#i could very much be wrong but the wording is also way too similar

[canmom]

This an interesting angle. I've never been particularly taken with trying to determine True Art from False Art on the basis of specific qualities of the piece.

(I did ok-ish but not exceptionally on the AI art quiz, probably with a slight bias for misattributing human pieces as AI ones - like many other respondees, I found the Impressionist pieces hardest to distinguish, since they very much play to the AI's strengths.)

There are many different ways you could describe "art" as a human activity, I'm sure there's a post somewhere where I make a list, but a really big one is its communicative function - one purpose of art is to somehow pass on some aspect of our 'inner world' to another person, through a lossy and limited channel.

That a signal can be easily imitated doesn't mean it doesn't carry contextual information. For example, I could ask a yes/no question of enormous emotional importance - "should I take the shot", "has the baby been born", "will you go out with me", "am I a good girl" - and be answered with either "yes" or "no". It would be trivial to generate a machine which randomly substitutes for this communication - that's basically all a magic eight-ball is.

The amount of information that can be contained in an image of a given size and colour depth can also be calculated. For example, the number of fullscreen images that would fill my current monitor at 8 bits per channel would be 2^(3440 × 1440 × 24) ≈ 3 × 10^35788372 - about 15 megabytes uncompressed. It's a number that seems astronomically huge, though effectively the amount of information is much less than you'd calculate since all the likely pixels are correlated. The same goes for other art forms, like novels (encoded as, say, UTF-8 strings or PDFs) or pieces of music (encoded as sound files, MIDI, MuseScore files, etc.). The exact number is complicated, you end up getting into Kolmogorov complexity and shit like that, but the point is that it's finite.

If we want to claim that all the information about a human life that Hofstadter describes (grief, despair etc.) is in there somehow, we're claiming that this finitely many bits is adequate to capture all the nuances of a human life. I don't know that that's true!

This, however, doesn't really seem to align with how we interact with art. Human production and exchange of "art" is a social act - I would describe it as being continuous with "play". When we observe a piece, we are opening a communications channel - at least a one-way channel. The person on the other side sends some information into the channel, and we process it somehow.

Since it is a lossy channel with limited information, we must infer various things about the other mind on the opposite side of it. If I show you an artwork that I made, we might have a conversation about how I did it, why I made the choices I did. If I feel something looking at the work, I might imagine that you felt something similar, and designed the piece to evoke it intentionally (a guess that will often be wrong but sometimes still productive). I might also look at what specific choices you have made, compare them to the choices others have made in the same medium, etc etc.

We form these inferences on the basis of experience - the more you learn about making art, the more you learn to appreciate other peoples' art and vice versa. And we project these experiences, usually plausibly, onto other artists.

(Perhaps I am saying all art is in a sense performance art? Seems like a tasty soundbite, though I'm not fully sure I wanna commit to it.)

I'm not meaning to claim that a computer couldn't simulate this kind of 'how did you make it' interaction too. This line of argument was anticipated by Turing in his original 1950 paper on the 'imitation game' that someone links in the comments above, where he describes a poet undergoing a viva voce test interrogating their word choices, and argues that a computer might be programmed to give convincing answers to such a test. I imagine he's right - for a paper written in 1950 he makes some surprisingly sharp predictions for how future AIs might be made, such as the idea that an AI could be built to be 'educated' like a child. (He also thought the evidence for ESP is 'overwhelming', but hey, can't win 'em all).

A lot of the context around art would be quite easy to forge, had you a mind to. For example, suppose I go to a film screening, and someone is introduced as the director so we can all clap them. Did they really direct it? I don't know! You could totally send an actor. Less conspiratorially, if someone says they made an artistic choice for x or y reason, they could be lying about it, or misremembering, or most likely oversimplifying a complex and inscrutable process down to a simpler story.

At some point you have to take something like that on trust, or else simply accept that being lied to about it is part of the game you're there to play! (c.f. Oshi no Ko.)

Anyway, the sudden arrival of a new process that can produce, at least sometimes, near-indistinguishable output to various types of communication, throws a spanner in the process. If we're feeling uncharitable, we could call it something like a DDOS attack, stuffing the channels with spurious inputs that don't fit our design assumptions. I think that goes too far, though. AI gen doesn't preclude communication, but it does need we need to think differently about what is being communicated.[1]

So to consider that last question, if art is like a game, could you train an AI art to produce art that is meaningful to humans only by 'playing against' itself, like AlphaGo Zero? I don't think this is so likely. The rules of Go are strict and well-defined; the rules of what humans find meaningful are inseparable from the history of interacting with other humans, which is why art constantly evolves. Training an AI on existing human artworks is training it to compress and interpolate/extrapolate that dataset; training it to optimise for "making novel art that expresses something in a form that its interlocutor could understand" requires it to be interacting with someone.

You could imagine a training process with an "artist" AI and a "critic" AI (a sort of more sophisticated GAN, where the adversary is optimising not to distinguish human/AI art but to judge it on aesthetic grounds) - but how would you get the "critic" AI? Whose taste would it express?

Admittedly, the developers of image generators are constantly refining their models in response to users, so they are being optimised to appeal to someone, not just interpolate existing artworks. But I think it would be very hard to remove humans from the equation entirely. And the present means of providing feedback to the AI are very crude.

For an AI to learn from interacting with other AI (and the world), I feel like you'd need a whole new process that isn't about minimising loss against input-output pairs. Romantically, I imagine it would be closer to how humans learn from life, but I don't really know what will 'work' in the end.

below: some other remarks that were excised from the main post.

[1] We can view AI image gen as another channel for communication between humans, with its own set of inferences to make. If someone shows me a picture they've generated with AI, there's no point asking why they painted this bit that way, but I might approach them more as a curator and ask why they chose this generation over others, or how they went about prompting it.

The AI artists who go to the trouble of finetuning their models with LoRAs for a specific end goal, or using more involved processes with multiple stages of generation, probably have most to 'say', either through the work they generate or how they'd discuss it. (I find it very endearing when someone trains an AI to serve up a hyperspecific fetish.) And the more I know about how AI images are generated, the more I can probably have a productive conversation.

In this light, the "problem" of AI is mostly one of deception, insofar as it tries to look like something else and thereby tell a misleading story. That's probably a big reason why why it brings the rancour it does, although it doesn't explain all of it. It's not (usually) a forgery of a specific human's work, but it is designed to forge spurious communications in this channel in general, so the channel is 'noisier' - and this could be thought to undermine many of the contexts, i.e. the operating narratives and social games, which are why we exchange art in the first place. Over time, we'll presumably end up renegotiating the 'games', and spawning new ones, as humans always have.

And of course, the issue of provenance and plagiarism in art - particularly when prestige and money get involved - long predates AI and is full of all sorts of bizarre contortions when you look at it closely.

More intriguing is whether there is some possibility for "real communication" between humans and AIs - that is, could there be an AI output that does respect the 'rules of the game' in some way. This is harder to imagine! Like, if you ask why we aren't solipsists, we could point to how much we resemble other humans and say, all things considered, seems very unlikely we aren't the same type of entity. But I only know 'what it's like to be' a human. Conversely, while I know a reasonable amount about how AIs work, the attention mechanism and latent-space vectors and so on (thanks 3blue1brown), the analogy isn't so clear anymore, so I don't even know how I'd determine whether there even is a 'what is it like to be' under all the 'noise' of communications aggressively optimised to fit the patterns of something a human might say. If there is, it's probably very alien to all of my experience.

Ironically I feel like the current model of 'AI', which teaches us to regard any generated output with suspicion of having 'nothing behind it', would make it harder for any 'real', agentive, subjective-experience-having AI to make itself known to us. But perhaps it's good that we're forced to sharpen our criteria of what we're looking for out of these things.

Anyway, all of this is probably just idle imaginings, because nobody can figure out how to make anything like enough money to justify the exorbitant costs of training and operating AIs, so at some point this whole speculative bubble will go up in smoke and whatever AIs continue to be in use will likely remain about as good as they are today, or stupider - at least until the next 'AI summer' when a new paradigm emerges.

Thinking about that that "slop accelerationism" post, and also Scott's AI art Turing test.

I also hope AI text- and image-generation will help shake us loose from cheap bad art. For example, the fact that you can now generate perfectly rendered anime girls at the click of button kindof suggests that there was never much content in those drawings. Though maybe we didn't really need AI for that insight? It feels very similar to that shift in fashion that rejected Bouguereau-style laboriously-rendered pretty girls in favor of more sketchy brush work.

But will we really be so lucky that only things that we already suspected was slop will prove valueless?

As usual with AI, Douglas Hofstadter already thought about this a long time ago, in an essay from 2001. Back in 1979 he had written

Will a computer program ever write beautiful music? Speculation: Yes, but not soon. Music is a language of emotions, and until programs have emotions as complex as ours, there is no way a program will write anything beautiful. There can be "forgeries"—shallow imitations of the syntax of earlier music—but despite what one might think at first, there is much more to musical expression than can be captured in syntactical rules. There will be no new kinds of beauty turned up for a long time by computer music-composing programs. Let me carry this thought a little further. To think—and I have heard this suggested—that we might soon be able to command a preprogrammed mass-produced mail-order twenty-dollar desk-model "music box" to bring forth from its sterile [sic!] circuitry pieces which Chopin or Bach might have written had they lived longer is a grotesque and shameful misestimation of the depth of the human spirit. A "program" which could produce music as they did would have to wander around the world on its own, fighting its way through the maze of life and feeling every moment of it. It would have to understand the joy and loneliness of a chilly night wind, the longing for a cherished hand, the inaccessibility of a distant town, the heartbreak and regeneration after a human death. It would have to have known resignation and world-weariness, grief and despair, determination and victory, piety and awe. In it would have had to commingle such opposites as hope and fear, anguish and jubilation, serenity and suspense. Part and parcel of it would have to be a sense of grace, humor, rhythm, a sense of the unexpected and of course an exquisite awareness of the magic of fresh creation. Therein, and therein only, lie the sources of meaning in music.

I think this is helpful in pinning down what we would have liked to be true. Because in 1995, somebody wrote a program that generates music by applying simple syntactic rules to combine patterns from existing pieces, and it sounded really good! (In fact, it passed a kind of AI turing test.) Oops!

The worry, then, is that we just found out that the computer has as complex emotions as us, and they aren't complex at all. It would be like adversarial examples for humans: the noise-like pattern added to the panda doesn't "represent" a gibbon, it's an artifact of the particular weights and topology of the image recognizer, and the resulting classification doesn't "mean" anything. Similarly, Arnulf Rainer wrote that when he reworked Wine-Crucifix, "the quality and truth of the picture only grew as it became darker and darker"—doesn't this sound a bit like gradient descent? Did he stumble on a pattern that triggers our "truth" detector, even though the pattern is merely a shallow stimulus made of copies of religious iconography that we imprinted on as kids?

One attempt to recover is to say Chopin really did write music based on the experience of fighting through the maze of life, and it's just that philistine consumers can't tell the difference between the real and the counterfeit. But this is not very helpful, it means that we were fooling ourselves, and the meaning that we imagined never existed.

More promising, maybe the program is a "plagiarism machine", which just copies the hard-won grief, despair, world-weariness &c that Chopin recorded? On it's own it's not impressive that a program can output an image indistinguishable from Gauguin's, I can write such a program in a single line:

print("https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gauguin,Paul-Still_Life_with_Profile_of_Laval-_Google_Art_Project.jpg")

I think this is the conclusion that Hofstadter leans towards: the value of Chopin and the other composers was to discover the "template" that can then be instantiated to make many beautiful music pieces. Kind of ironically, this seems to push us back to some very turn-of-the-20th-century notion of avant-garde art. Each particular painting that (say) Monet executed is of low value, and the actual valuable thing is the novel art style...

That view isn't falsified yet, but it feels precarious. You could have said that AlphaGo was merely a plagiarism machine that selected good moves from historical human games, except then AlphaGo Zero proved that the humans were superfluous after all. Surely a couple of years from now somebody might train an image model on a set of photographs and movies excluding paintings, and it might reinvent impressionism from first principles, and then where will we be? Better start prepare a fallback-philosophy now.

[missionel]

i'm the inspector over the mine

[mrfoox]

Uh.... Love how.... Instead of gently reassuring me or such whenever I say something really bad about myself Oliver just sigh loudly/grunt and then go to argue against me and finally gently tell me the opposite :')

[axiina]

I saw your post about writing for Coriolanus Snow Andi was thinking classic enemies to lovers nsfw I’ll give you free liberty with everything else 💕

'I hate you' is new 'I love you'

Pairing: Coriolanus Snow x capitol!reader (gender neutral afab)

Summary: When your professor tells you to come to an agreement with your enemy, and you take 'come' too literally.

Words: 3.2k

Themes: smut, nsfw

Warnings: using of 'you' to reader, set before events of tbosas so no actual spoilers, more like academic rivals to lovers but they want to fight at some point so I guess it counts, NSFW | public sex (or more semi-public), unprotected sex (wrap it before tap it), p in v sex, kinda toxic but it's enemies to lovers, more like enemies who fuck, Coryo is pretty rough and possessive, marking, making out, idiots in love but they prefer fighting with each other

Author's note: I found some free time between studying, so I decided that I can no longer delay. English is not my first language so i hope that i didn't do too much mistakes. It is possible that a single "she" or "her" will appear here because I changed the concept during writing and I do not know if I got rid of everything. Let me know whether to stay with the use of 'you' or maybe replace it with personal pronouns or 'y/n'. I hope it's not written very awkwardly and you will like it!!

Coriolanus Snow is a peculiar person. Most people love him. Nice, classy, handsome and rich from a wealthy family. What more could one want? However, one of Coriolanus' traits that everyone seems to turn a blind eye to is his two-facedness. Some say this is merely a symptom of his cunning and wits. He knows when and how to behave to make his counterpart happy. You are not one of those people. Saying that you and Coriolanus Snow don't like each other is a huge understatement. You guys hate each other. From the very beginning when you both met at the academy it was known that you would cause a lot of problems. Too much of a character difference, or perhaps too much of a similarity between the two. However, this is not what is crucial. Whatever it is, it makes you two most likely to kill each other if you could. Every move you make you do to screw each other up. To prove who is better.

Professor Satyria's pleas for you to finally come to an agreement are of little use. The conflict must go on, and neither of you has any intention of giving up.

You like the way things are working out. At first, Snow was annoying and you didn't understand how people couldn't see him for what he really was. Fake. Now he is still annoying, but getting under his skin has become a sort of routine. Quite a pleasant one.

"You have to get along with each other and set a good example as rightful citizens of the Capitol, otherwise the Academy will draw out the consequences."

Professor Satyria's words continue to ring in your ears as you get ready to go home after finishing classes and doing punishment work. On the one hand, you don't want something as silly as arguing to weigh on your future, but on the other hand, reaching out to agree is like admitting you were wrong. Failure.

"Wherever I am you must also appear. Are you obsessed with me?" Behind your back, you heard a familiar, annoyingly kind voice, in which you could sense some arrogance. You groaned turning around to see no one else but Coriolanus.

"Don't you have anything better to do? People are finally getting tired of your idiocy?" Your words, however, did not budge the blond. His expression remained unchanged. One that might make most people think he is a nice person. You, however, have known him long enough to see right through it. Perfect. Too perfect.

"We need to talk. A positive outcome for both sides. It will interest you." Well, the threat of Satyria. He is the first one to extend his hand for agreement. Where is the trick? You look at him suspiciously without saying a word, and so Snow takes it as a sign that you are thinking about the proposition. "Do you have free time? Maybe we could go out somewhere together?"

The suggestion makes you burst into laughter. "With you? No thanks, I'll pass on this pleasure."

Coriolanus is not surprised by your answer. He knew it wouldn't be that easy. Accepting rejection, however, is not his strong point. He is annoyed by your behaviour, but he bites his tongue to avoid responding in the same spiteful way. Instead, he doesn't give up.

"I know we were never on good terms, but I want this war between us to end. I hope we can put behind us all the bad things that happened between us and start fresh. What do you think about this?" he says, sounding quite sincere.

"Let me think." You say and sigh, pondering the answer, which is obvious, but you can't let go of a little malice. "No."

The expression on Snow's face became more serious. It seems that your refusal offended his pride. But he doesn't show it in his tone of voice.

"Why not?" he asks and you notice how he clenches his jaw and his gaze becomes unpleasant.

You enjoy the view and it fills you with satisfaction. "Because you think that with a pretty face and fake politeness, you can get anything. Maybe it works with others, but I'm not that stupid. Additionally, you are damn annoying. That's why."

The expression on Snow's face becomes dark. Typical when he fails to get what he wants. His usual tone is completely gone. His face is twisted with anger. He still tries to maintain a polite voice. The attempt fails.

"Do you want to repeat it?" he asks through his teeth. It's obvious that you've hit one of his sensitive points. That was the plan.

"Exhausting, isn't it? Hiding behind the mask of a nice and put-together boy from a highly placed family who is a veritable ideal is tiring, isn't it?" A mockery can be heard in your voice. Coriolanus is very sensitive to it.

