#i cannot stress enough how terrible he is
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nabaath-areng · 4 months ago
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I rarely post Laurens, but I found this again and I felt like I had to.
Garlean soldier steals from the army to redneck engineer a weapon capable of replicating aether manipulation like a conjurer, building it so that it physically becomes a part of his body, then runs away before he can be persecuted to abandon his wife and 5 children to live the sleazy cougar life of his dreams.
Think of the gif where Batman has Catwoman's animations and moves around all sexy and seductive and you got him. He will leave you with all his tavern bills and giggle about it. He's that one Vine with the lady dancing on that heavy machinery to Gimme more with Britney Spears before the camera pans out to the city view below. He is probably the worst character I have in terms of personality, but unfortunately I love him.
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batgeance · 1 year ago
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god bruce fucking hates talking to wayne execs and financial advisors
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geaibleu89 · 11 months ago
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Bio for my Overboss OC, Daniel-it's his birthday today and he's another OC who needed un updated design 🤷��‍♂️
He's not a nice person
His bio can be found here on Pillowfort:
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yuribalisms · 2 years ago
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If someone could just like…. Stab me through the eye that would be great idk
#idk what it is about today but I feel… terrible#not physically just mentally#and not even in a way that’s easy to place I just want to lay in the floor and melt into it#tbh I think it is premature exhaustion and anxiety ABOUT the exhaustion#because tomorrow we have two new apartment tours#and then Thursday (which is my other day off this week) I have that first therapy appointment#so my brain is not classifying either of those days as actual ‘days off’#(and I mean they’re not they will both be extremely draining)#AND THEN one of the store’s big managers insisted on doing the schedule instead of letting our department manager do it#so it’s sooooo fucked up and I won’t have a day off until NEXT Thursday and he scheduled me a bunch of inconsistent morning/evening shifts#so…. I am…. going to have literally no free time for like two weeks straight#no time to decompress no time to do things I think are fun no time to catch up on sleep#and my mom keeps messaging me about getting a new car which yes I need a new car and I WANT a new car and I’m finally in a position to GET#a new car#but she’s like ‘you have to go test drive a bunch of cars to find the one you REALLY want and then we’ll negotiate for it with you’#but I cannot stress enough that I would genuinely rather kill myself than go to a dealer ship and test drive cars by myself#I also just do not give a shit about cars there is never going to be one I ‘love’ because cars are cars I just want one that functions#I don’t CARE which one it is or how it drives or what the fuck ever I will NEVER care#but she keeps insisting I do it and I know they won’t help me go negotiate if I don’t do this first 😭#and I have a dentist appointment for the first time in like three years in a couple weeks and I know I probably have so many cavities#from when I got super depressed for like four months and didn’t brush my teeth at all#and I am just so overwhelmed#new apartment hunting new car shopping new therapist dentist appointment AAAGGGHHHH#I thought it might be a good idea to do it all at once so it’s all over with and I don’t have to have like four month period where it’s just#hopping from one thing to the other#except now I am just exhausted and overwhelmed and grumpy and feel like I can’t handle ANY of it let alone all of it#maybe one of the new apartments will go well tomorrow so at least I can cross that off and budget new rent prices….#ugh#kaz rambles
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malpractice-morale · 2 years ago
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you know green thumbs? And how people who are shit with plants have black thumbs? I am that but for cars….
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truecorvid · 5 months ago
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miserable little end to my college career
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gotta-winwin · 3 days ago
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OT13 Reaction -- when you ask them for an absurd amount of money as a prank
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SCOUPS:
will transfer you the money, no questions asked. unless it's like an insane amount of money - like enough to buy a car - then he'd be concerned and ask why you need it. are you in trouble? are you being blackmailed? what can he do? he's ready to assist you in anyway possible and will be sulky when he finds out it's a prank. relieved, but a little sad that you'd even feel the need to test his loyalty to you.
JEONGHAN:
his immediate reaction is no. have you guys seen that interview where one of the members (i think it was dino? mingyu? my memory is so bad) said that jeonghan doesn't play when it comes to money and it lowkey stingy? yeah that. he'll definitely be hesitant and might even just flat out say no. extremely proud when you reveal it was a prank all along. i knew it was a prank, baby~ the student can't fool the teacher~
JOSHUA:
his immediately worried something terrible has happened. it's uncommon for you to ask him for money, usually its small enough sums that you don't even have to ask - you have his card anyways. stressed and annoyed when you tell him its all a prank. ai~ you know my weak heart cannot take you stressing me out.
JUN:
a little confused why you're asking him for money. he's the type to not catch on, you being in danger isn't the immediate thought when you ask him for 300 thousand dollars. will not react when you tell him it was a prank, the request for the money hasn't even properly computed in his head yet.
HOSHI:
he's going to complain he doesn't have that much money even though we all know he does. he'll agree to transfer it to you, but will whine and nag the whole time that this is his hard earned money! he loves you but why are you taking it away! another type to get sulky when you tell him its a prank and you don't actually need the money.
WONWOO:
ummm...why? he'll ask a shit ton of questions before agreeing, he needs to know why, when, what, where, who? all the details. this is his money after all, he needs to know where its all going. it gets to the point where you give up, just telling him its a prank cause his questioning isn't making it fun anymore. he tsks and asks if you have too much time on your hands to be pranking him.
WOOZI:
the money is in your bank account before you even finish asking. he's lowkey surprised you haven't asked sooner, he's always open with how much he's making and constantly tells you he'd just rather you guys have a joint bank account so he can spoil you. refuses to let you return the money once you admit its a prank. he makes more than enough anyways.
MINGHAO:
another one that's immediately worried. money's never been a topic you guys have ever talked about so he knows there must be something wrong. asks a boatload of questions trying to make sure you're okay and not getting scammed online or something. ends up just chiding you for even falling into a trap where you need that much money and narrows his eyes at you when you tell him its a prank. he thinks you're crazy and has too much time on your hands.
DK:
poor baby's scared. sure he makes a lot of money but he's never needed that much. eyes are popping out of his head when you tell him the sum of what you need. he agrees, of course, anything for you, but his hands are shaking as he reaches for his wallet. dramatically flops onto the floor when you tell him its a prank, begging you to never do that again - he might be rich but in his mind he's got like 5 cents in his bank account.
MINGYU:
blinks. pretends to think about it, but really he's been waiting for this day. the only possibility in his mind as to why you need the money is only for good things, and who is he to not spoil his baby? begs you to take his card anyways when you tell him its a prank. it's literally the only reason why i work, baby. just take my card.
SEUNGKWAN:
he's dramatic, screeching about how that's an insane amount of money and that he wouldn't even drop that kind of money on himself- and he loves himself very very much! calms down and genuinely sits your ass down to ask why you even need it. feels extremely betrayed when you tell him its a prank and vows to get revenge.
VERNON:
he sighs. he knows this trend and he's not having it. baby, you know i'd do anything for you right. you've got me like wrapped around your finger. you literally don't need to test my loyalty. apologizes when you get sulky over him already knowing the prank and offers to let you try again - this time he'll play along. ohmygod that's a lot of money are you being blackmailed? shopping in the black market? getting us a house in Bali? shrugs when you complain about his reaction being ingenuine and over the top. there is only so much he can do.
DINO:
his jaw is dropping at how large the sum is. yeah, he's got that money, and he'll show you his bank account just to prove it. but he'll start listing out what everything is for. that sum's set aside for our house, that one's to send our kids to school - we never said how many we'd have but i set aside enough to four university tuitions, and- you'll cut him off cause he's going to make you cry with how thoughtful he is. scolds him for ruining your prank. prank? he's confused. what do you mean prank? he got so invested in telling you everything he's saved up for your shared future he kinda forgot the original question.
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doqt33th · 1 year ago
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SINGULARITY
MIRAGE/READER
SUMMARY: You and Mirage have been pining for each other for a while now. A nasty summer storm drives you straight into his arms. Shenanigans ensue.
WORD COUNT: 18k. Sorry I’m insane
WARNINGS: 18+ and I CANNOT STRESS THAT ENOUGH!! Explicit PWP, fingering + oral (fem receiving), penetrative sex, mild spit kink. Reader is fem and uses she/her pronouns but is written fairly androgynous. No descriptors of appearance beyond the basics and no (y/n) used.
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Familiar streets flashed by at increasing speeds, traffic and pedestrians flickering by and blurring together into a smorgasbord of color, all gilded by the setting sun. Unconsciously, you dug your fingers into the seams of the leather seat beneath you, worrying the stitches. Out of the corner of your eye, the radio blazed to life with color and that oh-so-familiar symbol.
“Hey, hey, easy on the merchandise, hot stuff,” Mirage crackled out of the speakers lightheartedly, and you immediately yanked your hands into yourself like they’d been burned. In your worrying, you’d seemingly forgotten about what — or rather, who — exactly was your ride.
“Oh— my bad, I wasn’t thinking,” you said, sinking your weight back and down, instead picking at your nails to give your hands something to do. God, you were so nervous, and for what? Mirage knew all these people— these bots, and knew them well. They were all friends! Or amiable towards each other, at the very least. And they were the good guys. Saved the world and all that.
So why were you so anxious?
“You’re good, don’t worry ‘bout it.” He slowed to a stop at a red light. Your leg started to bounce. “Sooo… you wanna tell me what’s on your mind? Save me a trip to Noah’s repair shop? I’d hate for you to start taking your emotions out on me, y’know.”
You scoffed, eyes sliding to the radio. The grin that pulled at the corners of your mouth was one you were helpless to stop. He just had that effect on you, where around him you became a slave to your laughter and, additionally, also became one half of a terrible joke machine that Mirage happily completed.
Leather creaked as you nudged the inside of the door with your boot to chastise him. “You love when I take my emotions out on you, dick. Don’t lie.”
“Only the good ones,” he shot back, and you could hear the grin in his voice. “You nervous about meeting the others?”
His probe was successful; you fought the urge to shrink at your feelings being read so accurately and so immediately. “I— yeah. I am, and I don’t even know why. I’m sure they’re all great, I’m just working myself up over nothing.”
Red faded to green. Carried on the tide of forward-moving traffic, Mirage rolled ahead, eventually slipping over to make a turn. You watched him twist his mirrors to check his blind spot.
“Ah, c’mon. Nobody could blame you, you’re meeting a bunch of aliens for the first time. Pretty trippy for anyone. ‘specially if those aliens are, like, double your size. And robots.” A short chuckle topped off his words.
“Right. I just don’t wanna fuck it up or embarrass myself, you know how it is. I don’t wanna embarrass you, either.”
“Oh, Primus, trust me. You’re not gonna embarrass me. I don’t even think that’s possible. Prime’s seen me in a lot worse shape than bringing you in to meet him.” The world continued to roll by. Brick buildings blotted out the sunshine in intermittent flashes. “You got good marks from your favorite bot, you’ll be fine.” The dismissive tone of his voice was working, in a weird way, to assuage your fears.
“Excuse me,” you said, crossing your arms over your chest pointedly. “My favorite bot?”
“What, am I not?” A downright theatrical gasp hissed out of the speaker. “Have you been cheating on me?”
Cheeks hot with a flush at even the joking insinuation of being together, you glanced away from the impassive Autobot symbol on the radio and out the window. Still, the laugh barked out of you was sudden and sharp, and quickly dissolved into giggles. “Yes. Mirage. I’m sorry. There’s another ten foot tall alien robot in Brooklyn that’s been vying for my attention. We’re done.”
“I should throw you out on the street right now,” Mirage fussed playfully, his evident pout tinging his voice. “For breakin’ my spark. Also I’m taller than that.”
“You wouldn’t dare. I’m fragile.”
“I dunno. Noah gets his ass kicked around pretty good and he’s still kickin’ it.”
“I am not Noah,” came your tongue-in-cheek rebuttal. “And Noah just refuses to give up even when it’s good for him.”
“Thought qualities like determination were supposed to be big things with you guys.”
“In moderation.”
Mirage barked a laugh. “Ha! Should tell that to Prime. He’ll blow a gasket.” You opened your mouth to reply, only to be cut off. “No, seriously, tell it to Prime, we’re here.”
The easy confidence that your playful back-and-forth had teased out instantly chilled into a dense mass in your stomach; Mirage was rolling slowly up to a nondescript warehouse buried deep within the old industrial part of Brooklyn, and the way the worn brick loomed over you even in the car made your heart rate pick up.
Now or never.
Familiar alien whirs and clicks of shifting and setting metal filled your ears as Mirage rose into his bipedal mode, the driver’s seat gently ejecting you onto your own two legs on the pavement. Following the motion, you took a few steps forward, but still balked a little at the half open door. Inside, you heard voices of varying timbre, and you fought the urge to turn tail.
Now. Or. Never. Gritted teeth accompanied the repetition of your thought.
The displacement of air behind you — and the soft, constant mechanical noises emanating from his body — signaled Mirage’s presence before his voice.
He said your name with surprising care, using a tone that only came out when he was really being sincere. You couldn’t help the way your face warmed at it as you turned, craning your neck up to meet his gaze. “Hey, you, uh, you want me to go in ahead of ya? Normally I’d be like ‘ladies first’ and all that, but you said you weren’t feeling too jazzed about going in—“
“Yeah, actually, if you could, that would be… great. That would be great.”
“Gotcha. Let you psych yourself up a little more before you go in, I see how it is. Let me do the talking,” he affirmed with an easy grin and a nod, bouncing on the balls of his pedes a few times before striding forward. His long legs folded easily under him as he ducked under the lowered garage door, and you traipsed after, smoothing your thumb over your knuckles repeatedly.
The warehouse yawned beyond you, orange shafts of light cutting gashes into otherwise brownish darkness. Old graffiti sprayed across the walls told you that Ramona had been there once, then Nick, then Darnell, and a million others. And you were there now, feeling impossibly small, yes, but a little more resilient with the fading sunlight at your back and Mirage, like always, at your side.
He’d become a permanent fixture in your life from the day you’d met him — when you’d strong-armed Noah into giving up his secret about his Porsche, and the mysterious car had ended up being a twelve-foot-tall robot with a literal motormouth that made a playful pass at you within the first hour of your first conversation. You’d been flustered out of your mind, but had just kept coming back out of unfettered curiosity and outright fascination. Aliens were real, and Noah was friends with one, and it— he could turn into a Porsche.
Mind-shattering observations on the surface, yes. Mirage tended to deflate the grandeur, though, because he never acted like aliens did in the movies or in books. There was no ‘We come in peace!’ bullshit. He was so easy. Everything with him was so easy. He was loudmouthed and extroverted and genuinely hilarious; you spent hours in Noah’s garage trading terrible jokes — mostly bad sexual innuendos — or buckled to Mirage’s driver’s seat as he flew down Central Avenue on the wrong side of the limit and blasted Haddaway so loud it nearly busted your eardrums.
Weird to say an alien robot was your friend, but he was. He gave you rides to work, to your lectures, to your labs, wherever; in fact, he got petulant when you dared to take the bus one day to give him a break, and made it a point to pry your routine out of you so that he could take you wherever you wanted, no fares needed. 
So infuriating. You loved it.
You loved… maybe more than just the back-and-forth. Maybe more than the bad jokes. Maybe more than the late-night drives. You were starting to think— starting to realize you loved big blue optics, and the rumble of a 260 horsepower engine when you made just the right innuendo, and broad, incredibly intricate servos that dwarfed yours in size but were so, so careful…
Man. You tried not to think about it too much. It as a concept made you laugh with its own absurdity. Poor human chick fell in love with the giant alien robot that made her laugh. It wasn’t… debilitating. You still functioned like a normal adult. Mostly. Except for that one night like two weeks ago where you’d been arguing with him about some stupid shit and he’d scooped you up, right off the ground, in both servos and held you there, digits interlaced against your back and thumbs on your front.
It wasn’t the first time he’d ever held you like that — he’d done it a few times — but something was different that night… even if he’d only done it to gain an upper hand in your bickering. The air crackled with latent electricity, made your skin buzz in all the right places, especially when Mirage had gone quiet for once in his life as he stared at you in his grasp. When you’d prompted him with his name, he’d only responded by gently stroking a thumb over the swell of your chest, which had made you gasp air in so sharply that it burned in your throat. The metal left a tingling path on your skin under your shirt in its wake and immediately sent your heart rate skyrocketing past whatever the fuck was a normal BPM.
He’d snapped back to reality at the sudden expansion of your lungs and had attempted to play it all off as a joke. You remembered how you’d still stumbled when your shoes touched the ground, an absolutely insane feeling of genuine heat rocking you as your brain seized the feeling of his touch while it still sparked against your nerve endings and helpfully replayed it over and over and over again. Sure, the rhythm of banter came back after a stuttering beat, but you never really cooled the warmth on your face for the rest of that night — and when Mirage had dropped you off at your apartment, your door was shut and locked for about five minutes before your shaking hand was frantically worked beneath the waistband of your pants.
…Whew. Definitely something a little more than friendly there. Maybe even more than pure love, something a little slicker and deeper that buzzed against your bones and coiled low in your stomach. It made you feel a little weird — just objectively, because of what Mirage was — but damn if it didn’t feel good to indulge.
God, fuck, why were you thinking about that now, of all times? Escapist fantasies be damned, you were going to meet Mirage’s comrades-friends-coworkers and leave a good impression. Not drool over the worn-out memory replaying in your head for the thousandth time this week.
