#i care about the inquisition she build

[twist-shout-and-shells]

They're gonna do the Inquisitor as dirty in Veilguard as they did Hawke in Inquisition, huh?

[bishicat]

*stands in your doorway (menacingly)* imma need a 5 from the touching prompts for your solavellan pls (i know i already sent one but that was before i knew about your lavellan also if you are not comfe with drawing them just do whatever!)

5. feeling their pulse

I AM SO COMFY WITH THIS!!!!!

(I just needed to practice drawing Solas again hehe)

<art meme here>

[blackberry-sage-tea]

"The Dalish gifted an Eluvian to the Grey Wardens so we can get in Weisshaupt" is just so emblematic of my problems with the game, because you can tell--it feels to me--that the thought process was "We need to have an Eluvian in Weisshaupt, Eluvians are an Elven(TM) thing, the Dalish are the Elven(TM) faction, so let's just say they were the ones who gave one to the Grey Wardens".

The Dalish have been established over all three games as a people who have spent the last thousands of years desperately scrounging for whatever scraps of their culture they can find, a struggle that has cost them dearly as typified by Merrill's plight trying to restore a single Eluvian which had previously Blighted two of her clan mates (an Eluvian that she can't open or use, and doesn't actually know what it's for by the end of her quest line). Multiple Dalish in Inquisition are killed trying to regain their history ("The Knight's Tomb") or trying to prove themselves by regaining even a talisman related to their culture ("Someone to Lose"). They are an insular and guarded people because outsider interactions frequently invoke a heavy toll in Dalish lives, up to and including entire clans. And yet, we are supposed to believe in a single throwaway piece of dialogue that in the 10 years between Inquisition and Veilguard, the Dalish have (offscreen) gained enough access to Eluvians as a piece of technology that they can afford to just "gift" one to the Grey Wardens without explanation.

There are constant revelations of this kind where pre-established parts of the lore are just thrown out the window. Things that had great emotional weight or impact in previous installments of the series are used for cheap thrills or plot-hole fills without explanation, justification, or even gravitas from the game. You have a moment in one of Emmrich's quests where you stumble through a portal directly into the Fade that Hezenkoss opened in Blackthorne manor, and you're tasked with closing it again. All of this is done entirely without the Anchor or even an implied blood sacrificial ritual, and it is never commented as anything particularly groundbreaking (when going into the Fade physically through tearing a hole in it was a Big Fucking Deal in Inquisition). You encounter a Compassion spirit in a side quest investigating the deaths of citizens in Tevinter who were murdered by a demon of Despair, and it is strong enough to not only retain itself through sensing the (unanswered!) suffering that these people experienced, but it also resolves to protect others to keep them from the same fate (when Cole was so traumatized by a single person's death that he completely reshaped his entire being around them). So on and so forth. Don't even get me started on Bellara's comment that the ancient elves "made most of their buildings in the Fade".

I'm not asking for someone to hold my hand and spoonfeed me information. I frankly don't care if an obscure codex entry, a reddit AMA question, bluesky tweet, or headcanon exists somewhere to patch in or bandaid over all of the jarring details like this, because it doesn't change the fact that the game itself should be doing this. The game itself should be taking the time to explain this in a way that is not missable, the game itself should be taking these things seriously, it should recognize when it is doing contradictory things and rush to justify itself accordingly, because these are things the emotional beats of previous stories hinged on. Like, when the game has Taash say a line like "The Qun isn't a prison, you can leave if you want", it's the responsibility of the writers to show that this is Taash being misinformed, not because I'm too stupid to headcanon that this is the case, but because this line is a symptom of how the entire game's writing seems to have forgotten about the Ben-Hassrath as a thing that exists in this setting.

Previous Dragon Age games are no stranger to "We quietly removed Solas' network of agents and spies offscreen"-style writing, but it usually didn't feel like a constant deluge periodically uprooting my emotional investment and immersion. There's only so much I can take in good faith before I realize that this game was just not written with any care towards ensuring that the worldbuilding made sense and felt right to the player, leading to awkward backpedaling in reddit threads like "no the Crows haven't changed as an organization, these are just the unique Good Crows and we forgot to mention it".

I just can't look past this shit anymore.

[invinciblerodent]

This is going to be very ranty and disjointed, probably borderline incomprehensible post, but with the "return" of Dragon Age Discourse (and really, did it ever go anywhere?) and me repeatedly seeing the complaints and dismissals of DA:I as a "chosen one"-type of a narrative, I just.... I keep finding myself thinking about the relationship of truth and lies within the game.