"What do you think you know about me?" He asks through clenched teeth, his tone no longer artificially polite, it is filled with rage. Your mockery has really gotten to him. He tries to calm down, but it's all in vain. Coriolanus has never had problems with self-control, but something about you makes him ready to abandon everything. You manage to get him off balance with ease. In his head, he has one plan. To destroy you.

"Do you think you pretend so well?" You burst out laughing and shake your head. You know you shouldn't say such things. The academy is practically empty, and Coriolanus's angry enough can be unpredictable. However, you can't help but point out everything that annoys you about him. "It's actually quite easy to see what kind of person you are. You look at people with disgust, but when they look in your direction, you suddenly change dramatically. how fake you are to everyone. I wonder how they don't see it. How empty and shallow you are."

"You don't know anything about me!" Snow shouts at you, his face twisted with rage. He is barely able to control himself. He doesn't even try to hide it anymore. He stares at you with hatred in his eyes.

"Don't you dare assume that you know everything about me. You don't know me one bit. You don't know what my life is like. Don't think so highly of yourself. You aren't better than me." He continues, his voice getting louder with every word he says. You really hit his sensitive spot.

"I don't know everything and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. For me, the most important thing is acts, and in your case, they are fake and two-faced. You despise people, and you yourself are at the bottom." Irritation takes over. You know that at any moment you can say one word too many if you haven't already. However, someone has to talk it all out for him. Adrenaline makes you take a step closer to the upset boy without considering the possible consequences.

Snow seems to be on the verge of a breakdown. His fists are clenched and his eyes are wide open with rage. He is breathing hard, trying to control himself. He's not used to being treated this way by anyone. He has come this far over the years, solely because of himself and what role he has taken in society. You really succeeded in hurting his pride. "I warn you right now. Don't mock me any further."

"Why? What will you do? hit me? do it, I dare you. Then everyone will see how "perfect" you really are." You know the situation is starting to get dangerous. However, you come closer. It's stupid, you know it, and yet you do it. Maybe it's the way his reactions give you satisfaction, or maybe it's the way he looks at you.

You can see the hatred oozing from his eyes when they are locked on yours. His face is full of rage, his breathing heavy and his muscles tense.

He takes a step toward you with a clenched fist. You can see his knuckles turning white. He grabs you and presses you against the wall, his body against yours.

A second later, you feel him pressing you against the wall tighter than before, and his hand grips your throat.

You feel the warmth of his breath on your lips. Your heart is pounding as if it wants to jump out of your chest. You feel a strange sensation in your lower abdomen. His eyes are cold, yet they make a pleasant shiver run through your body. His face is right next to yours, flesh pressing against yours. It was a matter of split seconds as you two pressed your lips to each other in an aggressive and hungry kiss.

He returns the kiss, wrapping his free hand around you. He seems to enjoy the kiss as much as you do.

You can feel his body trembling as he still tries to keep control of his overwhelming emotions, or maybe it's because of the situation you're in.

The two of you kiss aggressively. Snow's body shakes as he fights between his desire and how much you get on his nerves. You feel how rough but passionate his kiss is.

He draws you closer and your bodies press against each other. The friction of your bodies makes you uncontrollable over the muffled whimpers you make. You feel the bulge forming in his pants rubbing against your body.

The situation seems hazy, and only fragments register in your mind. How you both enter the bathroom without stopping your hungry and clumsy kisses, and your hands work to get rid of clothes that only makes it difficult. How Coriolanus presses your body against the wall slamming his hips against yours.

All this is to express yourself and give vent to all the negative emotions you have been holding for years.

Snow's body is now almost completely controlled by his emotions. His movements seem full of hatred and at the same time passion. He just wants to express himself using his flesh to claim you as his own.

You feel as if you are on fire, your body moves and reacts according to your desires. The tension that has built up between you for years is finally released, and it all comes out as raw passion.

His fast and aggressive movements make the place where your bodies meet burn in a pleasant way, and you think to yourself that it will be a miracle if you walk normally tomorrow. His dick stretches you nicely and his movements make your inside sting slightly. It's not a problem for now. Not now when your legs are wrapped around his waist and the only sounds you can make right now are moaning and repeating his name like a mantra.

Your body trembles at how rough his movements are, but you don't care now. The most important thing for you now is to show him how much you hate him. A broken moan leaves your lips when he reaches deeper.

Coriolanus feels your legs tighten around him. He moves slower now but is more passionate and rough. He holds your hips tightly, not caring if it is uncomfortable for you. His lips move to your neck, where he bites as if he is trying to unload all the emotions you are causing you this way.

His hips buck firmly against you. Each thrust makes your body more tired and aching but at the same time, it makes the whole experience even more pleasurable. If someone told you that you would end up having sex with your biggest rival in the academy bathroom, you would laugh in that person's face. There you are, panting, with your arms around his neck when Coriolanus Snow is abusing your cunt sensitive from too much friction.

Coriolanus brings his lips closer to your ear. His warm and irregular breathing makes a shiver go through your body. "Do you like it when I claim you as mine?" He purrs, his voice still filled with desire.

"I hate you, I hate you so much," You exhale in a trembling voice that takes a lot of trouble to keep from cracking. You bite and suck at the smooth skin of his neck, leaving there dark marks. "I hate you, Coriolanus Snow."

"I hate you too," Snow says with a low growl as he continues to hold you. He bites your shoulder, leaving marks on your skin. His moans are muffled by your skin, which he touches constantly, as if afraid that at any moment you might escape and leave behind only a faint memory.

You hate him, but you enjoy him. You are pleased when he takes you as his own. You are excited when he uses your body. You feel his passion and desire through his body. You feel his raw passion and it's hard to hate him now.

"oh go to hell" You hiss and bite your lower lip to stop your moans, feeling him moving faster.

He doesn't care if he hurts you or not. All he cares about is that you belong to him right now. His hips slam against yours in an aggressive peace. The bathroom is filled with sinful noises because you don't even think about the fact that someone might come in and hear them.

"you may have already fallen in love, but with me, it's not so easy" A trembling laugh leaves your lips. You feel your head getting foggier and foggier. It's hard for you to put together a meaningful sentence, "but you're doing a good job" a loud moan leaves your mouth. you close your eyes and throw your head back "mmm my sweet toy."

He hears your moans of pleasure, and his eyes close with a smile. He has won and he knows it. Snow always lands on top. He presses you against the wall with his body even tighter. His movements become more sloppy and deeper as if he wants to bury himself inside you. His body trembles as his lips leave broken moans and whimpers.

Passion is so strong that you can almost forget about hatred. You can almost fall in love with Coriolanus Snow. Almost. But you know that what you feel now is only lust, and you know that it's all temporary.

Not him. Not the arrogant boy whose whole life is based on lies. Not that boy who doesn't care about anyone. Not that boy with a beautiful face and mesmerizing blue eyes. Not him.

You press closer to his body, almost clinging to him as a wave of pleasure sweeps over your body.

Coriolanus lets out a raspy throaty moan feeling your walls pulsate around him. His voice is low and shaky. He doesn't seem to notice anything except the way you cling to his body. He moves faster and harder, making sure he satisfies you completely.

Snow is fully immersed in feelings. He can't think clearly or rationally. He only knows that he has to claim you, that he has to satisfy his needs. He wants to feel you and make the most of the situation. All his thoughts and desires are focused on you. His hip movements speed up as he reaches the climax. He hides his face in your neck to muffle his moans. His body stiffs as he comes inside you.

Your arms wrapped around his neck, while his wrapped around your waist. you cling to each other, still not making contact with the real world as your breathing slowly calms down.

What happened in that bathroom is over, they both return to reality. Snow steps back slightly and helps you stand on your own two feet. He looks at you with heavy eyes. All the emotions he had been hiding inside him had finally been released.

He has won and he knows it. He has succeeded. But what now? Was it really worth it? This is not a question for now. Coriolanus does not look far into that future with his thoughts.

You look at each other in silence. Slowly you begin to realize what you have done and now you look at each other awkwardly and somewhat panicked.

Coriolanus is the first to break the silence. His cheeks are flushed and his breathing is faster. The passion he felt a minute ago still lingers in his heart, something he tries to hide from you. He looks at you with a somewhat absent and uncertain gaze

"Do you think we should forget what just happened?" He tries to make his voice sound normal as if nothing had happened.

"Definitely." The words leave your lips before you have time to think. You stare at each other in silence for a few more moments and begin to quickly put on your clothes.

Snow is surprised at how quickly you agree with him. He needs to make sure this is the end of what just happened between the two of you, so he adds.

"If anyone asks, it never happened." He now looks at you with a somewhat panicked expression on his face.

"You don't have to tell me," you scoff, buttoning your shirt, "if you tell even one soul, I'll kill you, I swear."

Coriolanus looks at you with small amusement while fixing his jacket. "I hope you won't become obsessed with me after this."

"Maybe in your dreams," you say with a slight smile fixing the collar of his shirt. " you better be careful that you are the one who will be lost in memories of me." Before you leave the bathroom you stop in front of the mirror and fix your uniform and hair. Coriolanus smiles for a moment but then quickly clears his throat and tries to look cold.

You both come out of the bathroom, look at each other and part your lips, as if to say something to each other, but you look at each other in silence "Now everything is back to normal. We can still hate each other," you say, but this does not improve your mood at all.

"It never happened," Snow says trying to look you in the eyes, wondering if you're thinking about it too. He wonders if what he feels is real, or if it's just a moment of passion.

"Never" You agree by nodding your head. Your gaze goes down to his mouth. As you look into his eyes again without a moment's thought you move closer to him and press your lips to his in-hungry kiss. He kisses you back wrapping his arms around you to bring your body closer.

You parts away after some time and you both catch your breath for a moment after this passionate kiss. Coriolanus is completely consumed with passion and there is nothing in his mind but you.

You move away and nod to each other as if you have just made a deal and each is walking in your own direction in a much better mood.

Maybe that's not exactly what Professor Satyria meant when she said you two should come to an agreement, but it certainly worked.

[moonieandi]

snapshots pt. 3 | stanley pines x f!reader 

summary: a quick look through concerning the early months of your life “married” to stanley pines, particularly centered around moments on the couch

warnings (TW): mdni, contains mature/suggestive content, swearing, alcohol consumption, mentions of drug use

tags: mature/suggestive content (in act iii), fluff, early relationship described, pining, affection

notes: please note that there is heavily implied/suggestive/mature content in act iii of this posting (after the second break)- if you do not wish to interact with this type of content i swear to you you can completely skip it if you like, i attempt to not tie TOO much significance to the written scene- and if you would prefer that the postings stray away from this kind of content i will attempt to better balance it in the future! i am in no shape or form a very “smutty” writer (mainly bc i have never written it), so i hope the scene isnt like… terrible ya know lol (also i don’t consider it much for “smut”- i am def using said word very loosly). annnnyyywayyys hope you enjoy and as always my dms are open for suggestions in the future and general conversation and encouragement! enjoy!

also to note! I believe the story is best read in order- i put certain dependences on certain words and bring descriptions back to really solidify the importance of certain scenes/interactions ! but completely up to you, lol

edit 8/27/24: hello! below i have linked the up to date masterlist for this series- thank you for reading, hope you enjoy!

word count: 4.5k

| masterlist | part iv |

She had caught him sleeping on the couch in the early heat of June. 

They had a late night on the couch, discussing Ford’s margin notes and rewatching The Price is Wrong. Stan had a certain affinity for price matching, and she was more than a little stunned to learn of it the first couple of months they resided in the shack together. 

She just didn’t expect this 30-year-old man to know the price of most common household appliances. 

After his divulgence last month, in which he had confided a little bit of his background in sales, she began to piece together that although Stan considered himself a conman in every way but words, she considered it pure brilliance. 

So she quickly got used to late-night T.V. shows, as they discussed next steps back and forth, with Stan interrupting conversations to yell out extremely accurate prices at the small box T.V. in front of the couch. It had grown on her, actually, and had turned rather… endearing. 

If not also incredibly hilarious, as he was so passionate about his own accuracy he usually forgot his volume, and sometimes took to ranting at her. 

“Hun! Hun! This is a load of malarkey I tell ya! That vacuum price is way too high! It don’t even come with added nozzle attachments!” 

She would laugh, and he would revel in making her do so. 

They had concluded the night in a similar fashion, and she had stumbled up to her bedroom. The first one on the right from the stairs. But he had lingered in the living room, muttering about tidying up some soda cans and taking the trash out quickly. 

She had shrugged it off, giving her goodnight, and made her way up the stairs. She had fallen asleep so quickly, she hadn’t heard the usual meandering steps of Stan as he made for his own room across the hall from her. 

She almost never woke up before him, another thing that surprised her. She figured he was the type to doze in and out in the early morning, but he seemed to be quick to rise and even quicker to make a pot of coffee, usually stumbling down the stairs thirty minutes before she could manage to roll out of bed. 

So she thought it odd to look down the stairs and not see the usual kitchen light on, and the usual grumble of the shitty coffee machine either. 

She found him snoring on his back, the throw blanket she had brought with her half on half off him. It had grown a little muggy in the shack, due to the distinct lack of central air, but Stan’s solution seemed to be very simple. 

Just wear less clothes. 

Something that wouldn’t disturb her in the slightest, if it were not for, well… Stan. 

She was a scientist, a usual logical thinker, and only slightly prude (due to her upbringing), but she was no idiot, and she knew the man she was cohabitating with was attractive. 

I mean, he was also funny- made her laugh more times than she could count. He was oddly sincere for his age and even more oddly protective. He was flippantly affectionate and even more flippantly kind to her. 

And he was also shirtless. 

Something she takes note of instantly, instinctually. Whipping her head to make for the kitchen, and trying to forget the curve of his broad shoulders and the slight swell of his stomach. The smattering of dark hair on his chest all the way down to the crisp edge of the boxers she had folded two days ago. 

Coffee, coffee coffee! 

She didn’t make as good of a cup as he did, she had never had to before. Something he scoffed at, but quickly took to doing himself. He made it every morning, now. Always up before her, with her mug waiting for her by her worn kitchen chair. 

She turned to the stove instead, moving pans and turning on the burner. She’d make breakfast for them instead of her shitty burnt coffee special. Pulling eggs and bacon out of the small fridge she went to work. 

The smell woke him up, and she noted his groggy fumbling to redress himself. Glancing out the archway from kitchen to living room she watched him pass to the stairs, still shirtless. He takes the stairs two at a time, back up to his room to retrieve new clothes she presumed. 

He returns in minutes, in typical fashion it took him not too long to get ready in the morning. 

He walks in, still stretching, with hair muddled from sleep. A pair of work jeans that had seen a lot of love in the past month, and a shirt that was quickly growing too tight around his arms and shoulders. She decided to ignore that sliver of stomach that peaked out when he raised his arms a little too high, otherwise, the bacon would burn. 

He made his way to the coffee machine, beginning the usual morning routine as it spurred to life. Moving to the sink he began washing their shared mugs. 

Breakfast was always a little quiet like they both couldn’t be bothered to open their mouths beyond sating their appetite. They still moved the same, instinctually and without words. Falling into their unassigned assigned seats, Stan moving to grab her feet and drag them across his lap, while she moved the salt and pepper between them both. She always reached across to his plate, grabbing his toast to butter first and then moving to her own. 

She had decided to interrupt their usual silence this morning, looking across to Stan as he fumbled with the morning paper. He always went straight to the comics in the morning, hoping to pick up on a joke to read to her that day, hoping to make her laugh first before anything else in the morning. 

But she had thrown a wrench in his usual plan (that she still hadn’t picked up on yet). 

“Why were you on the couch?” She asked, biting around her toast. 

“It’s cooler down here hun.” 

“I know heat rises Stan, but the sun rises on my side of the house in the morning. It ain’t that hot upstairs yet. Is there something wrong with your bed?” 

When first rearranging rooms he had resolved to take Stanford's old one. He didn’t want her to have to live in the shell his brother had left behind. His more intimate nick-nacks and sticky notes had been scattered around what is now Stan’s room. Along with his random mismatched socks and sweater vests, and his cologne. And he didn’t want to think about having her live around the last remnants of Stanford, because she got this weird look in her eyes already when she retraced his brother's writings and he couldn’t stand it. He had lived with Stanford for eighteen years, and sometimes entering the room was at least therapeutic. 

Except Stanford always had a weird affinity for sleeping on the ground. 

It’s the main reason Stanley even had the top bunk during their preteen years to begin with, because Stanford would find himself stiff on the floor most mornings. His brother had a tendency to doze away on any hard surface he could rest his head on, starting at his desk most nights, moving to his bed, but usually rolling off it in favor of the floor. Stanford was… not one for restful sleep. And his hard ass mattress showed it. 

“Ya.” Stan muttered behind the newspaper. “‘Ford trying to fuck my back up from another dimension.” 

“You can have my bed?” She offered up her own mattress, one she had splurged on with her own money. He still remembers her playing Goldilocks that day at the flash mattress sale she had circled in the classifieds the week before. 