Out of the darkness and around corners, they emerged. The stealth wasn’t on purpose; you didn’t even think they could be stealthy. Oh, one was coming right for you now — tall was the only word your brain could muster. Tall and red and square were added to the list of adjectives as the stately bot approached, servos collected into fists at his sides and shoulders thrown back.
“Priiiime,” Mirage greeted warmly, throwing his arms out at his sides in his favorite pose. “Look, hey, I know what you said about bringing more people around, but I swear— Hey!”
Completely ignoring your friend’s (status pending) greeting, the bot— Prime, holy shit, this is THE Prime, was kneeling down, leaning forward, and he was right in your face. You fought the very biological urge to flinch. Blue optics considered you for a moment before narrowing and flicking to your right from his lowered position.
“Mirage,” Optimus started with a gravelly tone  from behind his faceguard that communicated exasperation above all else. “I explicitly stated that for our safety — and yours — that we were to come in contact with no more humans.”
“Sir, I gotta be honest with you. Kinda hard on a planet that’s got, what, five billion of ‘em? Six?” Mirage glanced at you for backup. You stared back flatly, refusing to say anything that might put you on the business end of a laser cannon.
“You were told to remain incognito so you could recover.” Optimus continued, his gaze returning to you. With a shunk of shifting metal, his faceplate slid away. His faceplates were weathered; the chipped metal around his optics gave the illusion of wrinkles and eyebags. Tired. He seemed tired. “This is not incognito. What is your name?”
You gave it after taking a beat to steady yourself. He repeated it back to you. “How did you come in contact with Mirage?”
“I, uh— Noah, Noah Diaz, he’s my friend. I basically pried it out of him,” you said with a nervous laugh. “So it’s not Mirage’s fault. I’m just nosy.”
At the mention of Noah, Optimus seemed to visibly relax; he moved back slightly, though he remained kneeling, and the narrowed, suspicious squint of his optics rounded out into something much softer.
“…I see. Then I assume you understand the… precarious nature of our existence on your planet.” he said, his tone grave and his optics searching your face.
You nodded, pressing the flesh of the inside of your cheek between your teeth for a moment as you came up with a suitably diplomatic response that still conveyed your friendliness. “I do, yeah. Noah told me most of it. What he could, anyway. I just wanted to make it clear that I’m not— I’m not a threat here. Like I don’t work with the, uh, the government or anything. Whatever you guys need help with, I’m available, even if that just means keeping my mouth shut.”
Christ, you were glad this wasn’t your day job. You’d be such a shit ambassador. I’m available. What the hell did that even mean? Fuck yes, you were available, your brain guffawed, thinking of broad metal thumbs brushing over your chest.
You blinked hard, squeezing your eyelids together until the world came back in a photo negative, to scold yourself.
Although you’d stumbled through your reply, Optimus seemed to approve. He rose with a great creak of metal off of his knee and backed up to give you space, though he still regarded you with those sharp blue optics that felt as though they pinned you to the concrete below. “I see Noah chooses his company well. I should have assumed his sentiments would extend to his companions.” He shut his optics for a moment and dipped his head, as if considering deeply what to say next. “I am not sure how much Mirage — or Noah — divulged to you.”
“A fair amount— well. Any amount that won’t get them in trouble,” you called up, taking in deeper breaths to project your voice up the two stories of height to his head. To your side, Mirage snorted. “I know your name— Optimus, I know that, and I know about the Autobots. A little bit about the— fuck, what were they called—“
“Terrorcons?” Mirage supplied, and you were impressed at how quiet he’d been otherwise.
“Terrorcons, thank you. Other than that, not much. How much should I know?”
“Your knowledge is sufficient. All we fear — and all we risk—“ Optimus added with a pointed look at Mirage, who looked incredibly sheepish. “—at the moment is discovery. So long as you maintain secrecy, no harm shall come to us… or you, for that matter.”
It almost sounded like a threat, but Prime worded it very much like a warning. You decided it was best to heed his word — not that you really had another option.
“Right. Okay. Well— I mean, it was nice to meet you. People — humanity, I guess — aren’t bad. Most of us aren’t, anyway. Just, uh, let me know if there’s something Noah and I can get or do for you.”
Prime’s gaze shifted away from you. In fact, it seemed to shift away from the warehouse in general, looking somewhere far beyond the now-shut garage door. “Your generosity is admirable, but it is not humans primarily that we are concerned with.”
Brows furrowed at his vague answer, you thought it over for a second — and then decided not to push it. He probably knew best when it came to whatever foreboding nebulous space threat loomed over your collective heads; you would leave it up to the experts.
“Oh, well, golden rule and all that,” you still offered in terms of a response. That got his attention. His massive head tilted downwards to look at you once more with curiosity. “If I crash landed on someone else’s planet, I’d want them to be hospitable, y’know? Just trying to make the best of a shitty situation.”
Like he couldn’t handle the terrible punishment of silence anymore, Mirage butted in. “See, Prime? I told you she was cool.”
A short jolt shook the broad, boxy line of his shoulders, and at first you had thought he’d coughed, and then you realized he laughed. It was barely anything, a huff of a chuckle, but you glowed with the indirect affirmation. Just made Optimus Prime laugh. Maybe you weren’t such a terrible diplomat.
He wasn’t looking at you, though, rather at Mirage, and you swore from your low vantage point you could see a barely-there smile on Prime’s faceplates communicating…was that smug amusement? As the tall bot carefully made his way past you, he stopped in front of your companion, and let a heavy servo land on the headlight adorning his shoulder.
“No matter what you may feel, you chose well, Mirage.” Optimus rumbled out, before removing his servo and traipsing off into a darker section of the sprawling warehouse, ducking through a much-too-small cutout and speaking to Arcee about something indistinguishable. However, you couldn’t care less about whatever her and Prime were discussing — what the hell did he mean by Mirage choosing well?
You turned your head towards said bot, mouth open for inquiry and one brow raised. Mirage looked mortified, in every sense of the word; he stood shell-shocked, lips slightly parted and servos up and open as if to defend himself. His head was whipped around to follow Prime’s departure from the room. A whir started, bouncing off the walls — Mirage’s fans came on and off intermittently to keep his ambient internal temperature at safe levels, but the steady hum of this fan let you infer that he was flushing something fierce.
“Mirage? What—“
Interrupting you by breaking, nearly jumping, out of his trance, he clapped his servos together and started talking at a million miles a minute. “Well, damn, look at that, haha, it’s late, ain’t it? You got work in the morning, right? C’mon, hop in, I’ll drive you home—“
“No, Mirage, hold on, what was he talking about—“
“Seriously, c’mon, he was just messing around—“
“You’re telling me Optimus Prime was joking? Is he even capable of that?”
He said your name with a finality that nearly made you flinch. “Look, I can’t really— Just drop it, please?” It wasn’t angry, nor was it even commanding; in fact, his eyes were wide and pleading with you out of embarrassment. You knew the feeling all too well, and in the interest of sparing his feelings, decided to let it go, despite your intense curiosity.
You put your hands up in surrender. “Okay. Dropped.” A few beats of silence passed while Mirage was still tamping down his fluster. “You wanna take me home now or are we waiting for Prime to come embarrass you more?”
“Please, let’s get outta here,” he affirmed, dropping into his alt-mode and popping the driver door for you. As you slid in, you couldn’t help the little mischievous smile that grew on your face as your brain cooked up some other joke to take the edge off.
The garage door opened on its own. Mirage rolled into the noticeably darker alleyway. The burnt umber glow of the sunset-stained sky was only visible overhead; otherwise you were boxed in on the sides by blacked-out buildings.
Stifling silence was broken by a joke. Your joke, actually. “…Can’t believe your dad made fun of you in front of me.”
The noise Mirage made was only comparable to a squawk. But obviously much more masculine, clearly. Still, his tires jerked on the road, betraying his surprise. “Hey— Prime is not my sire— or dad, or whatever you wanna call ‘em. He wishes.”
“I dunno,” you mused, arms crossed over your chest and back sunk deep into the seat. Brooklyn in transition blurred by in messy constellations of lit windows. “He got you pretty good there. Pretty standard dad behavior.”
“Hey, I don’t know what suddenly inspired him to go for comedy, but I do not appreciate it. That’s my thing. He’s stealin’ my thunder!”
“Maybe you’re just rubbing off on him.”
Silence.
The radio crackled. “Ew.”
Accompanied by the loudest eyeroll you could muster, you whacked the dashboard with an open palm, though you couldn’t stop your bubbling laughter. “Oh my god, you are so gross, Mirage! I hate you!”
“Ahh, don’t say that, c’mon! You love it here!”
“You wish.”
The rest of the ride home was spent that way, bickering like normal, and although you couldn’t let go of what Prime had said, nor his knowing look while he said it, you appreciated the return to baseline. When you got home, Mirage parked directly in front of your apartment building, and you lingered on the sidewalk for several minutes after you got out of the car. With the passenger door opened so it looked like you were talking to the ‘driver’ and not completely insane, you leaned on the doorframe and traded jabs with your ride until the humidity of the night air got a little too persistent to ignore. Damn you, Brooklyn. 
“See you tomorrow?” Mirage never said goodnight. He only ever asked when he could see you again, corny bastard.
“Tomorrow. My roommate’ll take me to work, don’t worry about it. I’ll just stick my head in the garage when I get home.”
“I thought we had a thing goin’, man!” His faux petulance returned. “You movin’ on already? You just met my folks!”
Your jaw dropped for a second at the fact he’d turned the damn bit around on you. “I met one folk, and you literally said he wasn’t your dad.”
“Maybe I was warmin’ up to the idea!”
Another lethal eyeroll. Your smile still remained locked on your face. “Whatever. Get the hell out of here, asshole,” you said, playfully shutting the door just a little harder than you needed to and slapping the roof like a horse you were trying to send off into the desert.
Even as you turned to walk into your building, you could hear the way his window shot down, far faster than a normal roll. “Ay! Merchandise!”
You stuck a middle finger over your shoulder, thumb out and all, to give him an idea of what he could do with his merchandise. Tires peeled against pavement as he screeched out of his spot and down the otherwise quiet street, letting you know in return how he felt about that.
Smiling like an idiot as you climbed the stairs to your apartment, you felt… airy. You were always smiling after hanging around Mirage, you couldn’t help it — especially as of late. But still, you were dying to know what Prime was talking about when he was messing with Mirage earlier. You chose well. Chose what? Your brain briefly entertained the thought of Mirage returning what you felt, and it made blood rush to your face.
It couldn’t really… work. You had made peace with your physical differences weeks ago. The both of you got along just fine despite the size difference, and it never impeded your normal interactions. But you doubted Mirage felt the same; no matter how familiar, how friendly you were with him, you could never shake the feeling of being just a little too alien. Your greatest similarities were in personality. The closest resemblance you held physically was the fact you were both humanoid in shape.
That didn’t stop you. No, not at all. It didn’t stop you from dropping into bed after a quick shower with a heavy sigh, your hand inevitably sinking beneath the covers as you thought of digits — Mirage’s digits, so well articulated for their size and so careful — playing with the hem of your underwear instead of your own fingers, pushing the fabric aside just a little roughly to explore your alien anatomy. It took very little time for you to grind yourself to climax; in fact, it was embarrassingly quick, and it left your face hot with some special kind of shame as you slunk out of bed to wash your hands. The entire time, you avoided your reflection in the mirror.
Even with the ancient AC cranked on and chugging away, it took you a long while to fall asleep.
Off in the industrial district of Brooklyn, meanwhile, Mirage was burning rubber as he took ninety-degree turns at sixty miles per hour. His processor was thrumming at max capacity, and his engine felt like it was about to either stall or explode.
Primus, it was all too much. Your teasing always got him some kind of hot and bothered, tight under his interface paneling, but the acidic rush of embarrassment still prickled at his cabling. Prime, come on, man. Mirage was still floored at the fact that Prime of all bots had embarrassed him like that, in front of you, no less!
He had it bad for you, and he knew it, but apparently every other bot in that warehouse knew it too. Ever since he’d met you, you’d stuck in his processor, the way the light glinted off your eyes and your all-teeth smile and the way he could get you to laugh. Sure, his flirts were only playful at first — and he only did them to mess with Noah, who’d harbored an on-and-off crush on you for a while — but the more he did them and the more you returned them, the more he started really… considering it.
It was so shameful. Primus, it was shameful. He’d barely ever interfaced in his life — there was just no time, especially not on Cybertron — and never with organics. After that one night where he’d hefted you up with ease in both servos and completely blanked when confronted with your soft, warm weight in his hold, he’d been on a spiral. It wasn’t just enough to be friendly with you; he was plenty friendly with Noah (though with the amount of stupid passes Mirage made at him, Noah would probably say too friendly) and he wanted something more with you.
He’d lost count of how many times he’d rolled into some long-abandoned warehouse or pitch-black deserted alley and scrabbled at his interface panel to pressurize his spike before he feverishly, frantically humped his fisted servo for relief, mental processors supplying increasingly filthy fantasies of your soft skin against his chassis and your mouth, Primus, your mouth on his own, on his spike, wherever, he didn’t care. Every single time, though, after coming down from his high with steam pouring off his lax frame, he felt just a little more discouraged than the last — because he knew that his fantasies would have to stay that way. Fantasies. Your friendship was enough, had to be, no matter how bad he wanted you, because he’d be damned to the Pit before he scared you off by being stupid and admitting his feelings.
Ugh. Ugh. He took another corner too hard and felt his tires shriek, let the burn travel upward and reverberate in his frame. The chaos in his mental processors quieted as he neared HQ. All he knew was that it was late, and he couldn’t be too loud or Prime would get on his ass for interrupting his stasis.
Can’t believe your dad made fun of you in front of me. Your voice played, unbidden, from some file that popped open in his memory bank. He willed it away with a vengeance as he rolled into the warehouse-turned-headquarters as quietly as he could, transforming as soon as the door was shut and stretching out his back. Clicking echoed off the walls as his spinal struts reset, and the residual burn in his scraped tires tingled.
Mirage turned, and—
Yelped. Bumblebee was standing right there, shoulder against the wall and fiddling with some holographic projection from his forearm. Mirage coughed into his clenched servo to preserve what was left of his dignity.
“‘Sup,” he greeted through gritted denta. “I, uh, didn’t see you there, man. How’s it hangin’?”
Bee gave him a flatly unamused look that communicated ‘No shit, you didn’t see me.’ very well. The projection phased out of existence and left the two of them in the dimmed space in some kind of standoff.
“Well, y’know, beauty stasis and everything, I’m just gonna—“
“I wanna know, what you’re feeling! Tell me what’s your mind!” burbled Bee’s radio in place of his voice. Mirage jerked back for a second, not expecting Information Society at whatever unholy hour of the morning it was.
“Look, man, I don’t really wanna talk about—“
“There are some things you can’t hide!” insisted the same song. Bee gestured for Mirage to talk. Clearly he wanted to know.
This was as good a time as ever to spill, he guessed.
Mirage groaned and clasped both of his servos over his face after explaining the bones of it, his head tilted upwards, optics fruitlessly searching the water-stained warehouse ceiling for a solution to his problem. His… very human, very embarrassing problem.
Not that he thought you were embarrassing— not at all, never. But Prime would have his head over falling for a human. Okay, well, maybe not his head; it was more like Mirage would be in for a lengthy disapproving speech about responsibilities and goals and distractions, and Primus, just thinking about it made the former option of decapitation the preferable one. Even though he seemed to approve of his choice, considering what he’d said earlier, the ‘Bots were still at war, and there wasn’t time for human distractions. Literal human distractions.
It wasn’t like he could help it. You were funny, okay? And smart. And you teased him in just the right way that made his cooling fans sputter, and you were so curious about… everything about him, he thought, remembering your impromptu Cybertronian anatomy lesson with a hot flash in his processor. He couldn’t help but be flattered by your attention.
“Ugh, Bee, I don’t know what to do, man,” he said despairingly after a moment, pacing in circles in front of said squat yellow bot leaned against the nearby concrete wall. “I mean, look at this, she’d be missin’ out if she said no,” he added, arrogance staining his words in an attempt to console himself. It didn’t work; insecurity eviscerated his bravado moments after he said it. “Or… I guess we’d both be, huh.” A short, self-deprecating laugh left him.
Mirage wasn’t entirely sure why he’d come to Bee of all bots for advice, but he was sure as shit not going to Optimus after today, and Arcee would have just told him anyway. Plus, considering that Wheeljack wasn’t even in the country at the moment, his options were slim. Besides, Bee had… experience with this sort of thing. Dealing with humans and all. Just… not in this way. But it was close enough, and Mirage was totally lost; if he thought about it by himself for any longer, his processors were going to fry.
Speaking of, Bee tittered through his gutted voice synthesizer to get Mirage’s attention. Expression drawn into a very human grimace, Mirage turned to face his friend, servos planted firmly on his hips.
“Well, you gotta tell her— wanna know what love is— want you to show me,” Bee’s radio clipped, first from a talk show, then from a nearby station, and Mirage felt energon surge to his face in a hot rush at a very personal song being blared back at him.