Throughout the course of DA:I, the idea of a malleable, flexible personal identity, and a painful confrontation with an uncomfortable truth replacing a soothing falsehood, follows pretty much every character throughout their respective arcs.

There are some more obvious ones, Solas, Blackwall, The Iron Bull, their identities and deceptions (of both those around them and themselves) are clearly front and center in the stories told about them, but this theme of deception (both of the self- and the outside world) is clearly present in the stories of the others as well.

Like, for example, ones that come immediately to mind are stories like that of Cullen, who presents an image of a composed and disciplined military man, a commander- all to hide the desperate and traumatized addict that he sees himself as.

Dorian grappled with the expectations of presenting the image of the perfect heir to his father's legacy, the prideful scion of his house, his entire life (he even introduces himself as the result of "careful breeding", like one might speak about a prized horse)- all while knowing that his family would rather see him lobotomized and obedient, than anything even just resembling his vibrant and passionate self.

Cassandra calls herself a Seeker of Truth, and takes pride in that identity- only to learn that in reality, she has been made a liar, a keeper of secrets, without her knowledge or consent, and it is up to her to either uproot the entire organization and painfully cut out the abscess it is to build it back from the ground up into something respectable, or let the information she had revealed sit, and continue to fester.

And this theme continues and reframes itself in, among others, things like Sera's own inner conflict between her elven heritage and her human upbringing, or in Cole being caught in this unconscionable space in-between human and spirit, between person and concept, etc.

The Inquisitor isn't exempt from this either.

I feel like this is where the core of the many misunderstandings of this plot come from, why so many people continue to believe that Inquisition is a "chosen one" or "divinely appointed" type of story, because I think many might just... not realize, that the protagonist's identity is also malleable, and what they are told in the setup/first act of the game is not necessarily the truth.

The tale of the Inquisitor is the exact opposite of that of a "chosen one" story: it's an examination and reflection of the trope, in that it is the story of an assumption that all wrongly believe to be the truth, and thrust upon you, even if you protest. The very point is that no matter who you choose to say that you are, you will be known as the Herald of a prophet you don't even necessarily believe in, and then that belief will be proven wrong, leaving you to cope with either a devastating disappointment if you believed it, or a bitter kind of vindication if you didn't.

There's a moment just after Here Lies the Abyss (when you learn of the lie you've been fed your entire journey in the game) that I don't often see mentioned, but I think it's one of the most emotionally impactful character moments, if you are playing an Andrastian Inquisitor who had actually believed themselves chosen (which I realize is a rather unpopular pick, lol): it's when Ser Ruth, a Grey Warden, realizes what she had done and is horrified by her own deeds, and turns herself in asking to be tried for the murder of another of her order. As far as she is concerned, she had spilled blood for power, and regardless of whether she was acting of her own volition at the time, whether she had agency in the moment, is irrelevant to her: she seeks no absolution, but willingly submits to any punishment you see fit.

And only if you play as an Inquisitor who, through prior dialogue choices, had established themselves as a devout Andrastian, can you offer her forgiveness, for a deed that was objectively not her fault- not really.

You can, in Andraste's name, forgive her- even though you, at that point, know that you have no real right to do so. That you're not Andraste's Herald, that Andraste may or may not even exist, and that you can't grant anyone "divine forgiveness", because you, yourself, don't have a drop of divinity within you. You know that you were no more than an unlucky idiot who stumbled their way into meddling with forces beyond their ken.

You know you're a fraud. You know. The game forces you to realize, as it slowly drip-drip-drips the memories knocked loose by the blast back into your head, that what all have been telling you that you are up to this point, is false. And yet, you can still choose to keep up the lie, and tell this woman who stands in front of you with blood on her hands and tears in her eyes, that you, with authority you don't have, grant her forgiveness for a crime that wasn't hers to commit.

Because it's the right thing to do. Because to lie to Ser Ruth is far kinder than anything else you could possibly do to her, short of refusing to make a decision altogether.

There are any number of criticisms of this game that I can accept (I may or may not agree depending on what it is, but I'm from the school of thought that any interpretation can be equally valid as long as there's text that supports it, and no text that contradicts it), but I will always continue to uphold that the Inquisitor is absolutely not- and never was a "chosen one".