He shook his head at the memory, them both laying side by side on each bed as she had discussed odds and ends. She had argued that she needed approximately 5 minutes on each mattress to sink into each, and that she couldn’t be intrinsically thinking about her comfort when doing so. So she had him lay beside her and talk to her, as she flipped from her back to her side testing out her comfort and considered the gravelness of his voice. Until she had landed on the right bed, the tenth one, declaring it her perfect match as she looked over at him beside her. 

“Nah, I can’t take your perfect match, hun, your one true love.” He joked, folding up the newspaper with the comics up, setting it aside in favor of looking at her. “Besides my bed is fine for now. I just… sometimes I like being close to the door.” 

She hummed. “I can rearrange the living room today? Do you want to move your bed downstairs?” She hadn’t even questioned it, still searching for something to sate his comfort. 

He laughed at this, he would never let her rearrange things without him and she knew it. He had hovered something harsh those first three months, moving around most things for her as she pointed from object to object. 

“No, no.” He shook his head. “I just, I ain’t used to sleeping in a room without a straight way out of it yet.” He admits, munching on his bacon, shrugging like he was discussing the weather. “So sometimes I just, sleep on the couch. No big deal.” 

She sits back in her seat, shock marring her face. He had spent so long hopping from place to place she had forgotten he hadn’t had a place to call home in a decade- besides his car. Something that may have four walls, but had no heart. 

Hotels, to cars, to floors of shelters, he had slept in questionable places for far too long, and in some cases Stanford’s room sometimes felt like a new prison, or at least reminded him of a certain Colombian one. Except this one contained taunting memories and a stupid amount of sweaters. 

It hurt more, to open his door to find hers closed, for some reason. He didn’t like the thought of her trapped either, nestled in a part of the house he couldn’t get to. But he didn’t know how to voice this to her without sounding mad in a way. Or obsessive maybe. 

She digs her toes into the junction of his ribs, grabbing his attention. She’s smiling across from him, and standing before he can ask why. Grabbing his hand, she pulls him up the stairs to their own parallel doors, not even hesitating to walk through the door Stanford used to call his own. 

She’s muttering under her breath as he stands in the doorway, landlocked by witnessing her in this exact space for some reason. She moves to the window, opening it all the way and fumbling with the screen. She gets it off and makes to climb out the window before he can protest. 

“If you want a way out, you got it right here!” She grunts, footing her way through to the shingled roof, his protests falling on deaf ears. 

“Get the fuck back in here!” He leans out, making to grab her. “Ain’t no way this shack's roof is any good!” 

She prances around, slightly mocking him by moving away from his waving arm. “Stan! It’s fine!” She laughs, the sun shining on her figure. Suddenly serious she stops, hands on her hips. “Seriously, if you need a way out, keep the window open, okay?” 

She crawls back through the window a moment later, using Stan’s hand as a weight as she balances back on the wooden floor. 

Still serious, she continues, “Stan if you need to keep the window open, you can keep the door open also if you feel like it.” 

She smiles like she has a brilliant idea, moving across the hall she opens her own room to display her own mess of things. “I can keep mine open also if it helps.” 

How the fuck had she read his mind? He was continually dumbfounded by her unquantifiable amounts of patience she had for him. Like it was a reserve she tapped into, to specifically deal with all his dumb bullshit. He would let it pile in the back of his head, but she’d reach back in and shake him awake, present him with a solution, and he forgets himself in his need to question “why?”. 

He had taken too long to respond, and she stands in the hall, hands wringing her too large t-shirt and looking surprisingly bashful. “Is this okay?” She asks, is this what you need? Vying for his approval as she continues. “Because really I don’t mind you sleeping on the couch, I really don’t, you can keep doing it if you like! Really! I just… I just…” 

Unspoken between them, he already knew. She meant well, she meant the best actually. She wanted him to be comfortable, here, with her. Wanted him to stop moving from place to place in the house because no where felt right because it all felt like a trap. Wanted him to know the four walls they shared could never be a prison, and that she didn’t want him to hop around anymore searching and clawing his way out of it. To not have to Goldilocks around the house, because across the hall from her had to be just right. 

And it was. Because she had read his mind as usual, and he was almost tired of being absolutely astounded by it. 

He nodded, smiling across from her, his confirmation in the squeeze he gave her hand as he reached for her again, and in the ruffling of her hair he gave her as he slipped from the house later. Making his way outside to his work, somehow lighter than usual.

They ended up on the couch most weekends, or at least most Saturday nights. 

She had insisted, against his better nature, that it was not appropriate to drink yourself into a stupor on a weekday. So he had gotten used to the shared moments on the weekend, routinely looking forward to shitty VHS movies and even shittier boxed wine and beer. 

She laughed at fucking everything when she was drunk. He almost wondered if she had ever been high, or if she even needed to be. He might as well be a stand up comedian most weekends, because if he thought he had a great audience Monday through Friday, well he had an even more endearing one on the weekends. 

It was a hot July night, and she had scoffed at his light beer that resided in the back of the fridge. Tisking at him as she danced around the kitchen, pouring sweet red wine into mugs (their only cups), and shooing him back to the couch. Only wine in the summer, only wine when it was this hot.

And it was hot, and humid, unsurprising for Oregon really. So hot in fact, that she had decided pjs were appropriate attire for the night, luckily for him. So he shed his jeans in favor of loose boxers and a well worn shirt. Unluckily for him, she had decided upon much the same wardrobe, which was odd for her and only uncomfortable for sober him. 

But he wasn’t sober anymore, and he had to admit she was rather enchanting hunched over on the couch, laughing at his shitty jokes with one of his old band t-shirts on, shorts that she made no indication of even owning, bagging up around the tops of her thighs. 

He had been intoxicated on numerous amounts of things, nothing, of course, too hard or addictive per say, but it’d be the first time he was this drunk on wine. 

And it was… different. 

He had scoffed at the movie she chose originally tonight. She always chose the second movie, and he chose the first. They had a habit of in depth discussing during films, especially when more intoxicated. 

But he had never been so incredibly invested in a romantic comedy in his entire life, he blamed his company and the alcohol. 

“I can’t believe that he thinks he stands a chance with the likes of her! She’s sacrificed so much! Her jobs on the line here and he won’t even consider marrying her for a green card!” He yelled, just about jumping at the screen. This man in the movie was ridiculous, demanding things from his assistant and throwing her away the next. 

She ran back into the room, mugs full with their next round. She had become the bartender tonight, waiting on him and grabbing snacks when he’d ask in exchange for rubbing her aching shoulders. 

“What did I miss!” She rushed back, handing him his mug and taking her seat back in front of him on the floor, her throw blanket being used as a cushion. 

He takes a sip, setting the mug aside her own on the floor and moving back to place his hands on her tense shoulders. 

“She’s being kicked out of the country right in front of her boss and he ain’t gonna do anything about it! She basically does everything for this man, why doesn’t he see he needs her?” 

She groans below him, her head rocking back as she takes her own drink. “Are we gonna discuss the intricates of them having a relationship though? I love marriage of convenience, don’t get me wrong, but that’s her boss! Isn’t there a weird power dynamic here?” 

“Oh ya!” He agrees, nodding along as his fingers began to dig into her muscles. “We gotta talk about that because if this gets creepy we gotta pick out a different one. He’s already pissing me off!” 

She looks up at him, eyes glowing with an idea. Enchanted, she moves away from him, crawling to the cabinet beside the T.V., and he really swears that he tries to look away. But he also reasons that it’ll be a while before he gets the chance to see her in shorts again. And fuck. 

She turns back, a new VHS in hand. “This!” She exclaims. “Now this is my favorite rom-com!” 

A shitty picture is well worn on the front of the movie sleeve, a VHS he doesn’t recognize from the donation bin sitting in her hands. She must have brought it with her, and she must have had it for a while. 

She crawls forward, movie in hand and a bright, flushed smile on her face. 

“Please, please, please Stanley! This one!” She all but yelled as she leaned up into him. His legs had already been parted to accommodate her sitting in front of him, but now were warm with her torso between them, as she crawled into his lap, movie still in hand and smile still on her face. She leaned up onto his chest, a fake pout on her lips as she looked up at him. 

He forgot himself for a minute, excusing her silently for calling him Stanley in her drunken plee. His hand finding her waist as he answered. 

“Okay, okay!” He snorted. “Better be a better love interest because this guy sucks.” 

He missed her as soon as she left, but his heart still felt something sick when she yelled victoriously on the ground, hand raised in celebration, movie clutched to her chest. Rolling from her current position to the VHS player and popping out the current horrendous movie. All the while she giggled, and he followed in much the same manner. Laughing while running his hand through his hair, trying to soothe himself to forget her warmth. 

She crawled back to him (fuck) settling back into his knees from her position on the ground. The title screen flashed, but he was much too busy watching it illuminate her face. Heart sick again when she leaned her head all the way back, hair across his knees and thighs, she smiles up at him, a thank you on her lips. Clutching his mug in her hands, bringing it to her lips for a sip before passing it up to him too. 

And when he carried her to bed that night he wondered when the tight sickness would leave him. He never closed either of their doors. 

It didn’t happen like this, that night. 

Not from what he could remember anyway, but he felt too groggy to care about accuracy and too intoxicated by the image of her to care much for what was right. 

Her hands had continued up his thighs from her place knelt in front of him, his back hot against the living room couch. She had climbed up on top of him, creeping up to sit on his knees and thighs like she had been there before. Her smile turned sweet into something twisted as she leaned in close to his face, the closest she had ever gotten to it. Whispering something between the heat between the two of them, something lost on him, as he tried to lean closer, tried to bridge the gap between their chests, aching to feel her against the very front of him. 

He knew it was different because she had never worn this in front of him before, at least willingly. He had caught her in the middle of the night, stumbling from her open bedroom door to the bathroom down the hall, panties striped and endearing on her ass. He had seen them in the washer, had seen her fold them and tuck them away. And she was in them, sitting on his fucking lap. 

His hands made for her, reaching behind her and dragging her close, his fingers edging the back of the band of her striped panties. 

She gasps like she does when she’s happy for him, always jumping from her position on the couch cheering along with him when he gets a stupid fucking The Price is Wrong answer right. 

And it’s how he imagined it, fuck, how he was currently dreaming of her noises. In bits and pieces he could remember, his brain scrambling to paint an image of her wanting him.  

Her hands edge along the back of his head, running through his long hair, and tracing to the front along his jaw. Mouth open, her fingers glide along the bottom of his lip, teasing. 

She whispers again, closer now. Her chest heaving against his own, her ass waits precariously positioned above right where he dreamt of her being. Right along the space he places her feet every morning, right where he thought she may kill him.

He catches it this time, between them. Her voice wavering like it had that day in the car when she had apologized for calling him him. He thought of begging for it, allowing her to say his name, but she had read his mind like she always fucking managed to do. 

“Please, Stanley.” 

He had surged forward like his own tidal wave, meeting her in the hot space between them. But he could only imagine a kiss with her, dream of it here. 

He imagined it slow, and building. Imagined her hesitation and the pout of her lip between his fucking teeth, imagined her moan when he eventually came back for more. 

Her hands pulled at his fucking hair, the only time she had placed them there to harm, and he groaned as she pulled him forward, meeting again in the middle of the heat they shared there on the couch. She moaned, her hips rushing to his own, making a new heat between them. 

The friction between them was the same as the kiss, slow and building. Grinding herself in the curve of his lap, right where they both needed each other. Every pass slightly faster, every groan from her more imagined, more unreal. 

The pressure felt real though, and her fingers in his hair felt even more so. His head thrown back on the couch, he looked down his nose at her, a groan leaving his throat as she makes a home in his shoulder, as her hips cause waves against his fucking lap. 

Her breath is hot on his neck, something real, and her echoing noises move up his shoulder to his ear and it makes him hotter than he could imagine. Her groans come to a precipice, getting higher in octave and volume and she thinks to fucking bite him there, right on his shoulder. 

The image she makes shakes him, his hands remembering where they are on her ass and hips, as he makes to work them harder, to somehow bring her closer and harder to the crook of his boxers. Her teeth nestle into him, and it makes him groan more, her hot breath and aching moans reverb off his skin back to him. 

It sends him reeling forward, his own head rushing off the back of the couch, groaning in heat, moving in blind passion. His head rests against the top of her own, his big hands digging into the fat of her behind, finger creeping in through the top of her panties. 

“Fuck.” He groans between them. “Fuck, honey.” His hips canting up, her moans echoing again, her teeth unlaching, like she can’t ground herself to him anymore, because all the movement is him now. He’s fucking using her, the pressure hot, and she peels back to look at him, a heat in her eyes he can’t have imagined. He must have seen it before, marring her face. He had, he swears, seen her with this heat in her eyes before.

He was using her. 

It stops just as abruptly as it began, and he wakes to his discomfort. His room is cool despite the morning sun, the curtains by his windows billowing out with September wind. His door wide open, and his hand curled around something that no longer needed relief. 

His other hand, clutching his hair in a fist. The back of his head tender from the pressure, and his fingers heavy from sleep. 

He got up quicker than usual, his heart still pounding oddly in his chest as he attempted to catch a breath he didn’t remember losing. On his way out of his room, dresssed for the day, he peaks into her parallel room, her door wide open like it was every day now. 

He groans low, she’s wearing the fucking stripes. 

He tries not to think about it the rest of the day, tries not to be disgusted with himself, but his chest aches something odd and his stride is somehow uneven for the rest of the day. His heart carries something sickly when he sees her that day, and she pretends it doesn’t hurt he’s oddly quiet that day, or that he doesn’t read her the morning comics like usual. 

She thinks it has something to do with how flushed he is, when she catches his staring that evening, as they sit beside each other on the couch, T.V. echoing in the background.

[sanguineterrain]

for the dc prompts you reblogged:

can i request jason todd x reader "someone likes being pinned down" + A flirting with B while sparring to throw them off their tracks

where reader is also a vigilante??

thank you so much 🩷

very sexy prompts thank u 😌

jason todd x gn!reader. r and robin!jay were friends, r doesn't know jason is alive/red hood but jason knows r is a vigilante. r's alias is 'nocturne' (if that's already in use oh well lmao). fighting/sparring, jason is mega in love with you as usual!!

all fics at @sanguinelibrary

****

"Still blindly following the Bat, huh?"

You land in a crouch on the rooftop, just like how Nightwing taught you. The Red Hood doesn't look at you, digging through two duffel bags. He doesn't even draw his gun, like you've seen him do with virtually every other vigilante in Gotham.

You wait, ready to spring into action. But Hood doesn't stop what he's doing. Slowly, you rise.

"What... do you mean?" you ask.

"I mean, why are you traipsing around Gotham as a bat-adjacent? Who are you s'posed to be anyway? Goth Bat? Alternative Scene Bat?"

"I'm Nocturne," you say, shoulders rising to your ears. Rude. You thought the chunky boots and star over your suit's eye mask were inspired.

Red Hood lifts a hand. "Don't get me wrong, I dig the threads. I'm just surprised B didn't have an aneurysm over the sequins. Then again, Discowing did do it first..."

Your first two meetings with the infamous Red Hood have been similar in that he's never very concerned about you stopping him (ouch), but he also isn't callous or cruel with you like he is with the other vigilantes.

Case in point: the last person who cornered Hood on a roof was Red Robin. Hood shot him in the shoulder before he could land.

In short, he's perplexing as hell.

Batman's forbidden the rest of the team to confront Hood without backup. And you're technically not supposed to be on patrol tonight. But if you can intercept Hood, that'll be a huge win.

Hood keeps on packing the duffels. You hesitate, then step forward.

"Get away from the bags," you say. "I won't ask twice."

Hood looks at you. "Nocturne's a pretty cool name, I'll admit. And I like the boots. But I still think you oughta call it quits."

He zips up the bags, stands, and kicks them to the corner of the roof.

"Because you're just that unstoppable?" you ask, hands curling into fists.

"Yeah. But mostly 'cause I know you're made for so much more than this, sweetheart."

And that is the third and perhaps most bewildering thing about your encounters with Red Hood: you've gotten the creeping feeling that he... likes you.

Which is ridiculous, and if you ever breathed a word of that to anybody, Batman would probably check you into Arkham.

You take another careful step forward. Hood leans against the railing and folds his arms.

"This the part where you apprehend and hogtie me for innocently packing a duffel bag?" he asks.

You glare. "Innocent? I know you're making a weapons delivery because I know you've been waiting for Batman to be off-planet to make it."

"Clever. Told ya you're too good for this," Hood says. "Should be in college with those smarts, not playing maid for Batman."

"Are you lecturing me?"

"I'm advising you as your friendly neighborhood drug lord. Lecturing makes me sound like a guy who's got too much money and too big of a savior complex to understand that the way he fights injustice is fundamentally flawed."

"Sounds personal."

Hood laughs. "Honey, you have no idea."

You strike.