He had the words memorized at this point. The shape of them was practically burned into his memory files, considering how much he played it for you. It was reserved for days on both ends of the spectrum, bad and good; Mirage would pick you up in his alt-mode and take you for joyrides across the city, flying over the Brooklyn Bridge at daredevil speeds, all the while blaring music loud enough to make your head pound.
The two of you had discovered a few favorites, but the Foreigner song was at the top of the list, right next to Careless Whisper, of course. The sound of your voice belting at the top of your lungs, softened with that specific human accent, thrumming and reverberating through your chest— you sounded so alive, but so different from what he was accustomed to.
“Dude—” Mirage nearly barked, voice up a full octave before clearing his synthesizer into his fist and repeating himself. “Dude. I can’t just do that. Aliens— we’re aliens. Well. She’s an alien, too, I guess, but we,” he paused to gesture frantically between himself and Bee, “are the aliens here. I don’t really think humans are into the whole giant robot thing.”
“Noah?” Bee played a clip of Mirage’s own voice back at him questioningly.
“Yeah, well, Noah’s a different story.”
With a whir of his actuators, Bee shook his head and looked away for a moment, big blue optics considering the floor. With a soft clunk, he crossed his arms over his chassis.
“Come on, man, you gotta give me something,” Mirage urged, tilting his head to follow the other bot’s motions. “Should I just leave it? I mean, I don’t want it to be weird, I just—“
Bee straightened up off the wall, clearly done thinking. His arms opened out in a shrug and his optics squinted, communicating I don’t know what you want me to say, dude, far better than his vocal synthesizer ever could have.
His radio clipped again, this time a few seconds of a Beatles song and then Noah’s voice. “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah— right?”
“I don’t know, that’s the problem,” Mirage groaned, rolling his head back with a pained expression and letting his body follow the motion as he paced another tight circle. His faceplates felt hot at the insinuation. “And if I ask, it’s gonna be weird. And if I make it weird, I’m never gonna—“
He stopped rambling when a four-digit servo thumped on the headlight atop his shoulder, rooting him to the spot. Bee’s optics stared him down, wide and bright blue, and it made Mirage press his lips together firmly as he awaited whatever sage advice he was about to impart.
ABBA filtered through the radio first. “Should walk right up to her and say—“ What came next made Mirage’s brow ridges shoot up so high he thought they were going to fly off his helmet. “—when I get that feeling, I want sexual healin’!”
Mirage’s jaw dropped. Immensely flustered and ten times more frustrated at his friend’s useless advice, he shoved the other bot off. “Are you serious, dude? Primus, I never shoulda asked you. Thanks, I’ll go walk right up to her and ask to interface on the warehouse floor, that’ll go super well.”
Bee nodded quickly and gave him a double thumbs up with a series of approving beeps and chirps, the bottoms of his optics flattening into an amused look. Mirage dragged his servo down his faceplates in mortification, although his cooling fans kicked on a click higher than normal.
Sometimes he wished he’d been left on Cybertron with Soundwave and all his other goons. This was one of those times. As he dropped back into his alt-mode with an embarrassed mumble about ‘going on patrol,’ Bee whooped behind him, and the last thing Mirage heard before peeling out of the warehouse was “There’s nothin’ wrong with me lovin’ you, baby, no, no!”
Whoever gave Bee access to Marvin Gaye needed to be whacked upside the helm.
Knowing Mirage’s luck, it was probably you.
He stayed out for the rest of the night in his alt-mode, wandering the streets and staying away from your apartment, no matter how bad he wanted to go. The pool of people with any useful advice to offer for his predicament was steadily shrinking; after the disaster with Bee, Mirage just needed to stay away from that warehouse and let his processors cool.
Sometime in the morning he returned, though not to the warehouse. He almost immediately crashed into stasis as soon as he rolled into Noah’s garage, his simultaneously pent-up and exhausted processors eager for a chance to refresh themselves and defrag.
Ha, he thought blearily as he sank into stasis. Defrag.
You were waking as he was crashing, though you weren’t happy about it. The eight hour shift that loomed ahead of you on top of the bullshit from last night was a pretty potent combination for a headache of a day, especially when you couldn’t have your morning jam sesh with Mirage on your way to work. Thankfully, though, your roommate was a kind soul, and there was an extra cup of coffee waiting for you on the counter when you stumbled out of your bedroom.
As you sipped it, you wondered just how long you could keep the front up. By some small grace of God, your roommate’s schedule didn’t align very well with yours; you barely saw them in your daily life even before you met Mirage. It wasn’t on purpose, of course. It just happened that way. But on a few occasions, they’d been home when Mirage had dropped you off, and you’d been just calling him a ‘friend with places to be’ to excuse the fact that he never walked you to your door. Being somewhat prescient, they’d nudged you a couple times about this ‘friend’ turning into a boyfriend, but had never pushed it.
You just hoped it stayed that way.
Breakfast was a quick and quiet affair, though you traded a few jokes back and forth that had the both of you giggling into your food. The ride to your job was similar, and your roommate wished you a good shift before driving off leisurely — such a stark difference compared to Mirage’s affinity for peeling off into the street at Mach-fucking-10. Thinking of him made your face burn and your mind race. You tried not to.
Time was an especially cruel mistress today, though. You swore that people were actively winding the clocks back every time you looked up at them, and your shift felt like a thick slog, knee-deep, that you had no choice but to wade through. The worst part about slow shifts was that your mind wandered with nothing else to do, and like a moth to a flame— or rather, like metal to a magnet, your brain circled around to Mirage again and again and again.
Damn that bot. Damn it all. Every time you thought of him, it was some stupid joke he’d cracked or silly offhand comment he’d made or ridiculous flirt he’d lobbed your way — always accompanied by memories of his body, surprisingly lithe considering what he was made of, all legs and a dramatic waist topped with wide shoulders that made your own engine purr.
“Mirage, did you go upstate or something? You’re disgusting,” you’d laughed as you raked your gaze over his pecs, pretending to eye the dirt smeared there and not something else.
“Disgusting?! You gotta be kidding me, I’m not half as bad as the rest of ‘em. You should see Bee, dude!” He’d gestured out the door of the warehouse, where you assumed the other bot was lurking in dirt-covered shame.
“What the hell were you two even doing?”
“Pfft. Practicin’.”
“Practicing body-slamming each other?”
“Yeah, want me to show you?”
“Mirage,” you’d groaned, laughing despite yourself.
“C’mon, I know a few good ways to pin a bot down,” he grinned, winking at you. You fixed him with the most dead stare you could muster before breaking into a half-smile of your own.
“I’ll pass on the whole getting crushed thing, but I could be persuaded to spray you down by hand,” you flirted back, just for fun. 
No, not for fun. Real flirt. It was real, all of it was, and you couldn’t shake the memory of his optics widening, brightening, with eagerness and the way he’d pleaded. Playfully. Playfully?
“Please,” he begged dramatically, clasping his servos together, optics enormous. “I’ll be good! Maybe even stay still!”
You pinched your nose bridge between your fingers and tried to think about something else, because you were starting to press your thighs together a little and you were still at work, damn it. Professionalism was something you were aiming to maintain.
Hot. It was hot. That’s what you were thinking about. You’d glanced at the weather report earlier in the morning, and seeing a row of little sun icons clued you in on an insufferable heatwave that didn’t have any intention of breaking any time soon. Even now you felt sweat collect under your shirt and dot your hairline; all you could do was wipe your face with the back of your hand and keep working.
And working.
And working.
And. Working.
And then, eventually, you watched the clock tick over the last minute of your shift, and you heard angels sing a holy choir as you all but slammed your things down and sprinted to clock out. Well. You didn’t sprint, but you did speed walk, which counted for something.
Such was your haste to leave your workplace and talk to Mirage that you speed-walked headfirst into the lashing rain outside without a second thought. Genuinely caught by surprise, you stumbled back into the safety of the entryway, eyes wide as you watched the storm front swallow the last dregs of the golden evening sky and pour rain on the streets outside. Ink blots bleeding across paper. Rorschach tests. Some other poetic fluff came to mind over the supremely annoying realization that you were going to have to walk to the garage in wet clothes.
At least it was a quick walk.
Patience waning, you nearly considered calling Mirage — or even Noah — to come get you, but at the last second your roommate swooped in, pulling up outside and honking the horn a few times to let you know your knight in shining Prius was here to rescue you.
They cracked a few jokes at your expense when they saw your wet clothes, but it was nothing you couldn’t handle. Not after the trials and tribulations of Mirage. With a few clicks, the rest of your ride home was filled with Boyz II Men and intermittent conversation as you watched raindrops race each other down the window and considered what the hell you were going to say to Mirage tonight. 
Mostly, you were dying of curiosity to know what Prime had meant to get him so flustered. Thinking about that, though, just made you go down a spiral of what-ifs… especially considering that one of them was ‘What if he feels the same way?’
You could handle rejection. You were an adult who paid taxes. But just this one time, you weren’t sure if you could handle reciprocation. Especially full reciprocation.
Mirage’s friendship was something you felt privileged to have. You were just quite scared to fuck it all up and lose out on all the things that made being his friend worth it — including him. Jaw tightening, you blinked and looked away from the window. No use stewing in it.
At home, your dinner was quick and light — something in a Tupperware that you didn’t look at too hard after microwaving. When your roommate asked about your rush, you came up with some lame excuse about hanging out with Noah, waving your hand dismissively.
Don’t worry about me. I’m going to go break Hynek’s scale of close encounters. Don’t worry about it though.
“In this weather? You’ll be soaked thirty seconds out the door. You were soaked thirty seconds out the door.”
“I’ll bring an umbrella,” you said, barely listening to them over the cacophony of your own thoughts. Mirage. Mirage. Mirage. I’m seeing him tonight. I’m talking to him tonight. I’m not going to pussy out of anything tonight. Now or never. “The place is like two blocks up the street, I’ll live.”
“If you’re so inclined to catch a cold, I’m not gonna stop you. Not making you chicken soup, though.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” you snarked affectionately, and the last thing you heard before exiting your apartment was their familiar laughter. That bolstered you somewhat.
Even if the rain whipping at your face made you reconsider your stupid horny stubbornness.
Only two blocks felt more like two dozen as you tucked your chin to your chest and gripped your hood to keep the wind from snatching it off your head; in your other hand you white-knuckled your umbrella to keep it from tilting the wrong angle and washing water down your back. Thunder rattled your bones more than once and made you think offhandedly of Kris, the poor kid. He hated storms but refused to admit it out of pride; he was probably curled up in a ball under his covers right now trying to block out the worst of the noise. And you thought of Noah alongside him just out of pure association, and you weren’t sure what made your stomach turn, but it did.
God, you hoped Noah wasn’t with Mirage right now. You didn’t want to slam the door open to the garage soaking wet and wrestle Mirage’s true feelings out of him while Noah spectated. Wrestle. Soaking wet.
Fuck my life.
The side door to the garage was jammed like it always was, even after you unlocked it, and you huddled against it to stay under the mediocre cover of the awning as you shoved your shoulder into it to force it open. Old metal hinges wailed as you ground them open, and the blessed dry warmth of the garage — the temperature always heightened with Mirage’s presence — sighed against your freezing skin as you wormed your way inside. 
“Mirage?” you called tentatively as you leaned back against the door to get it to shut and latch. A beat passed before your senses came to you and your hand fumbled behind you to lock it. Not for sordid reasons, honestly. You just didn’t want anyone to even have the chance of walking in on Mirage when he wasn’t folded into a Porsche.
Speaking of, you saw him then, pacing around the garage and seemingly very involved in a conversation with himself. Although the rain outside provided a dull roar of background noise, the whirs and clicks of his actuators and soft whooms of his pedes against the concrete filled your ears with their familiarity. It was Mirage, and you knew Mirage, and it helped dull the edge of abject nervousness in your gut.
He cut a sharp figure under the hanging ceiling lights, making sure to duck and avoid smacking his helm on them. When those bright blue optics registered your existence, you swore they flared with delight; he said your name with such enthusiasm it almost made you excited. For what, exactly, you didn’t know. “Hey, sugar, what’s k— Primus, you, uh, swim on your way here? Or do I just make you that wet? Cuz I appreciate the compliment.” He grinned wolfishly at you. Sparks flew off your rubbed-raw nerves.
The unimpressed stare you gave him was lethal. “That is not how that works,” you said, shaking your umbrella off on the floor and setting it against the wall to drip dry. “All the wetness is— would be in one place, dumbass.”
“Sorry. Wasn’t paying attention during my anatomy lessons. Wanna reteach ‘em to me? I’ll behave, swear on my spark.”
A scoff. “When have you ever behaved in your life?”
“When it counts! C’mon, you know you like it,” he said, gesturing down the length of his body with a flourish of his servo. “I mean, what isn’t there to like?”
“If I answer that question, I’ll hurt your feelings.” Excess rainwater dripped off your jacket as you peeled it off. Mirage’s optics followed the motion intently.
Amber lighting nearly glowed against the sleek metal of his torso. So what if your own eyes had wandered down it at his emphasis? He’d invited it. Expressly. He loved your attention, loved flaunting everything about himself just for a glance his way from you, for anything you’d give him.
It took him a second to register your words. He gasped and clasped a servo over his chassis— his spark, you remembered that from your own anatomy lesson a few weeks ago. “Gonna break my spark talkin’ like that. I hurt your feelings or something, sugar? What’s got you so bent?” With his question, he sank into a deep squat, draping his forearm over his thigh and leaning close to you.
A deep exhale left you. Your shoulders deflated. “It’s not you. Just the weather.” A short huff of a laugh, barely humorous, left you. “I mean, look at me.” You held your arms out and spun in a slow circle, errant droplets flying in every direction. “I look like a drowned rat.”
The lightbulb over his head was nearly visible. “You, uh, want a hand drying off?”
You stopped dead in your tracks. Your hands fell to your sides. Something akin to lightning danced up your spine.
“What?”
“Hold on, hold on, I got an idea,” he said,  holding his hand out at you to tell you to wait, excitement ramping up in his voice. What the hell was he planning? Nothing good, you figured. Or hoped.
Otherwise harsh sounds of metal against metal were softened by the alien chirrs and trills of the mechanical viscera working in his chassis as he settled on the ground in a sitting position. His back was leaned against the wall, carefully adjusted so his darling paint job was away from the rough concrete. To keep his balance, he rested against his tires and scooched his hips away from the wall, kicking his long legs out with a flourish and gesturing at his lap.
Although he was shorter this way, it was still a climb you didn't want to make while you were damp and the general slip hazard was high. “Can you give me a lift so I can see whatever shit you’re planning?”
“I got you, sugar, don’t even worry about it. Just hang on,” came the reply, and your brain blanked just a little at the feeling of his servos on you again, picking you up just like they had done on that night two weeks ago. With zero effort — seriously, you didn’t even hear any mechanical creaking — you were scooped upwards.
Your damp clothes clung to your body, a fact both you and Mirage were painfully aware of; the chill of the soaked fabric contrasted against that fascinating living heat of your skin nearly made the sensors in his servos short-circuit. He’d thought about this, exactly this, so much that it had probably worn a path into his neural processors. So soft. You were so soft.
A shudder ran up his spinal strut and he prayed you didn’t notice.
You were set down with your feet firmly on the flat tops of his thighs, ignoring the slight wobble in your knees. Arms raised a bit for balance, you looked down at the living machinery beneath you. The flight paths of the butterflies in your stomach grew more frantic. Broad servos released you from their hold, but they didn’t leave; no, they skated down, down, down until they settled on the flare of your hips and stayed. They were so heavy.
A breath caught in your throat like a wild animal in a trap. “If I fall, I’m gonna be so pissed off. You know that, right?” Anything to make this more normal. You had no idea how you kept the shake out of your voice.
“Relaaax, hot stuff, I’m on it. I got it, I got it,” he replied, his voice a full octave lower than what you were used to. “‘sides, I’m Mirage, remember? Protecting humans is kinda my thing.”
You scoffed. “Not with the way you drive.”
“Hey, I drive perfectly fine! You’re the one who’s scared of fun.” His servos left your hips to brace themselves on the floor. “Mirage, don’t drive so fast! Mirage, that’s a red light! Mirage, there are cops behind us!” His voice pitched up into something high and nasally to poorly, poorly mimic yours.
It was your turn to be affronted, though your mouth was open in a disbelieving sort of smile. “I don’t even sound like that, you fucker! And sorry for trying to keep us from getting arrested!”
“I dunno, you all sorta sound the same to our audio processors.” He was lying, and blatantly so. He had the distinct tone and pitch of your voice memorized down to the wavelength. “And besides, we wouldn’t get arrested.” His own voice took on a smug, self-satisfied edge, accompanied by the raise of his brow ridges.
“Oh, really? Why’s that? Please, enlighten me,” you snarked, crossing your arms over your chest and staring him down. In response, he leaned his head in, closer to you, closer than you expected, and an insufferable smirk crawled across his faceplates.
“Cuz cop cars can’t drive that fast,” he whispered conspiratorially, like it was a clever response.
What should have been a minute movement — just a shift of the head — actually became very noticeable on a twelve-foot-frame; his hips repositioned of their own accord to account for the redistribution of weight, and the change was enough to trip you up. Especially when you had been leaning in already to match his movement.
