gazes into his deep, brown eyes. He can tell she doesn't mean it and doesn't make any move to listen to her. Why can't she hold on to the rage? A muggle quote about anger floats through her mind: Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. What a sweet poison her anger at Sebastian had been, while it lasted. She tries telling herself that he must still feel the same as the evening he had called her ignorant (ignoring the small voice in her head that reminded her of the letters of apology he had sent (that she had burned without reading), the times he had tried to get Anne or Ominis involved and apologize for him) - because why couldn't he just tell her himself? Maybe she had shut down any and all attempts he had made to repair the rift that he had caused in the first place, but she had been right to be so angry with him.

But oh, Merlin, he's getting closer to her, and she can now clearly see the freckles dusting his cheeks and nose and forehead and then before she knows it, his hand is sliding up her arm, leaving goosebumps everywhere he touches and then he's caressing her jaw with his rough thumb and he pauses. Her eyelids flutter closed as her head tilts towards him - she couldn't stop herself even if she wanted to (what does she want?). She can feel his warm breath ghosting over her lips and she has the improbable, ridiculous thought - how is he remembering to breathe? - before he speaks. His lips brush against hers with every soft word and a deep shiver runs through her body.

"I," she hears him say, his voice so, so low, "haven't been able to think since last week."

That's all she needs to hear, the brush of his bottom lip against hers all she needs to feel, to push her into closing what minuscule distance there is between them and then his lips are on hers and it's better than anything she's been imagining. His mouth is soft against hers, insistent, and her hands go up to grip the collar of his plaid jacket to make sure he doesn't go away or disappear on her.

She knows she's behaving wantonly, snogging Sebastian Sallow in the middle of the hallway where anyone could come across them, but third period has only just started and besides, she has had a week of restless nights being tortured by thoughts of him. A week of a few hours of sleep found here and there. Just one kiss should be enough to help her get over these strange feelings, right? She only feels like this because having him lie on top of her after he crashed into her - that satisfying weight of him - the friction of his thumb brushing against her nipple - had made her realize just how stupid she had been, holding this grudge against him for -

She whimpers in protest but it quickly turns into a moan as his mouth moves away from hers and down to her neck. He pulls at her tight collar desperately - she hears some seams ripping - to give him better access to it, and she finds herself arching her back and pushing her body closer to his as he nuzzles her neck with his nose before giving it open, sloppy kisses. When he hears her, he moves back to kissing her, greedily capturing every breathy moan that comes out of her mouth, but the noises coming from him are matching hers, and at the sound she feels an unfamiliar clenching deep in her stomach. Her fingers come up to his hair, going through the silky curls over and over - how are they as soft as his lips? - and he slowly pushes her back until she's sandwiched between his warm body and the cold stone of the wall behind her.

He lets out a low, frantic growl as a hand goes to grip the back of her head, holding her in place as he slants his mouth over hers. He tastes like cinnamon and...like something forbidden. What has gotten into her? She hates him, and yet...

They have abandoned any pretense of propriety - had they ever even been trying? - by this point. His tongue swipes across her lips and then she is completely lost to him, to every sensation of his mouth, and tongue, on hers. His large hands - the wicked hands that had been caressing her palm and had caused this whole mess in the first place - have moved to her waist and are pulling her even closer to him. When he pulls away briefly, she whines in protest, opening her eyes to glare at him. The sight of him, flushed and breathless, his eyes wide and pupils dilated - must match her own appearance because she sees the same hunger she feels in his eyes. She has never seen Sebastian Sallow so disheveled, but she finds she quite likes it and tugs on his curls with a whine. He obliges eagerly, bringing his mouth back to hers.

She's pressed as tightly against him as she can possibly be, and yet it still isn't enough. Her back arches once again, trying to find something, and then he slots one of his knees between her legs. She moans at the friction caused by his movements, can feel an unfamiliar slickness forming at the juncture between her legs, and this seems to spur him on further as his kisses get more desperate and sloppy. She moves against his leg, trying to relieve some of her discomfort, gasping into his mouth, when -

They freeze. Even if they are fully, completely, absorbed by...whatever this is, they can't ignore the strange, metallic clanking sound coming from their left. Sebastian pulls his head back from her slowly, reluctantly, breathing heavily, and looks over to see what the noise is. She wants to, but all of a sudden the horrifying reality of what they've been doing sinks in and oh god what if the noise is a person? Someone who has now seen her in what might possibly be the most mortifying moment of her life - desperately snogging Sebastian Sallow - and she finds she can't look over. She tucks her head into his neck to hide her face as she listens.

"I demand that you get away from her at once, you knave! Cease your attack!"

The voice sounds vaguely familiar, but she's certain that it doesn't belong to any of her classmates. He almost sounds...medieval, but -

"I made haste when I heard sounds of distress coming from down the hallway," the voice continues, "and it appears I have arrived not a moment too soon!"

She brings her head away from Sebastian's shoulder but still refuses to look over at whoever is speaking, instead choosing to stare at Sebastian's face. He's still deliciously flushed from their snogging, still breathing heavily, but now he looks terribly confused. His brows are furrowed, mouth opening and closing as he tries to come up with a response to the outrage currently being directed at him.

The unknown man is continuing his diatribe, almost not even stopping to breathe as he gets more and more worked up, and she hears some more clanking as he reaches a particularly exciting moment in his rant. Sebastian looks increasingly confused, but still shields her with his body, not moving away from her at all despite the accusations.

Her curiosity gets the better of her and she peeks over to see who it is.

The man who has been reprimanding Sebastian so boldly is none other than Sir Cadogan. Although she's never interacted with him directly, she often hears him yelling at his pony as she passes his portrait on her way to Divination. The knight is standing between two witches having tea, who are glaring at him quite angrily as he gesticulates wildly - every movement of his sword comes dangerously close to their display of cakes and sandwiches and it looks like he has already broken some plates. His armor is ill-fitting and loose on him, which explains the terrible noise.

"You rascally knave! I assure you that you do not want to find out what will happen to you if you do not unhand the fair maiden."

He brandishes his sword again, and the woman closest to him quickly snatches her tea cup away to save it from being broken as well. "Come now, Sir Cadogan," she says, exasperated. "Can't you see that these two are in love?"

The other woman joins her protests, nodding vigorously. "Yes, exactly that. Leave them be!"

"Nonsense," he exclaims. "I too have succumbed to my baser instincts on occasion and I can assure you that this is decidedly not what is occurring."

As Sir Cadogan continues to alternate between lecturing her and Sebastian, and directing his two attention to the ladies who are defending them, she looks back to the boy in question. Sebastian is looking down at her, a bemused smile on his lips and she feels a twinge in her chest. His face is still so close to hers that if she wants to, they could be snogging again with barely any effort and her eyes briefly flicker down to his tempting mouth before going back to his eyes, but...

What had gotten into her? What is she doing?

He had somehow managed to manipulate her again, because there is no way that this situation could have happened otherwise. All of a sudden, the anger she's been feeling for the past year and a half - that had left for a brief, blissful moment - surges again, and she pushes Sebastian away from her with as much force as she can muster. She almost feels bad as the happiness in his face turns to confusion, then frustration as he realizes she's getting away from him.

"Stay away from me," she hisses, picking up her discarded schoolbag from its spot on the ground. As she stalks down the hall, she can hear Sir Cadogan cheering on her bravery over the ringing in her ears.

She has a lot of thinking to do.

Sebastian Sallow's List of Priorities (in no particular order):

Figure out what the hell I'm going to do when I graduate;

Figure out how the hell I'm going to finish this bloody Charms essay before tomorrow; and

Figure out what the hell is going on between us

Sebastian sits in an undisturbed corner of the library - nobody ever comes to this table because it's tucked away between shelves of incredibly dense magical theory books - and is twirling his quill in his fingers, watching the ink splatter on the list he spent his precious time writing instead of the Charms essay he should be working on. He's far away from the first-years who like to congregate by the windows and watch the leaves fall softly to the ground rather than study for their classes. He's made especially sure that he is far, far away from her.

It's not his choice, mind you, but he needs to be a gentleman about these things. If she needs some time and space to figure out that she's as crazy for him as he is her, fine. But even Sebastian Sallow's patience runs thin, and he's not sure how much longer he can give her to come to her senses before he snaps and takes matters into his own hands. If things were up to him, the two of them would be sitting far too close together now in this secluded corner, and maybe he would need to put a hand over her mouth to ensure her complete silence as he runs a hand up her thigh.

Now that he knows what delicious sounds can come out of her mouth - sounds that he caused - he's been having a hard time concentrating on, well, anything. Sebastian surreptitiously glances across the library to where she's sitting and studying with his sister and Imelda. Ever since the events after their Divination class, Sir Cadogan has taken it upon himself to follow Sebastian around the halls of the castle, tripping through frames and disrupting their inhabitants as he lectures Sebastian on love. The tea party women had managed to convince the knight that he had disrupted an amorous exchange, and Sebastian fervently wishes they hadn't.

The whole school is abuzz with rumors about who it could be. Nobody has even come close so far with their guesses, but Anne and Imelda are having too much fun teasing him about it. Somehow, she has managed to avoid suspicion - he wonders how this is even possible, since she's never been able to hide what she's thinking. He makes eye contact with her - has she been staring at him this whole time? - and she flushes before looking over to Imelda, who's laughing too loudly at something Anne's just said. Sebastian can't tear his eyes away from her profile, his eyes following the curve of her eyebrow, the slight upturn of her lips as she smiles at her friends, her eyes as they dart back to him, her cheeks as she turns an even darker shade of red as she realizes he's still watching her. She tucks a lock of hair behind her ear, and rests her chin on her hand as she tries to look absorbed in what Anne is saying to her.

Sebastian wonders if she's thought about him as much as he's thought about her. Judging by how she had snogged him back, he's positive that she feels the same way, but then he remembers how she had looked at him before she fled, and he's not so sure. He sighs as he looks back to his list, bringing his quill back to the third item and ripping the paper as he crosses it out again. His mind has been going in circles since that moment and he doesn't know what to think. He slowly puts everything into his schoolbag before heading out of the library for yet another freezing cold shower that hopefully tempers his now-permanent state of arousal whenever she's around.

He doesn't notice her eyes following him as he walks out of the library.

He doesn't hear her hurried excuse to Anne and Imelda as she shoves her things into her bag and rushes to follow him.

He doesn't hear her light footsteps as she gets closer to him.

When she puts a hand out to touch his arm as he waits for the moving staircase to stop, with a soft, "Sebastian" accompanying it, he nearly jumps out of his skin. He was so absorbed with thoughts of her, that to see her standing at his side, closer than she had been since they kissed was almost his snapping point.

"Can we talk?" she asks, looking almost embarrassed as she avoids his eyes. She instead looks determinedly at his collar. He thinks she probably notices that he swallows nervously before acquiescing, but she says nothing as she turns and starts hurrying away from him without waiting to see if he follows her.

She must know that he would follow her anywhere at this point.

They weave through hallways - Sebastian vaguely wonders where exactly they're going - before reaching a little alcove, hidden by a suit of armor. She looks around before pulling him into it. It's almost curfew and the halls are never that busy when the weather is as beautiful as it has been these days - the end of September seems to be clinging on to the summer for as long as possible.

Her lips are on his before he can even ask her what she needed to talk with him about, hungry and desperate. Sebastian is too stunned to pull away - not that he would actually want to. Her arms wrap around his neck, keeping Sebastian close, slender fingers sliding through his hair.

"What," she says breathlessly between kisses - almost not even moving her mouth away from his enough to be able to enunciate properly, "are you doing to me? I haven't been able to think for the last month."