Hood parries your first attack easily, which you expect. The truth is that whoever trained Hood cut no corners and you're still relatively new at vigilantism. It's only by the grace of God that Hood hasn't left you to bleed out on a roof.

You kick his shin, but Hood turns on the instep and blocks. You go for his shoulder, where his armor separates to give him more movement. But Hood's ready for that too, and he catches your arm.

"Gotta keep that right arm up," he says. "Surprised no one's trained that outta you yet."

You elbow Hood in the throat. He coughs and lets go.

"Like that?" you ask, muscles tense with adrenaline.

Hood makes a sound that might be a laugh, still choked from your hit. "Just like that, honeylove. Good job."

"I don't need feedback," you snap, immediately going back in for another hit.

"Sorry. I'll make this quick then. I do have a delivery."

On the next strike, you advance, using a technique Nightwing drilled into your head for bigger opponents. Hood goes down and you land atop him.

"Oh, that's a Nightwing takedown if I've ever seen one," Hood says beneath you.

You're close enough that you can hear his breathing through the decoder. Pride swells in you at taking him down. Not even Batman has managed such a thing.

Hood is warm and big. His shoulder span alone dwarfs you. When you'd seen him from afar, fighting Batman or Nightwing, you'd been terrified.

But now, perhaps stupidly, you feel comfortable. Annoyed, but safe. Something about him reminds you of home. Makes your stomach flip in a good way.

Which is terrifying.

"You're coming with me," you say, reaching for your cuffs.

"If only. Unfortunately, you've forgotten a teensy weensy detail, dearest."

Hood bucks you off, legs first. Your feet fly into the air, which allows him to flip your positions. You wince, preparing for a concussion upon impact as you go down. But Hood cushions your fall and neatly rolls you over. Your back is pressed into the concrete, hands locked over your head. Hood's weight holds down your hips and legs.

He looms over you, easily holding you down. Your face grows hot.

"How did—" You squirm in his grip. "I had you!"

"Weight distribution, sweets. Tell Al—one of the Bats to add weight to your boots. They keep you light on your feet, but you were depending on them too much to hold me down, and we ain't evenly matched there."

You thrash in his grip. "Hood, I swear to fucking—"

"Easy. Don't sweat it, sweetheart. You haven't been doing this for very long. That was a good takedown, regardless. I'm impressed."

"Screw you."

He hums. You can tell he's smiling under the helmet. "Sorry, I forgot. You don't like feedback."

Hood strokes the inside of your wrist. You aren't sure he's aware he's doing it. His grip is firm but light. He's not trying to hurt you. Your pulse is in your throat.

For a moment, you're both still. Hood seems caught in a trance, like even Superman couldn't tear him away from this moment. From you. And it's not that you're afraid, you're just... you're...

"How do you know so much about me?" you blurt, because it's puzzled the whole team. "You been spying on me?"

"'Course not. Unlike your boss, I respect privacy. No, I did research. I recognized you from when you'd hang around that second Robin. Shrimpy little guy. What'd ya even see in him?"

The grief overtakes you before you can control your mouth.

"You don't know anything about me or him," you spit. "Don't fucking talk about him. He had more skill and goodness in his pinkie than you'll have in a lifetime. And you could learn a thing from him about changing a city. He'd tell you that fear alone never works."

Hood is quiet for a long moment. Then he speaks.

"Where's your distress signal?"

"Why would I tell—"

Hood shifts over you, cutting off your reply. He pulls a ziptie around your wrists. They're not even a little tight. You could probably slip out of them if you had five minutes.

"I know you're not s'posed to be out tonight," he whispers in your ear. "'S not your patrol night. Good thing you're my favorite."

You nearly swallow your tongue. "How do you—I don't—"

"Uh-huh. So you be good from now on, yeah? Wouldn't wanna have to keep tying you up like this."

You lift your chin. "We'll switch positions soon enough."

Hood snorts. "Okay, I know you heard how that soun—"

"I heard it," you say grumpily. "Just get on with it. Jerk."

"As you wish. Distress signal?"

"Collar."

Hood presses the button under your collar. Your breath hitches as his gloved fingers graze your neck.

"Oh? Does somebody like getting pinned down?"

"In your dreams."

Hood laughs. He zipties your ankles last, then sits you upright against the railing.

"Not too tight, are they?" he asks. "I know you've got a circulation problem."

You squint. "You seem to know a lot about me. Not fair that I don't know much about you, Hood."

"'S just business, honeylove," he says, scooping up his duffel. "Now I don't wanna see you in a suit anymore, comprende?"

"Or you'll what? Shoot me?"

Hood pauses, eerily still. He turns those glowing white eyes upon you. Your heart picks up.

"No," he says, so serious it startles you. "But someone else might. And I don't want you to face the same fate as your good friend Robin."

He vaults over the railing before you can respond. Your head thunks lightly as you lean back and wonder if you're really just business to the Red Hood.

(pt 2)

[strwberri-milk]

[tw: self harm]

hey i was wondering if you could write lads men with a reader who sometimes self harms?

sorry if this is too sensitive and i will completely respect you not wanting to write it, but would really appreciate it if you do. i have been feeling like that for a while and these characters bring me so much comfort that i wondered how they would react/treat me, as a self indulging coping mechanism haha

again thankyou for considering and it's alright if you don't end up doing this one considering the heavy subject matter🤍

ofc cw for heavy subject matter and i hope you can get the support you need - these topics are a little difficult to write sometimes so i hope you forgive any missteps i might make - they also are gonna be a little similar bci def think theyd react similairly

Of course he's concerned for you. He knows you didn't mean for him to walk in on you but the way you're hurting - both physically and mentally hurts him more than he could ever imagine. However, he refuses to make it about himself. None of this is about him - it's all about how you're struggling and clearly need his support.

Thankfully, he manages to keep calm throughout your entire exchange. He doesn't want his distress to make things even worse for you so he makes sure he keeps his tone of voice even, providing a caring presence for you to rely on. You don't know what to tell him and he'll tell you you don't need to tell him anything that you don't want to. He's more than willing to wait for you to be ready but he implores that you do not continue hiding your hurt from him.

Zayne reverts to bedside manner. It's because he panics a little, not sure what else to do in the face of this. He knows that at the very least, bedside manner would avoid him saying something jarring or hurting your feelings but once you're all cleaned up he immediately crumples. It's not physical as much as it's emotional, holding you tightly as he asks you not to hide from him anymore. He doesn't ask you to tell him what's wrong - just that you rely on him.

Xavier asks you what's wrong, bandaging you up quickly and trying to get you to focus on him. If you can't tell him he'll just sit quietly with you, holding you tightly as he tells you he'll wait. His eyes won't leave them, making sure that the dressing stays on because if he doesn't focus on something he thinks he'll accidentally makes things worse. He isn't the best with his words but he's comforting at least, distracting you with a quiet evening.

Rafayel doesn't say much which scares you even more. He quickly cleans you up and wraps up the wound effectively, looking at you gently as he quietly asks if you're alright. When you nod he takes you into bed with him, holding you close as he tells you that he doesn't expect you to tell him now, but eventually he'd like to know what ails you. You get the sense that he understands though, resting his chin on your head as he fills all your senses with him.

Sylus doesn't say much right away either, dressing your wounds and asking you to talk to him. You don't really know what to tell him right from the start, just mumbling incoherently as he just nods. He doesn't really mind the time that it's taking you to talk to him, glad that you're at least open to do so. He'll spend the evening with you, wanting you to take your time to come down from the emotional turmoil.

[knavesflames]

Hello, I hope your day goes well as you're reading this!

If your request is still open, can I request touch deprived! Arlecchino and Touch deprived! Reader? Like reader is very clingy and affectionate to her closest friends because she's been deprived of physical affection since she was younger, and Arlecchino who's also touch deprived but unlike reader who has no problem with physical affection, she finds it hard to do it, but when she meets reader who's hugs are so comfortable she's grown addicted to it and craves her gentle touches more and more, thank you! Have a great day or night!

(I realise I’m apologising on every post for the late ones, but I’m almost caught up to a reasonable delay) hi anon!! I feel this hard, I am so affectionate because I was touch starved as a child. Though, I focused this writing piece more on Arlecchino. I love exploring her and her being in character and slightly OOC too. (She’s my comfort character, can you guys tell?) thank you for the ask!

Word count: 1k

Content: fluff, Arlecchino is touched starved, she loves you

Nsft utc!

Arlecchino and you have come from completely different backgrounds (that are unfortunately all too similar as well). You worked well together even so, your routines matching each other, the same sense of humour. By that, I mean, you joked, her lips barely turned up, and she hummed in response (which is equivalent to your wheezing on the sofa over.. a silly cat?). The point is, you worked. You both made sense together. Except one, tiny little detail.

You loved physical touch, and she despised it. Once you discovered how it felt, you were obsessed. You loved the way your body was enveloped by arms that seemed like they’d block out the whole world for you.

Arlecchino hated physical touch. She isn’t used to it, she grew up with her horrifying excuse for a Mother, and physical affection was used often as manipulation rather than anything else, she saw that much with what happened to her dear, dear friend (who haunts her dreams).

The first time Arlecchino held you was a year into your relationship. She awoke during the night to an empty bed, and when she made her way towards the living room, she saw you, in tears on the sofa. A bad dream, you had said, and nothing more. Arlecchino saw the way your body was almost aching for some sort of touch, and despite the discomfort, her arms wrapped around you. Awkward, clumsy, and a little bit forced, but she hugged you. She had not hugged someone since she was sixteen. Without a word, her thumb stroked against your arm, and she felt the way your body slumped against her body. She felt like a burning fire, you realised, most likely due to the flames running through her veins, but you welcomed it nonetheless.

She began to notice that holding you in her embrace was not as torturous as she assumed. Arlecchino held you until you fell asleep.

Her embraces were few and far between, reserved only for special moments or moments where she can see you need them. Her facial expression never changes, but over time, she becomes slightly more comfortable with every hug. She ended up craving your embraces, the way your hand gingerly caresses her cheek and your lips on her skin, the gentle squeeze on her arm when you go past her. She wanted so desperately to associate touch with you instead, someone she knows could never hurt a spider.

Eventually, she begins allowing it more and more, and even begins silently hinting when she wants one by sighing slightly louder, or grumbling a bit when things go wrong, only to feel a fuzzy warmth inside when you smile at her and give a gentle touch. Both you and Arlecchino wonder if she will one day make the first move.

Arlecchino does not know why she dislikes physical affection so much. She enjoys buying gifts she knows you will cherish and love instead, doing things at a distance. This was never supposed to be anything more than a fling, she didn’t want investment, she didn’t want any affection to be returned, but she fell for you, and hard. She dislikes how vulnerable she has become around you, but a part of her deep down inside of her likes it too. Arlecchino is scared you will leave, that you will ruin her one day, and she feels like it won’t happen if she doesn’t let on how hard she has fallen. (Everyone knows and says nothing.)

Perhaps she prefers affection the way she does, unrequited and with little investment, is because some part of her craves a love so great that it would tear her apart, and that frightens her. She does not know how to receive love, yet she still wants a love that will consume her entire being and burn hotter than the flames that course through her veins with every beat of her slowly-thawing heart. You are thawing her, she knows that much.

The weather chills the way her touch grows warmer, and winter comes quickly. The winter in Snezhnaya was cold and biting, and despite her accommodating her home for you (she clearly does not need it) by lighting the fireplace and leaving you blankets, the cold still finds its way into your bones, leaving you shivering. One night, when it is the coldest night of the year, you find yourself unable to sleep at all. You lay awake in the dark, thinking about your past the way you always do at night, shivering so hard you’re practically vibrating.

At some point, you hear her stirring, and you try to quiet yourself, to make sure she can continue sleeping. She noticed the second she opened her eyes, though. Doesn’t she always? She is glad you are pretending to sleep so you do not see the hesitation in her eyes before she snaps herself out of it and does what you both want her to. Wordlessly, she shuffles a few inches closer and her arm wraps around your midsection, dragging you closer until her body is wrapped around yours. Arlecchino, being the attentive person she is, notices your smile and sigh of relief and the way your shivering stops. She notices the way you nestle further in once you know she’s okay with it, and she notices when your breath falls into a deep rhythm.

It is her turn to stare at the wall, her heart beating faster than usual, the only giveaway of any of her feelings. Slowly, her arms snake around you until she’s holding you so tight you can’t move even if you wanted to. Her breath is visible when she exhales, when she lets her body finally relax in the company of another. Arlecchino buries her face into your hair, smelling your shampoo. The smell makes her drowsy, she tells herself (it is not the smell, it is that after so many years, her walls have crumbled completely), and she finds her eyes drooping until she, too, falls into the throes of sleep.

Arlecchino sleeps the best she ever has. Arlecchino has her first night of no nightmares since she became the poor, mad, cursed knave. Arlecchino does not feel so cursed when you are beside her.

[shuenkio]

Glass of Water | 엔.하.이.픈 ۶ৎ 제이⋆.˚ 🎃

Paring: Jay X M!reader | Genre: Heavy Smut

Synopsis: just a glass of water, take you back to your nightmare again.

Cw: size kink, cursing, rough play, mentioned of cum, unprotected séx(dni), cum inside, bad language(this fic), crush trope.

Non proof read | Eng is not my 1st

This is a work of fanfiction, do not throw unnecessary tantrums on this nsfw/sfw blog. ©Shuenkio

A💀N: I hate to be that person, but hey Jay fic is rare especially with the m so why not drop another Special Halloween gift~ (language is so bad in here so bare with me 😭)

Having those party friends was like being a kitten in a dog's cage, and as a nerd too, you were suffocating however at least you got friends to cure your boredom's life.

The sky shifted from gold to violet as the sun dipped below the horizon. Where in a club, you were drinking, dancing your ass out with your friends, forget yourself for the night just throw away all the worries.

However, it unfortunately happens when you are unconscious about yourself, last night until now, you find yourself in bed, an unfamiliar place In front of your face, not to mention there's someone else also in bed with you too. Panic sent down to your spine, as you get a closer look at that guy, seems familiar before you pull out the blanket out of his face, then it hits you like a bang of bullet, Jay? ... The senior that everyone loves on campus? What is he doing here? No way.

Feeling vulnerable and exposed, you dig your eyes down under the blanket to see you are actually naked, no this can't be happening. Not what you were thinking about it was right now. The atmosphere grows jarring, the silence inside the hotel room was so loud you could hear your own pounding heartbeat, it's very wrong. What happened last night, you can't recall, think head think. Epiphany, your body wide awake when you remember what's truly happened. You just having sex with your senior.

Couldn't take it anymore, you left the bed pulling the blanket off from the sleep jay, wrapped around yourself like a burrito before letting out a shriek.

Good thing the room is soundproof but Jay's ears are not. He jolted awake by the sudden screaming.

"HWAT WHAT? WHAT'S GOING ON" Starlet, he yells back out of panic, asking what is wrong but all he sees is you were there, wrapped around in blankets and immediately understands the situation.

"I see, let me explain M/N I swear" Jay rubbing his temple, already having a hard times to solve this. He was calming you down but before that, he soon realized he was exposed too in the sight. But soon cover by a pillow as his quick hand reacts. You slow down your heart and keep calm for a bit, giving him one last chance to explain, since all the events had happened last night are blurred in your head, and Jay was also responsible for this situation.

Later you discover, both of you and Jay are not at fault or else? By hearing his story side, it's actually an accident. Jay drinks too much vodka and also in heat at the time, while your story is also similar to him, your friends feed you too much alcohol until you lose control of yourself and boom, they put you guy in the same room out of prank, they know you had a huge ass crush on the senior.

Not to mention, The club is across the street of the Hotel which makes a lot of sense that this, happens on purpose.

"F-for real?" You spoke.

"I'm telling the truth. I know it's hard for both of us and I'm willing to take anything to make it up to you just k-keep it low alright?" Desperate of him, he asked for a favor in return for his responsibility, which he is willing to do as you wish just so you won't do bad to his image, and the priority was, the campus.

Biting your bottom lip, frustrated is not the word to describe how you feel for now, as if your world doing backflip from being bad to fine. lucky enough you were just a dude and not some of chic, wouldn't that be a disaster if that came true?

Taking time to catch his breath, Jay was thirsty from explanation and his sort of theory, oblivious as he took a full sip of glass of water on the night stand without knowing it was actually an aphrodisiac mix with water.

You are still in deep thoughts, thinking what would you do next after all of this thing happening all together. Unexpectedly, you glance at Jay who was looking out of the blue, uncomfortable on his feet.

"Are you okay there? Why are you fanning yourself? T-the ac is still on" stare at his body and began to tense and uneasy. You asked, It's really concerning at his state right now, why did he look like he was in heat,... Again?

"I'm i-m not sure I just drink this glass of water, n... Now I feel everything is burning ahh help m~me" unable to react, overwhelmed by the sudden hit of the mixing pill, to your surprise he lunches at you, as his strong hands harshly ripped off away of the blanket, wrapped around your body. The next thing you know, you were naked again. Now that's fuck up.