The world tilted as you started to fall forward; fearing injury or worse by tumbling off your semi-precarious perch, you jammed your hands out in front of you—
And slammed your palms directly on his chassis. It was all very fast after that. Mortified, you stared down at the planes of metal beneath you, feeling heat creep up, up, up your neck and seep into your face. Mirage had cursed above you out of surprise, and you felt the displacement of air as his servo shot up behind your back and hovered. Right there. He was right there, and he always would be.
You raised your head and made eye contact, and you knew it was over. His optics were wide with surprise, and they searched your face for any expression of pain or discontent. They cycled once, seeing none, and then flickered down to your lips.
He was so done for. Something in his expression sagged at your proximity; in his field of view, he saw an alert stating that his internal temperature was rising beyond ideal levels, and he would have laughed if not for you. Finally. Finally. Finally. He was half-expecting this to be a dream, something cooked up by his fried processors that he would wake up from any minute now. 
His servo was still hovering over your back.
“Can I—“
“Yes,” you said immediately in a sharp exhale — before he could even get the question out — and there it all went.
He surged forward like a flood from a dam, closing the distance between the both of you with a hungry rev of his engine. Explaining the logistics of it would sound silly; all you could do was go with the flow, just like every other time you’d ever kissed someone. All you knew was that it was satisfying, supremely so, and completely encompassing. Every sense was filled by him, and you realized with a kick of your heart that you never wanted it any other way.
Though your hand shook, you shoved past the fear and indulged in everything you had wanted for weeks, let yourself sink deep into that pit of want and refused to come up for air. Your fingers skated his curves and edges; you brought your palm up to the sharp angles of his jaw and smoothed it upward until it ran over the curve of his cheek.
He reacted to your touch like it was a live wire. Minute jerks of excitement ran through his frame, and when your hand rested on the side of his face, he tilted his helm into the kiss with barely restrained excitement. He was so careful, it made something inside you purr. That kind of caution was only reserved for something precious. You were precious. He couldn’t ever risk hurting you. Especially not by his own hand.
First impression was that his lips were far softer than you’d ever assumed. Pliable, hot metal pressed greedily against your mouth — more, more, more was a mantra echoed wordlessly between the both of you. The hovering servo came to rest on your back, pushing your front against his chassis as you shifted up on your toes to keep the angle of the kiss correct. Digits splayed against the planes of skin they found there, pressing down to feel your warmth — your heart slammed against your ribs so hard that Mirage could probably feel it against his palm.
With a hot flash, you wondered if the metal of his lips would bear the dent of your teeth from a bite. So you bit. It was more of a playful nip than anything, but the reaction you got was so instantaneous it was like Mirage had been waiting for it. Again, his engine throttled, the powerful rumble surging through you as his servo pinned you to his chassis. Against your mouth, his lips ticked up into a smile.
Air. You needed air. He let you pull away with no resistance, though his head did trail after your mouth for a moment.
You let your forehead sink down and rest against the top of his chassis for a moment; the condensation from your breath fogged the metal. Out of nowhere, manic giggles erupted from you. They shook your body incessantly as you rose and fell in time with Mirage’s heavy vents, your knees feeling weak and mind frazzled. From one kiss. One.
Laughter rocked his frame too, short chuckles of disbelief as his thumb rubbed circles into your back.
“Oh my god,” you murmured into the warm metal beneath you through shocks of giggles.
“Not exactly, but, eh, I’ll take it,” Mirage replied above you, and while he laughed at his own joke, you groaned and whacked him lightly with a palm. It wasn’t like he was unaffected though — far from it, in fact, judging from the steadily heating chassis beneath you and the tinge of static fringing his words.
“Bring me up,” you said hoarsely, twisting an arm behind you to paw at the servo on your back.
Without question, his other servo came up and curled under your thighs, hoisting you up so that his face was easier to reach. With most of your body now resting on his chassis and very much secured in his grip, you grasped his face in both your palms; he leaned so far into your touch with a shaky ex-vent that your noses almost brushed.
“Again?”
“Yeah, again,” he agreed, and this time you pulled him in, fingers hooking in some unseen seam behind his jaw as you crushed your mouth against his. Hunger, latent and now finally triggered, drove you closer, as close as you physically could, until your skin was starting to hurt from the random edges being pressed into it.
Curious above all else, you licked your tongue into the front of his mouth. The searing heat inside surprised you; it teetered on the edge of uncomfortable and reminded you very much of your computer at home when it ran for too long, with that special kind of mechanical stress and burning warmth that only came with overworked processors.
“‘S like that, is it?” he murmured into your mouth with a grin, his engine kicking up a notch and the vibration of his chassis hitting you very nicely right where you needed it most. You made some soft noise, half-gasp, half-groan, and hiked one of your legs up so it was bent at the knee, flattening your hips against his chest and fuck, there it was. The consistent rumble of his motor pressed a steady vibration right into your cunt over the seam of your jeans; a particular grind made you gasp and falter as you rolled your clit against the line of denim and held it there.
“Whoa-ho-ho! Heyyy, hot stuff, something feel good down there?” His voice was bursting at the seams with some rich kind of excitement; you breathed into his neck cabling as your hips jerked a little against his chassis. One servo pawed at your ass, clumsy with its eagerness, gripping and massaging the soft flesh it found there with intent.
Experimentally, his servo pressed down, pushing your pelvis down with it, and the pressure on your clit pulled a groan of satisfaction out of you that had his cooling fans sputter.
“Fuck,” you hissed through gritted teeth, and before he could say something stupid, you leaned your head down and pressed kisses to the delicate cabling of his neck.
A delighted noise rattled out of him, and his helm rolled back against the wall to allow you more access. Impatient, your kisses soon turned to bites, playful nips that tugged at the sensitive wiring and made his body jolt beneath yours like he’d been shocked. To your utter delight, you found that Mirage’s proclivity for talking extended to situations like these, too — noises streamed from his mouth as your curious teeth and hands worked over such a fragile part of his anatomy in ways that only a human could.
“Oh, Primus, babe, babe—“ he stammered out, and you lifted your head for just long enough of a window to allow him to swoop down and kiss you again, feverishly now.
Something thick and wet prodded past your teeth experimentally. For just a second you balked— and then remembered it was his glossa. His tongue. Yeah, you remembered that from your anatomy lesson; he’d stuck it out and pointed at it in a dumb way then, but fuck if it didn’t have your thighs tightening now. The hot biomesh probed your mouth, and it was so big you inadvertently drooled around it — but Mirage didn’t seem to mind at all. In fact, you were pretty sure the spit dripping from your mouth around him was getting him even more worked up, judged by the way his digits tightened their grip on your ass.
You had been cold when you’d walked in that garage. Keyword there was had. Now your skin seared with a deep flush and steadily increasing heat; mindlessly, your hips started a slow, staccato rhythm that kept your breathing heavy. The servo on your back slid upwards to the point where it encompassed the back of both your neck and head. He could not get enough of your taste. He wanted it burned into the sensors on his glossa, for all he cared. Spit and lubricant swapped between the both of your mouths — you found that the metallic taste that seeped into your tongue did nothing but turn you on further.
Pulling away again for a deep inhale of air, you propped yourself semi-awkwardly on an elbow to look at him. Open adoration was written across his faceplates, along with blatant want that made his optics cycle frantically.
“I thought you were— fuck, I thought you were supposed to be drying me off,” you said, breaking in the middle of your sentence as his servo carefully started to move you. Just barely — just enough pressure to keep your hips working against him and chasing your pleasure.
“You really wanna?” He grinned at you, spit shiny on his chin. “I dunno about you, but I think I’m likin’ you being wet more.”
“You’re awful. That was terrible,” you laughed, brain foggy with arousal and general swelling affection for the bot underneath you.
“How many more of those you got left in you before you start admitting the truth that I’m the funniest bot you’ll ever meet?”
“I mean, you don’t exactly have stiff competition.”
“Aaand the best-looking.”
“I dunno… Optimus is kind of—“
“Hey!” he interrupted, bringing you up for another kiss to silence your thought before you could finish it. You happily complied, laughing into the heat of his mouth and then moaning in the same breath as his servo ground you down against his rumbling chassis again.
Hot. You were getting really hot. The damp clothes sticking to your skin were not helping; in fact, they felt as though they were going to start steaming being pressed against your skin like this. Against your wishes, you pulled backwards again, bracing yourself against the warm vents that substituted for his collarbones. They cycled hot, dry air against your fingertips, though it didn’t burn. Not yet, at least.
“Mirage,” you breathed, and that got his attention immediately. “…Are we fucking?”
“Please,” he instantly replied, so eager that it made your cunt throb. His enormous blue optics watched you with such intent that it almost made you want to shrink away from the scrutiny — but you steeled your resolve. You had him, and you had him right where you wanted. Opportunity of a fucking lifetime. You were not about to waste it.
You glanced down for a reprieve from the eye contact. “Fuck,” you swore softly, staring at the metalwork beneath you for a few heartbeats before shaking your head and glancing back upwards at him. “Okay, well— I— Okay. Let me just— do this—“
Hands shaking slightly, you balled your fists in the hem of your work shirt and wrestled it up and off you; the damp fabric lingered and peeled off of you, which made Mirage’s motor throttle powerfully underneath you. Other than that, though, you got no reaction, which made all that heat in your abdomen cool rapidly into a dense ball of abject horror.
Oh, you made a mistake. This was too much, you were too alien, too different—
The servo not supporting you against his chassis slid around from the planes of your back to your front, and you gasped sharply as he did the same fucking thing that drove you insane the first time, however many days ago. His thumb, warm on the palm-side, gently passed over the peak of your chest. His optics narrowed in on the indent in your soft flesh his digit created. Nerve endings in the trail it left behind sparked.
“Oh, you don’t know how long I’ve been waiting to do that,” he said reverently, voice steeped in a combination of awe and victory.
Oh-kay! You sucked a deep breath in, a litany of responses running through your head. The boost to your ego was very much appreciated, and it helped lighten the sinking mass of worry that had formed in the pit of your stomach.
Mirage nearly groaned when you placed your soft palm atop the junction of his digit and the heel of his servo. “Do it again,” you decided on, and that worked damn well.
As his servo groped at your chest, he leaned in, tucking his face under your jaw. To accommodate, you tilted your head up and away—
Only to swear into negative space as he very much returned the favor from earlier and began carefully sucking the world’s biggest hickeys into the skin of your neck. Breaths came harsh and choppy as the expanse of his glossa, hot and spit-slick, laved over the gentle bites he worried into your skin with his denta. 
“Ah, Mirage, Mirage,” you breathed; every mention of his name spilling from your bruised lips made his circuitry heat just a little more. It was so much all at once — his servos were so broad that their expanse covered huge swaths of skin at once, and his mouth on such a sensitive part of your anatomy wasn’t helping either. Your hands clawed for purchase against his helm and the back of his neck. One palm flattened as much as it could on the back of his head, trying with all of your laughable human strength to bring him as close as possible. The other ended up cradling the side of his head, your thumb brushing over the audial disk there. With no small amount of wonder, you watched the plates of his back ruffle at your touch.
Mirage wasn’t trying to be weird, but he could die happy so long as he had the taste of your skin still registering on his glossa. It was more addictive than any high-grade he’d had back home by leagues. That human flavor of salt and skin and some kind of sweetness had his processors thrumming at maximum capacity; you made his mouth flood with lubricant, a fact you could corroborate by the amount that spilled over your bare sternum. The feeling of his own spit sliding down your front between your bruised breasts made the muscles of your abdomen twitch. Fingers shaped like claws now, you pressed weak kisses against the smooth curves of his helm wherever you could reach.
Your jeans were just getting in the way at this point. The minute shocks of pleasure you derived from grinding your clit against the inseam were just that — minute. You needed something more now or you were going to get frustrated, and you’d dealt with enough sexual frustration over the past weeks to be very sick of that feeling.
“Oh, fuck, okay— Mirage,” you said breathlessly, giving him a light tap on the side of his helm to get his attention. Reluctantly, he pulled away from your chest, optics dimmed with pleasure. They cycled once and returned to their full brightness as he cleared the fog of arousal — barely — away from his processors.
“All systems go, sugar?” Static hissed underneath his words.
You tried and failed to stifle a snort of a laugh. “Corny ass,” you mumbled, although you were absolutely close enough for his audial sensors to pick up on it. He made a sound of indignation, but you pushed forward regardless. “I, um, I need to get these off.” Hooking your thumbs in the waistband of your jeans to emphasize your point, you glanced up at his optics again.
Blankness for a second. Then it registered. “Oh, right, right, of course, haha! You, uh, want help? Or you got it?”
“I think I can manage taking my pants off,” you laughed. “Just— let me sit on like— the top of your chest, there we go,” you instructed, and the hand under your ass pushed you up until you were turned around and seated on the lip of the top of his chassis. For a second, you wrestled with the denim — still not fully dried — but you managed to kick both your jeans and your shoes off. They were thrown somewhere in the direction of the door. God, you were so glad you locked it.
Underwear went next. There was a beat of hesitation — for what, you weren’t sure — but like you’d done so often as of late, you just ignored your trepidation and worked the elastic down your legs. A laugh barked out of you when you lifted the fabric up and saw the downright ridiculous wet spot that stained the gusset.
“Jesus Christ, look what you did to me,” you said with a faux accusatory tone, holding your panties out for Mirage to inspect. Two digits delicately took them from you; he held them up to his face, so close that it made you blush from sheer embarrassment.
“Wow. You weren’t kiddin’ ‘bout all the wet being in one spot, huh?” He examined them with no small amount of fascination, much to your mortification.
“Mirage! Put those down, oh my god,” you said, covering your mouth with a choked noise.
“What, I can’t admire my work?”
“No you can not.”
Mirage pouted at your denial, and mumbled something about you being no fun, but he still lifted you off his chassis regardless. Like he was helpless to your draw, he pulled you in for another kiss, though he couldn’t stop his mouth from wandering. Down, down, down, until his nose was nestled in your chest and he spoke into the soft flesh of your stomach. Shaky ex-vents tickled the damp skin there.
“Shit, baby, tastes so good,” he mumbled, and you were impressed by his ability to sound completely sex-drunk without even having done anything yet.
Your hips rolled against nothing; they bumped into his neck cabling and the top of his chassis fruitlessly, and a noise of frustration eked out of you. Mirage seemed to get the memo and pulled you away. Your body was brought down until your ass was sat firmly on his hips — his interface panel nestled right in front of your dripping cunt — and your back was leaned up against the flat support of his thighs; his knees were tucked up and his pedes placed firm and flat on the floor to give you the most stability. Fumbling for a second before you found somewhere to place your own feet, the enormity and absurdity of the situation brought more of those breathless giggles to your mouth that seized your chest and shook your shoulders.
Toootally breaking Hynek’s scale here. So beyond abduction. Way beyond abduction.
A few careful digits slipped around your knee, wormed their way between your legs. “Can I—“ 
Your thighs fell open without a word.
What had made you fall for Mirage the hardest was his motormouth. He never stopped talking; he always had something stupid to add, something to pitch in with, some silly joke to crack. There was a lightness he teased out of you that even you didn’t expect. But now? Now, for once, he was speechless. It made uncharacteristic shyness flare in your gut and heat your face as he studied your very bare, very human form with slightly parted lips and enormous optics.
His body caught up before his mouth did. The servo on your knee slid over it until it gripped your bare thigh; he watched the flesh shift back and forth under his touch with no small amount of fascination.
“Is it— it’s okay?” Your voice sounded very small. It was a special kind of insecurity to be faced with.
“Oh, yeah, it’s okay. It’s cool, you’re just— just different. A lot different.” He jiggled your thigh again playfully.
“Good kind of different though, right?”
“Very good.” To punctuate it, his engine snarled again, seemingly in response to the drool of your cunt on the hot metal of his interface panel. “Primus, you look good, babe. Shit.”
Ego boost! You smiled. Any other partner — any person — and this would be too much, this position too unflattering, your everything too open… With Mirage, though, it just felt like it always did. Easy.
One of your hands rested atop the servo still holding onto the meat of your thigh. The other slid down over your shining chest, passed over your stomach and pubic mound, and brushed past wiry hair, shiny with slick, in order to slide a finger up your folds. A whine ripped its way out of you at direct contact with your clit after mere heavy petting, and you couldn’t stop yourself from drawing tight circles with your fingers and twitching your hips forward to eke out more of that delicious pressure.
The servo on your thigh dug into your skin. Mirage’s vents became far heavier at the open display of your arousal; it has always been him vying for your attention. Now that it was the other way around, he wasn’t sure if he could handle it. Transfluid was seeping between the seams of his interface panel, joining your own fluids in a shiny pool that sent sparks up his struts. He made you like this, made you so wet you dripped, made your clit swollen enough to be visible, made your cunt tight with heat and Primus, he needed you on his spike so bad, he thought he might die without it.
He verbalized these thoughts with an unintelligible noise of adoration.
It was enough encouragement for you to slide down from your clit and venture two fingers into yourself. Zero friction. They glided. Christ, when was the last time you were this wet? You’d slept with a handful of people, especially in your first couple years of college, but you’d never been soaked like this. Mirage’s cooling fans choked at the sight of your fingers vanishing into you. His thumb dug into the crease of your thigh and hip as he leaned just a little closer to watch.