Sebastian smiles into her mouth, wondering if she knows that she's repeating the very thing he told her two weeks ago. Maybe she has been thinking of him all this time - he almost hopes that she's been suffering as much as he has. Instead of responding, he moves a hand to cup her jaw, deepening the kiss. His other hand moves to her waist, gripping it tightly, pulling her flush against his body and she gasps into his mouth. He slowly moves her closer to the window alcove behind them, snogging her senseless the whole time. She moans into his mouth which just spurs him on further - her skirt rides up to her hips as Sebastian trails a hand up her stockinged thigh and they both gasp when his hand reaches skin. Her skin is so, so soft and her breathing gets faster as he continues to caress her inner thigh, closer to the bend between her thigh and her center. Sebastian wonders if she's ever been touched there before by someone else and jealousy flares up inside of him at the thought.

In one swift move, he scoops her up and places her so that she's sitting on the window-ledge, the dusky light of the sunset illuminating her from behind and making her wispy flyaway hairs a golden halo around her. Sebastian's breath catches in his throat - has he ever seen anything so beautiful as her in that moment? - she's staring up at him, her fingers playing with the hair at the nape of his neck, her breathing shallow and anticipation in her eyes. "You're," he starts saying and his throat goes dry. He brings a hand up to tuck the errant lock of hair - the one she had tucked earlier in the library - behind her ear and she leans her head into his touch, closing her eyes briefly before looking up at him again with wide eyes. "You're perfect."

She smiles faintly and pulls his head back down towards hers and now she's brushing her lips against his, teasing him, before it's too much and he grips the back of her head, holding her in place as he crushes his mouth against hers in a bruising kiss. Her knees are on either side of his waist, and she desperately grinds her core against his throbbing erection and they both groan at the friction. Sebastian moves his hands down to her thighs again as he kisses her, slowly caressing his way up and pushing her skirt up further until it's completely bunched around her waist. She gasps into his mouth at his first tentative touch after he pushes aside her undergarments. Sebastian swipes a finger up her slit, through the slick that coats it, and then he starts circling her clit with slow, even strokes. She shivers against him - at his touch - clinging tightly to his shoulders and gasping into his mouth as he continues.

Every little noise coming out of her mouth, feeling how wet she is, how the slickness keeps growing growing growing makes Sebastian hungry for more - it isn't enough -

Slowly - so slowly - he wants to savor this moment - he lowers himself until he's kneeling between her legs and he looks up at her. Her face is deliciously flushed, all swollen lips and hair in a wild cloud around her face and all she can do is stare down at him. Her chest is heaving and she tries to close her legs - hide what is exposed to him - but he holds her thighs firmly in place on either side of his head. He turns his head and kisses her inner thigh, maintaining eye contact as he swipes his tongue across where he's just kissed, moving closer towards her slick center.

"Oh," she breathes, not-quite-a-word, not-quite-a-gasp, when his mouth reaches her center and hovers over it, lips slowly teasing her the way she had just teased him. Sebastian tentatively runs his tongue up her slit; the loud moan she lets out when he reaches her clit makes him stay there, applying light and not-so-light pressure in equal measure.

Her hands are scrabbling at his hair, digging into his scalp, ruining his earlier attempts to make it look presentable, hopefully attractive, for her these days. She's pushing his head deeper into the space between her legs, starting to rock herself slightly on his mouth, and Sebastian is happy to oblige. He eagerly laps up her slit, and the obscene wet noises as he continues combined with her whimpers and barely-spoken profanities "oh-yes-fuck-yes-there-please-" are making him hard beyond belief. He's straining against his trousers, begging to be let free. Without moving his face from her, he unbuttons his trousers and starts palming himself, using the slickness weeping out of the tip as lubrication.

She's abandoned all control at this point, grinding herself into his face as he laps her up, and it's driving him wild - knowing that he's doing this to her - causing her to be so undone. Normally she's so poised and aloof, never letting any real emotion flicker across her face, so to see her so desperate and needy and wanting him so -

Sebastian's gasping into her, tongue deep inside of her, "ohmygod" he hears her whisper, her hips driving into his face when she shudders and goes still, pulsing around the tongue that's deep inside of it. He slows down, smiling as he continues to run his tongue up her slit until she's responsive again. He kisses her inner thigh and hears her moan before getting up, caressing a finger down her love-struck face and leaning his head down to kiss her deeply. With his other hand he's still touching himself - the thought that she can taste herself on his tongue driving him crazy - and he starts rubbing its blunt head against her swollen clit. She takes it out of his hand- he groans at the feeling of her soft hands (the hands he had held a week ago in Divination and pictured doing this exact thing) tentatively caressing his length before she begins to slide it up and down her slit, coating it in her wetness.

Sebastian has surrendered all control to her - resting his hands on either side of her hips on the windowsill, tucking his head into the crook of her neck and thrusting with her movements as he loses himself in the sensation of sliding through her slick folds. He can feel his release building building building, and when he finally comes, all over her perfect, pink center, it feels like a finally.

Sebastian feels so, so heavy as he pulls his head away from her shoulder, as if he could fall into a blissful sleep right there, in the little window alcove where they've hidden themselves away. The sun has now set completely and they're in shadow as they stare at each other, the sound of their ragged breathing filling the tiny space.

"Sebastian, I..."

She's staring at him with an unfathomable expression on her face, still holding him in her hand, her other hand playing with the hair at the nape of his neck. They look down and he feels his face heat up even more at the mess he's made - he quickly pulls out his wand and cleans her up, before looking back at her, giving her a wry smile as he buttons up his pants and helps her off the ledge. "What did you want to talk to me about, again?"

She gives a slight shake of her head and looks away, but she can't hide the small smile that's growing on her face just like she can't help her eyes that keep wandering over to his. He knows the growing smile on his face matches hers - did that really just happen? She reaches over to lace her fingers through his as they walk around the suit of armor. "I - it's not important."

"Come on," he says, not being able to resist the opportunity to tease her - he's somehow managed to break through the barriers she's set up around her, and he's not about to let the opportunity slide. "Surely that's not what you had in mind when you..."

Sebastian trails off as he sees the expression in her face turn to one of horror - he didn't think his teasing was that bad, was it? - but she's also pulling her hand out of his like she's been burned and -

He follows her gaze, to where it's fixed at the end of the hallway and he knows that once again his face mimics hers. He will never live this down.

Standing at the end of the hallway and looking like two cats who've just found a huge dish of milk, are his sister and Imelda.

Misery.

Complete and utter misery are what she's feeling, if she has to put it into words, which she does. Writing things down always helps her out, helps her organize her thoughts into some sort of order. Except...this time around, it's not really helping. She can't seem to make any sense of her feelings for Sebastian.

She looks over the muddled mess of words she's written down - stream of consciousness, incomprehensible babble - and sighs. She's been dreaming of falling in love since she was a young girl - Jane Austen will do that to you - and can't believe that now that she's had her opportunity, it has to go and be with Sebastian Sallow. Because it has to be love, hasn't it?

There can be no other explanation for the painful way her stomach twists itself up whenever she catches a glimpse of him these days, the way he's consuming her every thought - even when she's dreaming she can't escape him. She can't get the sight of his tousled curls between her legs, his mischievous, warm brown eyes looking up at her as she had the most mind-numbing, toe-curling orgasm of her life - none of the times she's touched herself have ever come close to the sensations he managed to evoke.

Every time she's walking through the hallways between classes and hears his loud voice as he jokes with Garreth, or Ominis, about quidditch or Merlin-knows-what her eyes snap to his face as if he were the sun, and she a sunflower searching for its warmth. And he is most decidedly not the sun. He has the tendency to snort when he laughs, and he laughs too much, especially at his own jokes. Sometimes he talks while he eats. He always twirls his quill between his long fingers in the most annoying way, splattering ink onto any parchment unfortunate to be caught underneath. But he also...

He also always goes out of his way to prepare Ominis's Potions ingredients (why Ominis decided to take and was accepted into NEWT level is a mystery to everyone), occasionally stops to play a round of gobstones with Zenobia when he has the time. Sebastian can often be found in his favorite armchair in the Slytherin common room, resting his face on his hand as he idly flips through the pages of some book, looking altogether too handsome as he does so. And when he stretches and yawns at the end of every Arithmancy lesson - like he is now - his shirt lifts up a bit and she can see a tan sliver of his stomach and -

Snapping in front of her: she blinks and looks over: when she sees it's Imelda her face immediately turns beet red and she grabs the paper she's been doodling on and rips it to shreds as fast as she can.

"Are you fantasizing about a certain annoying someone?" Imelda asks with a wicked grin, dramatically looking over her shoulder at the certain someone in question. He's still stretching, blinking sleepily; when he notices the two girls watching him he flushes deeply. Her stomach twinges again at the sight of him noticing her - has he thought about her since that moment as much as she has? What would she do if he had? Or...if he hadn't? - and she focuses instead on the paper she is currently destroying.

"Imelda," she hisses, glaring at her best friend, "stop."

Imelda does not stop.

Imelda doesn't stop during their walk to Herbology, and she does not stop as they set up their planting stations, and she most certainly does not stop as they mutter charms over their plants.

Ever since she experienced the most wonderful moment in her whole life, followed by the most mortifying, Anne and Imelda have not stopped pestering her about it. They've finally solved the 'Sir Cadogan Puzzle' - I knew it was you all along, claims Anne - but if they truly knew what had happened between her and Sebastian, she's afraid the two of them would simply combust. She loves them dearly, but they never know when to stop, and they've been pushing and poking and prodding her for more information the whole week. She has managed to remain tight-lipped and, she hopes, mysterious about the whole thing, but she's getting tired of the teasing.

"Really," Anne says, wiping her forehead and leaving a trail of dirt behind, "if you would only talk to him, I would stop bothering you. Promise."

"Yes," chimes in Imelda, on her other side, wrestling the leaves of her own plant into submission. "You know, after we saw the two of you holding hands and looking at each other with stars in your eyes, I'm really starting to doubt that you hate him as much as you claim."

"Were the two of you snogging in secret all of last year too? Because, I'm starting to get annoyed thinking of all the times I had to talk to my brother for you because of your stubborn pride."

Does she still hate him? She certainly thinks she should, but then her thoughts get terribly confusing as she continues to think about him, and she realizes all of her old hatred has long since faded. Anne has forgiven her brother, Ominis has forgiven him, and all that remains is her.

They should talk, but she doesn't know what to say.

She's afraid that maybe the man she's been inventing in her mind this past month is simply a figment of her imagination - a fictitious being created by an accumulation of stolen glances when he doesn't know she's watching, someone who all of their classmates seem to like, someone who is very different from the fifteen-year-old boy she had that terrible argument with all that time ago. Maybe he doesn't actually exist.

She would be crushed if he's hiding the fact that he still holds on to that desperate darkness that had driven him to save Anne by any means necessary.

And so she keeps her space. She watches him from afar, feeling the hatred slowly melt off of her, falling more in love every day, but too cowardly to make the next move.

Anne and Imelda continue bantering on either side of her, not noticing - or, more likely, not caring - that she isn't participating.

Sebastian's hands are sweating. He wipes them on the inside of his robes as he glances at the girl next to him. She's holding herself rigidly, but she did this to herself, sitting next to him at dinner as she had.

Well, sitting next to him hadn't been completely her idea if he's being honest. He'd been having dinner with Anne, and the two of them were dying of laughter as she recounted seeing Duncan Hobhouse get tormented by Peeves earlier that day. One moment, Anne had been demonstrating what she had seen using her potatoes and green beans as props, and the next, a particularly evil grin had lit up her face as she pushed her plate away with gusto and jumped to her feet, calling her over.

"It would be such a shame for these potatoes to go to waste, seeing as I have a very important meeting to attend," Anne had said, after pushing her friend into the very tight space at Sebastian's side. "Never mind the mess, I can assure you I didn't actually eat the food..."