"Jay!! What are you doing HaHH waait what no—" taking a pleading sight In front of him right now, his intentions are clear as day what he wants to do, by the time you could figure what's wrong with him, you were already under his pair of arms, as he spread your legs apart like a pro, lifting you up in mid air. So then when Jay's hands finally found a comfortable place behind your nape, he quickly entranced himself on your vulnerable pink tint hole, he won't fear that he might break your hole again, cuz he was already done last night, before bucking his hip upward brutally, giving you no warning.

The nostalgia pleasure flashbacks again, this feels almost like what you recall last night, his long colossal length thrusting in with no mercy, fucking you out of your brain repeatably.

"FUCK JAY ST-OP WA-it I need to process AHHHHH" You cry out an arousing guttering pleasure, his fatal pace making you dizzy each time he thrust his hip inside out of you, giving you no room to fight back for what you want.

*Always so good, M/N you're so fucking TIGHT just like yesterday 𝗡𝗴𝗵 𝗡𝗴𝗵 𝗡𝗴𝗵 yeah just like that, taking my cock so well, why is your damn body react to 𝗠𝗲 when you don't hah?" His voice was alluring inside the soundproof room, dangerously and full of lust beneath those sounds. At each of his moan instances he would be pounding on you with his powerful hip, your body would bouncing along with your dick too, the sticky wet precum jumping, as he abuse your pretty hole again.

Meanwhile, on the other hand, you were low-key enjoying it, his god damn cock just hit the right on your sweet spot, silence you from whining again when you feel like you seen a shooting star in the bright morning sky.

All at once, jolt hitting on, spread over all your body and system, signaling you would need to release soon but before you even react and inform Jay, he was one step ahead of you greatly, chasing for both sides climax.

"JAY please h-Harder I will...come soon ermm AH"

"wanna cum? Hah? As you wish my prince, but let's do it together shall we" growling darkly under his hitch breathless air suppliers, Jay picks up the pace already lost in the deep sea, fuck your ass in a motion you can't even catch up. As your body continues to wear thin, in one last forceful arching, Jay finds himself empty inside you, extremely.

"Holy my Father, SHIT SHIT SHIT—"

"FuCk EheH..."

Both bodies shudder, choke up for air, you finally spill on the floor with your clear liquid. Your legs shake uncontrollably, the black pupils were nowhere to be seen in your eyeball which explains how much this makes you feel.

Jay crumbles down with you in his arm still, flop down on the bed exhausted, nothing much different from how you experienced, while the pill of the aphrodisiac slowly wears off.

"I fucking knew it I figured it out now Jay, all because of that glass of water"

"I'm sorry I'm sorry"

Ps; Happy Halloween day y'all, I just want to thank you for 600 followers 🥹🫶🏻 it's a milestone for me mwah mwah.

[kiss-me-muchoo]

𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐬 || 𝐂𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐮𝐬 𝐒𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐱 𝐟𝐞𝐦!𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫

part one: here || part two: money power glory

Summary_when Coriolanus promised to split the plinth prize with his best friend, he didn’t knew that would be enough reason for Dr. Gaul to transform you into an experiment.

Warnings_bff to enemies, asshole Coryo, violence, mutations, angst, fluff.

Note_ im back to my coriolanus shit, and nothing just listen to valley of the dolls and girl

♪ ♫ Coryo playlist ✰ Index (+ fics here)

_________________________________________

It was a dry fall day when Coriolanus and his family ran out of cabbage and potatoes. He was to go to Pluribus Bell and trade some belongings for food. He was a kid, and he had been struggling for a very long time now. The Capitol was slowly making its way back to what it was before the war, but it was taking longer than expected.

Tigris was out, trying to trade some of the gold earrings from Grandma’am for wood, for the upcoming winter.

At the rough age of twelve, Coriolanus Snow had been growing impatient to get older, get into University, and give his family a better life. He already knew how to disguise his lack of wealth and how to fit in with his classmates. Coriolanus had no friends, just people to blend in.

He carefully closed the door from Pluribus’ place when someone opened the door from inside, pulling him backward, and making him trip.

“Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry- Coriolanus Snow?” He heard a soft female voice and when he stood up, he finally saw you.

“Y/n?…” He grew worried, wondering if any other classmates were around, hoping to be wrong, as he didn’t want to be seen.

“Hi…” you awkwardly said.

Coriolanus was indifferent to you. He disliked how he often heard you gossiping with your friends. He disliked how you always participated in debates and readings, finding it annoying. And most important, he knew you were born capitol but your family was once District 1 generations ago. You were no daughter of elite members.

“What are you doing here?” The boy asked.

You weren’t expecting to see him there. Pluribus’ customers were always… poor people, hungry. So when you saw the brown bag with two cabbages and some potatoes in Coriolanus’ bag, you didn’t even need to question.

“I come here to trade my mother’s designs for food.” Coriolanus never thought you were in a situation similar to him.

“My father served in the war, he got injured and couldn’t keep working, and my mother quit her job to take care of him. We don’t have much but we are surviving…” you added shamelessly, Coriolanus was jealous that you weren’t afraid of revealing the truth, something he couldn’t.

“I won’t tell anyone I saw you here, Coriolanus. If that’s what you want” you added after seeing him judging you quietly, giving a cold look. You had the idea of him being serious and a young man of few words, no doubt he was.

“Can I trust you?” He asked, thinking he sounded so dumb.

“I have no reason to spread details of your life. So yes, you can trust me…”

“Okay…”

“I live on the Corso…” you said and without thinking, Coriolanus smiled more than he should have.

“Me too!” His excited tone made you feel relieved.

“Can you imagine both of us living in the same place?” You asked cheerfully. Coriolanus doubted it.

“I don’t think so…”

Oh but how mistaken was he? Not only do you two live on the Corso, but you also live in the same building. He had the penthouse and your parents owned the floor below.

Coriolanus was taken aback by how calm and excited you were as you showed him your house.

The boy learned quickly that your family was doing better than his. You had a lot of things, your room had exotic wallpapers, and a lamp made of feathers was even affordable.

For the first time, Coriolanus felt like he could actually enjoy meeting someone new. Even better if it was in his safe space, his home, and the source of his identity.

And that’s how you turned out to be the only person Coriolanus allowed to know about his situation.

…

Exactly five years later, Coriolanus was coming back from the market where he had traded a watch for some black dressing pants. Even though the Plinth Prize had been only announced two days ago, Coriolanus was already thinking about clothing for the occasion. He was out of breath by the time he hit your floor. And he was not going to stop by your place but he grew curious when he saw you tending a big piece of dark grey crinkled fabric. You had your long hair curled up, wearing slippers, a nightgown, and a robe.

He smiled, wondering how important could that fabric be to not acknowledge him.

“What you got there?” You quickly looked up, slightly embarrassed that Coriolanus caught you in your pajamas.

“I know it’s early, but my mom and I had an idea for a set. In case you know-“ you feel like you sound very narcissistic, hinting that you could possibly win the Plinth prize. Coriolanus and you were exceptional in school. And the only “friends” you could count were Clemensia, Festus, and Sejanus, although they were slightly behind you and the blonde.

“I had the same idea,” Coriolanus said, walking closer, showing you the black pants in his arm.

You smile at him, feeling reassured that you both thought the same. You knew the young man judged you once. But now, he had no reason to. Or so you believed.

He was very close to turning eighteen in the first months of the approaching year, you had also thought about buying him a present.

“Come inside. I need to tell you something…” he nodded, but gulped, thinking the worst.

You shut the door and Coriolanus noticed it smelled sweet.

“Oh, I’m baking something… I would like to share it with you and your family” The boy blushed at you noticing how hungry he was and also because it was very kind of you to share given the circumstances.

“You don’t have to, y/n”

“But I want to.…” he rolled his eyes, chuckling, tenderly accepting your good intentions.

“I don’t have anything to give you back. But we made a promise. Remember?” You nod, smiling softly at him.

Coriolanus is your best friend. Although Clemensia, Festus, and even Arachne were close friends, no one compared to Coryo.

“I do, but…”

“No, y/n. No matter what, we are splitting the prize. Both of us are going to university together.” He seriously said.

In the most inconvenient way, Coriolanus had found an ally. He knew most of his classmates since he was a little child, but after getting to know you, he understood it wasn’t the same. He was grateful for having you.

“That’s why I wanted to talk to you. Sit…” Coriolanus walked towards your kitchen table. He realized your parents were gone. Which made him wonder where were they.

The place smelled like corn syrup and roses. Deep down, probably those two were his favorite things. He craved sweet things and the roses reminded him of his mother and her powder.

“So?…” he inquired, you were a little busy placing some towels on the table.

“My mother found a job in a fabric store, in a couple of weeks she’ll be able to refer Tigris. She’ll be able to leave the work with Fabricia” his eyes went wide, a smile immediately growing on his face.

“And not only that. My father accepted to work as a secretary in the offices of the Capitol’s congress” he couldn’t be jealous of the success of your parents when they were offering to help Tigris. He went up to give you a hug.

“That’s great news, dear” you hugged him back. He smelled like cedar and roses. You remembered the flowers his grandmother sent the day before.

“If things go right. My father could get us a job there after the Academy. And we’d have more money to pay the university’s tuition” he nodded, unconsciously hiding his face in your neck. The closure made you blush, it wasn’t like you and the boy hugged very often. But you appreciated it.

“I have faith we’ll have a bright future, Coryo. I really do”

“Thank you, for everything you and your family have done,” the blonde said.

“You are like family too. It’s nothing…” you reply, breaking the hug to check at the oven.

Coriolanus eyes you. He catches the smell of your hair, patchouli, and herbs. He smiles, looking at your clean face and old nightgown. He can’t deny you’ve grown into a gorgeous woman. But he blocks the thoughts from flowing further.

“I made bread pudding.” You knew it was his favorite.

And his smile only grew. When Tigris had the chance to steal from Fabricia and his waste, she made a classical bread pudding. But you were able to do a more sophisticated one. With cherry blossom powder that your mother had. The bread was more wet and less like fudge. Coriolanus loved it ever since he tried back two years during the holidays.

“I’m really liking this day” he admits, making you chuckle as you place the dessert literally in his face.

…

Reaping day wasn’t your favorite. You didn’t hate the districts but you didn’t like how they tried to destroy the Capitol. Nonetheless, the Hunger Games weren’t part of your fond morals. Having the privilege of being a mentor for the first time ever in the history of the games, wasn’t as exciting as it sounded. The only good thing is that it would lead to being closer to knowing who won the Plinth prize.

Months had passed and the day had finally arrived. You slipped into the two-piece set your mother made for you. A blazer and a long circle skirt in dark grey. An old pair of black boots that belonged to your grandmother and were in excellent condition, the leather felt nice and the heels added elegance to your outfit.

You never felt intimidated by not being part of the elite and being considered “poor” and it tore you to see Coriolanus feel like he wasn’t enough. Like the grate was of his last name had to loosen power.

So when you called him through the phone to see if he was ready, he said you should go first, showing a display of a little panic attack because Tigris hadn’t returned with the shirt he was to wear.

As much as you protested and said you would wait for him, he made you leave saying you couldn’t be late.

So you did.

When you stepped out of the building, you encountered Persephone, Coriolanus’ neighbor. The blonde had said once that Persephone and Clemensia were probably the prettiest girls from class. Which made you feel terrible but you ignored it from the moment it happened.

“Hey… Are you ready for today?” She asked.

“Yes… totally” You weren’t happy, to be honest, but you showed her your best smile.

“Why is Coriolanus not with you? He’s always attached to you…” the comment makes you smile nervously. Although you knew most of your classmates and had literally grown up along them, you never knew what kind of assimilation they had about you and Coriolanus.

“Oh, he woke up late. I wanted to wait for him, but he literally obliged me to go on” Persephone giggled, urging you to cross the street.

“That boy is head over heels for you…”

“Oh my goodness, Persephone. That’s not true…” she laughs, her lilac makeup and crimson lips making her look even more pretty.

“Trust me, y/n… There are even bets on the year you two will tie the knot!” Her comment makes you so embarrassed.

“We’re here!” You say changing the subject.

Heavensbee Hall is full of students and faculty. A lot of them say to you because it wasn’t a secret that your friendly demeanor and good grades made you more popular than Persephone.

When make it to the talk with Felix, Festus, and Arachne, you spot Clemensia entering the event along with Coriolanus.

At first glance, you tried to ignore the mixed feelings you caught after Persephone’s comments and seeing the man you quietly doted on the girl he considered the most beautiful.

“That can’t be y/n y/l/n! That’s a model!” you finally turn when you hear Clemmie, which makes you smile shyly.

Coriolanus finally spots you and he gulps. Every day, he saw you wearing opaque tones. He knew you craved vivid colors and exotic makeup, your mother was an unemployed fashion designer after all. Having the chance to wear elegant clothes and highlighting your skin with splotches of berry colors was a sight for Coriolanus. His hands felt sweaty and numb, a familiar feeling he started developing whenever you were close.

He walked straight towards you, taking a last sip of the posca he disliked. You smile at him, accommodating the rosebud attached to his heart. The action caught the attention of all your classmates and friends, who quietly gossiped or exchanged looks.

“That’s a gorgeous shirt, Coryo” he smiled.

“Tigris and your mother are my saviors” he whispered in your ear, which sent shivers to you.

You and your friends are called out to take a seat as the reaping is about to start. You end up seated between Coriolanus and Sejanus. And suddenly you find yourself lost in your thoughts, wondering who you would be mentoring. It’s all you could truly think about since you woke up. But suddenly, Coriolanus makes you come back to life.

“It’s going to be okay…” he said to which you replied with a little smile.

“By the way, you look very pretty…” your heart pounds as he whispers in your ear for the second time. Your smile grows along the blush creeping on your face.

“Really?” You feel so stupid after asking that. You didn’t want him to think you needed validation.

“Every day you look pretty, but I rarely see you with color in your face” he admits and it sends you to death the fact that he proceeded to grab your hand and give it a squeeze.

He didn’t know why he did that, but it felt right.

Something weird happened, you both felt a spark.

…

Watching kids fighting for their lives in the most gruesome way wasn’t appealing. Your eyes are on the little girl from District 8, your tribute; Wovey. The last time you saw her in the zoo before the games started, she made you cry so badly. She was just a little girl and the fact that she had smiled at you, saying how beautiful your dress was, made you understand every word Sejanus said.

The districts deserved to pay? Yes. But why not make them pay extra taxes, or limit their supplies? Why do you have to scavenge food for a little girl who is likely to die?

Sejanus had walked out after seeing what happened to his tribute. The bloodbath had been disgusting to watch. And as the hours pass as you sit along Coriolanus and other classmates watching your tributes, the weight of the events that happened on the previous days hit you. The moment you saw the rainbow-ruffled skirt from Lucy Gray Baird, you knew it would mark a before and after.

It was like her appearance in Coriolanus’ life had worsened everything for everyone surrounding him. First was Arachne, then Clemensia, whose image still haunted you with the scales and yellow eyes. Then the rebel bombing. It had been a long time since felt fear. You felt alone because you protected Wovey. But nobody protected you. The blurred sight of Coriolanus clinging to the ruffles of Lucy Gray’s skirt and calling for her as the medics took him away was very present.

You look down at your lap, the skirt of the uniform was on, but not the pants, since your leg was still bandaged from the burns you suffered the day of the bombing.

There’s a drift between you and Coriolanus since the day of the reaping. He appeared at the zoo and at night told you it wasn’t planned, he practically ignored you whenever he visited Lucy Gray but squeezed your hand the day of Arachne’s funeral. He confided to you what happened with Clemensia but refused to console you when she appeared in the hospital while you took care of Coriolanus.

The only good thing is that your parents were making a name. They were getting popular and you loved seeing them happy. Unfortunately, just as they were finding happiness, you were losing it.

You kept losing friend after friend. Clemensia ignored you moments before the games started. Arachne was gone, and Sejanus looked beyond depressed. And Coriolanus was falling for District scum.

How could he even inquire if the songbird was almost Capitol during the interviews?

Maybe you were a hypocrite for claiming Sejanus as a friend, who once was District and called it his home. But you despised Lucy Gray for wearing the clothes and makeup you craved, for being naturally charming and unconsciously revolving around most of your problems.

You have been quiet for hours, only having eyes for little Wovey.

Coriolanus glances at you frequently. And he can see the sad look on your face. He couldn’t ignore you had been changed since the reaping. The happy and positive girl he knew was slowly morphing into some lost panicked mentor.

The moment the games started, Coriolanus realized how hard it was for you to look after Wovey, one of the youngest tributes he had seen. The guilt of being such a bad friend started rubbing him in the wrong way.

Which is why he found himself constantly looking at you to see how you were doing.

But when he looks back, you’re gone. Most of the people watching the first day are gone.

It’s just Dr. Gaul telling him Sejanus entering the arena.

…

The tension was escalating. Coriolanus couldn’t sleep, not even with the cold shower that resulted nice for the heat. All he could think was about Sejanus and him running for their lives. He killed a boy. There was blood on his hands. He desperately called you but you didn’t answer. He went to bed thinking of Lucy Gray hiding in the arena and you practically ignoring him. And just when he was about to doze off with the memory of the kiss Lucy Gray gave him, his eyes opened abruptly.