Very little time passed before it devolved into your fingers working inside your walls, crooking against that one spot that made your breath hitch and hips jump. Mindlessly, you ground against your palm, catching your clit on the heel of your hand with a sweet moan that nearly shorted out his processors. He had to hear that again. Without thinking, he moved his servo over, resting the digits on your lower stomach and gently, gently nudging the heel of your hand out of the way to replace it with his thumb.
“Ah!” spilled from your lips at the insistent, broad pressure of his thumb, and your hips jerked against it, working your fingers that much deeper. Tears pricked at your eyes from pure sensation. “Mirage, mmm, just— just rub, up and down— or circles, just move, I don’t ca—are,” you floundered, the last word breaking as he did as he was told, carefully sliding his thumb up and down on the bead of your clit and sending twinges of searing pleasure up your spine.
You found quickly that just your fingers weren’t enough. Not when the reminder of his servo lay heavily on your lower stomach, tips of his digits digging into the soft fat there insistently. Although you were loath to part with your hand, you pulled your fingers out with a sigh. Mirage froze, optics flicking to your shiny hand as you spread your fingers, examining the strings of fluid that connected them with a far-off feeling of pride.
“Sugar, you’re killin’ me here,” he groaned, and you saw, for one endearing second, a puff of actual steam rise from the vents near his shoulders as he ex-vented harshly.
“Okay, well, here,” you said, unable to come up with anything clever with the purr of arousal in your cunt fanned by the heat of his interface plate and consistent, maddening rumble of his engine. Your hand, still shiny and wet with your fluids, grasped the top of his servo and gently pushed it downwards, until the tips of his digits rested against your drooling entrance. To fight the whimper that threatened to claw its way out of your throat, you nearly chewed a gash into the inside of your cheek. A gasp of an in-vent jolted his frame in awe.
“You sure? I mean— it’s cool?” His flustered stammering was so damn endearing; supreme affection for him swelled in your chest. 
“I’m sure. Just— just go slow.” His adoration was fueling your bravery. You knew he wouldn’t hurt you; if he did, it would never be intentional, and it would never be something he couldn’t fix.
He paused for a second before remembering the position of your own hand and flipping his servo so it was palm side up; you dragged a large enough breath in to balloon your lungs fully at the sight. Anticipation danced in the burn of your spread thighs. For a few seconds, it was just exploration; his digits slid over your silky folds, collecting the gathered slick with minute trembles. One delicious slide all the way up from entrance to clit had you gasping. Mirage silently thanked Primus above that your whole set-up was similar enough to his valve to know at least some of his way around it. It was just hotter. Wetter. Softer. So much softer.
“‘Raj, just— fuuuck,” you groaned out, your head rolling back as the tip of one digit sank into you, soon followed by the rest as it slid all the way to the base. Stars flickered behind your eyelids. The width matched the two fingers put together you’d just pulled out of yourself, though the texture was so wildly different to anything you’d ever put up there that it made your brain stutter for several moments as your nerve endings processed the feeling. The individual ridges and articulations of his knuckles dragged against the silk of your walls in a way that pulled the breath right out of you; your chest rose and fell rapidly with shallow breaths as your thighs twitched.
You were a mess. Mirage was in love. “Holy shit, baby, I get you this bad?” It was only partly teasing. “l— fuck, a second one good?”
“Good, yes, please.”
All thoughts were wiped clean from the forefront of your brain with the addition of a second digit. Slick noises and the sound of dripping fluids landing on metal and concrete filled your ears over the steadily climbing racket that Mirage’s entire body was making — his cooling fans competed with his engine to make the most noise, over top of the typical whirs and clicks that came with his motion. You couldn’t look, could only feel with your eyes squeezed shut as Mirage pumped both digits in and out, in and out, in and out. One arm was thrown up behind you, hooking loosely around his knee to ground you somewhere. The other was occupied: your hand clutched his wrist like a lifeline, white-knuckling it even as your sweaty palm slipped over the metal cuff. When his thumb returned to your clit, swirling clumsy but eager circles on top of it, that only contributed to the tight, hot coil building in your gut.
Mirage had half a mind to pop his interface panel right then and service himself, because the sight of you, shining with sweat and slick with his spit as you rode his digits, was almost too much to bear. The plush folds of your cunt, tight with arousal, were so soft against the hard planes of metal that comprised his servos; the contrast was short-circuiting him. Under his paneling, his spike was already pressurized. Had been for what felt like hours. Your ass was beginning to slide back and forth just a little due to the transfluid collecting underneath you; the rippling motion of your flesh was driving him insane. As were your walls, Primus, your walls that sucked greedily around his digits as they glided in and out of the tight ring of muscle that made up your entrance.
Your name left his lips in a groan that was an octave too high to be suave. The thought of your cunt clamping down on his spike — so soft, so hot, so wet — like it was doing on his digit had his hips rolling against nothing, working fruitlessly for friction they weren’t getting.
Sweat collected wherever skin touched skin. Condensation fogged wherever skin touched metal. The combination of his digits stretching you, curling in you when he realized what a dramatic reaction it incurred, and his thumb working your clit was getting to be too much. Heartbeat roaring in your ears like the rain outside, you clawed a grip into a seam in his leg and jerked your hips against his servo with breathy noises and gasps that you certainly wouldn’t be proud of later. For now, though, all it did was fuel Mirage’s ego and go straight to his spike.
Almost there. You were almost there, grinding your way towards it, sweat beading on your hot skin—
He pulled out. He pulled his digits out. A keen tore out of you at the loss of feeling, tears springing to your eyes as the hot edge you were so fucking close to fell away, your hips working unconsciously against a servo no longer there. With a gasp of a breath, you wrenched your eyes open, blinking away the collected tears and nearly baring your teeth at the bot beneath you — until you saw what he was doing.
In utter astonishment, you watched as the digits that were just inside you slid into his mouth, peeks of his glossa flashing as it worked them clean.
“Oh fuck,” you said before you could stop yourself. One of your hands slapped over your mouth; you tasted sweat and metal. His optics slid to you, lidded and cycling frantically as he processed your taste. A harsh ex-vent slumped his shoulders — the servo not preoccupied with his mouth clutched your hip like you were something precious.
“Sugar,” he breathed, static grating on the word. “Fuck, c’mere.”
Servos hefted you up, and you clutched onto them out of instinct as he helped you up to his face. Without thinking, you lunged forward to kiss, your tongue seeking out his glossa and tasting yourself with a resurging thrum of arousal. He cut it short, though, ignoring your protests as he cupped your ass in one servo and held you aloft. 
For a second, you stared at him in confusion. “What are you—“ Then it hit you. “Oh.” Your heart rate skyrocketed.
The grin stretching his faceplates was downright devious. “Hang onto something, wouldja? Not that you’re gonna fall. Just want you to enjoy the ride.” A short, heady chuckle rounded out his words.
“You’re insane— oh!” Your lighthearted scold was immediately interrupted by the press of your hips against his face and the slide of his slick glossa over the entirety of your sex. “Oh my fuck!” sobbed out of you as your upper body jackknifed over his helm. One arm curled around it with clawing fingers; the other slammed, palm flat, against the concrete wall.
A groan of satisfaction rumbled into your cunt as the taste of salt and sweat and girl bloomed on his glossa — just like earlier but so much stronger now. The proud line of his nose bumped your clit for a second before his glossa followed, narrowing so he could flick at it experimentally. Lubricant spilling from his mouth mixed with your own slick and ran down his chin; his cooling fans sputtered and spun weakly for a second as he pushed up further against your hips, malleable mesh drawing shapes between your clit and your hole.
Your fingernails scraped against the wall as your hips jerked of their own accord; the edge stolen from you earlier had very much returned, and the feeling of his faceplates sliding over the plush, soft skin of your inner thighs was doing something terrible to you.
“Mirage, ah, ah— I’m— fuck, fuck!” Broken syllables and curses streamed from your lips as a substitute for real words. When he closed his lips around your clit and sucked, it was over. It was so quick, embarrassingly quick. The orgasm that had been building suddenly snapped free and tore through you like a fucking hurricane, leaving spasming muscles and a wonderful endorphin afterglow in its wake. As you sobbed out his name, he slid two digits of his free servo back into you just to give you something to clamp down on, and it made tears spill down your burning cheeks from pure stimulus. Mirage drank you; he wanted nothing more than this, to swallow you down and leave your taste buzzing on his glossa like high-grade. Several thundering heartbeats later found you hunched over his helm as his glossa continued to work lazily against you, forcing twitches out of your thighs from pure overstimulation.
“Okay, okay,” you managed to croak, voice hoarse from weeping moans and boneless from what was probably one of the most insane finishes of your life. You tapped out weakly on the side of his helmet. Reluctantly, he pulled your pussy away from his face and cradled you in both servos, one noticeably damper than the other, in front of him.
His chin was shiny with you, his grin wide and completely self satisfied, and his optics dimmed with pleasure. If you were being honest, he’d never looked better, but in your frazzled state you weren’t sure if you had the capacity to string together enough words to form a compliment.
“I gotta say, compliments to the chef,” he hummed, and you stared at him, words not processing.
“Did you seriously— you just gave me head and that’s what you’re gonna say?”
“Uhh, yeah, babe. And I meant it.”
A genuine laugh shook you. “Oh my god. Ohhh my god. Okay. Well, put me back down there, you corny fuck,” you said with a gesture back at his hips.
“Oooh, keep sayin’ that. I’ll start thinkin’ you mean it.” Your body, errant trembles still running through it, was set carefully down back near its original position. This time, you sat in something closer to a straddle, back straight instead of leaning.
The garage air had gone from temperate and warm to fucking scorching. Outside, the rain droned on, occasional rumbles of thunder sounding so far away that they may as well have not been real. Your entire world had been compressed down to one point — a gravitational singularity in this garage, crushing space and time down until only bricks and concrete stood between you and the oblivion outside. All you knew was living metal and Mirage’s voice, trembling with excitement and fuzzy with static, and that was all you wanted to know. His chassis was making so much noise that you probably, under any other circumstance, would have been concerned; if he blew a gasket fucking you, though, you would wear that with pride.
Pure adoration reflected right back at you from his optics as his servos settled on your hips, his thumbs stroking your slick skin. Any concerns he had about Prime’s reaction to you, or to this — well, maybe not to this specifically, but to the both of you being together — were completely null and void in your presence; the reality of your soft weight in his lap was enough to short out his circuits.
Your hands slid down from the cooling fan in his abdomen spinning at maximum speed towards his soaked interface panel; glancing up at him demurely through your lashes, you spoke.
“You gonna let me return the favor?”
“Huh?” He broke out of his reverie. “Oh, right, um— yeah. Yeah, please.”
A smile crawled over your face at the reminder that despite all the poetic words you could come up with in your head, Mirage was still, and always would be, Mirage. Dazed already, he ran the subroutines to open his interface panel. Machinery shifted with a few clicks, and there was a hiss and an outpour of steam as his spike swung up before you, clearly aching for some kind of touch.
You heard more plates shifting lower, too, and out of curiosity peeked downward; something slick glowed lower down, but the nervous shifting of Mirage’s hips and his closed thighs obscured it from view.
Probably better to just focus on what’s in front of you. Your eyes roamed the length of his array first, your mouth going dry just at the size of it. It was bigger than any toy you owned, anyone you’d slept with, and bigger than his digits, too. Still, though… what were humans if not persevering?
And flexible?
You wrapped a hand around it right below the tip, and a full shudder lanced up Mirage’s frame; it was so thick that there was still space between your fingers and thumb left over. Transfluid, milky in consistency but pearlescent pink in color, spilled from the flared head. Curiosity overtook you, and you swiped a thumb up to catch an errant bead of it as it trailed down the side. The fluid was semi-oily, and smelled… fairly innocuous. Metallic, sure, but that came with the territory.
The array itself was as impressive as it was pretty. Like everything else about Mirage, it was fancy, mostly chrome with blue striping up the sides that led to a fully blue head. The biomesh it was made of — similar to his glossa — gently throbbed with alien pulses as you stared at it. Oh, that was hot. Why was that so hot?
Exploration in full was rewarded with soft noises spilling unbidden from Mirage’s lips, his hips twitching uncontrollably as you carefully slid your hand down from the tip to the base in one fluid motion, feeling the transfluid slick under your fingers. “Mmph, I— ah,” he choked out through gritted denta as you observed him.
Oh. Oh. The realization of the power you held over the big mech made a special kind of arousal thrum through you. Another slow pump had his hips jerk up once and a servo clamp over his mouth.
“This was not included in your anatomy lesson,” you said pointedly, a cheshire grin on your face as you hovered dangerously close to his spike. It throbbed in your grip, working another bead of transfluid out of the tip.
“Oh shit, babe,” he groaned, rolling his helm back against the wall. “Uh— hands— hands-on learning?” he offered weakly, unable to focus on anything other than the soft, damp skin of your palm around his spike.
He made the mistake of looking down as you let spit drool out of your bruised lips and spill over his spike for additional lube, and he snapped his optics shut to avoid from a spontaneous overload right there. The noises he made as you slid your tongue over the head were pitiful.
“Fuck, baby, fuck, fuck, fuck,” he hissed, spinal struts clicking as they arched. Primus, was he seriously about to overload in your mouth? Your lips closed around the head and sucked lightly, and he yelped. A servo shot out and carefully grabbed your shoulder, though the tremors running through his digits told you of the restraint he was barely employing. A string of spit and transfluid connected your mouth to his spike as you lifted your head, and he had to force himself to look away for a second with that same servo clutched over his mouth to keep steady. “‘m not gonna last like that, you— can we just—“
“Fuck?”
“Primus, yes.”
“Yeah, we can. I guess.” Despite the leap of excitement in your stomach, you rolled your eyes.
“Don’t even start with that, c’mon,” he said fondly, one servo supporting you as you lifted yourself above his spike and stared down at it with no small amount of trepidation.
It looked a little more manageable from above, but working with something the size of your forearm would cool anyone’s heels, even if there was slick drooling down your inner thighs. Mirage’s servos settled heavy on your hips and you braced yourself on first his knees behind you, then his wrists as you tilted your pelvis to align your entrance as best you could. You sank. The head pressed insistently against your hole. Relax. Relax. Relax.
A deep breath filled your lungs, then whooshed out, deflating your shoulders. Unable to help himself, Mirage inched one of his servos over and ran his thumb through your folds, rolling over your clit and jolting your hips enough to slip the head inside. A long sigh of  “Fuuuuck.” was all that managed to come out of your mouth, your toes curling at the stretch and then the pop of the flared head sliding past your entrance.
Mirage’s entire frame trembled. His vents became shallow and sharp, and the tips of his digits clamped onto the soft meat of your hips desperately as the sensors on his spike reckoned with the realization of just how wet and warm humans really were. “Babe, babe, babe, shit,” he stammered out. “That’s— um, fuck, that’s good!” A weak laugh escaped him as his chin sank down to his chassis, cooling fans hiccuping from stress.
“Hold on, just hold on, I can… shit.” Sweat-dampened palms slid off his wrists for a second before you resituated yourself and leaned back a little, letting your upper back rest against his tucked up thighs. Whatever you were doing worked, because you sank further, and you thanked whatever god was listening that you’d already finished once, making your body quite boneless and that much easier to maneuver.
Mirage, on the other hand, was as taut as a fucking bowstring, made helpless to his own pleasure and completely powerless to you. His optics first scrunched shut, unable to look at you for fear of overloading at the sight of you finally on his spike; then they flew open at the realization that he wanted this burned into his visual processors forever.
Your skin shone with sweat and lubricant; rivulets trailed down your body like a visual pointer to your slick sex, nestled within wiry hair and stretching so beautifully around his spike that it tore an honest-to-Primus whimper out of his vocal synthesizer.
“Mirage, I need you to— mmnh, fuck, I need you to just touch— please,” you gasped, his spike punching the air right out of your lungs. Although your words were broken, he seemed to get the memo, and despite his minute tremors, brought his thumb back to your clit and pressed down. Just the surface area alone made you sigh and roll your head back in pleasure, and it loosened you enough to take him right up until the head nestled against your cervix and your ass brushed his hip plating. There was maybe an inch or two left, but you felt immense pride at managing to work most of his spike in — and immense pleasure, too. If he moved his thumb at all, you were done; you were so fucking full you could barely breathe, and you felt the slow, rhythmic pulses of his biomesh throb through you.
Mirage had never been one for restraint. He did things all-in, one-hundred-and-ten percent, all with a flourish to top it off; the feeling of the hot silk of your walls flexing around his spike just sitting there was enough to quite literally kill his cooling fans via a micro-short in an attempt to divert more power towards keeping his hips still. Senseless praises streamed from his lips, voice whining and roughened by static fuzz. “Yes, yes, yes, sugar, Primus, that’s good— feels so good, please, can I move, please,” he fumbled, jaw slack and optics flickering with the power surges cascading throughout his frame.
“Just— let me start,” was your response, tears pricking at your eyes, and although Mirage groaned pitifully underneath you, he listened.
You had a fair amount of experience with riding toys, and you knew what felt good; the lightbulb above your head became apparent. A shift in your position pushed further weight to the back so that the ridges and nodes of his spike pressed insistently toward the front — though, to be fair, it pressed everywhere — and oh, fuck, right there. Now shoved against that sweet spot inside you, the pleasure teetered on the edge of pain, and you dragged yourself up with a vicious grip on the seams of his thighs behind you. Mirage whined and shifted his hips just slightly; it was enough to pull a moan from your lips as you slid upward. Thick, sluggish droplets of slick swirled with transfluid oozed down his spike. He watched — it was all he could do — with an open mouth and rapidly cycling optics.