And with that, Anne had flounced away, Imelda on her arm, the two girls cackling to each other as they snuck wicked glances over their shoulders at the couple.

A couple who is now steadfastly avoiding each other and trying their hardest not to even brush elbows. Sebastian is altogether too aware of her presence, has been for the better part of a month, and his patience is dangerously close to snapping. He keeps getting maddeningly close to finally getting her to open up to him - had actually achieved it for a few blissful moments - just to have it be taken away again. It's almost embarrassing how many times he's thought about their encounter. She had been everything he'd been dreaming about and more - soft, responsive, just as desperate as him - so why has she been avoiding him so thoroughly?

Yes, he's caught her staring at him more times than he can count, with that same unfathomable expression she had before, almost dreamy - wistful - could it be love? But he knows that it's preposterous, wishful thinking on his part. If it were love - if she felt the same crazy, tumultuous emotions that he was feeling constantly - she wouldn't be so cold towards him. Even if she was staring at him more than ever before.

He doesn't notice as she slips a folded paper into the book sitting next to his plate, but he does notice that she sits next to him for barely five minutes, not even touching the food that Anne has so graciously left her, before she gets up and slips away without so much as speaking a single word to him, or even looking in his direction at all.

Sebastian's sitting in a nearly empty common room after curfew, flipping through his book as he normally does this time of day, when she sees him pause.

Although she's been waiting for this moment, watching him from the corner she's tucked herself away in, she feels ready to pass out from nerves. Her heart's ready to burst out of her chest as she watches him curiously pick up the letter she slipped in his book earlier, brow furrowed. She wrings her hands nervously as she watches him read the letter and flip over the page to see if there's more, and then he goes back to read it again from the beginning.

She wasn't expecting him to read it a second time, let alone a third time, still with an inscrutable expression on his face. Maybe she should have positioned herself closer so she could see every emotion flickering through his face as he reads - she's too far away to see anything and she curses her lack of foresight. If she moves now, he'll see her, and she doesn't even know what she was thinking when she wrote the letter, when she managed to convince Anne to help her get close to Sebastian earlier that night during supper, when she moved herself to sit in this corner just so she could watch him find and read the -

"Hello."

She nearly jumps out of her skin with a muffled shriek at the sound of his voice so close to her. Why does she feel almost guilty when she looks up at him? She's so, so afraid.

Emotions have never come easily to her. Showing them is something she's not sure will ever come naturally - Anne and Imelda can laugh and shout without a care in the world, but she always holds herself back. Hides a small part of herself away, that only she knows about. Baring herself completely to Sebastian in the letter she feverishly wrote the day before was like ripping out a part of her soul and giving it to him to keep. Once the words were written down, there was no way to take them back, not that she wants to.

But what if he rejects her?

Her eyes get hot and tears cloud her vision as she stares up at him, still wringing her hands together over and over, feeling like she's positively going to burst with the force of the emotions roiling around inside of her. Why did she think this would be a good idea?

Now he's kneeling in front of her, holding her hands in his bigger, rougher ones - reminiscent of that fateful day so long ago in Divination when he had flustered her so - and a thumb is gently wiping away the big, fat tears she didn't even realize were rolling down her cheeks and she lifts her face from watching their intertwined hands and gazes tremulously into his eyes.

They are so, so gentle and warm and full of love, but the emotions are still too much for her and she can't stop crying for some unfathomable reason, so the kiss they share is wet and lovely and full of incredulous laughter.

"I love you too," he whispers between kisses, over and over again, until the words almost lose meaning - but these words could never lose their meaning when they come from him.

In the years to come, they always bicker about who was the first to say it. Sebastian says that writing doesn't count - that his words are the ones that decide who is the victor in this small argument - but she always just smiles at his insistence, knowing that he's kept her letter tucked inside whatever book he's reading since it first fell onto his lap.

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bratbarzal · 8 months ago

Text

On Your Side (NH13) / Chapter One

Pairing: Nico Hischier x Fem!OC Poppy Jensen*

*I say it's an OC, it's just a name and third person POV. I use minor character descriptions because I don’t get on with writing vague reader inserts/YN for long-form, story heavy fics, but I will generally try to avoid including race and body type or really any physical descriptors. I’m always open to feedback on my writing, or how to be more inclusive.

WC: 14k

Chapter Warnings: angst, miscommunication, drinking, some fluff!! a cute flashback and a happy ending, references to poor relationships with parents/bad parenting (including minor mentions of maternally-encouraged disordered eating but not an ed), instagram stalking, allusions to cultural appropriation and problematic tweets, depictions of anxiety, a lot more words than necessary because it was like 23 words away from the next thousand and I'm nothing if not a yapper

Summary: Poppy Jensen’s job with the New Jersey Devils was supposed to be her first big step into adulthood - a way to prove to herself and her overbearing parents that she could make her own way in life. She was never supposed to become involved with any of the players. Becoming best friends with their captain was stupid. Getting her heart broken by him was tragic. Getting knocked up with his child was just plain messy.

Series Masterlist

Previous Part (Prologue)

A/N: thank you thank you thank you for all your kind messages and feedback around the first part it really means a lot to me!! taglist included at the end, if you want to be added pop me a message :)

when I first started writing and mapping this series out I never intended to have split pov chapters cos that's !a lot! but I ended up writing so much more from Nico's perspective I literally never write male pov cos who wants to be in the mind of a man?? not me. but Nico comes easy to me what a man what a man what a mighty good man. he's a bit dumb in this series but who isn't. don't shame him. he is very precious to me.

Poppy

How Poppy ever thought she would have been able to get away with tricking Jack Hughes into forgetting she said she would come to his party by just waiting out his drunkenness, she does not know.

The guy is a nuisance.

Her phone has been blowing up since she and Nia started getting ready for their evening festivities, sharing a bottle of rosé between the two of them as they both sit in Poppy’s bedroom doing their hair and makeup.

Jack: What time do u think u’ll get here? 😬

Poppy: idk

She’d tried being somewhat aloof in the hopes he would move on from bothering her and she could let the wine do it’s intended purpose of blurring her mild irritation from the day, but she’s starting to think mild irritation is Jack’s middle name.

Jack: rough estimate?

Poppy: roughly? 🤔

Poppy: idk 🙂

Jack: cool

Jack: ur uninvited

Poppy: cool

Poppy: see ya next year

Jack: ur reinvented

Jack: invited*

Jack: attendance is mandarin

Jack: mandatory* ffs

“Is that Hughes?” Nia questions the continuous buzz of Poppy’s phone. She’s sat on the floor in front of the mirror with a curling wand in hand, her hair 90% done and curls pinned up to set them. Nia has borrowed some of Poppy’s pyjamas, and is sat wearing a silk robe she didn’t even know she owned. “Dude needs a hobby.”

“Annoying me is his hobby, I think.” Poppy locks her phone and puts it face down on her dresser as she skims through her closet. She did have an outfit picked out already for her usual New Years celebrations, but bar hopping around New Jersey and attending a fancy private party with a bunch of rich athletes and their drop dead gorgeous partners are two different ballgames entirely.

Poppy knows all too well what it feels like to turn up to an organisation event underdressed, and she won’t be making the same mistake ever again - even if this is a party held in a player’s own residence, she knows that people will be dressed up.

It’s New Years Eve, for sake - everyone will be primed for a photo opportunity for the instagram dumps, her usual trusty top, skirt and boots combo won’t cut it.

“Blazer dress?” She holds up her latest suggestion so that her best friend can see it. She’s worn this one a couple times before, knows it makes her legs look incredible when she pairs it with some pantyhose so she doesn’t have to worry about getting too cold on the way there, but it limits her shoe options if she is going to cover her legs.

“Boring,” Nia throws back, and Poppy isn’t even sure she’s looked, but she knew the second she pulled it out her friend would decline - it’s what she’s been doing at everything Poppy owns for the past half an hour.

Poppy’s thankful she hadn’t started by trying on the options, knowing that if she was in and out of all the dresses she’d suggested, she would be a hot, flustered mess by now.

“Surely you’re running out of excuses by now, Ni,” Poppy sighs, stepping away from her closet so she could stare down Nia’s reflection in the mirror she was sat before. “You’re being absolutely no help.”

Nothing has been right.

The red strapless dress that flared out at the waist? Too Christmassy. The navy blue one shoulder body con dress? Too millennial. The rhinestone silver slip dress? Too much. The black off-the-shoulder mini dress? Too plain.

There is nothing in Poppy’s closet that is going to appease her best friend’s tastes, so she doesn’t know why she’s bothering.

“Just give me 2 minutes and I’ll find the one, trust me.”

“Why have you let me stress about this for so long if you’re just gonna come over here and pluck out something random like you’ve had it in mind this whole time?”

“Because I like winding you up and watching you go, Pop.” Nia winks at her from the mirror, holding up her near empty glass. “Top us both up, babe, you still have your cranky pants on from earlier.”

“I’m not cranky.” She mutters to herself, picking her phone back up from where she had just discarded it, and collecting both their glasses to take back through her apartment into her kitchen.

The device buzzes as soon as she sets it on the counter, but she ignores it in favour of pouring herself a drink, taking gulps of the rosé she’s just poured before topping both of the wine glasses back up with equal measures. She needs the extra pick-me-up to calm her nerves, and debates swigging down her second glass when she turns her phone back over.

Jack: ur grumpiness is contagious btw

Jack: u have broken my captain

Below Jack’s messages, he has sent through a picture. It’s a setting Poppy knows all too well, having only left a few hours ago after helping finish set up the party. In the midst of everything - decorations, attendees with drinks in hand chatting away and mingling with each other - Nico stands alone. He has his arms crossed, the sleeves of his sweater rolled up to his elbows, and he looks deep in thought. The people around him have turned into their own conversations, but he shows no interest in joining them, not in the picture at least.

It’s not the way she remembers him to be - not the way the pictures that still litter the front of her refrigerator portray him to be. Front and centre in most of them, tongue sticking out or mouth open in a face consuming grin in all, drink in hand in a few. Her free hand lifts until her fingers graze over one of the pictures - taken when the Devils had thrown a party after they had clinched the playoffs at the end of last season. Nico and Poppy stood together, his arm slung around her, cheeks smushed together as the rest of the boys and a couple other friends from within the team pressed themselves into the frame, smiles so big she can barely see their eyes.

She doesn’t know why the pictures are still up. She should have taken them down, by now. Made way for new memories. Pictures of her with Nia or any of her other friends, pictures of her with family, but she struggles to recall a memory as happy as the ones magnetised to her fridge door - none from the past few months, anyway.

Her eyes dart back to the picture on her phone. Nico doesn’t seem himself, but, then again, he hadn’t seemed entirely himself earlier, either. The few smiles he had offered hadn’t quite reached his eyes, she had noticed, and he constantly broke out into nervous ticks - chewing at the inside of his cheek, scratching at the skin of his elbow when he folded his arms across himself, rocking on the heels of his feet.

Sure, she hadn’t been the nicest to him, but that was the first time they had spent any longer than a minute in each other’s company since the summer, and she’d noticed him being off before that interaction.

He’d been similar when she’d seen him throughout the last week at work. Zoning out sometimes, eyes focusing on some far off spot until someone spoke directly to him and shook him out of it.

Whatever is going on with him isn’t her fault.

Her grumpiness is not contagious.

She isn’t even grumpy.