He remembered the promise you two made.

When he walked back to Heavensbee Hall for the second day of the games, he could hear Lucky Flickerman giving the broadcast. He went straight to you, firstly noticing how you caressed your knuckles, showing that you were anxious.

“Could you sleep?” He asked, taking a seat beside you. You glanced at him, only to bow your head, back to your knuckles.

“I took some pills…” he frowned, confused.

“Pills?…”

“It’s nothing, Coryo. Just melatonin pills, to help me sleep well.” He nodded, not fully convinced.

“I’m sorry for being… distant,” he said, to which you shrugged, crossing your arms.

“It’s okay. We all have acquired different problems since the reaping. You have just been busy with your rainbow girl” Your tone distilled bitterness when you mentioned Lucy Gray, which didn’t go unnoticed by Coriolanus.

“When one of the two of us wins, it’ll be like before, but better.” he knew it wouldn’t.

“It’ll never be the same. Arachne is gone, Clemesia out of herself, Sejanus defying Gaul, the Ring twins' death… You’re already changing” he quickly took your hand, ignoring the way some people could be looking at him.

“I’m not. We’re family… you’re special. And I will always fight for you, y/n” his comment lit a fire inside you. You give him a little smile. But he knows you’re still blue.

Right when he was closer to admitting he had feelings for you, Lucy Gray appeared, withdrawing any plan he could have. And now he was confused about you.

Perhaps you only saw him as your best friend. Which is why he didn’t suppress the emotions Lucy Gray made him feel.

…

No-no, no, no, no, no… NO!

Every mentor and attendant in Heavensbee Hall heard you whisper until you literally screamed. The little Wovey had drank the water with poison. Tears immediately swelled in your eyes and you stood up, splashing the room with sorrow.

Even Capitol people felt emotional about the little girl slowly dying unbeknownst to her. Even Livia Cardew looked at you with empathy when you walked past her.

Even Clemensia, briefly looked at Coriolanus silently asking if she should go to follow you, but he told her he was going.

And he did. He followed you outside the room, finding you on one of the stairs leading to another hallway. Your hands covered your face, but he could hear you sobbing.

You felt terrible. You knew Wovey was likely to die, but that didn’t stop the pain. Adding all the strong emotions you’ve dealt with in the past days made you explode.

You just wanted your best friend. Regardless of his unrequited feelings, you needed him.

And he magically appeared.

When you wiped your eyes, he approached you. He took a seat beside you and caressed your shoulder.

“You’re not okay.” He said, to which you shook your head.

“I’m feeling the same as you. Only that I’m a crier and you’re not…” Coriolanus briefly smiled, appreciating your profile.

He faced the woman who knew all of him. The only woman that could ever understand him. And the only one who would care for him enough aside from his family.

“You were closer to Arachne than me. With Clemensia too. And your tribute was closer to being a baby again than she was to become a teenager…” new tears poured down and Coriolanus cursed himself for making you cry again.

“Is she finally gone?…” he nodded at you.

“You have to win, Coryo. You must win… This suffering must be worth it for one of us at least”

“If I win, you’re also in. We said it the day the prize was announced. We’re in this together…” Once again, he grabbed your hand again. And just when he was about to move away because you weren’t reciprocating the touch, you caressed his fingers, interlocking your hand with his.

“Lately I’ve been missing you a lot…” you confessed and it nearly made him blush.

“Why?…” it was dumb but he needed to hear something, he needed to comprehend.

“Well…. Because I need you, Coriolanus” his heart thumping and shaky hands prevented him from doing something stupid, but he offered you a lovely smile that you reciprocated.

He was about to say… “I need you too, y/n. Let me kiss you so I can accept whatever I feel for Lucy Gray is a whim”.

But he couldn’t. Because Festus appeared, looking for you two.

“Dr. Gaul wants you two back…” he said.

“Thanks, Festus” you thanked him.

And all the way to the room of commands, Coriolanus held your hand.

When the snakes landed on the arena of the games, Coriolanus stood up. When Lucy Gray was officially the winner, he went running to Tigris. But when he spun to hug you, he didn’t contain.

He grabbed your face and leaned to kiss you. The crowd cheered even harder, believing you two would officially begin a romance after years of uncertainty. You kissed him back, savoring the moment and feeling glad you didn’t give up on him.

“We won, y/n.” He whispered in your lips.

“We won, Coryo” You smiled, out of breath, and kissed him again.

…

His brain wasn’t thinking clearly. Coriolanus had messed up everything. He was being punished for his lies. Serving as a peacekeeper and leaving the Capitol was one thing. But for 20 years?

Perhaps he could follow Lucy Gray to District 12, just to see how was she. But 20 years was too long… especially when you were the woman he intended to marry one day.

He could say goodbye to his place in the University, he could say goodbye to paying the tax of his home. And he certainly could say goodbye to you.

But his biggest fear was that he slipped out you had the idea of the rat poison. Coriolanus was aware you said it vaguely, and he never told you he actually cheated.

As he walked out of Highbottom’s office, completely downcast, wondering how he would break down the news.

“Hey… Are you okay?” His nervousness grew as he watched you walk escorted by two peacekeepers.

“What are you doing?” You shrugged.

“Dr. Gaul wants to see me…” Coriolanus frowned. Was the lunatic going to punish you?

“And you? What are you doing here?” he bit his tongue. He couldn’t tell you yet. But probably it would be worse to wait and tell you in the morning, just when he was supposed to leave for the districts.

“The dean… he wanted to talk to me about the disbursement of the prize”

The guilt started killing him the moment you smiled at him. You leaned, stepped on your tiptoes, and gave him a gentle peck.

It took him by surprise, but caressed your cheeks and kissed you back.

“I’ll see you at home?….” He nodded, pressing his forehead with yours, knowing he probably wouldn’t see you again. His eyes watered and he tried to stop time.

But it was inevitable because you gave him one last smile and you passed by him, followed by the peacekeepers.

Chills assaulted him, but he thought everything was going to be okay. At least for you.

…

For a couple of days, he was able to forget about you. But soon when Sejanus asked how were, the guilt felt like a bucket of ice blocks falling all over him.

He lied, saying you were okay. But Lucy Gray knew he wasn’t being truthful. Coriolanus confessed to her. The songbird found it very hard to admit that Coriolanus’ true love was you. Perhaps he followed her to her home, he was making her happy. But the blonde was Capitol, he would always prefer his people and his girl.

“You have waited too long, darling. Please call her and at least apologize” she said throwing some rocks at the lake in front of them.

“She’s probably mad at me…”

“More the reason to fight for her” Coriolanus glanced at her confused. But Lucy Gray rolled her eyes playfully.

“Look…” she reached for a purple flower. She cut it and showed it to Coriolanus.

“From what I’ve heard of y/n… is that she is important. You said once she’s your best friend. Think of her like this flower, which is a hydrangea. They have medicinal properties and they are very pretty… but they’re delicate. So I think you would prefer to keep her nurtured. Because she’s special…” Coriolanus sighed.

He couldn’t say to Lucy Gray he was scared of losing you because it would mean that all he did the moment he bribed the secretary of the military deferment wasn’t worth it. He came to the twelve because he wanted to be with Lucy Gray, but he had some unresolved feelings for you.

It was so confusing.

“I’ll call her tomorrow during my break…” Lucy Gray nodded, knowing that after that call many things could change. But it was the right thing to do. Because you were innocent.

…

The jabberjays awakened something inside him. The possibility of finding a reason to be sent back to the Capitol sounded very attractive. But all was forgotten when he requested to call your apartment. In the same building, he called home.

He gulped nervously before a female voice picked up the call. Your mother.

“Hello?” She asked.

“Mrs. Y/l/n… It’s Coriolanus” she sighed, the blonde could almost see her nodding.

“Oh, Coriolanus. What a surprise to hear from you…”

“I guess y/n told you I was sent to serve as a peacekeeper” he admitted, surprised to hear your mother didn’t want to kill him for hurting you.

”Coriolanus… y/n has been sick since the day the hunger games closed” he frowned, holding the phone closer to his ear.

“What?…”

“Apparently she was working in the laboratories in the Citadel with Dr. Gaul. She caught a virus and has been quarantined. I’m so desperate to see her again. Her father has been asking but Dr. Gaul says she’ll be fine in a couple of weeks.”

Coriolanus immediately thought back on Clemensia and the “flu” she caught. But now, it was ten times worse.

Did Gaul punish you for helping him to cheat in the games? Were you dead?

His hands started shaking.

“As soon as I’m back in the Capitol. I’ll try to ask for more information. She’ll be okay…” he tried to soothe your mother, but he was already freaking out.

So he didn’t have situate to send jabberjays with the recording of Sejanus revealing his rebel plans. All so he could go back to you.

…

He didn’t regret it. Because as soon as he stepped into the Citadel, back at home, it felt right.

“Welcome back to the Capitol, Mr. Snow,” said Dr. Gaul, tending her water mutts and giving him a sadic smile.

He stood silent for a couple of seconds. Debating whether to ask you or not.

“I know what you’re thinking about, boy,” she said, walking down the stairs of the mutt's cage.

Coriolanus remained silent, carefully eyeing her.

“She couldn’t get away if she was also guilty for putting in your head that silly idea for you to cheat during the games” he gulped, nervous.

“Have you talked with her parents?”

“Just with her mother once. They think she’s sick and will be fine in a couple of weeks. But they’re worried…” he admitted, trying to act relaxed.

“Oh sure they are worried. I heard the man is going straight to the president’s cabinet. And the mother, already spreading her wings in the fashion tendencies…” Coriolanus wasn’t aware that during his time away your parents had spent all of their time working to try to not worry too much about you. To gain power and find a quicker way to be with you.

“I didn’t know…”

“She was very angry when she learned you had lied to her…”

How was he supposed to keep his composure with that talk?

“I never intended to hurt her” he hated to admit that. He couldn’t be vulnerable. But it crumbled just because it was about you.

“Ah, young love. It’s so dangerous because it makes us weak…”

“Is she alive?…” he tried to change the subject.

“You just have to say you want her back and she’ll be in the Capitol’s hospital in a couple of days” he grew more worried.

“She can’t die… or stop being her”

“The snakes in your other friend really triggered you…” Gaul mocked, laughing.

With that lunatic mentoring him, he had to pull out a stronger card. Something that would compromise him as well so she had no choice but to let you go at once.

“I intend to marry her.” The woman stopped laughing, only to look at him, trying to find the lie in his words, but there wasn’t.

“Brave girl to conquer the heart of a Snow…” and with that, she started walking towards another room in the big laboratory.

The room of voxels and human mutations. He grew anxious until Dr. Gaul pointed out a big water tank.

Coriolanus holds a big breath of terror. He tries his best to remain still. But he felt fear. Just when he thought nothing could ever hurt him again, he had to encounter you in the worst possible way.

“What a shame, she was responding very well. Even looks like a mythological monster”

“Is she going to be… human again?”

“With patience, yes. I’ll let you know when we move her to the hospital. It would be nice if you gave the news to her parents. You know, given you’re the reason she almost ended up with a mermaid tail.”

There rested your naked unconscious body, almost completely covered in salmon scales. Your legs seemed to be slowly disappearing, as the scales were tangling them from your hips to your knees. Your hair was matted and your lashes seemed oddly long.

Coriolanus walked home. He couldn’t take the trolley. The walk seemed short, even with the approaching winter. Your image was haunting him. He couldn’t keep the secret to Tigris when he came back home. He pretended to have a giant smile on his face when he blurted that the Plinths made him heir of their fortune. And he tried to ignore the memory of the elevator indicating the name of your floor.

“But she’s going to be okay?” Tigris asked worried.

“Dr. Gaul said so…”

“I thought she was busy trying to get into the university… her parents rarely appeared to be around too”

Coriolanus remembered what he said back in the laboratory.

“I told Dr. Gaul I’m marrying her” Her cousin opened her eyes in disbelief.

“So she could release her?”

“Yes. But also because… I always thought of it.”

“Are you conscious she’s likely to be mad at you for leaving without answers?” Coriolanus nodded, knowing very well you had plenty of reasons to hate him. But there was no going back.

”Very aware…”

“Then you’ll show her again the fine man you are. You remind her why you were best friends.” He was no good man. He killed people to get to the top. But he wouldn’t be that man to you. You were the only one who could possibly understand him and keep his filthy secrets.

“Snow lands on top” Tigris whispered.

Coriolanus turned to look at a picture of you. He and his family love you so much, you had your own portrait in the Snow Penthouse. The first your mother designed was pink and you wore it. You were always very pretty to the eyes of everyone. But only at that moment Coriolanus appreciated your beauty. The he looked at another picture, the one of you two during the reaping ceremony. His tailored shirt and your handmade clothes. That girl and boy were long gone.

But Coriolanus had done so much damage to step back. With Sejanus and Highbottom gone, he had secured a place in the Capitol. Lucy Gray couldn’t hurt him anymore. All he had to do was to win the girl that once belonged to him.

Giving one last look at the picture of you two, he smiled.

“Snow lands on top…” he answered back to Tigris.

_________

[loulovingho]

(I made this little headcanon then had to write a fic for it. Here's 2k words of the 118 being obsessed with Tommy ft. Bobby being a dad, of course. Enjoy here or on ao3!)

The Problem

Buck has a problem.

He knows it shouldn't be a problem. Knows he should be grateful. He's never had anything like this before. Never felt so secure in his life. Work is good, home is good, friends are good, family's good, and his boyfriend... well, he's really good.

Buck is in love, like really and truly in love, for the first time ever. Yes, he's said it before, and maybe he meant it, but not like this. He's never had this much stability, and care, and comfort, and security. Buck doesn't just love Tommy, he feels loved by Tommy. Since the moment the words I love you slipped out of Tommy's mouth, there has never been a doubt in his mind that Tommy means it. And he knows that Tommy feels the same way about him too.

But none of that is the problem.

The problem is he's not the only one who loves Tommy.

All of his coworkers love Tommy.

A lot.

Apparently he is a very popular guy with the 118. Buck always knew Tommy was a cool guy, even when he first tried and failed to discredit the claim, but he didn't realize that every single one of his coworkers would also think Tommy was the coolest guy to ever walk the planet.

Okay, maybe they didn't actually think that, but it was obvious that they liked him and they wanted to be around him.

All. The. Time.

At first it was cute. Buck was thrilled that everyone liked the person he was dating. He was overjoyed that they always had something positive to say about Tommy, that they had him included in group chats, and invited him to hangout with the team after a shift.

Then it became... a lot to manage.

Chimney and Tommy had a long history, so it was to be expected that they would hang out on occasion. They both loved to watch classic movies and, while Buck didn't mind one every once in a while, he wasn't a huge fan of black and white so he let them have their time with that. He just didn't expect Chimney to add the Old Classics Movie Network to his cable subscription so there was always another movie being recorded that they needed to watch and analyze.

Tommy and Eddie were already friends, and Buck and Eddie were best friends, so it was easy for the three of them to hang out. Buck could get into wrestling, he liked karaoke trivia, and he was a big fan of learning Muay Thai. But that's where Eddie had a problem.

“Every time you come to Muay Thai,” Eddie whined, “you and Tommy end up going one round, get all horned up, and leave early.”

“All horned up?” Buck repeated with a glare. “What are we, fifteen?”

“You're banned from Muay Thai,” he declared, holding up a finger to silence Buck's incoming protests, “at least once a week.”

Then there was Hen, who Buck thought would care the least of them all.

He was wrong.

She became convinced that she was the reason he and Tommy ever got together, not Chimney.

“Chimney may have been the one to contact Tommy, but it was me who planted the seed in his head,” she'd say, “so I was actually the one who connected you two.”

It turns out Tommy and Karen also had a lot of similar interests, so one double date turned into regular double dates. Often, Karen was texting or calling Tommy to set up the next double date before Buck even knew a thing about it.

Hen also enjoyed Tommy's dry humor. They could battle back and forth for hours in sarcasm wars, and often enjoyed hating on the same things.

Even Ravi wedged his way into Tommy's life. He actually wanted flying lessons for other purposes than staring at Tommy for hours at a time while he rambled on about what each button did.

And Tommy was so kind, so insanely, annoyingly, kind that he always made time for everybody. Buck had no idea how he did it, but he did. He even always had time for Buck too, Buck just wanted more of it.

He knew it was selfish. He knew Tommy deserved to have all the friends and found family in the world, which is why he'd never say anything to him about it.

But, he could talk to Bobby. Ask Bobby to talk to the rest of the team, because he'd tried and they wouldn't listen to him. Or, maybe Bobby could just schedule him off a day where everyone else worked? Give Buck and Tommy a day where distractions weren't possible, because all of the distractions were busy at the station. Surely he could do something.

He should've known better.

The second he tapped on Bobby's office door, Bobby excitedly waved him in.