The flared head caught against your entrance; a spike (ha!) of pleasure lanced through you. “Okay, now, you can— help me, please,” you stammered out, dizzy with pleasure already and feeling a loopy kind of open-mouthed grin situate itself on your face. 
Your words were all he needed. Although he desperately, desperately wanted to snap his hips up and chase the vice-grip of your slick walls, he’d rather take on Megatron alone with his servos tied behind his back than risk hurting you. Especially while interfacing. He did not want to have to explain that to anyone.
Thumb slowly working your clit, his servos gripped your hips just a little too tight and assisted; you could feel the tremors lancing up and down his arms as he helped you establish a rhythm. At a word, the dam would break, but for now, you maintained tenuous control over the mech and over yourself as you rode him with his help.
Well. Rode was a strong word for it; he all but dragged you up and down the length of his spike, earning each of you luxurious groans from the other, but your quivering thigh muscles assisted as best they could. Heat surged through your body at the drag of his nodes against your walls, and you realized with a hot flash that Mirage was going to fucking ruin you for anybody else, and you liked that. Which was good, because he could have stayed buried in your cunt for the rest of his life and offlined happily just like that.
It was good. It was really good. But even the overwhelming stretch wasn’t enough. Just like earlier — it seemed like light years away now — when you’d still had pants on and hadn’t been completely lost to metal-on-skin debauchery, the grind of your clit on the seam of your jeans had been good, but not enough. Your fingers clawed at his wrists. The burn of your thighs from exertion seared through you, mixing with the jolts of pleasure from your clit to create some new, terrible monster that had you twitching with shameless ecstasy.
“Mirage, Mirage,” you croaked, as he slid you down his spike again and pushed it into your lungs, “I’m— fuck, please, faster, please, please.” In any other scenario, your begging would have immensely embarrassed you; now, though, it seemed like the only viable option to get him to fuck you like you needed him to.
“Shit, baby,” he hissed, and you gasped as he kept moving you, legs jerking uselessly. “You— fuck, you sure?”
“Yes, please, just— oh, fuck!” The cry — and the air in your lungs — was knocked right out of you by a single desperate snap of his hips upward, his spike driven straight home. Your entire upper body crumpled forward, kept upright only by a tenuous grip on his wrists, and then he really started fucking you, and you were gone.
His cooling fans surged back to life as he slammed into you, power no longer diverted towards holding the actuators of his hips back. No, now he was fucking jackhammering into you, and you were barely moving as his spike pistoned in and out of you, slick drooling from your cunt. Like he remembered himself, his thumb began to work furiously against your clit, and you rewarded him with a gasp and more than a few uncontrollable moans of his name, which only served to fuel him more.
Not like he was being quiet, either. You were glad that the building was solid brick and the rain continued to pour outside, because the amount of noise coming from his chassis and spilling from his lips was worrying. Praises and broken mentions of your name streamed from him; he tossed his helm back against the wall with his optics squeezed shut to keep from overloading prematurely. It was too much— it was way too fucking much. Your poor overworked cunt was nearly bruised with sensitivity, barely able to keep up with the stretch of his spike as the nodes pulsing along it raked that sweet spot inside of you mercilessly. Neither of you were going to last long; not your fragile human body nor his torqued-up frame could handle much more of this.
Every sharp thrust paired with the frantic, messy circles he pressed into your clit brought you viciously closer and spilled tears from your eyes. All you could really do was hold on as Mirage wrung pleasure from both your body and his. Impossibly, his thumb worked faster, his pace got even more brutal, and you were almost seizing from pleasure as your nerve endings were frayed raw. That peak was building in your gut, that familiar tight coil of heat, for the second time that night, and you knew it was going to completely destroy you, and you wanted it to.
Without warning, Mirage spread his knees apart, slammed his pedes flat on the floor, and thrusted up. His spinal struts arched again to get his spike that much further inside of your yielding body, his overload imminent and warning signs flashing in his optics’ periphery. “Fuck, yes— yes, baby, yes, yes, ah, shit!” His frenzied whine rang in your ears as steam from his vents heated the air around you; the only thing that rang in your ears besides your thunderous heartbeat was the heady slap of skin against metal, everything slick with your combined fluids.
You responded in kind at the new angle with a cry of his name and some noises that resembled words, but the way he sheathed his spike inside you — fuck, was it all the way in? — and ground his thumb against your clit was too much— too much— you couldn’t—
You shattered. Doubling over from pleasure, you sobbed incoherently as your climax slammed into you. Pleasure crackled through your veins like lightning; a fog of pleasure dulled your senses until the only thing you could focus on was his spike pulsing in your cunt and his thumb still grinding against your clit. Tears pricked at your eyes, joining the ones already wetting your cheeks, as jolts of pleasure lanced up your spine. Maybe you moaned his name, maybe you didn’t. You couldn’t tell.
Mirage went soon after you, because the feeling of your walls clamping around his spike as if trying to suck him in impossibly further did him in instantly. His optics snapped open wide before slamming shut and he cried your name as the best overload of his life wracked his frame; the actuators of his hips trembled violently, along with his servos, as transfluid gushed into you and was immediately forced out by the pure lack of room inside your cunt. Engine snarling, cooling fans nearly spinning off their axles, he held your hips as flush to his as possible while the both of you rode out your respective climaxes, twitching around each other violently. Minute jerks of his hips attempted to work more transfluid inside of you. Brain still wiped blank with pleasure, all you could do was make soft noises and let the aftershocks spasm through you.
Consciousness eventually came back to you in gritty waves. Mirage had set your body down, leaned back against his thighs, his spike still seated within you but depressurizing slowly. Transfluid seeped out of your puffy folds, and you lifted a shaking hand to collect some of it and taste it. Metallic. Like you’d expected.
Enormous vents whooshed through his frame as he attempted to cool his chassis; coolant dripped from him, some of it turned to steam by the pure heat of his internal mechanisms. Body shaking and feeling very small and human, you stroked a thumb over his wrist where you held it, feeling both its ambient warmth and a surge of affection. And satisfaction.
You were absolutely going to feel this in the morning, holy shit. Thank God you didn’t have work tomorrow.
Mirage eventually came back down to earth, his optics cracking open and cycling a few times before they flared to their usual brightness. Lids heavy and a dopey grin on his face, he carefully lifted you off his spike — it slid out of you with a slick noise that made you flush — and brought you up to face-level. With one servo, he held you tight against his torso; he planted the other flat on the floor and resituated his hips so he could slump down further against the wall, his entire frame lax.
Self-satisfaction beamed at you from his faceplates. “Oh, that was good, huh?”
You scoffed, too tired to get riled up at his teasing; you knew he was feeling the same as you. “Yeah, pretty good. I don’t know if I’ll be able to walk tomorrow, to be totally honest.” An exhausted laugh left you.
“Gonna count that as a win.”
“You… do whatever you want.” You waved a limp hand at him dismissively, letting the rise and fall of his chassis with his vents rock you.
“Well, then, I wanna do this,” he purred, and brought you in for a kiss that communicated all his smug affection without any of his stupid jokes. You returned it gratefully, a smile on each of your mouths as you basked in that pleasant post-sex glow.
The rain still droned outside. A boom of thunder rolled through the building; the lights flickered. Both you and Mirage glanced upward. His optics slid back down to you first.
“You thinkin’ about going anywhere in this weather?” he asked, raising a brow ridge.
“I dunno, do I have a ride?”
“Nah,” he replied playfully, kissing you again, and you found that it could storm for the rest of your life, and you wouldn’t really care. So long as you had your favorite — yes, your favorite, not that you could ever admit around him — to keep you company.
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nathaslosthershit · 6 months ago
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Celebration Baby, Literally! (CL16) [Blind Items AU]
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(Part 6 in the Blind Items AU [can be read separately])
Summary: 8 months after Charles Monaco win, the fans get to see just how hard he celebrated
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“Ohhhhhhh mate, you have been outed!” Pierre laughes as he shoves his phone into Charles’ face.
“Pierre, I cannot read when you put the screen in my eyes like that, back up” Charles responds as he shoves his longtime friend. Like many of the other victims of the ‘F1 Blind Items’ account, Charles’ face drains of color as he sees what they are saying. While there is some truth to the rumor, it still is far from correct. “Ah! Merde, they got so much wrong, mate!”
“What's wrong, honey?” Charles’ girlfriend calls from the other room where she is sitting with Pierre’s girlfriend. The couple decided to join the Gasly house for a nice dinner, although reading the post surely made Charles lose his appetite. 
Charles and Pierre look at each other as they realize she heard them. The one thing the post got right was that his girlfriend was very pregnant with what is most likely a post-win conceived baby. There was no reason to stress her out when she was so offline it would take a while for her to learn about the rumor, giving Charles enough time to convince her to go public and try to make this into the smallest problem possible. 
“Nothing, baby. I love you” He responded as he made a ‘stay silent’ motion at Pierre.
“Um okay, love you too?” was all she replied, not believing in the slightest that this was nothing. 
It didn’t help that for the rest of the night, Charles was off in his own world, thinking of how he was going to execute his terribly thought out plan. But she wasn’t going to interrogate him on it, at least not again, she had already asked him multiple times if he was okay and if he wanted to talk but he would always answer with a “I am fine, beautiful. How can I not be when the woman I love most is pregnant with our child.” While it was charming, she still wasn’t convinced he was okay after all. 
After hours of deliberation, as he sat outside the bathtub while his girlfriend relaxed in it, he finally spoke his mind.
“We should tell people” is the best he came up with after hours of thinking.
“Tell people what?”
“About the baby”
“We told people about the baby”
“I mean like everyone, we should go public.”
She turned her neck to fully face him at that. 
“Where is this coming from? Why now?” She asked.
“No reason”
“You are a shit liar, Leclerc, tell me why.”
“People know”
“What people know?” She asked. God, he was awful at explaining things.
“Everyone.”
“Then why would we need to tell them?”
Right when he was about to reply, he closed his mouth. Why would he need to tell people? While the Blind Items account had become a reliable source as they had yet to be wrong, there wasn’t any reason to actually address the issue, at least not till the baby was born, which would happen during winter break.
“...I guess we don’t need to. It's just- there is this account that posts rumors about the drivers that so far have always been true, but one came out about us and it isn’t really that correct, I just thought we should squash it.”
“What did they say that wasn’t correct?” She questioned.
“They implied we only got together because of the baby, and that we weren’t dating before I uh, knocked you up.” The ‘very public breakup’ the post referred to, was an actual breakup that happened a year prior to the world knowing. It was another very private relationship, as Charles became more famous and ‘sought after’ he liked to keep relationships from the limelight till they got serious in order to protect his girlfriends. But when his ex had found out just how serious things were with his current girlfriend, she wanted to bring it to light in order to get her 15 minutes of fame, which ended up being more like 2 minutes. As terrible as it was, once the public knew she had no connection to Charles anymore, they lost interest in her. 
After requesting he pull up the post, Charles handed his phone to his girlfriend so she could read.
“Is this what you are worried about? The part about me getting a ring for a ‘push present’? Don’t want me getting any ideas?” She joked. They had been together long enough and were about to have a baby, so the idea of getting engaged took up about 65% of the monégasque’s thoughts, the rest being about her and the baby, maybe 5% in total was devoted to F1.
“Ah no, my love, you know that is not it. Although an engagement ring would already happen even without our baby, so I will get you something else as well as a present” He said as he kissed her shoulder, then her neck, then her cheek, finally landing on her lips.
“We don’t need to say anything, let us enjoy the privacy for a while longer. Wouldn’t it be better to go into the upcoming season with a baby and a financée?” She asked.
She was right, why not make an even bigger entrance by saying nothing and letting the rumor die down, in order to enjoy the bliss of privacy for a little while longer.
“That sounds wonderful, mon amour. Absolutely perfect.”
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hairmetal666 · 11 months ago
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Steve who goes on a Bake Off type show after Robin, Dustin, and Max set him up as a contestant. He doesn't want to, doesn't think baking or cooking should be stressful, but he's been wallowing since his knee surgery took him out of work and basketball, since his divorce.
His first day on set, he's totally gobsmacked by the sexy host with all the tattoos and long, curly hair. Just, cannot take his eyes off the guy, blushing and stammering whenever he comes around to do interviews, obviously can't stop starring.
After the first day, where he manages to stay comfortably in the middle of the pack, he calls Robin to complain about what a mess he becomes around this gorgeous dude.
Her response is to cackle and say, "Steve! How do you not know who Eddie Munson is? Oh my god, you're a disaster."
Turns out, Eddie Munson is the lead singer of Dustin's favorite band, Corroded Coffin, and also pretty well-known for his dnd YouTube channel. He's been a host on the show for years, only Steve doesn't really pay attention when the others watch it and didn't know.
Eddie, for his part, is losing his mind. He'd known about the beautiful contestant for this season, former college basketball superstar turned coach, having a hell of a shitty year after dislocating his kneecap in a charity game. Eddie--foolishly, it turns out--thought he wouldn't be as attractive in person. He also expected Steve to be terrible and egotistical, a jock through and through.
So, when Steve Harrington walks into the tent in a short-sleeved polo and obviously ironed jeans and is still drop-dead gorgeous, he's fucking flabbergasted. And then Steve has the audacity to be nice? Kind and thoughtful and running to help other bakers when he still has work to do himself? He also blushes so pretty, high across his nose and cheeks, and god does hewant to be the reason Steve blushes like that.
Eddie is beside himself.
Leading up to the second week, Steve schools himself into being calm around Eddie. He can't afford to lose his cool like that every time the host is around. Except, this week Eddie flirts with him shamelessly. Winks at him, leans into space, calls him "m'lord" with this deeply resonant voice that makes Steve want to drop to his knees. Steve doesn't mean to, not really, but he flirts right back, feeding Eddie tidbits of his bakes and looking for any excuse to touch him.
Steve does well for the first half of episodes. He never wins the technical or star baker, but he's regularly within the top contestants. On episode five, though, something is off. He's distracted, forgetful, doesn't leave enough time for his custard to set in the signature. Eddie asks if he's okay, but Steve shrugs and smiles, says "off my game today."
But then, in the technical, he curdles his buttercream more than once, and his genoise sponge burns. Eddie watches as Steve folds his arms above his head and disappears from view. He doesn't hesitate, he sprints from his interview, falling to his knees in front of the contestant.
"Stevie, sweetheart, what's going on?"
"I get migraines," Steve whispers. Trails of wet streak down his cheeks. "I've felt one coming all morning, been trying to stave it off but--"
"Okay, okay," Eddie shakes out his hands. "You can sit out this challenge, yeah? Or take this weekend off. It happens. You'll come back next week--"
"I don't want to stop." More tears fall from his eyes.
"What do you need?"
Steve shakes his head, wry little smile pulling at his lips. "Time to breathe."
Eddie glances up, eyes catching on the camera crew hovering in front of them. He throws both middle fingers up and says, in the most reasonable and even tone, "fuck!" Everyone in the tent looks at him, but he doesn't stop. "Shit!" "Bitch!" Motherfucker!" He goes on and on, saying the filthiest series of things he can think of. The camera crew steps away, another contestant brings Steve a glass of water, and Eddie sits with him.
The other host announces that there are thirty minutes remaining in the challenge.
"Well. That's that, then," Steve says. He stands, patting the naked skin of Eddie's knee where it shows through the rip in his jeans as he goes.
"Wait, what do you mean?"
"Out of time, no cake, no buttercream."
Eddie hops to his feet. "You're going to let that stop you?"
"Well." Steve laughs. "Can't serve this." He gestures to his discarded bowls of frosting, his burnt cake.
"You have time to make another buttercream."
Steve raises an eyebrow. "Sure, but not the cake."
"Cut the burnt off. Cover it in the buttercream. Easy peasy."
"Okay..." Steve stares at his station. "Okay, that could work. It won't be pretty, but--"
Eddie, knowing he's no longer needed, steps away, and Steve gets to work.
Steve tells Robin all about it and, as soon as he gets home from the taping and she's immediately like, "Eddie Munson, huh?"
He shoots her a look. "It's nothing."
"Yeah, him leaping over a table to check on you is surely nothing."
"Robin," he warns.
"What?"
"Eddie would never want a guy like me."
She laughs but quickly grows sober. "Steve. Of course he would. He likes you."
"It's nothing, really." He walks towards the kitchen. "What do you want for dinner?"
Eddie experiences the same harassment from his band members and their manager.
"You're gonna ask Harrington out, right?" Gareth asks.
"That would be a little bit of a professional conflict of interest," he deadpans. He doesn't look up from his guitar.
A puffed Cheeto smacks him square in the forehead. "Hey!" He shrieks.
"He means once the season is done, Edward," Chrissy says.
He wipes the cheese dust from his forehead. "Not a good enough reason to call me Edward. Anyway, I'm pretty sure he's straight."
Jeff guffaws. "C'mon, dude. No way. He's so into you he might as well have a neon sign."
"He divorced a woman."
"That doesn't mean anything, and you know it," Chrissy says.
Eddie rolls his eyes. "I may be considering asking him out. Maybe."