They're just as small, and sad, and lost, as all the other protagonists- the only difference is that they didn't need to fight for their mantle, because instead of a symbol of honor, it acted as a straitjacket.

[ryssabrin]

i feel like people who don’t like solas or solavellan have such a warped perspective of what the romance is and how fans of it actually engage in it. like i’ve seen a lot of (most likely het dudes lol) on reddit say they tried it to see what the fuss was but felt it was “demeaning” and i’ve seen it described as literally a horror story where solas is manipulating and using and lying to a young impressionable lavellan who gives up her entire identity for him and becomes a complete doormat to all the awful shit he does. that’s never been my experience and i kinda just want to ramble about how i see it and what i find romantic about it?

so full disclosure, if veilguard had come out a few years ago with how they portrayed lavellan and solavellan i might have been pretty disappointed. i think there is a subset of the solavellan fanbase that likes the wolf/halla or student/professor thing and they play their lavellan younger and agreeing almost without question to everything solas says. i see the appeal but i never played my lavellan that way and i really like the dynamic of it when lavellan actually goes against his advice at times. solas is a character that needs to have his preconceived biases questioned. especially in inquisition when he’s still coming to terms with the fact that the modern people of thedas are in fact people lol. so i was concerned at the prospect of my lavellan being taken out of my hands and having to listen to her make excuses for him and submit to everything he says. (which tbf i don’t think is how she actually comes across in dav, but that was a worry.)

however when i replayed my canon dai run this year, i realized i was closer to the age i always saw my lavellan as (early 30s), and as my lavellan is probably the bioware pc i’ve always played closest to my own personality, i took the opportunity to tweak her a bit and make some different choices. i’ve (hopefully lol) matured and grown a lot since i was 24 and so rather than going for the snarky sarcastic cool girl vibes i opted to play her with more diplomatic and caring choices. it made me see the solas romance in a completely new light. rather than some sort of student/professor dynamic or a pride and prejudice-esque rivals-to-lovers vibe where lavellan is fighting for his respect the whole time, what stuck out to me was how much their connection builds simply because lavellan is kind to solas. she hears him out when he wants to give his opinions and advice, she respects his expertise on the fade and spirits, and she offers him comfort and friendship when she sees he needs it. she impresses him because he finds himself wanting to indulge in her closeness. he finds a connection to someone he never expected to and it makes him rethink everything about the broken state he put the world in.

it’s worth noting that lavellan is always making the first move. she kisses him first, she pursues him. he tries to brush off the kiss as a spontaneous lapse in judgement and she doesn't let him. he only ever gives in to her advances, he doesn't make them himself. he calls their relationship "selfish" on his end. he knows he shouldn't be encouraging her but he can't help but long for her companionship. that being said though if lavellan shuts it down he respects it. he probably feels a little relief because the temptation is now out of his hands lol.

i feel like there’s also this perception that he’s constantly shitting on the dalish while lavellan just has to put up with it and that alone is reason enough to find the relationship demeaning. he mentions the dalish in one optional conversation chain where you ask him for his opinion on the state of the elves and then in the balcony scene where he realizes he’s misjudged the inquisitor after his personal quest. in both instances, lavellan can stick up for the dalish. in the optional conversation, lavellan can say that if solas had a bad experience with a clan once (which we know from dav is exactly what happened lol), that she’d like to correct that misunderstanding about her people.

it's worth noting as well that lavellan doesn't know solas is the dread wolf when he's criticizing the dalish. from her perspective, he's essentially a city-born elf who had some dalish look down their nose at him for not being a "true elf" like they are, something that not only happens in canon throughout the games and lavellan would be aware of, but literally happens to solas specifically, right in front of you. he doesn't say a single word to mihris and she doesn't know a thing about him other than his face is bare and thus feels comfortable referring to him with what is essentially a slur. but rather than confront her directly about it he just passive aggressively speaks to her in elven almost exclusively for the rest of the quest lol.

far from the dynamic being that lavellan is just putting up with someone talking down to her about her culture, i think it's reasonable to see her view is more that they're both members of the same marginalized group, but from different cultures. his position in criticizing the dalish is not punching down it's lateral. she loves her culture, but is able to recognize it has flaws and not every member in it treats other cultures well, particularly even when they're from the same marginalized group. (and it's also just really meaningful that the first "flirt" option you get in the solas romance is lavellan recognizing that solas has put himself in a very vulnerable position as an elven apostate joining the chantry-led inquisition and with whatever power she has she will make sure that it's not held against him.)