“It came in the mail today,” he declared, as if Buck was supposed to know what that meant.

“Wh- What came in the mail?” Buck asked cautiously as he sat down.

“The murder mystery game Tommy and I talked about last time you guys came over. I had no clue he was so into puzzles and mysteries. I already talked to Tommy, and you two are coming over for dinner tonight.”

“We are?” Buck asked. This was a lot of information to be thrown his way so quickly.

“Yes. Well, he actually said he'd ask you about it and then confirm, but you already said you didn't have plans earlier, so...”

He should've known that question was a trap. Bobby had asked what everyone's plans were while they were on the way to a call earlier in the day. Buck had answered that he and Tommy didn't have any, which was risky, but his mind went blank in the moment. His actual plans involved a lot of nudity, mind blowing sex, and hopefully some whipped cream, but he was trying to not be so blatant about his sex life anymore.

But now Bobby was looking at him with wide, excited eyes, and he did remember Tommy talking about that game, and Bobby's food was always so good, so it wasn't like he could say no.

“Yeah, of course it's fine.”

Which led them to now, having just enough time to shower and change before driving over to Bobby and Athena's place.

“I know we haven't had as much us time lately,” Tommy said as they reached the door. Of course he did. Of course he noticed everything. “So we'll stay for dinner, and do this game, and we'll go by nine.”

Buck tried to play it cool. “No rush.”

“Evan,” Tommy replied knowingly, dropping a kiss on his temple, “we'll go by nine.”

Who was Buck to argue? “Yeah... Yeah, okay.”

Dinner went smoothly, as if there was another option. Tommy was always great at keeping up conversation, and he and Bobby knew tons of people to reminisce about and catch up on. Tommy had a long history with Athena as well, and a lot of mutual respect between the two, so the conversation never stalled.

It wasn't like Buck was ever left out either. Bobby and Athena were his family; more of his parents than his actual parents. Bobby cared for him, loved him, watched over him in ways his father never did. Athena was a dose of reality when he needed it. She was stern, expected the best from him, and didn't whitewash anything. He felt more comfortable in their home than he ever did in the house he grew up in.

And Tommy always had a hand on his leg, or his back, including him in the conversation or bragging on whatever he did at work that week. When Buck talked, Tommy looked at him like nothing else existed in the world. He listened, hung on to every word.

He made Buck feel special.

Which is why Buck wanted to take him home, rip off all of his clothes, and adore every inch of his body.

He couldn't do that yet though, because it was only seven-thirty and they still had to play the murder mystery game.

It started innocently enough. It was a fun game with pictures, paperwork, some evidence, and background on all the suspects. Buck figured they'd read through the material, follow along, and they'd be led to the murderer in no time.

Then Bobby rolled out the cork board and began pinning suspect photographs and pictures from the “crime scene”.

Things devolved from there.

Athena gave up before nine. “I solve murders all day long, I don't want to do it all night too.”

Buck still held out hope they'd leave on time.

Another mistake.

“Hon, it's getting late,” Buck said a little after nine, gently patting Tommy's back. They were sitting beside one another at the dining room table. Buck had been half paying attention, half going through a Wikipedia rabbit hole that started with active US serial killers and had somehow ended up on the origins of duct tape. “Maybe we should let them get some rest.”

“Buck, we haven't solved the murder yet,” Bobby replied, lifting both of his hands to show all the paperwork. “Cassie's ex-boyfriend is a prime suspect, but I have no physical evidence to prove he did it.”

“I think we should look more into the circus clown,” Tommy replied, handing Bobby yet another piece of fictional paperwork. “I learned a long time ago that you never trust a clown.”

“We already cleared the clown. He had an alibi.”

“Did he though? His best friend, the balloon artist, was his alibi. The clown could've paid him off.”

That's when Buck decided he'd be better off slipping away and joining Athena in the living room.

“Would you like some leftover pie?” Athena asked, eyebrow raised knowingly, as she lifted up her own slice.

Buck nodded. “I got it.”

He returned a moment later, pie in hand, extra whipped cream. He sat down on the couch, across from where Athena was curled up on the loveseat.

“There's not much on right now,” Athena said, staring at the TV, “but these home improvement shows always find a way to reel me in.”

“As long as it's not a murder mystery, I'll enjoy it.”

Athena let out a laugh. “They're in it deep, aren't they?”

“I'm not sure an actual murder would take them away from that game.”

Athena shook her head, peering into the dining room. “Our boys are something else, aren't they?”

Buck smiled. He couldn't help the butterflies in his stomach. The night may not be going as planned, but there was something so sweet, so domestic, about it all.

Everything felt... right.

“Yeah,” he replied, “they're something.”

Two more shows started and ended, and Tommy and Bobby could still be heard in the other room, arguing about whether it was the clown or the ex.

“You know, I looked up that game a while ago,” Athena whispered into the darkness of the living room, the only light from flashes on the TV, “and it wasn't the clown or the ex.”

Buck sighed sleepily. “I think we'll be spending the night tonight,” he mumbled, his eyes slowly closing where he laid on the couch.

“Already made up the guest bedroom,” Athena replied, taking another sip of her drink. “New toothbrushes in the bathroom too.”

It'd be another two hours before Tommy would come and gently wake up Buck and lead him to the guest bedroom. They'd brush their teeth, and change into some of Bobby's pajama pants before snuggling in bed.

And then, before the sun rose, Tommy would be popping up from a dead sleep to exclaim, “It was the candlemaker!” before running out of the room, and apparently right into Bobby who- from the sounds of their mumbled laughter and high fives- had the same epiphany.

Yeah, Buck had a problem. And he hoped he had it for the rest of his life.

[blueberrymocha]

Hi ! I saw that u already made hxh headcanons on a reader who's always cold, could you do then headcanons of the main 4 (hxh) with a reader who is actually always really nice and sweet, friendly and polite? But gets absolutely feral and relentless when someone is rude or hurts their loved ones??

Ty ahead and have great day 💗💗💗

main 4 with a reader who goes feral when someone hurts their loved one

gon

✰ he adores how kind and sweet you usually are

✰ while he can get along with virtually anyone, he prefers friendlier people like you

✰ and he’d probably also rely on you to keep him in check and be the calmer one

✰ so when someone makes a rude comment towards him, he definitely doesn’t expect you to jump to his defense

✰ and if you got physical with someone, he’s even more shocked

✰ his biggest concern is stopping the disagreement, he just doesn’t want to watch you get hurt over something trivial

✰ so as much as he loves you defending him, he’ll tell you it’s not worth the trouble and to let it go

✰ don’t get me wrong though, he’s quite happy that you’re willing to do that for him in the first place

“i’m so lucky to have you by my side… but seriously where did that come from!?”

killua

✰ he finds this pretty intriguing

✰ because under normal circumstances, you’d never result to aggression/violence

✰ and yet when he’s involved… you immediately drop those hesitations to stand up for him

✰ now at first, he might jump to the conclusion that you think of him as weak

✰ so while he bandages a cut you got in the fight, he’ll bring it up

“idiot… why’d you have to get hurt for me anyway? i could’ve dealt with it on my own.”

✰ but once you explain things, he realizes he was overthinking it

✰ and when he does, he becomes the biggest cheerleader

“yeah! beat his ass y/n!”

✰ to be honest, it reminds him a lot of gon

✰ which would make him love it even more

✰ however, if you go too feral, he’ll probably get you to stop

✰ because at the end of the day, whatever the person did didn’t even matter to him

kurapika

✰ he himself would be more protective over someone sweet and kind

✰ the world can be very harsh and someone who’s polite to everyone would come across as naive to him

✰ which is also why he’s the most surprised of all when you get defensive

✰ you going crazy on someone for insulting him is just completely out of character in his mind

✰ that being said, if you can handle it yourself, he won’t stop you

✰ after all he’s the exact same way

✰ not to mention he’s honored you’d do so much for his sake

✰ if it got out of hand, he’d just tell you to lay off

✰ and once the two of you were alone, he’d make it clear he thought your actions were justified

✰ although, if something similar happened in the future, he’d remind you not to engage and try to cool you down

✰ mainly because he’d prefer you don’t get into any fights at all

leorio

✰ you’re giving him whiplash

✰ like he can’t understand how someone as sweet as you could switch up so quickly

✰ we all know that he’s no stranger to getting into arguments

✰ so if you’re merely defending him with words, he’s got no problem

✰ if you started fighting the person, he’s conflicted

✰ cause part of him is like

“punch him harder!”

✰ but his rational side will probably break up the fight

✰ if you ended up getting injured for him, he’s really flattered

✰ and of course he takes care of every injury

✰ but also “don’t do that ever again”

[bejeweledraven]

call it what you want

All the drama queens taking swings All the jokers dressin' up as kings They fade to nothin' when I look at him

relationship headcanons with the gotham villains

parrings: oswald cobblepot x gn!reader, ed nygma x gn!reader, victor zsasz x gn!reader, jerome valeska x gn!reader, jeremiah valeska x gn!reader

genre: fluff, slight angst

warnings: mentions of criminal activity, mentions of toxic and unhealthy behaviors in romantic relationships/mentions of unhealthy relationships

requested?: yes

request: anon: can i request general relationship hc with oswald cobblepot, ed nygma, victor zsasz, jerome valeska and jeremiah valeska with a gn reader

song prompt: call it what you want by taylor swift

word count: 1392

oswald cobblepot:

first and foremost his love language is 100% gift giving

it would be both subtle and dramatic

subtle, because he would never ask directly; he'd listen

was there something you were talking about currently? or maybe something you've wanted forever? he would pick up on the slightest mention of it

but like i said, it would also be dramatic

an artist you've been listening to lately? he'll make sure you have every possible record on vinyl and cd, concert tickets, merch

a car that you've dreamed of for years? in your driveway, with every possible upgrade

growing up he didn't have much, so he wanted to make sure someone that he cares about never feels like that

although he's not really the one for physical intimacy, there are some small gestures he really loves

great example are forehead kisses - long evenings after tiring days, right by the fire places

he might not be huge with PDA, but everyone knows that you're involved with each other, making you untouchable

and when i say everyone, i mean everyone; his enemies, his allies, his staff

his worst fear is someone hurting you to hurt him; makes him extremely protective, making sure you're safe 24/7

your relationship is the definition of "private, but not secret"

ed nygma:

although the pre and post riddler ed might have fair share of differences when it comes to dating, there's definitely a lot of similarities

for example, for ed you're always the number one priority, not matter what

the pre-riddler ed would cancel any plans for you (not that he had loads of those anyways lol)

it would take one phone call from you for him to drop everything and meet you somewhere

if ed liked you, he would have the hardest time telling you; even if you were involved with someone else, he would be your shoulder to cry on, no matter how much it broke his heart

once you got together he would need regular reassuring of how much he means to you

would be a combination of his own insecurities and how highly he thinks of you

both before and after you start dating, you smiling in his direction would be enough to make his day

post-riddler is much more confident, cares significantly less of what people think of him

but even given all of his confidence, his old insecurities still get the best of him

he would get very jealous at times

whenever he would suspect you could have feelings for someone else (which is a conclusion he makes way too rapidly) he would feel like the awkward and practically invisible technician working at the police station all over again

takes a ton of reassuring to for him to seem confident again- because deep down he will always feel like that to an extent

being his partner means being his best friend- it's such a special connection

he relies on your support so so much

although it took him a while to learn to come to you with his issues, you're definitely the best support system he's ever had, and he makes sure you know how much that means to him

victor zsasz:

one word: TEASING

so so so much teasing

oddly enough, this might be the healthiest relationship on the list

he has an understanding of personal space and time

i mean don't get it wrong: he WILL show up unannounced in your living room in the middle of the night on a random tuesday, just chilling on the couch because "he missed you"

but if there is ever a situation where you tell him that you need space and time alone, he just respects it

he has a very laid back attitude towards you, but if the situation requires he will act very quick to protect you; whether you disapprove of his methods or not

even though like i said he gives you space and time if needed, he has his subtle ways of knowing whether you're staying safe and out of trouble

i can for sure see him with a fellow assassin, even, or maybe especially, working for a rival gang

business is business, and he doesn't see a reason why it should interfere with his personal life after work

and the constant competition is kind of fun and exciting to him, which is ironic, given the line of work

one time you were ordered by your bosses to take each other out, and for shits and giggles you even pretended to attempt it, but gave up easily just cause you couldn't take one another and this whole situation seriously

overall it's a very playful relationship of equal time teasing and strong sense of protection, on both sides

jerome valeska:

the best word to describe the relationship with this man is 'rollercoaster'

with the highest of highs and lowest of lows

good moments make you feel on top of the worlds and bad moments make your stomach drop

no two days are the same with this guy

no surprise that he is very obsessive

the second he saw you and was utterly and completely fixated on you and you only

it was obsession at first sight for sure (bonus points if you met at arkham)

and you can't really blame yourself, he was very charming

just something completely captivating about him

although his attention is all over the place, he would make sure to always have a good look at you, even with the corner of his eye

he just needs you around 24/7

the respect for personal space and time? yeah don't really count on that

at a certain point there's some sort of addiction formed, where you can't really function without him either

say what you want about jerome, but his energy is absolutely infectious and sometimes you just need someone who will make you feel like you're on top of the world

another thing about him is that his obsessive sense of protection mostly extends to guarding you from the GCPD, but not really to a basic sense of safety

he will take you with him to all of his most dangerous heists, because he doesn't want you 'missing out on all the fun'

he regularly finds places to break into in the middle of the night, like theme parks and big malls, and just goes CRAZY

he is there to make any absurd wish of yours come true

if during the time where everyone just assumed he was dead you moved on with your life and god forbid found happiness with someone else- he is changing that the second he's back

jeremiah valeska:

the jeremiah before the transformation was paranoid about absolutely everything

including your safety, mostly because of jerome

his childhood made him put up this shield around him and it wasn't easy to let you into his life - but once he did he shielded you even more than he ever did for himself

if it was up to him, you'd never leave his super-secure home/facility, because he's that worried

and many times he's begged you do to so

out of sheer sense of protectiveness over you

but staying in a windowless bunker is not really easy for many people

and he knows that he can't really argue you on that, so all he has left is worrying until you're back

you always were back, and he had to fight the urge to beg you not to ever leave again

the post-transformation jeremiah is also insanely protective- with the added effect of more confidence is slight obsessiveness

his obsessiveness would be much more subtle than one that his brother displayed - jeremiah would just always know where you are and who you're with

he would go to actual insane measures to protect you; he'd burn entire cities if it meant keeping you safe

both before and after the transformation he's not really the best at communicating his feelings, but his way of making up for it is acts of service - subtle before transformation and less subtle after the transformation

oddly enough, he also became a lot more openly romantic than before, with grand, dramatic gestures

not that he wasn't romantic before; just in a lot more shy and delicate way

one thing never changed - how much keeping you safe meant to him

[platinumrosetail]

Okay so could I request Adam, Poseidon, Loki and Shiva with a mischievous god reader that acts like the Cheshire cat he basically has his disappearing power thingy?

Also if you're fine with it can you make him a cat-human hybrid?

Sure! The Cheshire Cat is my favorite from Alice and wonderland! Though it’s been a while since I last seen Alice in wonderland so some things might be wrong so I’m sorry for that but I’ll try my best to make it as in character as possible.

Warning: noob author, male reader, and others.

Characters: Adam, Poseidon, Loki, shiva.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Adam:

You were a cat like god with a mischievous personality almost like Loki but less destructive and more in a fun pranking way as well as giving out riddles for fun to confuse your guest when they show up.

So it wasn’t a shock that you decided to play a playful little prank on the father of humanity though what you didn’t know was that he saw this coming, he copied your disappearing ability and teleported behind you spooking you in the process.

You of course was shocked at first before a big grin appeared on your face, amused at how the tables had turned on your little failed attempt of a prank on the father of humanity.

That was how both of you met, you two spend some time together afterwards though it’s usually you the one talking, whether it be about pranks and how they went or possible riddles to give to others you also give some to Adam but it’s more the ones that he can solve a bit easier instead of left confused on what you mean when you give riddles to other.

You usually lay on his lap when you’re not busy pranking or doing something else that requires your attention.

he pets your head and give little scratches behind your ears making you purr at the nice feeling.

Adam finds it cute that you’re cat like and has fun seeing how cat like you were with the help of inventions his children has created for cats to use and play with, you noticed it and decided to humor him though you soon came to found out that the cat toys are very fun to play with which made you like humans more for creating them, that made Adam proud of his children more than before especially on how it made your cute and docile as well as more tamed and not planking anybody as much.

Poseidon:

You had pulled a pranked Poseidon that ended with him covered in in mud and chicken feathers, you quickly put the blame on Loki, thankfully you can disappear and tun invisible and escape out of trouble but unfortunately for Loki he now has the wrath of the god of the sea trying to skewer him with his trident as he was the closest when it happened and it doesn’t help that he has a bad reputation when it comes to pranks more so than you do.

You like to hang around Poseidon even though many suggest you shouldn’t as he would kill your soon enough but you always declined that with a riddle like answer.