Everyone cheers. More Cheetos hit him in the face.
---
To Steve's great surprise, he makes it to the finals. Not just makes it, he gets a star baker, gets first in the semi-final technical. He's baking in the final and might have a fucking chance.
It's with great surprise, once it's all said and done, that he hears his name announced as the winner. He doesn't have much time to process it, because Eddie is striding towards him. He's not carrying the cake stand trophy or flowers, it's just Eddie.
Eddie who stops in front of him, eyes shining. Eddie who leans in and whispers, "I knew you could do it, baby, I'm so proud of you." Eddie who twines his fingers through Steve's hair, pulling him into a soft, sweet kiss.
The internet explodes as the season airs. Everyone is obsessed with Steve and Eddie. They have fics on ao3, a dedicated tumblr community, edits, playlists, gif sets, a ship name all dedicated to them. The fandom grows after episode 5 airs. Not all the footage makes it, thanks to Eddie, but they still witness him tenderly taking care of Steve and directing the cameras away. Fans start scouring their social medias, looking for any hint of their relationship status; even beg them in comments and DMs to reveal if it was just a showmance.
Eddie and Steve, however, are happy in the quiet little world the carved out for themselves after filming. They aren't ready to reveal anything, even hints, whether or not the show would let them.
Then, the final airs and the kiss is revealed to the world. The ending title cards show a picture of Steve with the rest of the season's bakers and the caption, "Steve threw a party for the other bakers..."
The picture then changes to one of he and Eddie, arms wrapped around each other. This caption says: "...at the home he shares with his boyfriend Eddie."
That night, in bed, Steve says, "I'm really glad Robin and the kids made me go on the show. But do you think it's bad that the thing I'm happiest about, way more than winning, is that I met you?"
Eddie places a slow circle of kisses in the dip of Steve's lower back. "Sweetheart, I'd be disappointed if you said anything else. Now, hush, I have a baking champion to congratulate."
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slimepuparibaba · 5 months ago
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LnDS HCs: Sylus (General HCs)
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HI! I HAVE TOO MANY HEADCANONS FOR SYLUS SO PLEASE TAKE THEM!! THEY WILL DEFO NOT BE ACCURATE COME JULY BUT STILL IM USING WHAT SCRAPS OF INFO I HAVE RN AND IF HE TURNS OUT LIKE THIS APOLLO GAVE ME THE GIFT OF PROPHECY
IF THIS IS INACCURATE I WILL COMMIT CHAPTER 4 OKOK
GENERAL HC DUMP / PREDICTIONS (MAYBE DONT COUNT ON IT)
Okay, we all agree he comes off as the type of guy that would burn the world for you.
BUT!
Big but here.
I don't think he's a terrible boyfriend or anything. In fact, he genuinely does love you.
I believe, me personally, you are the one weakness this man has and he will treat you with care. Is the way he treats you rough around the edges and comes off a little different than most? Yes.
But he won't ever actually hurt you. He watches you from afar like a silent protector to make sure you aren't hurt, even using his Evol to make sure you STAY alive.
I personally think he might actually treat you kinda like one of his men, like an equal in terms of "you can definitely handle yourself and I know you're strong", but he'll still keep an eye on you just because you're that important to him. He trusts you.
...okay, so like, maybe not completely trust you because let's be honest here, you're kiiiinda prone to trying dumb shit on him, but it's funny. He'll forgive it. The smug bastard.
From what I've seen, he comes off cool, suave, knows what he's doing. Cocky.
Bad boy. He's a bad boy in all sense of the word.
He knows what he's doing, he's confident, he's charming. Knows what to say and do. He's also a CEO so dealing with people? Basically easy for him.
When it comes to you? He will flirt. Because he likes getting a reaction out of you.
I bet he teases you a TON. You hate him? Good. At least you have him in your thoughts.
Love is war with him. You try to scheme? He already has a counter. Man is 100 steps ahead of you, but just likes seeing you make a complete fool of yourself.
You know when he gets the upper hand he'll have that signature smirk of his that just screams "kiss me to shut me up and I'll consider this your win".
You thought Rafayel had an ego? Nah. NAH, THIS DUDE HAS AN E G O.
Sparring sessions with him are very likely. He'd probably be like "alright, but not going easy on you" or something cocky like that with a smug smirk on his face.
Man genuinely treats you as his equal though when training. Teaches you everything he knows and points out some techniques you might be rusty on.
Rizz is off the charts. He's lived in the N109 Zone and breathed it for so long. He's a sweet talker, so be prepared for him to know how to make you melt.
But also, he will actually spoil you. Will he make you work for it? Yes. He will give you an entire runaround (make you say please, make you verbalize it, etc), but he does it because he loves you.
You are genuinely his soft spot, and I CANNOT stress this enough.
The things he does in the dark are things he does FOR YOU. His reason for being REVOLVES around you, you just don't know it yet. Don't let him being the leader of Onichynus get to your head—he has method to his madness.
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nothorses · 1 year ago
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I hope this is okay to ask but I’m pretty desperate and googling stuff has failed me, so do you or one of your followers have recommendations on how to deal with the BO that comes with taking testosterone? I never had BO that couldn’t just be managed by showering enough and putting on just any deodorant but now that I’m taking T I sweat a lot and I smell bad and I nothing I do seems to fix it. My boss has politely mentioned it several times now despite all my effort and it’s so mortifying and embarrassing.
Things I’ve tried and am currently doing include so many different deodorants which I bring to work and reapply, putting baking powder in my shoes, on top of general basic hygiene. But none of it seems to make a dent and it doesn’t help that I can’t really change clothes or shoes throughout the day. I have to wear closed toed shoes and a lab coat and my job is pretty active, plus it’s 10 minutes walk from the parking lot and it’s over 100F or 40 C right now so when I arrive at work I’m already pouring sweat. I also have a large chest so it all gets under my bra and soaks into it and by the end of the day the bottom part of my bra reeks.
I know some ocasional BO on a busy day can’t be helped but none of the other people at work including other male coworkers seem to have the same issue at all, so there’s got to be a solution but I haven’t found it. Im thinking of trying antiperspirants but I also know I need to sweat and I would rather not put my health at risk. So if anyone has something that works for them please let me know bc im really desperate here.
First I want to say: you're not doing anything wrong. You probably just sweat more than some other folks, and that's not your fault, and you shouldn't feel bad about it. I'm gonna give you some ideas to try if you haven't yet, but I don't know how much you've already tried, and it sounds like you've been through a lot already.
I also have always had terrible BO, and the only thing that helped at all pre-T was "prescription strength" deodorant. I honestly have had less of an issue since starting T, weirdly enough, but part of that is also that I physically cannot stand to shower any less frequently than every single morning (not necessarily a good thing lol), and I also started using antibacterial products on my armpits when I shower.
Currently I use benzoyl peroxide body wash on my armpits, which can be drying, but it hasn't caused me issues so far (just look for Panoxyl, other brands have caused irritation for me and my partner both). I used Betadine surgical scrub before that for a bit (you collect weird shit when you work with horses 🤷‍♂️) and that worked well, too- plus it's less likely to irritate skin.
I also find that certain shirts cause me to sweat there more, and those also tend to be the more form-fitting shirts that get up into my armpits. That skin def needs to breathe.
My partner has had trouble with feet/shoes in the past, and he's used cedar shoeforms to mitigate that (cedar is also antibacterial!). He also makes sure any shoes he gets are breathable (not leather), and if they are leather, he gives them at least a day or two between wears. Probably good practice if you notice any kind of smell on any of your shoes.
You mention baking powder, and I'm not sure if you meant baking soda and just mixed them up (which I do all the time lmao) but just in case: if you are using baking powder, the one you want is baking soda.
I don't have much advice for chest sweat, except that you may want to consider bringing an extra bra (and maybe an extra pair of socks if you're noticing it before the end of the day) to change into midway through the day. You can also look for more breathable fabrics in general, especially athletic-wear, which is already designed to help wick sweat and mitigate those issues.
Lastly, I want to stress again that you're not doing anything wrong. Some people have more trouble with this than others, and if you're really struggling in a way nobody around you is, it may be that you've got something going on in your body that they don't have to deal with. This could be a medical thing as well (like acne!!), and there's no shame in seeking medical solutions for it. Talk to your doctor if you can; it sounds like it's causing you distress, and you deserve to be comfortable.
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rooshoom · 1 year ago
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I did it. I have Spots verbal quirks in the previous post and now you get to have Spots physical quirks and movements with some quotes from when I noticed he does them.
Poses
Terrible casual ‘guy’ poses
The arm lean, the hand on the hip, the tilted head. He is totally faking the confidence.
“I love how many of your there are!”
“It’s the place with the big collider.”
Shoulders / Arms
When he first walks into the store to rob the ATM, he has super tense shoulders. We see a lot of his stress and tension carried more in his upper body than lower body.
Lots of shrugging
Shrinks in on himself by squeezing his arms to his sides
During the flashback when he brought the spider from 42 to 1610 you can really see how much he tries to squeeze in on himself.
Slings his arms, when he throws his portals his arms fly forward very fluidly. Example when he throws the portal at Pav, Gwen and Hobie, he throws it hard enough that his upper body drops once it’s out of his hand.
Hand movements
Fingers first, if you watch the way he reaches into the ATM he doesn’t just casually reach in, he grabs things with his fingers instead of his whole hand or with his palm
Floppy hand / t-rex arm
Conveys tons of emotions through his hands, like when he is shocked he flexes his fingers open. Maybe picked up on this since he can no longer express emotion through his face.
Balled fists but likely out of nerves. Once again seen in the flashback of the spider.
Points with all of his fingers instead of just one. “You made me into this!”
Standing / walking
It seems like he only stands at full height when he’s trying to convince himself to be confident. “I am the Spot.”
Even when he’s actually confident he doesn’t stand at full height. Right before he disappears inside Pav’s collider, which you can tell by his verbal cues that he’s very confident with what he's about to do, he’s still leaned over.
Knees together, once against this man just wants to appear small.
Clumsy. “I need more spots!” Running into walls, dropping things, and twisting around corners.
Would rather stand, crouch, or stand on his knees than sit down. Look at Gwen watch him ramble to himself while building, he doesn’t sit once.
Crouches with his neck more than his back. “You’ll have a villain worth fighting for.”
Head / Face
Head tilts
Leans forward to see with face first, so lucky he has a hole right there to deflect fists because if he didn’t he would be punched in the face so fast.
When he says “wow four on there.” You can see him lean in with his face. Totally why that old lady beat him with a purse.
Literal nose tilted up attitude later in the movie. When he’s in Pav’s universe dropping scientists into portals, he has face tilted up and nodding along with how many holes he creates.
Other
I see him stim with his legs a lot, such as hopping foot to foot. “This is real.”
Just generally very fluid, watch how he falls into the portal when he yells, “I am your nemesis!” He flops into it instead of bracing for impact. He has no sense of self preservation.
He. Cannot. Fight. Watch all of his scenes and look at how loose he is. A slinky of a man.
Look at how he flails. This man would flinch if you threw a pillow at him.
Y’all, I’m absolutely encouraging you to write Spot X Reader with my lists. I’m trying to make this easy as possible, don’t think babygirl just write a bedtime story for the masses we can all peacefully drift off to. Let me spoil you with the time I spent doing this so you don’t have to.
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frostbitedoesstuff · 3 months ago
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I wanted to make this post not to address anyone in particular, but just for the sake of getting it off my mind.
I absolutely hate it when people in the Honkai fandom say that Welt is a terrible father and/or abandoned his family. The truth is, Welt loves his family so, so much, and still cares about them deeply even though he’s far away. There is clear and irrefutable evidence of this.
When you talk to Welt on the Express, you have the option to ask him about his friends. This is his response.
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Here, he acknowledges that there are people waiting for him back home, and says that at some point prior to the game’s events, he asked Herta to send a signal to his home in hopes of being able to tell his family that he’s safe, and perhaps even tell them of his whereabouts (though that’s just an assumption on my end.)
When the Express is about to leave for the Xianzhou Loufu, if you talk to Welt, you can ask him what planet he would like to go to. This is his response.
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Notice how his immediate answer to where he wants to go is home, as well as the word he uses to describe the fact that he cannot do so: sadly. He really could have said anywhere else, especially because he likely knew that probably wasn’t what the Trailblazer meant when they asked that question, but no. He answers honestly, and his honest answer is that he wants to go home.
This next section will have spoilers for the Penacony quest line, so proceed with caution.
For this next example, we’ll need some background information. What exactly is Ena’s Dream? Well, to explain in simple terms, Ena’s Dream is an escapist dream state meant to simulate what someone would view to be an ideal reality. The specifics of the dream varies from person to person, because each person has different desires, different ideals, different wants, different needs. But Ena’s Dream is meant to simulate what the individual TRULY desires, no matter how unrealistic or outlandish it may be.
In 2.3, if you talk to Welt, you can ask him what he saw in Ena’s Dream. This is his response.
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In Ena’s dream, he goes home and reunites with his family. Do you understand what that means?
What Welt truly desires, more than anything else, is to find a way back home. What he saw in Ena’s Dream is blatant proof.
Another thing I’d like to draw attention to is how he says that realizing it was a dream was a “bitter truth.” The fact that he still had the Astral Express wasn’t enough for him to describe it as “bittersweet.” It was just bitter.
(No more Penacony spoilers from here on out)
Speaking of the Astral Express, I’d like to bring up something regarding not only Welt’s relationship with them, but the entirety of Star Rail’s world as a whole.
Something about Welt’s character that I really love is his ability to embrace the world around him and the people in it, DESPITE the fact that he also misses his home.
He’s engrossed himself deeply in the history and general ins and outs of Star Rail’s universe, to the point where whenever the Trailblazer finds something they don’t recognize, they ask Welt, and he can always provide a detailed answer.
Additionally, Welt has formed a strong familial relationship with the members of the Astral Express, and has a strong desire to keep them safe. For example, during the Jarilo-VI quest line, Welt expresses a clear desire to intervene when he sees the intensity of the situation Trailblazer, March, and Dan Heng are in, and when they return, Welt outright admits that there were more than a few times where he felt legitimate distress, making an off handed comment about having to “stop worrying so much.”
This is something that I feel like some people don’t understand; Welt can love this world and his home world simultaneously, and he does. Just because he isn’t constantly stressing out about going home and refusing to make connections out of fear of getting attached doesn’t mean that he isn’t thinking about his home or doesn’t want to find a way to go back.
I believe that the solution Welt wants is to have the best of both worlds, not to completely abandon one for the other. This is why his desired reality of finding a way home and him hoping that his journey with the Astral Express never ends can exist side by side. He truly does want both, and in the ideal ending to his story, he should be able to have both (at least in my opinion.)
I’ve never even played HI3, but I know of Welt’s lore and he is my favorite character in HSR, so I hate it when people mischaracterize him, ESPECIALLY when it comes to this. I hope that by writing this character analysis, this will help people understand him better, and show the people that think he doesn’t love his family that they are blatantly wrong. If you know someone who thinks that, please consider showing them this post.
(One last thing! If you read this entire analysis, then clearly you must like Star Rail. If you’re looking for more content, I’d like to make you aware that as of posting this, I have a Sampard and Astral Express chatfic, as well as a blog where I post Star Rail fanart (frostbitedoesfanart)! Please check them out if you have the time, and thanks for listening to me ramble <3)
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heliads · 2 years ago
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whilst requests are open I have an idea to put forth after years of us discussing this man. Harry Hook x reader based on 'the way I loved you' by taylor swift. Childhood friends to lovers, to strangers to lovers again mayhaps? idk babes. Love you though, I hope your requests don't get out of hand again so you can stay stress-free!
eva i love you for sending this in, please let me talk about harry hook. he's insane and i cannot get enough of him
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You are lying on your bed in a dorm room in Auradon Prep, and if you close your eyes, you can almost convince yourself that you’re somewhere else entirely. Your roommate hung a lantern in the window, and with the glass pane cracked halfway, the light sways back and forth on the ceiling, painting shifting golden silhouettes on the perfectly painted ceiling. If you let the present world fade into the corners of your consciousness, you can pretend there are flaws in the endless pristine magnificence. You could even pretend that you aren’t on the continent at all.
No daughter of a princess should ever be anywhere but in Auradon. That’s the way it should have been, but you ran the second you got the chance and ended up amongst criminals and sons of thieves instead of with other prettily polished girls. Is it a terrible thing to admit that you miss it more than anything?
You shouldn’t, that’s the worst part. You left them willingly. As time passes, though, you’re starting to think that what you thought was one great fight with the so-called lowlifes of this world might have been the greatest time of your life. It’s like fording a raging river; while you’re in the thick of the waves, you think you might drown, but when you’re safe on the dry shore again, all you can think of is the coolness of the water, how the flood had sparkled like a thousand sapphires.
You shut your eyes and then you’re back again, just a kid, happier than you’ve ever been and twice as free. It had been easy to leave, actually, easier than it should have been. In your family, there were enough siblings and cousins and relatives that just one girl could go unnoticed. It’s not that Ariel intentionally tried to blur all of her daughters together in her memory, but it couldn’t be helped. She was one of seven daughters, and you were one of many as well. It wasn’t her fault, no, but it was your excuse anyway.