Poppy: not grumpy

Jack: he’s watching the door

Jack: has been since he got here

Jack: clearly waiting for someone 👀

Poppy: maybe you should talk to him instead of texting me

Poppy: be a good host

Jack: he’s waiting for u 🙂

Poppy: not friends, remember? 🙂

Jack: popstar

Poppy: 🙄

Jack: pls hurry

Jack: he’s depressing me

“This one.” Poppy hadn’t even heard her best friend approaching, her lack of shoes and her featherlight step making her the perfect creeper. Nia is stood on the other side of the kitchen island, holding a dress between both of her hands. Poppy puts her phone back down on the counter and leans over it to properly assess what is being shown to her.

The dress is asymmetric, she thinks - she can’t entirely tell by the way Nia is holding it and she knows she hasn’t worn it before, can still see the tags attached to the label inside - one of the shorter ones in her closet, but not in the way she will worry about flashing her co-workers all night, and a boat neck so she doesn’t have to worry about it being too revealing up top. It ticks most of her boxes. Not too bright, not too showy. She’s pretty certain she’d shown it as one of her earlier options, but Nia had turned her nose up at so many things she can’t remember. She only wishes she had saved herself 30 minutes of irritation by not asking in the first place.

She reaches out to where Nia is holding it, feeling the fabric between her fingers, testing to see if she can see them through the material and breathing a sigh of relief when she can’t. She takes the garment out of her friend’s reach entirely and holds it up in front of her body.

“Are you sure? It’s not too dressy?” Poppy mocks, trying to catch her reflection in the glass parts of her kitchen cabinets.

“It’s perfect,” Nia says, eyes pulled down by the flash of a new message on Poppy’s phone. Too distracted by trying to get a good look at herself, Poppy doesn’t notice her best friend pick up the device and start looking through.

She wouldn’t usually mind, but Nia has been dropping comments ever since she had arrived at Jack’s place earlier, and Poppy has only just been able to shrug off her commentary.

“Why is Jack sending you weird, sad pictures of Captain Sexy?”

“Could you stop calling him that?” Poppy frowns, reaching back out for her phone only for Nia to pull it out of her reach.

“Oh my God, Pop, he’s waiting for you!” She pouts, flipping the screen to show Poppy the newest picture of Nico sat checking his watch.

He’s doing her no favours right now.

“Don’t you start with that, too. I don’t know why everyone’s so intent on blaming me for how sad he looks.” she scoffs, “He’ll be waiting for his girlfriend, Ni,”

“About that,” Nia taps away at the phone before turning it again towards Poppy’s glare. “There’s no trace of a girlfriend on his insta,”

“You’re probably checking the wrong one.”

“Nope. Checked both while you were in the shower before. Not even a sneaky hand shot or a corny Christmas stocking with her name on.”

“Give me that,” Poppy finally manages to snatch the cell back, crease forming between her brows as she frowns down at the device, scrolling through Nico’s private instagram where she knows for a fact there had been pictures of him and Talia earlier in the month.

It isn’t that she checks frequently, she just hasn’t unfollowed him yet - wasn’t ready to put the final nail in the coffin wherein lied their friendship, so to speak - and so she’d seen them as he posted them. And she had maybe tried not to throw up in her mouth and had cast her phone beneath a stack of cushions and throws on her couch to avoid it for a few hours after the fact.

The pictures of them in New York City have disappeared. As have the ones from early December, where they were looking at Christmas trees together, wrapped up in matching hats and scarves with sickly sweet loving gazes cast toward each other. Nothing in November, when Talia had started coming to games and he had posted something with a corny caption along the lines of her being his biggest fan. No carousels, no story highlights, and when she checks his following list, Talia is nowhere to be found.

“Huh,” she mutters, going into the search function and trying to hide from her best friend that Talia is already one of the options there. She really needs to clear her history before that lands her in trouble.

Her latest post is a photo dump from Christmas, Talia with her family, as well as a few other pictures of her in New York throughout December, no sign of Nico in any of them, and he hasn’t liked it. Hasn’t commented his usual red heart. She has no qualms about checking her story - she and Talia were never introduced, she’ll have no idea who she is or care that she’s viewing her story, and she’s a model with thousands of followers, Poppy isn’t sticking out to her at all - and squints to read the text over a video of fireworks before realising it’s written in German. She isn’t in New Jersey. She’s already in 2024 in a whole other timezone, and has left Nico behind.

No wonder he’s grumpy.

Not her fault, after all.

When Poppy snaps herself out of sleuth mode, she looks up to meet Nia’s knowing gaze. She looks smug. Like she’s caught her out - and Poppy can’t even deny that she has. “Stalker."

“You started it.” She huffs, pointlessly locking her phone knowing Nia knows the password and throwing it onto the side.

“I was doing my due diligence as your best friend,” Nia shrugs, picking up the wine glasses as the pair make their way back toward Poppy’s room to finish getting ready. “If we’re heading into a New Year, we are doing so as new and improved women, Poppy. 2024 is the year of reconciliation!”

“I thought 2024 was the year of saying yes.” She mockingly references the mantra her best friend has been spouting since the start of December every time she made a somewhat irrational decision.

“That too, obviously.” Nia smiles big, waiting until Poppy has laid her dress out on the bed to hand her her drink over, holding her own glass out for a toast. “To saying yes to reconciliation!”

“You’re an idiot.” Poppy says, but clinks her glass, anyway.

“No, you are, Pop.”

Poppy can’t shake the buzz of anticipation as the two girls finish getting ready, the previous pool of trepidation in her gut swirling into something a little more optimistic.

It means nothing, she tries to tell herself as she fastens her earrings and fans her hair out down her back so it doesn’t get all tangled up in the hoops. Instagram isn’t a reflection of reality, Poppy, you know this.

There are several reasons the pictures could be gone.

There is a high possibility he has archived the posts because someone leaked the photos of him and Talia. They were on his private account for a reason, and Poppy knows the guys have all had trouble with this kind of thing before - photos from private events being posted all across fan socials because someone had taken screenshots from a hacked account. And she also knows there had been some kind of discourse around Talia online - about some tweets she’d put out years ago or a photo fans had found from a halloween party where her costume wasn’t entirely appropriate - but Poppy had tried not to get lost in it. She didn’t want to form an opinion on the girl without having properly met her, considering they still technically operated in the same circles despite Nico’s insistence that he and Poppy no longer did.

Nico is a protective person by nature - she’s been on the receiving end of it before, so she knows how quickly he can shut things down when intrusive fans become a little too much - and having his privacy violated like that would definitely cause him to be grumpy.

But with the looming possibility that she is looking too much into such an easily misinterpreted detail, the memory of their earlier interaction floods back to the forefront of her mind.

He had spoken to her. In clear, full sentences. As much as she had let him, at least. Had tried to initiate actual conversation, wanting a back and forth that she hadn’t been prepared to reciprocate. He had wanted to help her, wanted to be around, and for as long as he had been with Talia, he hadn’t wanted any of those things.

Something has to have happened, another voice chimes in within her. He’s been off all week, remember?

Shut up, shut up, shut up.

Poppy can’t let herself fall down the rabbit hole of what ifs and hypotheticals. Not anymore. She’s spent the last 4 months in her head about the whole thing, and if she’s going to enter the next year a new and improved woman, she needs to learn to let things go.

Saying yes to reconciliation is one thing, letting delusion take over is another.

She casts a final look over herself in the mirror, fingertips flitting over each of the touch points she wants to check before she leaves. Hair still feels smooth, free of knots and frizz so far, earrings are secure, necklace clasped and positioned right, heels buckled, a couple of rings on odd fingers.

When her right hand brushes her left wrist, her eyes dart over to the jewellery box on her nightstand, where all her favourite pieces are discarded at the end of each day. She knows what is sat in the bottom, has had to ignore its presence every day when she reaches in there to put on her other bits.

On her right wrist sits a welded bracelet, identical to the one currently wrapped around Nia and her other friend Kelsey’s wrists. The trio had gotten the matching permanent jewellery at a random pop-up one weekend in SoHo, figuring it was the more responsible thing to do than get tattoos to symbolise their friendship, and it has lasted well for being 3 years old. Still shiny, still pristine, still as gold as the day it was fixed to her arm. Still never cut off for the sake of an MRI like her mother keeps threatening she will need. Sometimes she wears a watch, usually one gifted to her by Nia after one of her trips to Japan - gold banded with a mother of pearl watch face, classic and goes with everything - but she likes it more for every day, and doesn’t trust herself not to lose it or break the dial if she’s out somewhere at night with a few drinks in her.

Her left wrist has been bare since September, around the time she stopped reaching out to Nico. Before that, since she had received it on her birthday a couple years ago, it had been adorned with her favourite piece of jewellery she had ever been given.

Most people gift Poppy silver, and not that she’s ever ungrateful to receive any present, she can’t bring herself to wear it outside of seeing whoever gave it to her. Silver just never looks right. Mixed metals aren’t her thing, either.

But Nico had gotten it right. A gemstone bracelet, pink tourmaline and opal stones dotted along a fine gold Figaro chain, similar to the one permanently enclosed around her other side. She had worn it every day, wouldn’t even take it off to sleep, and had only stopped when she started to feel the true weight of it.

A constant reminder of a once formidable, now broken link.

“Look, I know you said no gifts,” Nico turned to face Poppy as she unbuckled herself from his passenger seat, turning the engine off so he could focus on her for a minute without the sound of the car running in the background. He usually does the same thing when he drops her home, parks up on the street and leaves the car off until she’s safe inside.

“The flowers from the team are very pretty, so you’re forgiven for going against your word,” She gestured towards the bouquet sitting on his back seat, craning her neck to look back and admire them. She had never seen a red arrangement quite as beautiful as this one - the use of tulips instead of roses a nice touch. “They’ll be dead in a week, but I’ll cherish them for as long as I have them.”

When she looks back toward Nico, he’s wearing a shy smile, and when her gaze drops to his shuffling hands, she notices the elongated black box within them.

“What’s that?” She asked, on too much of a high from such a good day to give him a hard time about it, a playful smile tugging at the corners of her mouth as her eyes look back up to meet his.

“We don’t have to call it a gift if you don’t want to,” he extended his hand out towards her, the box clutched between his fingers. “It can be payback for all the snacks you’ve given me in the last year.”

“The snacks you’ve stolen.” She corrected.

“Well, when you keep your office stocked with the stuff only I like, is it really stealing? That sounds like a trap to me.”

“I’ve been collecting evidence against you for your crimes. What I do with it depends entirely on what’s in here.” She had tried to shake the box by her ear to gauge the contents.

“You’ll like it.”

“You sound very sure of yourself.”

“Open the box, Mohn.” Nico’s voice was lower, commanding, and he leaned forward over the console, so close she could probably count his eyelashes if he gave her the time to do so.

The box itself was fancy, bound in black velvet and magnetised like a sunglasses case, so she knew it had to be something nice in there - knew he wasn’t pranking her with team merchandise or a bobblehead version of him for her desk like Jack had tried to give her.

She tried to shrug off the heat of his gaze as she pried it open, never enjoying opening gifts in front of the giver, but her mind went blank as she looked down at what he had gotten her.

The stones in the bracelet matched that of one of the rings she already owned and wore every day, an ornate opal ring passed down from her late grandmother. There were pink gems in there too, and she knew as soon as she saw them what they were.

“It’s your birthstones, right?”

She nods, unable to form any words yet, passing the box back over and holding out her left hand. Most other people she knows don’t pay enough attention to notice she wears gold everyday, and Nico knows her birthstones. “Could you put it on for me, please?”

Nico clasped the chain around her wrist, taking her hand in his and angling it a few ways to make sure it was the perfect fit - loose enough to move around and reposition with ease but not enough to fall past the base of her thumb. “Is it okay?”

“It’s beautiful, Nico.” She smiled softly up at him, watching his eyes reflect the dim ambient light in the car. “I’m never taking it off.”