i do think the writing conveys that he does have his mind changed about the dalish at least a little bit, but one of his pet peeves is when people are ignorant and refuse any information that challenges their worldview. as a manifested wisdom spirit, it is a particular sticking point to him to not be listened to when he is providing knowledge. i think criticism of how he is towards the dalish is lacking without taking into account his nature as a spirit. obvs we didn’t know that in dai but we do now. when wisdom isn't listened to it turns to pride. "i told you so," "i'll prove i'm right," "you should have listened to me," etc. etc. he got his feelings hurt when the dalish didn't believe him (and according to dav, literally tried to kill him) and his ego's held a grudge ever since.

when it comes to the vallaslin, to me it’s less about solas wanting to dismantle part of dalish culture (he offers no actual opinion on the dalish during that scene) and more that it clearly bothers him a lot that he fought so hard to free the elves from slavery and the one community of elves that’s closest to the descendants of the people he wanted to free still wears tattoos honoring the very tyrants he wanted to free them from. if lavellan says she wants to keep them and that the dalish reclaimed them and they mean something else to her, he doesn’t argue. i actually don’t like that solas’s post breakup banter with cole implies that lavellan thinks he might have broken up with her over the vallaslin. it’s putting thoughts in the head of my character that i personally don’t see her having. the way the breakup plays out, there’s not a single indication that it has anything to do with the vallaslin. i like to pick the “i believe in us” option because it shows lavellan having some idea that there’s something solas isn’t telling her and that’s the main reason he’s walking away. and the irony of course is that we learn in dav that that was the moment he came the closest to just giving up everything to just be with her.

so when i played through dav with my solasmance lavellan and she talks about what drew her to him it all just felt so right. he was kind and wise and sad but he made her feel like she was the only thing that mattered to him. (and that was very almost true!) there was a passion and intensity to their relationship that made her think he was the person she wanted to be with forever. when she says "i thought i would have followed anywhere he asked me to" you could read it as her saying she would have joined him in tearing down the veil if he asked and depending on your lavellan that might be true (though in the next bit she talks about how she would have been trying to change his mind anyways). but you could also read it as what her mindset was while she was with him during dai. before joining the inquisition, she knew him to be someone that traveled the world looking for lost secrets and history. why would she not have wanted to join him in that? is that not something you do when you're in love with someone?

something else that i find really compelling about solavellan is how solas relates to the inquisitor (not just lavellan) as a figurehead stripped of their personal identity. he knows from personal experience exactly what that's like. in the romances (not just solas's), the inquisitor is able to find someone that knows and cares for them for who they are, not what they represent. this aspect of the inquisitor's arc is honestly why i like keeping the vallaslin. my lavellan wants people to be able to look at her as the inquisitor and see a dalish elf. it's one small act of defiance and in reclaiming her own narrative. so thinking about what she might want to do after her responsibilities to the inquisition are over, it's reasonable to think she might want to just go wherever solas goes? because she loves him and feels like herself around him. even her asking him to let her come with him in trespasser feels more motivated by the fact that lavellan sees solas isolating himself and closing himself off and she's sad about it because she cares about him. that was why she wanted to grow close to him in the first place.

and i genuinely don't think it's all that wild that lavellan still holds a torch for solas 10 years later. i personally was friends with this guy in high school i always had a crush on, and towards the end of senior year it looked like it could actually end up turning into something. but then he immediately left for a summer abroad after graduation and eventually moved out of the country full time for school. we kept in touch off and on and caught up when he was in town, but nothing romantic ever happened. for years after i would catch myself thinking every so often what could have been and what he was up to. for solavellan, they were actually together. they had mutually expressed feelings and though their time together was maybe a few months at most, it was intense and passionate. they split up not because anyone's feelings changed, but because of solas's baggage. it's really not unrealistic for lavellan to continue wondering to herself what would have happened if he had been honest with her sooner. if she could have convinced him to change course. and it's not like she has the luxury of retiring and just not thinking about him anymore. that's not a conscious manipulation on solas's part to string her along, that's just the reality of their situation.

and even with all that in mind, in dav lavellan is still able to have the self-awareness to understand that the good in him that she believes exists and all that they had together and what she meant to him could all just be wishful thinking on her part. that she's giving him the benefit of the doubt "imagining his broken heart" when he doesn't deserve it because it makes her feel less foolish. she's not blindly faithful to him. i just loved everything about that scene and every word out of my lavellan's mouth felt spot on and perfect for how i saw their relationship. i could not have been more relieved lol.