You mostly appeared in your vat form that you have as he actually gives your pets and scratches while in that form.

You mostly nap in that form on Poseidon’s lap but when you’re in your more human form you begin to tease him.

Poseidon didn’t want to admit to it but he found you cute especially your full cat form which was half why you weren’t a corpse yet.

Poseidon usually make empty threats which you would laugh at as you knew that he loved you too much to do that though he did say that was your words and not his which you also knew was false.

You lightly prank him and surprisingly enough he does prank about which in turn makes you tease him some more after that, you just hope it’s not revealed that you were the one that pranked him instead of Loki as you knew that would get you in so much trouble with Poseidon, what you didn’t know was that he already knew.

Loki:

You and Loki are both very similar though only you give out riddles to prank people along with prancing people the normal; as normal as a god’s prank can get, way.

You and him both prank as many gods as you can without getting into too much trouble for it but there are some instance where either one of your or both of you get in trouble;le by one of the older gods; mostly being Odin, though Loki surprisingly tries to take the blame for you even though you never asked him to.

Both of you try to get the other out of trouble if one of you get caught and punished; which usually is basically a timeout, and so the other makes a plan to help break the other out of timeout, sometimes leading both of you getting timeout for longer than before if the one helping the other escape get caught in the act of trying to break the other out.

You like to go in your cat form and have Loki scratch and pet you, sometimes he’ll even turn himself into a cat along with you for fun and so he can see what it’s like to be a cat as well.

You sometimes give riddles for Loki to solve for fun, you give him hard ones as it’s fun seeing him. Frustrated after still not getting the right answer to the riddle which sometimes is a very common answer to the riddle, you also say no to the answer he gives even though it’s right and later revealing that he had got the answer right after all.

That leads you to being playfully chased by Loki who wants to give payback for that but he can hardly catch what with your ability to disappear and teleport.

Shiva:

You met him through Rudra who wanted you to meet his childhood friend shiva and shiva to meet his new friend that he met while traveling.

You interested him what with your powers of disappearing and reappearing with a big grin and your cat like features.

You like to prank him which results in a prank war with all three of you as well as other gods as well.

What with him having two pairs of arms make it soon becomes a paradise of pets when you’re in your full cat form as he has multiple hands to get at all of your favorite spots to scratch and pet at the same time.

You give him riddles all the time as he gets frustrated with what the answer could be if he gets it wrong.

You like to watch him do his dances and relax, sometimes rudra likes to come and join to relax and dance with shiva.

Shiva would join you when you take naps whether you’re in your cat form or human form, but you always find yourself cuddling next to him when you wake up close to him.

(A/n: hope y’all liked it! I don’t think i have anything else top say so hope y’all have a wonderful day/evening/night!!)

[mariaace]

Love languages (Wind Breaker guys)

A/n: MORE WIND BREAKER!!i love this anime sm

@semisutopia @transmascaraa @kajibunny (very sorry if you didn't want to be tagged, i just assumed you would like to see this😢)

Btw inspiration for this from @un0rin and her love language hc's for bllk guys. (go check them out😠i mean pls do) Now enjoy reading!

Warnings:i think none?

Genre: Pure fluff

Pairings: Sakura, Suo, Umemiya, Kiryu, Kaji

Sweet things he does as your bf

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Sakura Haruka

Does Sakura have any idea what love languages are? Absolutely not. Still for giving, his is definitely act of service and quality time. He likes being with you all the time, even tho he would never admit it. While he's with you, he can actually relax and not have his guard up. Act of service comes out more naturally in him than he would like it. Don't get me wrong, he would do anything for you, but the problem is that he doesn't even realise when he's doing it. He doesn't realise how when you said you wanted a sertain boba he was already at the shop, he doesn't realise how when you said you like Suo's earrings he was asking him from where they are. And every time he realises, he blushes like crazy. For receiving he would prefer physical touch and words of affirmation. As much as he wouldn't admit it. He loves your touch and your compliments. Usually, he doesn't accept those things from people, but when it comes to you? He just can't resist you.

Suo Hayato

Now Suo is a very... Mature lover? Sure, let's go with that? 😅 MY POINT. For giving it's all. I'm sorry, i just can see him doing all the things regularly. Act of service, physical touch, gift giving, words of affirmation and quality time. He doesn't have a favourite way of spoiling you, okay?☺️ BUT. His words are always so beautifully picked out. He knows how to compliment you. Whether that be when he wants to make you flustered or tease you, be more passionate, when you need reassurance. His words just always work. Now, for receiving? Suo enjoys your compliments and spending time with you. He handles compliments veeery well tho. He's slick, okay? Most of the time he will return it back to you tho. Also, when he is one patrol, if he sees you he will go up to you. And when you finish school, he is already at the gate waiting for you.

Umemiya Hajime

Now for this big sunshine of a man. For giving it would totally be gift giving. But not just any gift, no no no. Most of the time it's flowers. Flowers he grew himself and gave them to you. He learns your favourite flower and puts it in graden right away. His other gifts are always very creative too. He sometimes doesn't even realise when is he already at the store to buy them, it just happens, okay? Of course, we can't forget also, physics touch. This man is clingy as hell, in a good way tho. Always an arm around your waist or resting on your shoulders, hugging you when he sees you right away, hands interlocked while you're walking together, etc. Now for receiving uhm...to be honest this guy doesn't care. He would genuinely enjoy everything the same amount. He loves everything you do, like you could breath in his direction and he'll find it cute.

Mitsuki Kiryu

Okay, let me start again by saying. Kiryu. Is. A. Gentleman. He is the Man in Wind Breaker. For giving, i feel like act of service definitely and words of affirmation. And kind of physical touch. But like, soft physical touch, not like Umemiya who would jump on you, Kiryu is very soft and careful with his touch towards you especially. And now for his compliments. His are kind of similar to Suo's to be honest. He is soft spoken and knows how to gift compliments. He is also cannonly popular with girls so. For receiving tho? Hm..... I had to think here, but I think i would go with quality time and gift giving. And by gift giving, i mean giving him little things. I don't think he is a person who prefers big gifts over little. Like, they're very important because they are from you. And for the other, he just likes spending time with you.

Kaji Ren

Wohoo have i ever told you how much i love Kaji, hm? No? Well now i do. I fucking love this guy. Now onto the actual thing. For giving...well i would say quality time and act of service. He's not very good with words or touch, so he prefers to show his affection through other things. Like act of service, and the point of that, is that he doesn't do it for anyone else. If you told people how Kaji treats you, most of his friends would be like "Are we talking about the same Kaji?" You're just special okay? Also all of the time that he can be with you, he is not waisting it, you are glued to him. Now, for receiving as much as this guy won't admit it, it's physical touch. Again, like Sakura because of his pride. He might act annoyed, but thr moment you pull away from him, he's like "Nuh uh get back here." Yeah, you would bethe one to grab hus hand and hug him first, but he would also eventually. Not really in front of others tho. Or maybe sometime...

© mariaace 2024 pls do not copy, translate, steal or claim any of my works!

[siddyyyyyyyy]

Brother's Bestfriend

Roy Harper x Reader

wc: 2.2 K summary: Best friend of your brother really likes you, and you finally cave in warnings: selling drugs, smoking weed, (overprotective brother) a/n: divider (@xurengu0), have him in my mind lately, so here you go. there are way too little fics about him. enjoy!

Ever since Roy saw you fighting with Jason, he knew he needed a special way to win you over. Back then, he didn‘t know you were his sister. Even now, he is still trying to figure out on how to flirt or let alone get close to you. Jason made it clear that he will break every bone in his body if Roy even thinks about you.

He didn‘t see you very often, but when he did, he couldn‘t help but stare anytime you were near. It was as if you were hypnotising to him, in a good way. The only thing that creeps him out a little is how similar you behave to Jason. It‘s like two people have almost the same personality.

You are just a bit more bearable and nice to him and others.

All in all, he was down bad for you. From the very first time he heard and saw you bickering with Jason, that boy was smitten. It wasn‘t even on purpose, something about you made his brain chemistry change. So, he definitely wasn‘t expeting you to catch him selling dope to stranger in a random party.

From all the failed attempts of flirting and winning you over, this just added another nail to the grave. From getting beaten up from Jason for crushing on you, this was not a good time to see you again. Even for you, it took a moment to process what‘s fully happening. But now it is a bad time to pretend you don‘t know each other and approach him before he could get away with this.

»No, no, no, wait— I want to talk about this,« you stop him mid-fleeing-attempt, grabbing onto his arm, »what are you even selling? Weed or worse?«

Roy is actually surprised with how… calm you sound. He expected much worse, probably even getting to face Jason if you decided to give him a call. But no, you sound rather concerned and he has the strong urge to reassure you.

»Not ‚worse‘, just some coke. I also have joints, but only for me.«

He blurts out with a shrug, flashing a casual smile at you. That doesn‘t ease you up however, just makes you glad he seems to be honest.

»Yeah, that‘s… a bit less worse than I expected.«

With a small sigh, you let go of his arm and fish your phone out.

»Wa- wait a second, you‘re not gonna call him, right? I didn‘t even use, I was just selling! I can give you my joint if you want.«

That last statement made you pause, glancing down at his hands that are already rummaging through his pockets. You slowly put your phone away, crossing your arms in an attempt to not come off as too curious.

»You would?« He nods quickly at your question, already having a joint in his hand and tries his best to give you his sweetest puppy eyes. You purse your lips, taking a glance around before you nod towards the exit.

Getting high wasn‘t new to you, but it sure was for Roy seeing it in first hand. He never thought you were a little experimental, but it makes sense now. He lit your joint with his lighter, letting you have the first few drags before you share with him. The rush comes slow but steady, making sure you don‘t smoke too much or do anything wrong while smoking. Time flies by fast when you‘re being high and talking to someone decent for once, sitting by the porch of the house party. You only realise how late it is once you get a call from your brother, picking it up just to hear Jason going straight on lecturing you. Right, his patrol ended and you aren‘t in the apartment you are both sharing for now. With an exhausted sigh and some last words, you make your way back home. Roy insists on walking you home, which you politely accept. The walk back was a little funny, leaning against him for support while he is no better. But once at the front door of the apartment complex, you both seem to have sobered up a little because of the walk.

»So, Jason‘s waiting, huh? Don‘t snitch on me.«

»Oh, trust me, he doesn‘t even know I smoke weed occasionally.«

The irony, a previous crime and drug lord won‘t allow his younger sibling to consume any form of drugs or alcohol. But you both know there‘s a deeper reason to that. The overdose of your mother was bad enough to traumatise both of you equally. Maybe Jason still holds onto that, but you don‘t see any point on missing out on any fun because of that.

Still, it‘s better Jason doesn‘t know any of this. Let alone the fact you go to some less than harmless house parties. Of course, he is smart and knows the few parties you go to are at least a little illegal, but as long as he doesn‘t see you actively use drugs, he doesn‘t bother.

Walking into the dark apartment, you were greeted with Jason in his full Red Hood armors still on, the white slits of his helmet glowing in the dark. You jump up slightly in surprise, scowling at him after.

»Standing there like a murderer won‘t help you, you know?«

He simply shrugs, taking you in intently. But you are skilled in keeping suspicion off of you. With a casual demeanor, you take your shoes off and hang your jacket up.

»How was the party? Met anyone?«

You simply shake your head at his question in response, walking past him to the kitchen.

»No, just the usual people.« A bag of chips sits atop the counter, but you find something way better. Sandwich maker.

Without another word, you make yourself a sandwich with all the ingredients that sound about good right now.

»Right. And you walked home by yourself? This late?«

He presses further, leaning against the doorframe of the kitchen and watches you prepare the two sandwiches. With a quick glance to the clock, he notes it is about four AM. He tilts his head.

»Oh, no. A friend got me here.« You answer back just as casually as before and close the sandwich maker, waiting for it to cook. He watches you, his expression unreadable from under his helmet.

»Right. What friend? Was it Jess?« You perk up at his guess, turning your attention to him.

»You remembered the name of my friend? Wow, you deserve the best brother award of the year.«

You tease instead, keeping watch over your sandwich maker again. Once the small light turns green, you open it up and almost salivate at the smell of fresh sandwiches and carefully take them out.

»I‘m going to sleep anyway,« walking towards, you put the second sandwich into his hand, »good night.«

With that, you disappear into your room, glad he didn‘t seem to be overly suspicious of something and just hope he won‘t figure out anything.

Jason looks down at the sandwich in his hand, his expression softening under his helmet. Finally, he takes it off and eats it, retreating back into his room.

↣

Since that one bonding session over a joint you had with Roy happened, you became closer friends. Sharing a small secret together from Jason was both exciting and funny. In some way, at least.

Getting back home at the same ungodly hours as Jason became more frequent. He stopped questioning it at some point, but deep down, he is still slightly worried. Still, he won‘t push you to tell him about it, considering you actually look happier for once.

Over at some random park, Roy finally had the courage to ask you out. The moment couldn‘t be any more chaotic, to be honest. While feeding some ducks at the small lake, it first seemed like a peaceful moment between the two of you. Roy was busy feeding bread crumbs to the little animals, before he speaks up in a more softer tone than usual. Once he got his question across, asking you out to hang out at his place for a movie marathon and confessing his feelings somewhat, the ducks decided to ruin it.

One of them was impatient, biting into his hand to get the last breadcrump, which made him yelp and fall back into the grass. The duck followed suit, jumping onto his chest to just scream at him. The whole scene of Roy getting attacked by a duck was funny, almost forgetting what he was asking you before that.

But you help him get the duck off of him and gently back into the water. The animal wanted to run at him again, but you held it back as best as you could and convinced that eager thing to return to the rest of the ducks.

A small huff comes from Roy and he sits up, a bit red in his face as he waits for you final answer. Well, the answer was obvious with how you smiled at him.

Finally, at his cramped apartment, it was cosy and comfortable on his couch. Being together under a soft blanket was the best thing you‘ve probably done together with him and he couldn‘t be more happy. Some old horror movies were playing on the TV, making this somehow even more cosy for you two.

The casual date turned into a cuddle session the later it got, ending up in his bed, again cuddled up together. It was actually way more comfy than you thought it would be. His strong and big arms around you felt so squishy and perfect, you couldn‘t help yourself but bite into them. It confused him a lot at first, but eventually just accepted it and let you be, knowing he wouldn‘t let that make him scare him off. It was endearing either way.

Falling asleep was even better. You didn‘t think you would sleep so well in one night, waking up well-rested for once. He felt the same, if not better. He finally found a decent and sweet soul, ignoring the fact that you are related to Jason Todd. All that mattered is that you are sweet and caring to him and he is trying to reciprocate all of that in double amount.

Making breakfast together was fun and relaxing, having missed some kind of domestic feeling in his old apartment. He let you wear one of his shirts and shorts, melting every time his eyes met your form, sitting by the table and eating the pancakes peacefully. He can‘t help but steal a few small kisses onto the top of your hair and your shoulder, really wherever he can reach. It felt blissfully normal with you. Being so casual and affectionate together was like second nature to the both of you.

Until his bell rang, making him answer the door. However, his heart sinks dramatically as soon as he sees who it is in front of him.

»Did you see my sister? She didn‘t come home last night.«

Oblivious, you stay seated at the small table and sip on your coffee, not thinking much of it all.

Roy on the other hand, doesn‘t know what to say. Should he confess and then pay with his death, or should he just close the door? No, both options would make him end up six feet under.

»I, uh...«

He sighs out instead and rubs the back of his neck, trying to sound as casual as possible. It‘s not working, judging by the twitch of Jason‘s eye. Without another word, he steps in and gets past Roy easily, walking to the kitchen since it‘s the closest room to the entrance.

He halts once he sees you, calmly eating some breakfast. You look like you just woke up, a little dishevelled and sleepy. Your clothes slightly crinkled— wait…

»Is that Roy‘s shirt?«

You purse your lips and try to approach him jokingly, but Roy arrives behind Jason, red in his face.

»Uh, yeah, what a coincidence, huh?«

The red head tries to joke, but it falls on deaf ears. Without wasting any time, Jason turns around and glares even harder at him. He probably got the wrong idea of this, taking it as your sign to cool the tension in the room.

»Hey, look, I was just hanging out. And we‘re dating now, so… just calm down, yeah?«

Jason tenses even more at your words, his theories now proven right.

»Don‘t tell me you two fucked—«

»No!«

You and Roy both exclaim at him, huffing out afterwards.

»I knew something was up with you two...« Jason sighs out instead of getting even more furious but keeps his eyes on Roy. It‘s a silent warning that he can and will rip his head off if something goes wrong between the two of you.

But luckily he isn‘t mad at you, one of the perks of being his little sister.

»Just get home in the evening.« He grumbles eventually before leaving the apartment, leaving you two embarrassed messes alone. Either way, you know he‘ll start lecturing you once you get back home in the evening, but that‘s not your problem for now.

a/n: made this because there are so little Roy x Reader fics around.... made me sad, so here you go. hope you enjoyed it!

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