“You probably should around water,” he had chuckled, bashfully, looking down and breaking their gaze, “I found it in a market back home, I’m not sure how durable it is.”

Poppy knew real gold when she saw it - knew the shimmer of natural gemstones and the shine of genuine opal, the stone on the bracelet mirroring that on her ring that she knew was antique and valuable. And although she didn’t care if it was expensive or not, she understood what he was trying to do.

He hadn’t just stumbled across this on some street market.

Poppy reached over to grab either side of his face, leaning across the console and planting a firm, loud kiss on his forehead, chuckling slightly to herself when she pulls away and he wipes at where her lips had just been in faux disgust. “I’ll look after it, I promise.”

“Happy Birthday, Mohn.”

“Thank you, Nico.”

She had found herself admiring the bracelet every time it caught the light, and when she had met up with her mother days later to celebrate her birthday with her family, the authenticity of it was confirmed when she had heard her shocked gasp - her mom, an expert in fine jewellery, spending the entire evening fawning over it as if she was jealous it wasn’t clasped around her own wrist - and had spent the evening fighting off questions about who had gifted it to her.

She shouldn’t wear it tonight, she thinks. That would be a bad omen - an assumption that one conversation between the two of them was going to immediately put them on the straight and narrow path back to being friends again.

But it’s just a bracelet - a gorgeous one, at that, and Poppy has it in her head that she’s one beautiful accessory short of perfection. She marches over to the jewellery box, opening it up and picking the bracelet up from where it has its own compartment. No one will even notice she tells herself as she manages to clasp the metal around her wrist with one hand, it doesn’t mean anything.

She is about to enter the year of saying yes, after all.

“You good to go?” Nia asks from the doorway of Poppy’s bedroom, Poppy’s phone stretched out for her to take.

“Let’s go.”

Poppy: omw stresshead

Jack: finally!!!!!!

Poppy and Nia arrive to a party that is well and truly in full swing. It’s crowded, Jack having invited all the team and a quite lot of the staff, and everyone has brought a plus one, so Poppy is glad she overcompensated for him when she ordered all the drinks and food. She's also glad Jack and Luke had overcompensated for space when picking out an apartment meant only for the two of them.

The girls had ubered over from Poppy’s apartment despite it being so close, partly due to the almost freezing temperatures in the midst of winter in New Jersey and partly due to the amount of wine they had consumed when they were getting ready.

Poppy is tipsy enough that her previous anxiety around coming has quelled for the most part, but not so much that she is unsteady on her feet.

She’s has a sociable kind of buzz - not that she isn’t usually sociable - that makes her slip into conversations with ease and without much thought about what she needs to say.

She has introduced Nia to whoever she has talked to so far, her best friend holding her own in conversations too, and, attached at the hip, they have immersed themselves into random discussions with the guys, flitting between the different groups that had formed before they got here.

They joke with Luke about Jack torpedoing through the apartment checking in that everyone is having a good time.

John Marino cracks a joke about how on earth Jack has managed to lure Poppy out of whatever hole she’s been crawling into after work, and Nia joins in, affectionately jibing that 2024 is the year Poppy renounces her life as a recluse. She doesn’t usually take well to being the butt of the joke, but she’s happy her friend is getting on with the guys, and the rosé has now managed to fog up the part of her brain that takes offence to little things.

She chats with Holtzy and Jesper about their Christmas spent in each other’s company, not having the opportunity to do so in the week when she had been working. She talks to Dawson about his brief trip back home, to Curtis about his sons and coos at all the pictures he shows her of them in their cute little Christmas get-ups.

She reaches a point where she doesn’t even remember why she hadn’t wanted to be here.

She has built such great relationships with the guys on the team over the years she has worked with the Devils - those friendships extending to their significant others, too.

And it’s only a matter of time before she is pulled into a group of the girls. It’s been a while since she’s been able to catch up with them, having not spent too much time with any of the team outside of work for so long. She is introduced to the new faces, is flashed the sparkling new engagement rings she had only seen on instagram, and is practically given a play-by-play for all the things she’s missed since she truly had dropped off the grid to them.

It is Jesper’s partner, Nicole, who has the guts to open the gossip floodgates. It starts off innocent on her end, telling Poppy about how she and Jesper had hosted Christmas at their place for some of the European bunch, which she already knew after her conversation with Alex and Jesper, and how she had been stressing about how many people she was going to have to entertain. She mentions the amount of food she had to cook, especially considering the amount of hungry athletes in attendance, and then says, “I am thankful Nico turned up alone, after all, though. We ran out of chairs, I almost had to have people standing to eat.”

“Nico went to Christmas alone?” Nia’s ears have clearly perked up at the information, along with the few of the other girls, who all lean into the circle - a telltale sign, if any, that they have stumbled into a juicy topic of conversation.

“Yeah, him and Talia are done.”

“I knew it!” Nia yells in triumph, pointing at Poppy with a too loud, “I told you so!”

Poppy pinches her best friends finger until she drops it, the other girls giggling at her outburst. Thankfully, not too many eyes have been cast their way, the steady thump of the music overpowering their conversation.

“You didn’t know anything,” Poppy rolls her eyes. “She just stalked his instagram.”

“Yeah, sure, I stalked his instagram,” Nia scoffs, “His instagram which his girlfriend has mysteriously disappeared from, Pop, doesn’t take a genius to put 2 and 2 together!”

Poppy really doesn’t want to be having this conversation again. “He probably archived the posts, Ni.”

“Nope. They’re done. Deleted.” Nicole shrugs, “No chance we’ll be seeing her again.”

“Why?” For someone who doesn’t want to engage in a gossip session about the object of her own problems, Poppy sure has had her interest piqued there.

“She dumped him like 2 weeks ago.”

They had literally just been on a romantic trip together, Poppy remembers, why would she dump him?

“Over text.” One of the other girls adds.

“What?!”

“Nia!”

“Sorry!” Nia grimaces at her previous volume, this time definitely attracting attention. “Over text?” She whispers to the circle of girls, who nod in response. “What a bitch.”

Poppy’s stomach feels tight, like her insides are cringing at the realisation of what she’s engaging in. The girls continue to talk around her, but she can’t focus enough to make out words, guilt clouding her senses.

She doesn’t want to talk about Nico - not like this, at least.

She doesn’t want to dissect the breakdown of a relationship he clearly cherished - enough to squash their own. Doesn’t want to pick apart what went wrong, or map out a timeline of how and when things fell apart.

She doesn’t think she could even if she did want to, because all she can do is think about those pictures Jack had sent her earlier, and about how she’d shut Nico down before when he had maybe tried to talk to her - potentially wanting to open up to someone.

As much as she hasn’t been that person for him in a while, she has always wanted to be, and so she can’t help the shame that gnaws at her. Wondering that maybe if she’d had the nerve to take a proper look at him when she’d seen him earlier, or at any point when she’d been in his vicinity and ducked around corners or hung her head to avoid him in the past couple of weeks - if she’d taken notice of him, just once - she’d have been able to see through him.

She’s been so wrapped up in the way she’s been feeling, the way she has been hurting, that it hasn’t occurred to her that he could be hurting, too.

Maybe not for the same reasons, but hurting, all the same.

“I’m gonna get another drink.” She mutters out quietly, excusing herself from the group and ambling through everyone to get to the kitchen.

“Why do you look like that?” She hears as she’s looking through the different bottles littered atop Jack’s countertop. “Please tell me you’re having a good time.”

“It’s not quite the depression session I was promised,” Poppy pouts mockingly over at her jittery friend, trying to fix whatever Jack had seen on her face to question her. “Are you having a good time, Jack?”

“I am if you are.” He reaches out for one of the bottles in front of her, twisting off the cap and taking a swig straight from the bottle of Jim Beam. Poppy grimaces at even the thought of how that tastes. The poor kid is wasting his night away stressing when he should be enjoying himself, she thinks.

“You’re sweating.” She observes.

“Yeah, well, I think I’ve hit 10k steps checking in on everyone.”

“Everyone’s having fun, you should relax.”

“Not everyone,” Jack sings, clearly having found some liquid courage in his gulp of hard liquor.

“99.999% of your guests are having a great time.”

“You know me, Poppet, I’m nothing if not a perfectionist.” He swings his arm around her, guiding her away from the counter until he can point towards the far side of his apartment.

Nico is stood with a few of the other guys - Curtis, Dougie and Timo. He’s listening to their conversation, nursing a bottle of beer in hand, looking between them as they speak, but he’s not engaging in it. Not talking back, only just smiling when the rest of them laugh.

“If I’d have known you’d break him, I never would have sent him to help you earlier.”

“Yeah, I never thanked you for the ambush,” she shrugs out from under his arm, walking back to pour herself a drink, mixing herself a makeshift Paloma with what’s on the counter - tequila and grapefruit juice with a wedge of lime to try and jazz up the plastic cup. “You ever thought that maybe his bad mood has nothing to do with me?”

“No.”

“Jack, we’re-,”

“Not friends. Right. And the Pope’s not really a Catholic, and the Earth is flat.” Jack mocks.

“You know, I’ve always had my suspicions Luke would be the Flat-Earther in your family.”

“He is. He also thinks the world is run by lizard people.”

“Weirdo.”

“Total weirdo.” Jack chuckles, almost losing himself. “Stop trying to dodge the real issues, here, Poppy.” The lack of any childish moniker is Jack’s way of attempting to be stern, he doesn’t resort to it often, but when he does, Poppy tends to fold.

She’d tried her best to avoid broaching the topic of Nico at length with Jack. He’s his captain, his teammate, his friend, too, and it hadn’t felt fair to vent her feelings about the whole situation to someone he was equally, if not more, close to.

There was also the minor detail regarding the voice inside her telling her Nico never cared about her in the same way that stopped her from opening up about her disappointment and hurt out of sheer embarrassment. The potential that she was mourning a friendship that never meant as much to him, and doing so to other people who saw all along what she was too naive to notice.

But that hadn’t stopped Jack from trying to eke out information from her the whole time there had been a noticeable tension between the two of them.

He’d try and initiate conversation between them in group settings, often getting one or two word responses before one of them excused themselves. He’d invite either of them to plans he had with the other person, and there was even a stupid group chat he’d tried to form that Poppy quickly archived and ignored after Nico never responded to Jack’s clear attempt to reel them both in.

“You should talk to him,” Jack pushes, sticking to his guns and rooting for the revival of their relationship. “He’s had a rough couple of weeks, could really use a friend.”

If Poppy Jensen is motivated by anything in life, it is the crippling guilt that Jack knows just how to spark up.

“So I’ve heard. Maybe you should go check on him,”

“Don’t be annoying.” Jack frowns. “I know it sucked that he dropped you before, he’s an idiot and I won’t back him up for it, but you can either mope about it forever and both suffer, or suck it up and move on.”

“Go check on him, Jack.” Poppy speaks through almost gritted teeth.

“Poppy,"

“Don’t be a dumbass.” She sighs. “Be a good host, maybe see if he needs to get another drink,” she enunciates her words as much as she can, and her eyes widen suggestively, waiting for him to catch on.

“Oh!” Jack exclaims, shooting back with a slacked jaw as realisation washes over him. “Yeah, he looks thirsty! Great idea, Poppy!”

He dashes off, bumping straight into someone and getting mildly distracted as their drink spills down his front.

Poppy mutters a profanity to herself, not able to watch the absolute train wreck of a man in front of her.

This is where making spur of the moment decisions gets you, she thinks, but her own thoughts are drowned out by another voice inside her head - one that sounds a little too much like her annoying, inebriated and loud best friend. This is going to be the year of saying yes. Yes to growing up, yes to moving on, and yes to olive branches offered to her from pouty Swiss hockey players who are clearly going through it right now and don’t need her to be stubborn about her forgiveness.