as for the ending, i really really dislike the bad faith read that the only thing that matters is mythal and that he somehow loves mythal more and if that weren't true then lavellan alone would be able to convince him to stop. varric says about solas that he wants to be a hero, but it's easier for him to play the villain because it means he didn't fail, everything bad he's done is a choice. once you've done one bad thing, betrayed one friend, manipulated and sacrificed some pawns, committed one lil genocide, etc. lmao, it becomes easier to do it again. you've already crossed your moral event horizon and now you just have to find an end that justifies the means of all your misdeeds. what i've said about solas before is that what's frustrating is that he does genuinely feel remorse about the shit he does, but he needs to believe it's necessary and he will keep doing it. he needs to believe it will all be worth it in the end. it's not that he thinks feeling sorry makes up for it necessarily, but that he had to do it. he had to be the one taking on all of the bad things to hopefully one day do a good thing and it will all work out.

(as a side note when solas says "i would not have you see what i become" in trespasser i always thought that meant he was going to resort to some awful corruptive magic or something but it turns out what he actually meant was "i'm about to be a real asshole and do some incredibly awful things and i don't want you to see that side of me" which is much sadder.)

so when rook says "you don't have to do this" solas counters with "i've betrayed and fucked over and killed so many people who trusted me and if i stop i will have done that for nothing." so then the inquisitor jumps in with "as one of those people, i'm telling you that you can stop." but then we get to the heart of it. he thinks he failed mythal when she died the first time and was unwilling to listen to her as flemeth. he needs to make that mean something. he needs to justify to himself what mythal made him into. so he needs to hear from his mythal, not morrigan's mythal who has the benefit of the wisdom and hindsight centuries of living among mortals gave her, but his mythal, the one closest to who she was when she died that what he is is broken. that she's the one that broke him and he alone doesn't have to bear the weight of everything he did because of her. it's not about loving her, it's about the specific relationship he had with her. with that baggage unpacked, he's not only able to let go of his prideful need to prove himself right by tearing down the veil, he's also free to choose what he always really wanted: lavellan.

and still! yet again! he does not ask or assume anything on her part. she offers! of her own free will. something that really rustles my jimmies about a lot of solavellan criticism is that people act like lavellan has no agency. that she couldn't possibly make the choices she does of her own accord and it has to be solas manipulating her. that has never rang true to me at all. she always made the first move. i think this more uncharitable read might unfortunately be encouraged by how many actual solavellan shippers play into the wolf/halla thing but i personally don't think that's the dynamic that weekes actually wrote. it is lavellan that pursues solas, not the other way around. and weekes was honestly so careful in how they wrote the romance so that when solas's identity and plans are revealed, it doesn't feel like he intentionally tricked you or took advantage. i actually really like the ambiguity of whether or not they slept together because to me it does feel like that's a line solas wouldn't cross, but i get why that doesn't matter as much to other solasmancers.

i also think there's this perception that solavellan is a ship with an unhealthy power dynamic that needs to be "fixed" in some way or at the very least apologized for before you're allowed to like it. for me it's honestly kind of the appeal? not that there's some goofy dom/sub thing going on lol but that in spite of how "superior" solas may or may not feel to lavellan and the modern elves, he still falls hook line and fucking sinker for her. lavellan has so much more power in the relationship than she realizes. she changes his entire perspective on modern elves and his ultimate goals so bad he had a complete crisis of faith and had to run as far away from her as he could. how could he have broken the world so badly he needs to catastrophically break it again to fix it if it could create someone like her? someone he wants and cares for so desperately? it's the push and pull of him trying to stay away but selfishly indulging as long as he can that's so juicy to me! it's so good and i just wish other people could see that, even if they don't care for the character.

anyways. i don't have a conclusion. i don't want anyone to think i'm vaguing about them. this is honestly the result of some thoughts that have been brewing for a while and a lot of common criticisms i've seen over the years. i didn't want to respond directly to anyone in particular bc i learned my lesson about not doing that waaay back in the shenko fandom iykyk lol. i just really like the ship! i think it's tragic and romantic and lovely and poetic and mythological and all that good stuff. it humanizes solas as a character and makes me think about empathy and compassion and how much faith you can have in someone if you love them. or how it might feel to sacrifice love for something you think you need to do, only to ultimately realize you never did and find that love patiently waiting for you to get your shit together. or to love someone and know they love you back and that they love you so much they had to leave or they would have given up everything they thought they needed for you and then to be able to actually get through to them and get them back. "she could save him if he'd only just let her"! it's a very niche wish fulfillment fantasy and it's me! i'm the fan being serviced!