It turns out that nobody bats their eyes at a mermaid’s daughter when she’s running headlong towards the surf. You dove into the waves and came up to shore miles away. Your mother was terrified of losing any one of her children to the endless sea just as her father lost her to land, so none of you were allowed to stray that close to the beach. Of course you would see how far you could go the second you were unsupervised. Of course you would push the limits just to learn where you would break.
You ended up scaring the daylights out of a boy in a small sailing craft not far from the limits of the Isle of the Lost. You hadn’t meant to go that far, but you were giddy with the feeling of doing something wrong and he was trying to escape as well. He’d offered for you to hitch a ride with him so long as the wind was good. You thought that suited you well enough, so you took the hand he gave you and listened when he introduced himself as Harry Hook.
He said his name the same way you did, emphasis on the first name and not the last. It’s the exact opposite way any child of a prince or princess does, and you think that might have been why you liked him from the start. The sun shone overhead, and you talked to him about running away and taking to the sea and all the things you wanted to do if you just had time.
Neither of you wanted to leave, not really, but of course all good things have to come to an end at some point. You watched the sun sink lower and lower in the sky with all the dread of a doomed man going to the gallows. You must have looked seriously unhappy, because you remember Harry laughing and saying that you could meet him tomorrow, if you wanted. You wanted that more than anything, as it turned out, so you eagerly agreed.
Harry took you as far as he could towards Auradon again, and watched as you dove into the water. You can still remember how he’d watched you go, the way his eyes had tracked the water as if he could look at you forever, even after you disappeared from view. He stayed there for a long time before finally forcing his ship to turn around again. You’d know; you stayed there on the ocean floor watching him back until he was gone.
The next day, you slipped away to meet him again, and the next day, and the next. When you were caught trying to go out to the sea sometime in the second month, you fought until you could find a suitable excuse. Your mother was perfectly fine to let you go to some private school by the coast, it would mean one less child to keep track of. The papers were signed and agreements made before you could so much as blink.
You, of course, never went to that school. Instead, you showed up on Harry’s ship just like usual and told him that you wouldn’t be going back. Harry had been talking about a friend of his, Uma, and how she was forming a crew of her own larger pirate ship. You wanted in, and he couldn’t be more delighted to take you home.
You think you replayed the memory of him introducing you to Uma about a thousand times over in your head, and you’ll do it again tonight. The slats of the dock had been slippery under your feet, but you knew that so long as he was by your side, you would never once fall. Uma had looked at you questioningly, blue-green hair cascading down her shoulders, but Harry had hardly been able to tear his eyes away from you.
“This is Y/N,” he’d said, “she’s my friend.” He’d imbued the word with all the hope and grief and joy you could ever possibly attach to such an idea. Harry smiled as he said it, took your hand, let his eyes open comically wide so you’d know he was just joking when he mentioned that he’d jump overboard if Uma didn’t take you on.
Luckily for him, Uma had no problems with you. She saw something in you, the same sort of restless troublemaking spirit the rest of them had in spades. Before you knew it, you were quite literally learning the ropes of how to help out on Uma’s ship.
From there on out, everything was perfect. You watched the sun rise and set from the deck of a ship you could call home. When the weather was good, you spent all night and day out in the grasp of the world, and when the storms raged on, you hid belowdecks with the best friends you’d ever had. They wanted you, not your mother in a younger form, but you. Just you. It was wonderful.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that you would end up falling in love with Harry. You were hurtling towards that fate as fast as you could, running and sprinting towards the inevitability of it all. No one compared. No one had half as much influence over you as him. And, when he finally managed to tell you how he felt, you thought you might be able to take over the entire world with the sheer force thrumming through your veins.
Perhaps you should have taken that as a warning. The universe doesn’t care much for happy endings, you’ve learned, even for its fairytale heroes. Princesses grow old and fade into obscurity. Princes forget how to save the day. Villains live out their days with fantastic dreams that will never be achieved. You learn how to deal with adequacy, and pretend that it is enough for you.
You loved Harry because he was wild, your untamed, brilliant boy, but then you hated him for it, too. Just once, you wanted to walk into a room and know what he was going to say before he said it. Every word from his mouth was a dagger in your chest. Some days, he was a hopeless romantic, others, he was mad and uncontrollable. He never hurt you, but at least the pain of a blow would be something you could depend on and understand.
Your mother tried to find you about a year or two after you took to the sea, and you used that as your excuse to break up with him. Harry found out you would be returning to Auradon at the exact same time as the rest of the crew. You think he might hate you for it still. You think he would have reason to hate you for a lot, actually, most importantly that you were never quite enough to match him.
So you slipped away from the ship with the worst kind of goodbye, one that you did not mean, and you never looked back. You greeted your mother and agreed when she said that it was time you took up your studies at Auradon Prep. You joined the endless number of would-be princesses and princes and pretended that it was all you had ever needed in life. If you woke up sometimes with the sound of waves crashing in your ears, or felt the steady rock of a ship beneath your feet as you dreamt, you ignored it. Such illusions only belong to the past, and they will never be yours again.
You still have a jacket of his in the corner of your room; you brought it all the way over here, anywhere you go. You never had the heart to give it back. You don’t know that you could if you tried. It still smells like saltwater and laughter and sun-bleached him, and you have absolutely no idea what you will do when that familiar scent fades.
Still, you weren’t able to completely erase his influence on you. Children of villains arrived at Auradon Prep, and instead of running away from them, you befriended them as quickly as you could. Mal thinks like you do, her and the rest. You laugh like them– not quite as polite as you should be, but loud and beautiful and real. You hang out with them all the time and, when they talk about how much they wish they were back on the Isle of the Lost, you lie to yourself that you do not agree.
You never told them the full scope of your exploits, but they know part of it, enough that one day Mal knocks at your door and tells you that she needs your help on a pirate ship. She needs to get something from the Isle of the Lost, a mysterious ingredient for a spell, but they have to keep it a secret so they can’t use the bridge. The next best option, then, is to sail. It’s not a far destination, so it would work.
A thousand memories of sun and surf flash through your head, and you find yourself agreeing before Mal can so much as finish trying to convince you to go along with her plan.
Mal blinks in surprise. “Really? You’re sure? I thought you would have mixed feelings about that time in your life.”
You breathe out slowly, trying to calm yourself. “Certain things scare me more than others.” Certain people, that is.
Mal winces as she leads you out of your dorm and back into the hallway. “Actually, we might have a problem with that.”
You frown. “What do you mean?”
Mal casts you a nervous glance. “Before I continue, remember that you already agreed. I’m not letting you leave now.”
You laugh. “I’m starting to get worried. No, Mal, I’m not backing out. Just tell me already.”
Mal holds up her hands in mock surrender. “Okay, okay. Never doubted you for a second. It’s just, well, we don’t have a ship at our disposal, obviously, so we’re borrowing one from Uma.”
You shrug. “I have no problem with that. Uma’s great.”
“Yeah,” Mal says, drawing out her syllables in an attempt to buy herself time, “but she insisted on having a skeleton crew present. You know, to make sure we wouldn’t run aground or something like that. That includes her first mate.”
Your head snaps up. “Harry’s going to be there?”
You can feel Mal’s gaze on you, but you refuse to look at her. Instead, you’re scanning the hallway, every door you pass, sure that he’s going to be waiting for you, leaning casually against a wall or peering out of a window or somewhere you could find if you just looked hard enough.
“He is,” Mal confirms, “is that going to be an issue?”
Yes. “No, I’ll be fine.”
You can’t really tell if Mal believes you or not, but then you’re rounding the corner and the rest of the VKs are in front of you, and the conversation must be dropped as Mal explains her plan. You’re going to join the four of them and Uma’s guys in piloting the ship over to the Isle of the Lost, where you’ll search for a talisman hidden somewhere on the island. Once the talisman is secured, you’ll head back. Easy as that.
Mal leads your group to a boathouse on the southern part of the shore. You take up a position in a corner of the room, hidden by the shadows. You suppose that’s why the pirates don’t see you immediately when they come in a matter of minutes later. You suppose you chose that place on purpose so you could get a good look at Harry without him seeing you.
He looks just the same. You don’t know why you thought he would change, that he would have to look different to explain how different you feel, but he’s the same. It makes a soft smile rise to your lips at the same time as the weight of all your memories pierces you through the heart.
Uma’s talking to Mal, doubt lacing her every word. “I hope you have a good idea of how to run a ship, because I don’t think any of your friends have the slightest clue what to do on the sea. That’s my territory, in case you forgot.”
“I know,” Mal says, temper just as strong as always, “that’s why I brought a friend.”
Harry arches a brow. “What friend?”
“That would be me,” you say, and step out of the shadows to face him.
For a moment, you swear that time stands still. Harry’s breath catches in his chest as he looks at you for the first time in months. He has never been one to show off weakness, always laughing off injury or claiming not to feel pain, but in this instant, you can see the shock lancing through his eyes, wracking his frame until he has no choice but to stand there and stare.
Uma breaks the silence, wrapping an arm around your shoulders with a grin. “Y/N, good to see you! I take it back, Mal. Y/N could captain a fleet of ships with her eyes closed.”
It’s easy, after that, to pull yourself together. Uma’s friendship is something familiar, a rock you can stand on. “I appreciate your confidence,” you reply, “good to see you too, by the way.”
“Of course,” Uma says dismissively, then adds somewhat unnecessarily, “Hey, Harry, look who it is!”
Harry swallows hard when Uma addresses him, tries to pretend he’s just like normal. “Yeah, I saw. Hey, Y/N.”
“Hey yourself,” you say quietly.
Evie looks at you nervously, then quickly speaks up. “So, should we get to the ship? We only have so much time before people start looking for us.”
Uma rolls her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, you guys are too popular, I get it. Ship’s docked outside.”
Harry takes this as his excuse to bolt out, and you watch him go with wide eyes. Evie heads over to you as soon as everyone’s attention is off you again. “Hey, is everything alright?”
“Perfectly fine,” you whisper back through gritted teeth. Of course it is a lie. You couldn’t be more affected by this.
You avoid Harry the entire duration of the trip over to the Isle of the Lost. It’s difficult, especially when you push off from the shore and the wind is on your face again and everything is just like you remember. You tug a few lines into place, tie them down with the knots he taught you, and race to the bow as soon as you’re free.
You forgot just how wonderful it is to sail. You laugh delightedly as the ship picks up speed, skipping over the waves as the wind snaps the sails almost to bursting. This close to the surface of the water, you can’t hear anything, but you sense something anyway, and that’s how you know to lean back up and look to your side to see Harry standing there, smiling as he takes in the sight of you.
Your laugh dries up in a moment and you feel frozen there, trapped in this moment with him. Someone calls your name a second later and you’re able to spirit away to safety, but you can still feel his gaze burning like a brand into your back every moment until the ship docks at the Isle.
Mal announces that you’ll be splitting up in pairs so you can properly canvas the island for the talisman. Before you can look at her or Evie, Uma suggests that you and Harry work together, and the rest are already partitioned into pairs before you can fight it.
Fine, then. You’re certain he’s put her up to this, but you won’t give him a scene if he wants it. Instead, you march resolutely towards your assigned location, and pretend that you’re just really invested in finding the talisman so you can’t hear him when he tries to talk to you.
Eventually, Harry has enough and puts his hand on your arm, trying to get your attention. You spin back around by reflex, dagger in hand and held to his throat before Harry can get so much of a word out. The Isle has always brought out a different part of you, more of a villain than any princess’ daughter.
Instead of looking afraid, Harry just laughs. Usually, this is the time at which you’d join in, but you narrow your eyes and hold strong.
“Easy, sweetheart,” he says when he’s finally able to get his laughter under control, “I don’t think your friends would like it very much if you killed someone on your little vacation to the island.”
You glare at him. “We’re not friends anymore, sweetheart, or have you forgotten that already?”
“When your knife is to my throat? Couldn’t forget that if I tried. Out of curiosity, why are we enemies again? I seem to remember you liking me very well just a couple of months ago.” Harry says, reaching up to tap your forearm where you still hold your blade.
You pull your dagger away but stand there still, thrumming with the urge to run. “We’re too different. You’re a villain, and I’m a perfect angel, obviously.”
Harry grins. “What, just because you’re the daughter of a princess? You’ve never let that come in between us before. You’re not Ariel, you’re Y/N, and I have always loved that about you.” Something like doubt flickers across his face. “Is that why you left? You thought you had to become more like her?”
You glance away from him, suddenly unable to look him in the eyes. “I left because I had to. We weren’t working out.”
“Why not?” Harry asks, and suddenly he’s the one in control now, he’s the one stepping forward until your back hits the wall and you have nowhere to run, “What was so wrong with us, Y/N?”
Your hands are shaking. Harry takes the knife from you, carefully sliding it back in the holster on your side. His hands linger there a second longer, and when he finally takes them away, you can’t tell if you’re glad of it or deeply unhappy that you can no longer feel him.
“We could never work,” you insist.
“Why not?” He replies, “Show me we could never work. Prove me wrong.”
Harry Hook has always been somewhat of an enigma to you, just as unpredictable as the sea that both of you love, but somehow you know it’s coming when Harry leans forward and kisses you. For a moment, you consider pushing him away, and then you realize that you do not hate this, not him, not in the slightest, not at all.
Surrender is not the worst thing in the world. Sometimes it’s like the release of a sail to the wind, the acceptance that even though you let a person go, they will always come back to you. You surrender the last of your inhibitions and you kiss him back. It is everything you missed, the fighting and the laughing, the good times and the bad all in one. It is all that you love about him and more, what you didn’t realize you held most dear until you were gone.
Harry breathes quietly against your lips and you breathe back, one small circle of in and out and together. He grins, says, was that really so bad? And you laugh and tell him to shut up, so he does, but only by kissing you again. The island can wait, the talisman and the life waiting back for you at school. You have your boy back, and you could not care about anything else.
requested by @thatfangirl42, i hope you enjoy!
disney tag list: @rogueanschel, @lovesanimals0000, @/thatfangirl42, @amortensie
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give-some-lemons · 2 months ago
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Watching/playing in horror genre with Sylus
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~first of all he’s a busy man and despite the fact that he likes horror genre, usually he just don’t have enough time for watching movies giving more preference to books. He’s favorite would definitely be Stephen King for that atmosphere in his artworks.
~he’s a kind of person that will chuckle or at least smile at characters deaths, especially if it’s a stupid one like stepped on “the most obvious trap he’s ever saw” and he’s more than glad if you’re same, discussing how dumb heroes are for coming up with those decisions.
~he secretly waits for scary moments cause he loves when you cling to him all tensed seeking for his protection and comfort when monster’s face appears on the screen with a loud scream. But if you’re a tough one, that cannot be affected so easily don’t worry, after some time you’ll find yourself in his arms pressed against strong chest anyway.
~he would be glad to watch all the screen adaptations of Stephen King’s novels, even if he doesn’t like any of it, telling how much better it was on the book pages, but he has favorites like “Carrie” and “It”.
~movies about serial killers is his top of most enjoyable ones, sympathizing Myers and Ghost Face and considering how society itself made a monsters out of them. And that is the reason why you often need to put it on pause for you two to meet in a debate battles on that topic.
~if we’re talking about games he’s not much of a player but of course he will do that with you cause obviously that’s what you’d like. It takes some time for you to explain him how to play but since he’s a “talented student” he’s very fast at learning.
~for the reason that not so much horror games are a multiplayer ones, you play in turns, even if at first he prefers watching you, taking his turn only in case if some moments are too scary for you but after not so long mostly you will be the one to just sit, often giving him advice.
~I feel like this man would like “Resident evil 7” and first parts of this franchise, cause the atmosphere in some places there would keep him all in tense, plus he seems to really like the idea of Umbrella, an evil company with their terrible experiments on human body and you already were regretting of giving him ideas for his next business.
~even though he loves to control everything he seems to enjoy games with an unpredictable jump-scares like “Layers of Fear” or “Mortuary Assistant” that can throw him off course for a couple of seconds. And it’s funny for you to watch how carefully and slowly he’s trying to turn back not to be taken by surprise after the last jump-scare.
~”Phasmophobia” is next on your list, a game that was terrifying for you first times you played it. But despite your expectations you almost always were the one to die first while your man just sat there holding a laugh, hidden in the closet like he never even entered the haunted house. Newcomers are lucky not to go out on the ghosts, I guess.
~not a secret that he adores the feeling when somebody’s life fully depends of his choice, no matter if that’s a real life or a game, that’s why he enjoys “Until Dawn” along with “Dark Anthology Pictures”. That thrill of power and control that he has over these virtual humans make you feel very sorry for them. And don’t even doubt, if he doesn’t like the character they will not make it until the end, at least alive.
~he likes horror games/movies with a deep meaning, you know the ones after which you usually sat on one place for some time reflecting on what you’ve just seen or played. At that point you and your partner are talking sharing your thoughts and considering all the ways how differently it could be if characters did this instead of that.
~he would love as well physiological thrillers like “The Shining” and “The Babadook”, movies where the story is told through the thoughts of psychologically stressed characters, revealing their distorted mental perception of the world and how what seemed like a nice, not remarkable at any point person goes all the way straight to insanity.
~not a big fan of a body horror, as he thinks that it’s the easiest way to impress people with just an image of blood and organs everywhere on the screen. As was said before, he appreciates people’s emotions and the atmosphere, that puts viewers or players in a primary terror.
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