She tries to busy herself in Jack’s kitchen, making quick work of straightening out all the drinks and throwing away some of the discarded cups - anything to avoid looking over to where she knows Jack is being his obnoxious self.

She can practically hear him from where she stands, not knowing lowkey if it smacked him in the teeth. Poppy’s asked me to lure you to the kitchen or Poppy’s absolutely desperate to speak to you, Cap.

Annoying.

“Hi.”

Unlike earlier in the day, Poppy allows herself to truly take Nico in when he stands in front of her, this time.

He’s dressed in all black, a dark sweater and dark jeans, no hat for once though - his hair has grown out enough that it’s at the length he usually gets frustrated with it and hides it under a beanie or a backwards cap, but tonight he hasn’t, unless he’s taken one off and discarded it somewhere. It is a little unruly, but more in the way he might have been running his hands through it all night. And he hasn’t shaven in a few days, she can tell - the darkened formation of a shadowy stubble frames his jawline and runs in a slightly jagged line below his cheek.

“Hey,” she attempts a warm smile when she notices him chewing at the inside corner of his mouth, nervously anticipating a response. Her own heart is thumping so hard in her chest it almost feels like it’s echoing. “You want a beer?”

“Yeah,” he nods, stepping further into the kitchen so he’s on the same side of the counter as her. “Jack just stole mine straight out of my hand. Thanks.”

Of course he did. “He’s a strange boy.” She says, wanting to distance herself from his behaviour. If she’s being fair to herself, she hadn’t asked him to be a freak in his endeavour to send Nico over here - he chose that path, himself.

“Very.” Nico affirms, taking the bottle out of her hands by the neck to avoid touching her. “He’s asked me seven times already if I’m enjoying myself.”

“Yeah, I don’t think we should let him throw another party for a while, it makes him go weird.” She watches him smile as he takes a sip from his drink. “Are you, though? Enjoying yourself, I mean.”

She doesn’t remember talking to Nico ever making her feel like this before. Like an uphill climb to figure out what to say and still only coming out with unfamiliar small talk. But she can give it time, she thinks. Maybe it just needs time. They just need to warm up to each other, again.

“Yeah, but I want to make him sweat a little, so don’t tell him I told you that.”

“I won’t.” The smiles they share are familiar. Knowing. Like they’re the only two people in on a joke. “He said you’ve been off all night.”

She only realises once she’d said it that it’s almost word for word what Nico had said when she saw him earlier in the day. She wonders if he remembers the same thing, wonders if Jack had said something similar to Nico to prompt their run-in. If he had been worried about her in the same way she was starting to worry about him.

“Is that why he sent me over here? For you to scope out the reason for my bad mood?” He tries to keep his tone lighthearted, as Poppy’s has been, but she can tell it’s an effort not to sound bitter. There’s a disappointment that presses obviously on his posture, shoulders dropping.

“Cute how you think I’m at his beck and call like that,” she leans against the counter behind her, wanting to send a message through her body language that she’s settling in for a conversation, instead of avoiding one like before. “He’s worried about you, I think.”

“And you’re speaking to me now for his benefit?”

“No.” She tries not to frown at the accusation. Maybe his back is up after their earlier interaction. All she can do is own up to her actions. Growing up. Moving on. Accepting olive branches from pouty Swiss hockey players. Maybe even offering one of her own. “I feel bad for being a bitch to you before. You were trying to talk to me and I was shutting you down.”

“I didn’t think you were being a bitch, Poppy.” He leans against the counter that is perpendicular to her.

“Oh, I’ll try harder next time, then.” She makes an attempt at a joke, and relief washes over her when he breathes out a chuckle. “I was for sure trying to blow you off.”

“Yeah, I got that from your two word responses.” He jokes back.

It starts to feel like progress. A silence falls between them, and it isn’t uncomfortable, per se, but she doesn’t quite bask in it like she used to. Her muscles don’t relax the same and her worries don’t entirely ease up.

She glances over at him, able to take a good look as he stands with his arms crossed, looking down at the floor as if in deep thought. And, not for the first time in her life, Poppy wishes she could read Nico’s mind.

Nico

Nico is cursing every day he has spent in the cold, away from the warmth of Poppy Jensen. How he’s survived this long, he doesn’t have a clue, but he wishes more than anything he’d worked to fix things so much earlier than now.

It’s not the looming deadline of midnight that’s making him feel like this - he knows deep down that he’s placing an unnecessary time limit upon a reunion - but the instantaneous relief he feels whenever Poppy’s eyes meet his, and she keeps them there, looking straight through the privacy film he’s wrapped himself in for so long. He’d forgotten how good she was at that - making him feel deeply seen with one glance.

It’s the relief he felt when she’d smiled at him - fully, properly smiled; eyes crinkling slightly in the corners, soft, balmy lips stretching and cheeks rounding - or when she’d casually fallen back against the counter, feet crossing over each other at the ankles, showing him she had no intention of running away from him anymore. She’s even facing away from everyone else, not actively looking for a way out. It’s like a flashed out version of the Poppy he had only managed to catch a glimpse of earlier.

He wishes he could have felt this sooner, the absence of the consternation that has clouded his every thought lately brings a welcome comfort. He feels like he’s taken his first deep breath in months, and he’s greedy with it, filling his lungs with everything she can offer. Snark - albeit with less bite than before - sarcasm, jokes, even the littlest offering of pity she seemed to give. He doesn’t have much time for anyone else’s attempts at empathy, but with her he doesn’t care, he’ll take it. With Poppy comes genuine concern, and that means she still cares.

That had been a little hard to gauge before, her avoidance and indifference blurring together, and her lack of emotion had stung, but he sees it better now. Sees it clearer - how she is consciously making an effort to make him feel better.

He doesn’t entirely know why, doesn’t think he deserves it.

“Did you have a nice Christmas?” He asks in an attempt to shift the conversation, not quite ready to attempt to tackle the behemoth elephant in the room - not with everyone around, at least. Although as soon as the words leave his mouth, his toes curl at how he’s now engaging in small talk with her.

Poppy scrunches her nose in a wordless answer, and he feels himself smile before he realises he’s doing it. “It was pretty boring,” she shrugs, “I had dinner with Nia and her dad and then came home, watched some football and snacked myself into a coma.”

Nico frowns, thick eyebrows pushing together as something akin to a fiery guilt bites away at the pit of his stomach. He doesn’t like the idea of Poppy being on her own for the holidays - she’s usually so tied into a routine around this time of the year that it doesn’t seem right. “You spent Christmas alone?”

“My parents went to California to see Oli and his family.”

“And you weren’t dragged along, kicking and screaming?” He asks. She shakes her head and gives him one of those smiles again - and pride swells in his chest at how well he knows her.

Nico finds it strange how much comes flooding back to him when he gives himself the opportunity to think about her. To think about all the parts of their lives they had shared with each other, and all the little details about her that were ingrained within his memory as much as details about himself. Recalling tidbits of information about her comes to him as effortlessly as breathing.

“I’m a big girl, now, I can make my own decisions about where I spend my holidays, thank you very much.”

“I hope that’s not what you said to your mother.”

Nico can’t recall a single person in the world who intimidates him as much as Priscilla Jensen, and he has constant face-offs with amped up, aggressive, mostly 6 foot-whatever hockey players on a regular basis.

That woman is scary, but no one can handle her better than her daughter - he’s witnessed it first hand.

The first time he had ever met Poppy’s mom had been an unfortunate, unplanned accident. He’d been returning from a roadie, and Poppy had loaned him her headphones after his AirPods had given up on him mid-workout the week before. He could have just bought a new paid, but he’d run into her on her way out of work before the team were about to leave, and when he’d mentioned he was about to fly cross-country with no music, she had taken pity on him. She’d placed her headphones around his neck, telling him they had a full charge and should last him until he was home.

And they had. He’d gone straight from the team bus to her place after they’d gotten back from the airport - not much of a detour, her apartment not out of the way on his usual journey home - and when he knocked on the door, he was a little shell-shocked when her mother answered.

A lot of things about the woman before him immediately intimidated him to the nth degree.

The way she somehow seemed to look down upon him, even from a stature that was inches shorter than his own. The way she was dressed, prim and proper, not a wrinkle in her fancy dress, somewhat out of place in the doorway of a Jersey City apartment. The way she so easily made her distaste of him obvious from the second she laid eyes upon him. Dread had consumed him, like he’d stumbled into a lion’s den and the only exit was immediately blocked behind him.

“Who are you?” She had asked. No hello or can I help you? Just pure distain and an eyre of being inconvenienced by his mere presence.

“Oh, I’m Nico,” he stuttered. “Is Poppy here? Poppy Jensen?” He was starting to think he had to have the wrong place, and had seriously just ruined this woman’s day by knocking on her door and interrupting whatever sacrifice she was making to the gods behind closed doors to keep her youth. She was going to sacrifice him, next. But, there was no mistaking the relation when he took a proper look. The slope of her nose, the curve of her lips, the unique shade of her eyes, he was definitely in the right place. “This is Poppy’s apartment, right?”

“What do you want with her?” Her glare was just as accusatory as her tone, like he could ever be worth a second of her or her daughter’s time.

Nico’s throat was closing up. As captain of the Devils, he had faced some hard press in his time Having to deal with media after back to back losses, organisation restructures, poor performances, and dancing around admitting to injuries for himself and his teammates - but he hadn’t had to answer to anyone like this in a long time, and he was seconds away from apologising, forgetting how to speak English, and bolting back down the stairs before he heard Poppy’s voice.

“Jesus, Mom, cool off,” she had sighed, coming into his field of vision behind the scary woman before him. “This is Nico, he’s here to whisk me away into the sunset and elope so I don’t have to answer to you guys anymore.”

Nico’s eyes widened. If she didn’t have a reason to hate him before, she sure did now. Thanks, Poppy.

“That isn’t even remotely funny, Poppy,” her mom snarled, disgust evident in her tone. “You have 5 minutes before we’re leaving.”

She had stormed off then, the echo of her heels clicking against the hard wood floors of Poppy’s apartment echoing until they eventually dulled when Poppy came out into the hallway and closed the door behind her.

“Hi,” Poppy gave a bright smile, as if Nico hadn’t almost just been traumatised.

“I just came to drop these off,” he had gulped, with an alarmed look to make sure she had definitely closed the door and he was safe. He handed over the headphones, as well as a cookie he’d got her from the airport. “Did I do something? Has she gone to put some sort of generational hex on my family back there?”

“You didn’t give her your last name, did you?” Poppy asked, her eyes widening in mocking horror.

“Not funny.”

“Don’t worry about her,” Poppy scoffed, “She wouldn’t waste her evil energy on such petty curses. She’s already forgotten you exist, bud.”

“That doesn’t make me feel better.” He shuddered, “I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody that so outwardly hates me within seconds of meeting, before.”

“She’s like that with everyone, I wouldn’t take it personally.” Poppy tears open the wrapper to the cookie before bringing it up to her mouth and taking a bite. She hums in appreciation.

“What, even you?”

“Especially me.” She covers her lips as she speaks around the mouthful of gingerbread. When she’s finished, she gives a gentle smile, reaching out to pat his arm, thankfully. “Thanks for the cookie, I’ll let her know who’s to blame next time she’s over and I’m like half a pound heavier.”

“Maybe I should take that back,” he frowned, reaching forward only for her to pull her arm back, out of his reach.

“Nope. This is my only sustenance for the evening. Who knows if she’ll let me even look at the hors d’oeuvres.” She shudders. “I’m resigned to a night of sparkling water and biting my own tongue.”

“If you need me to make up some emergency for you to leave whatever hell it is you’re being taken to, I could call you. I’m really good at fake crying.”

“I bet,” Her eyes shone with mischief, biting back a grin. “Unfortunately I don’t think she’d care enough about your wellbeing to let me leave, but I appreciate the effort, thanks, Cap.”

It was only the rush of blood to his cheeks and the need to divert his gaze from the teasing glimmer in her eyes that brought his attention to Poppy’s attire. An ankle length, satin cocktail dress fit like a glove to Poppy’s figure, the bright magenta colour not something he was used to seeing her in, but complimented her skin tone perfectly, nonetheless. Her hair fell in loose waves, one side tucked behind her ear, and her makeup was soft - cheeks flushed, lips balmy and a small spattering of barely-there shimmer in the corners of her eyes, making them sparkle even more than usual. “You look nice, Mohn” He hadn’t tried to make his voice sound any kind of way, but it had come out lower, breathier than normal, and he couldn’t quite pinpoint the new feeling that began to brew in the pit of his stomach.

“Thank you,” she had given a bashful smile, reaching her left hand up to tuck her hair behind her other ear, too. The bracelet on her wrist had caught the light, the same one he had gifted her on her birthday a few months before, the same one he hasn’t seen her without, since. The beat of the peaceful silence that fell between them was harshly interrupted by the shrill call of Poppy’s name from within her apartment, accompanied by a banging on the other side of the door. Instead of shouting back, Poppy just banged back on her side with her elbow. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Only if you can figure out how to break the curse she’s for sure put on me back there.” He pouts, “Otherwise, it might be too late.”

She smiles big, and his lips automatically mirror the curve of hers, arms instinctively opening for her to shuffle into his embrace. “I’ll see what I can do to save the fate of all future Hischier children.” She promised as her arms wound around his back. “Bye, Nico.”

“Bye, Mohn.” He’d pressed his lips to the top of her head before backing away, making sure she was somewhat safe inside before making his way back down the stairs.

Nico had left her that night to whatever her unspoken, fancy plans with her mother were. He’d driven back to his apartment, unpacked from his roadie, and had spent the evening alone, watching soccer and eating meal prep. He couldn’t even find it in himself to be embarrassed at the fact he had ended up viewing Poppy’s instagram story a mere 40 seconds after she had posted it.

She had been with Nia, still dressed up, both of them wearing goofy smiles as they fed each other greasy pizza outside one of the hole-in-the-wall vendors in the city across the river.

That had been maybe 18 months ago, and it concerns him only slightly how little has changed in that time.

He’d done the same thing tonight, before Poppy got here. Sat on his own, busying himself by doing nothing on his phone, refreshing instagram in the hopes she or Nia might have posted a story and he could tell where she was outside of checking the door every couple of minutes for her arrival.

He wonders, as he remembers back on how easily Poppy had handled her terrifying mother, if things are still the same with them, but refrains from delving too deep into that whirlpool, and instead asks, “She didn’t blow up on you, then?”

“Worse, she gave me the cold shoulder for a week.”

“Sounds like the dream.”

“You’d think so, but my mother’s version of the silent treatment is surprisingly loud.”

He doesn’t know how he hasn’t noticed it before now. He’s had his eyes on Poppy from the second she came in. He’s watched her hug everyone she speaks to, has watched her hands gesture around whatever story she’s telling, watched her cover her mouth when she laughs a little too hard at someone else’s joke. But it’s only as she lifts the plastic cup she’s holding to her mouth and takes a sip that he catches the glimmer of the gemstones adorning her wrist.

She wasn’t wearing it, earlier today.

Hasn’t worn it in some time, he doesn’t think.

But she’s wearing it now - the bracelet he had given her for her birthday 2 years ago - as pristine as they day he had bought it. She’d worn it so much before that he had thought she’d permanently fixed it to herself, but she’s always taken good care of it. Always cherished it, despite him selling her short on its value.

And he knows he shouldn’t read too much into it. It’s just a piece of jewellery. But it isn’t. It never has been. Not to him, and certainly not to Poppy. So he can’t stop himself before the words tumble out from between his lips. “I think I need some air."

He looks up from her wrist to meet her eyes, now widened in confusion. “Oh,” her lips form a pout around the exclamation, her feet uncrossing and her back straightening until it’s no longer resting against the side. “Okay.”

She seems disappointed, and he immediately realises that she thinks he means without her. “Would you come with me?”

“I, uh,” she cranes her neck to seemingly look back for something in the crowd of their teammates. “I didn’t bring a jacket.” She’s frowning when she faces him again, and he knows not to take it as another attempt to avoid spending time alone with him. She’s genuinely disheartened at the thought of missing out.

“You can borrow mine?” He suggests.

“Are you sure? It’s barely 30 degrees out,”

“Yeah,” he shrugs, like he even understands Fahrenheit, anyway. 30 degrees sounds decent. Where he wants to go, there won’t be much need for a jacket, but that would involve divulging more information to Poppy than he needs to share, right now. He just needs to get her to come with him. “I run hot, remember?” He swears he sees her blush - tries not to give into the quiver of his lip that’s fighting to curve into a smirk. He feels giddy, almost. “I also live upstairs.”

“Oh yeah,” she chuckles, nervously. “Let me just find Nia?”

“Of course.” He straightens up, “I’ll grab my jacket and meet you by the door.”

Nico had shrugged his jacket off somewhere in the corner when he had come in, and when he goes over to retrieve it, digging it out from a pile of coats that had formed since he got here, Jack rushes over.

“Are you-,”

“I’m having a great time, Jack.” He chuckles, and this time he thinks he means it. “Me and Poppy are gonna go out for some fresh air, so don’t go blowing up her phone when you can’t find her.”

“I would literally never do that,” he snorts in denial, backing away and acquiescing immediately, giving up whatever he had come over to bother Nico with. “You kids have fun!”

Nico finds Poppy waiting by the entrance to Jack’s apartment, hands busying themselves by playing with the rings on her fingers. She looks up as he approaches and smiles, accepting the jacket he hands over to her and immediately shrugs it on.

The jacket is only slightly shorter than her dress, and so her bare legs come straight out from the bottom, but he hopes it’s enough to keep her warm for the time being. It has a fleeced collar, a thick overall lining, and he knows that if she puts her hands in the pockets, the soft sherpa interior will melt her icicle fingers in no time. And if her legs do get cold, he’s almost desperate enough for her approval that he will shuck off his pants and give them straight over to her.

He holds the door open for her, and when they get over to the elevator, he presses the button. They wait side by side in a comfortable silence, arms bumping each other as she sways very slightly on the spot. He tries not to get into his head about how she doesn’t move away. They stand similarly when they get into the elevator - he reaches forward to press the button at the top, and falls back into place beside her, her shoulder brushing his bicep.

“We’re going up?” She asks. “I didn’t think you could get on your rooftop.”

“They opened it up back in September,” he tells her, “It’s nice, there’s seating and tables up there and everything.”

“Oh wow, you’re gonna get hypothermia.”

“I’ll be alright,” he breathes out a laugh as the doors open, and he gestures for her to step out before him. He buries a hand into his pocket for his keys, pulls them out, and reaches around her to unlock the entrance to the roof - only accessible to a few people in the building if they have paid for the privilege. There’s a single flight of stairs before they make it up there, and they climb them side by side before he pushes the door open. He’s grateful for the lack of wind, tonight, but she’s right. It’s cold. And as much as he’s used to temperatures like this, he’s thankful he had the foresight to prepare for this earlier.

Nico guides Poppy with a hand on her back to the far corner of the rooftop, toward the pergola that surrounds the outdoor seating area.

The city provides a decent glow at this time of night, but the pergola is lit up with ambient lighting strips, and it looks cosy. The couches have plush cushions, and the weather hadn’t been too bad the past couple of days, so it’s all dry.

“Wow,” Poppy steps away from Nico, toward the side, hands reaching out to grasp the railings as she looks over what she can of the edge of the building. There’s a safety perimeter that stops her from being able to see to far if she wants to look down. “This is a lot higher than my roof.”

“It’s a great view, huh?”

“It’s incredible.” Nico had been on her rooftop with Poppy a couple times, and she has a great view, herself, but hers is blocked by some of the taller buildings to either side of hers on the waterfront. “You can see my apartment from here.” She points, and Nico’s eyes follow the direction of her finger. “We’ll have to get binoculars and test if you can see me through all my windows.”

As ridiculous as that suggestion is, Nico’s heart beats erratically at the idea of it. He can picture the scenario in his mind, clear as day. She’d get him to call her to test the theory, ask him if he could see how many fingers she was holding up, and flip him off from the window in her bedroom.

He laughs out loud at the thought.

“Do you come up here a lot?” Poppy burrows into his jacket, stepping away from the side and toward the seats.

“Not really,” he denies. He’d only gotten a key from the building manager today. He’d put in an urgent request after he’d seen Poppy and Nia, and realised Poppy wasn’t going to get to fulfil her New Years tradition. He’d wanted to do something nice, and as he takes in the wonder and amazement she exudes, he’s happy he did. There had been a few scenarios of how he’d get her up here, and he’d actually settled on a plan to give Nia the key and tell her to take Poppy up before midnight, but he much prefers how this is playing out. “Hasn’t been the weather for it.”

“Right,” she sighs, sinking down onto one of the couches, sitting with her knees tucked beneath her and her feet hanging over the edge so her shoes don’t touch the cushions. “Because the weather now is ideal for a rooftop gathering,”

Nico lifts the top of the storage trunk that sits beside the couch, reaches in and retrieves the blankets he’d stashed in there earlier when he’d scoped the place out. He throws one over to her and chuckles at the surprise that spreads across her face when she catches it.

“I take it back,” she bites back a smile as she unravels the blanket, wrapping it around her shoulders and making sure it spreads to cover her legs. Nico waits until he’s sat before he wraps his around himself. He sits beside her, inclining his body towards hers, one leg under himself and elbow leaning on the back of the couch. When he drapes the blanket over himself, he does a quick check to make sure there isn’t any bare skin of Poppy’s he can see that he’d need to extend his cover over. “I never asked about your Christmas.”

Nico thinks that maybe he doesn’t hate small talk as much - talking about anything with Poppy is good enough. “It was pretty boring,” he echoes her earlier sentiment, smiling down at her when she glances over and rolls her eyes.

“C’mon, I know what you European guys are like when you all get together, Holtzy said a few of you were over at Jesper and Nic’s place.”

He lets himself wonder for a second if she’d asked about him, specifically, when she was talking to the other guys about how they spent their holidays. If she had still cared enough to consider where he had spent his Christmas, and wasn’t just asking now to fill in any potentially awkward silence or reroute the conversation from anything else.

“It was good,” he offers, vaguely, “I do think I was bringing the vibe down, though, wasn’t really in the Christmas spirit.”

Christmas at Jesper’s hadn’t been as bad as he’d made it out to be in his head in the build up to the day - he’d had a good time in the end, but he had left just after dinner; told everyone he was still tired and aching from their game the few days before. He’d paid no mind to the pitiful glances cast to him from throughout the group, and he would never in a million years admit to any of them that even in a room full of people that he did genuinely care about and love being around, he couldn’t shake the feeling of loneliness that crept up every time he glanced around and saw his friends all loved up with their partners and having the time of their lives.

He realises that he and Poppy had both been alone on Christmas, and maybe if he hadn’t have been such a royal idiot about things, he could have invited her along and had a chance to truly engage in all the festivities and joy.

“Never had you down as a party pooper, Nico.”

“You sound like Jack.”

“I take great offence to that.”

“I got dumped.” He may as well get this part of conversation over with, he’s going to struggle to skirt around it much longer. He almost expects surprise on her end, shock or disbelief, but Poppy just nods in understanding.

“I heard.” She purses her lips, shuffling until her elbow is against the back of the couch, a mirror of his own position, and she can listen with intent. “I’m sorry, I know how much you liked her. It seemed like you two were perfect for each other.”

Nico can’t hide the frown that takes over. He doesn’t feel like they were perfect for each other. Doesn’t remember trying to make it seem that way, or remember telling anybody in any kind of detail how much he liked being with Talia. He doesn’t quite understand how she had come to that conclusion.

When she takes in his expression, her shoulders tense. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry or anything.”

“No, you’re fine, I don’t mind talking about it.” With you, goes unspoken, but lingers quite obviously between them, he hopes. He nudges her elbow with his, narrowing the space between them in the process. Pry away, he thinks. He’d much rather have Poppy poke around at the inner workings of his brain than anyone else. She’d be able to make much more sense of it. But she needs to do so with the right assumptions. “It’s just that it wasn’t really like that, I don’t think.”

“Oh.” She sounds almost disappointed, he thinks - disheartened, maybe. It almost seems like she wanted them to be good, wanted him to be happy, and seemed unsettled by the idea she had the wrong perception of it all. The idea brings back a constricting feeling in his chest. “Breaking up around Christmas must be like torture, either way,”

“The returns policies aren’t too bad this time of year actually.” He shrugs. He feels like enough air has cleared between them that he can attempt a joke to pick the mood back up. He doesn’t really want to talk at length about his break up - he’s processed it, he thinks, despite the short passing of time since it’s happened. He wants to talk about Nico and Poppy - he’s finally ready to now.

That doesn’t change the swell of pride he feels with the way she looks at him, like she hadn’t expected him to make light of the situation, and doesn’t know whether it’s okay to laugh until his own cheeks dimple and his eyes crinkle with mirth.

She scoffs out a genuine chuckle, and he can no longer feel the cold seeping into his bones; the blanket covering him is just a mere coincidence, it’s the warmth that radiates from Poppy that does the trick.

“That’s bleak,” she shakes her head, biting back a full smile.

“I thought it was funny.”

“You can’t joke your way through heartbreak, Nico, trust me,” She gives a familiar sigh, and he wants to tell her his heart hasn’t been broken, but that’s a partial lie. It just hasn’t been broken for the reason she thinks. “My dad always says that’s like patching up a boat hole with a bandaid.”

“You Americans have such a way with words.” He smiles, fondly. “I think it’s easier to see the situation for what it was now that I’m out of it.”

He notices that pang of disappointment make another quick appearance before she has the chance to check herself. She seems to let his words stew for a second in her brain before forming her next question. “If you aren’t cut up about the breakup, why have you been so down these past couple weeks?”

Nico tries to remember all the times he had seen her in that period. The time she was speaking to Jack in her office, a couple times on the plane to and from away games, he’d maybe caught a couple of glimpses of her around the Prudential Center when she’d been working - but all those times, he had never managed to catch her eye.

Had she been looking out for him, too?

His lips part to form a response, but words fail him for the time being, and all he can do is tilt his head and try to properly decipher that look about her that she reserves just for him.

Poppy’s eyes glow in the subdued light, reflecting the faint beams that line the structure around them, and they narrow only slightly as he stares at her for a prolonged moment.

He’d been a little harsh earlier when she’d tried to measure the scale of his mood - thinking it was only because she was pushed by someone else to do so - and she had said that Jack was worried about him, but maybe she was worried, too.

He doesn’t want to worry her.

He wants to explain things, but a sudden barrage of emotions seems to hit him at the concern etched upon her soft features. Months worth of inner, suppressed turmoil wreaking havoc within him like a tornado of grief, stress and longing. He had maintained an unwavering calm about himself for the last two weeks - or, so he had thought.

Whenever anyone had directly asked about the breakup, he’d given short, unattached answers, never showing his hand, never revealing his true feelings, and now he can feel it all climbing its way out from the depths of his chest. Feelings from before then, even, when he had been struggling in the months leading up to that God-forsaken text from Talia, and he’d had no one to talk to, clawing their way up, scratching his throat and burning the back of his mouth like acid that he needs to spit out before it has the chance to poison him.

He wants to tell her none of it had been purposeful. How he’d slipped straight into routine, at first - pre season had been rough in comparison to his somewhat slack summer training schedule, and he and Poppy never used to hang out much at that point in the season anyway. In the beginning, it hadn’t felt like he was doing anything wrong by not reaching out.

He wants to tell her about the first time he’d seen her after he came back from Switzerland, at the end of summer get together the team had thrown for the whole organisation in the Prudential Lounge, and he’d seen her slink in through the side doors with one of her colleagues from the foundation to sneak some food from the buffet. He remembers the nerves creeping in, and how something had kept him rooted to his side of the room where he would have normally gone straight over to greet her. He’d introduced Talia to the team as his girlfriend that afternoon, and had tried to focus more on making her feel welcome than tracking where Poppy had ended up.

He wants to tell her about the pages he’s formed on his Notes app - wherein sits a bunch of drafted messages to her from the past week. Even stupid stuff that his mind has lingered on - mundane questions he wants to ask in order to catch up with everything in her life. Does she still have a weird food fixation for Caesar salad and French fries? Is she still trying to force herself to like matcha? Is she still thinking about getting a cat? Did her super fix that cracked tile in her bathroom that she keeps cutting her foot open on and complaining about it every time she has to walk more than usual?

He wants to tell her about how he was so focused on being the best player, the best captain, the best teammate, the best boyfriend, that’d he’d forgotten how to be a good friend. He knows that if anyone had no expectations of him to be the best, it would be Poppy, and so the excuse seems a bit pathetic when he reflects on it.

Instead, through a lump in his throat and the welling of tears in his eyes, he tells her, “I’ve missed you,” and hopes it’s enough to answer her question, and for her to understand the insurmountable weight of those 3 words.

Nico anticipates from the quiver of her bottom lip and the rounding of her eyes that she gets it.

Poppy offers him a kindness he knows he doesn’t deserve when she sits up straight and takes the weight off of where she’s leaning on her elbow. She shrugs the blanket from over her shoulders and throws her arms around him - barely giving him a millisecond to even fear a negative reaction.

Her grip around his shoulders is tight, burrowing her face into the crook of his neck, and he tries to match her fervour with his own embrace, arms looping around her ribcage and cradling her back. They both seem to squeeze, his hands stroking soothingly up and down her back, and he’s not sure if the erratic thumping he feels in his chest is his own heartbeat, or that of hers pressed against him.

They stay together like that for a good minute, maybe more, her body relaxing a little more into his until she’s practically in his lap, knees overlapping his.

Nico can’t remember the last time he felt this calm.

It’s only when he hears the hitch in her breath that he pulls away.

He feels like he’s taken a hit to the gut when he gets a good look at her face - eyes glassy with unshed tears, her lips pursed as she bites at the inner corner of them.

“I’m so sorry, Mohn,” he mutters softly, thumb raising to swipe at her cheek when a tear falls free. “Please don’t cry.”

“I don’t understand what happened,” she laments, “You just shut me out. It’s like you went home for the summer and decided you didn’t want to be friends, anymore.”

“That’s not,” he begins to rationalise it before realising he can’t. He barely has an explanation he can voice, not one he has been able to bring himself to understand, yet, anyway. “I wanted to come over and speak to you after like a week of being back, but I just-,” his throat starts to feel tight again, but if he doesn’t get this out now, he might not get it out at all. “Every day that passed that we didn’t talk, that I didn’t reply to your texts or come find you, things just got worse. And then, after a while, no matter how much I needed to reach out, it felt like I’d left it too long.”

He knows it’s a cop out of an answer, and that she deserves more, but she also deserves for him to be at peace with what he wants to say, and he isn’t quite there yet.

“You could have just come to me and told me you were being an idiot.”

“That doesn’t feel like it’s enough.”

“It can be for now.” For now. She gets it. “I missed you too much to hold a grudge.”

“Really?” Nico can’t fully comprehend why she would go easy on him. She’s well within her rights to cause a scene - kick and scream and never speak to him again - but instead, she gives a remorseful shrug, glassy eyes casting down to her lap.

“I don’t want to lose you for the sake of my pride, Nico.” She admits. “And I could have fought harder, too.”

He knows he’s long lost the right to ask such a selfish question of her, but he can’t help himself. “Why didn’t you?”

“You seemed happy.”

The thud of his heartbeat rattling around his brain turns into an incessant ring, like the kind that people use to measure the frequency in which they stop hearing noise. His bones feel like they’re buzzing, and his lungs feel like they’re plummeting somewhat throughout his body, his breath stuttering in his chest.

Maybe this is her way of dishing out some unintentional cruelty - he can’t argue that he doesn’t deserve it - implying she would have, in any way, suffered herself, just because he seemed content in shutting her out. It hurts to acknowledge that he had let her hurt for so long.

“I wasn’t.” He feels slightly better having said that. It almost makes up for what he’d chickened out of saying before, hopefully saying more than the 2 words might suggest.

Maybe if they’d been speaking all along she’d have seen right through him - got a glimpse behind the curtain of the charade he’d been putting on since the summer. Maybe it would have eased the weight of whatever was sitting on his chest for the past 4 months, would have made everything just that little bit easier to have shared his true feelings with someone who had no expectations of him other than to be there.

He has missed having someone he can be honest with. Has missed not having to keep up appearances, or make himself bigger or smaller to fit someone else’s needs.

And when Poppy’s fingers wrap around his, looping through them when they open up at her touch, and the bracelet she wears tickles softly at his own wrist, it washes over him just how much he truly had missed her. He’d said it before, but there aren’t enough ways to to say it and accurately convey the depth in which he feels it. Having her here, now, makes him feel whole in a way he hasn’t for a long time, and he hadn’t realised all the time he’d known her just how much she calms the storm within him.

He pulls her hand back over his shoulder and circles an arm around her waist, tugging her body back into his embrace until she’s cuddled into him and he’s leaning into the back corner of the couch. There’s no point in which she fights the movement into the position, and when his muscles settle into the cushions, she follows suit, her head resting on his chest and her legs thrown over his.

The hold they have on each other now feels a lot more secure, and he manages to wrangle the blankets back over the two of them, covering her legs so they can stay like this for a little longer.

“Thank you for letting me back in.”

“Thank you for coming back to me.”

Neither of them make any effort to move, content in each other’s arms, not caring about the time - even when the distant calls of a countdown stagger in the air, stirring a pulse of anticipation, and muffled cheers erupt from the surrounding buildings, a symphony of joy washing over the city like a tide. Not even when the sky ignites into a breathtaking explosion of colours, the fireworks painting their world in vibrant hues, do they break free from their tranquil embrace.

“Happy new year, Mohn,” he whispers into the crown of her head, placing a soft kiss into her hair.

“Happy new year, Nico.” She whispers back, looking up at him to give him a heart-stopping smile that had his chest aching in an entirely new, almost welcome way.

taglist: @alwaysclassyeagle @bunbunbl0gs @idgaf-if-youre-here @youflowerr-youfeast @thearchersstuff @bellsdi0r @wonderheartz @jjgsunflower @butterflies35 (sorry if your tag hasn't worked btw)

> Chapter Two

#nico hischier imagine #nico hischier #nico hischier x oc #nhl fanfiction #nhl imagine #anyways listen to the elevator by lizzie mcalpine that is nico and poppy's song I hear it every time I write them looking at each other lma #you might think the ending wraps things up a little quick and you'd be right #rude but right lmao #but like bare with me on it ok x #pretending to be grown but actually never resolving things is these two's bread and butter #I got really in my head about how to end this one cos I had a lot of stuff drafted for this that I've moved to the next chapter #it was getting way too long lmao #but hope you like it anyway #*writing #*oys

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