[ir-abelas-vhenan]

I would give all my critiques (this is a lie) back if at the end of Veilguard we had found out in an extra extra post-Marvel credits scene that it's just been Sandal playing with figurines on the Skyhold war table's map of Thedas all Civil War Buff Dad style.

I wasn't going to do this because everyone deserves to rationalize Veilguard however works best for them, but in the wake of that hilariously dismal end-of-times IGN interview and AMA, I thought I'd share how my best friend and I decided to view Veilguard. Everything below is taken from probably a fifteen minute text conversation we had working through our disappointment together, but by the end we both felt way better about the game.

Picture this. You reach the climax of the game, Solas has freed himself from the fade and is getting ready to cast a really powerful spell and suddenly, out of nowhere, he just gets squished flat and then it immediately cuts to Bodahn in a little fire-lit room saying "Oh Sandal, you crushed another one of the pieces?"

Varric is sitting there alive, well, and BLONDE, and has been playing the whole game with Sandal and says "the kid's got a great imagination." They're all in the home of the Inquisitor.

So how do we get here, you might ask?

*drumroll*

Actually wait no I fear this is going to be long so I'll put a divider thingy in.

So hear me out.

We'll go a year or so after Trespasser. The inquisitor is going through it. Skyhold is still theirs to command because sure everyone and their mother's mother was mad at the Inquisition for taking care of business, but what are you going to do, take their home away? Not if any of the Inquisitor's fiercely loyal friends have anything to say about it (I'm sure Josephine had something worked out to get a title locked down after there being so much uncertainty at Haven, anyway).

So it's become a home base once more, regardless of how intact the inquisition is or isn't under Divine Victoria. Agents are always going in and out, the murals in the rotunda serve as an ever-present reminder of the mission at hand, and Varric visits regularly from Kirkwall to touch base. On one such visit, Bodahn and Sandal accompany him, because they heard there might be a need for enchantments (BOOM).

One night everyone ends up around the map because it's been a rougher week than usual and a game of wicked grace at the tavern just isn't enough, they've gotta treat this like an overdue group project and pull an all-nighter to get SOMEWHERE on tracking down Solas.

Enter Sandal. He's bored, no one is asking him to enchant anything, and Dagna isn't around for them to talk shop (engage in probably illegal/definitely unsafe experiments). And there, amidst the pile of clutter the team has been using when they need to add a new piece to the war table, is a Rook chess piece.

He's seen one before, of course. Varric used to try and teach it to him back in Kirkwall, and Sandal was good in the way that new chess players who go full chaos mode are stellar at driving experienced chess players crazy. His win streak is no joke. So he grabs it, tries to lighten the mood around the war table because no one in a bad mood is going to be requesting enchantments any time soon, and suddenly the tension that's been building up for months starts to ease just a little.

Eventually, everyone gets involved. Much like any great D&D campaign, they fit time in for the adventures of Rook & co in between skrimishes, secret missions, and stressful planning sessions, but that just enables more people to have input.

The Chargers keep making suggestions of all the missions Rook should go on when they pass through, but these all end up becoming Neve's cases.

Bellara was made up by Cassandra who stopped by for a visit from rebuilding the Seekers/wearing her big hat and she was too busy to give anything substantial, but she went with what she knows: a character who loves romance and has a dead brother.

Sera doesn't have the attention span to get too in-depth with it, but she does doodle all over the map of Thedas and add some much needed commentary as the Rook piece moves across it. She also INSISTS that the villains of the story be old and elfy, because they don't get enough representation as villains.

Lucanis loving coffee/it being 75% of his lines comes exclusively from the fact that on the nights they get too invested to stop it's the only thing that keeps them going and he became the character that embodies that particular struggle.

There are so many enchantments Rook can take advantage of because Sandal keeps thinking of new ones he can test with Dagna when she's next around.

Speaking of Sandal again, he tried to kill Varric off in the beginning because he was putting on his author hat and over-narrating. Varric was of course like "wait no why did you kill me I wanted to be part of this" so he keeps interjecting as himself and everyone else is like "shhh you're dead." They only indulge him when they conclude what feels like a major plot point and need someone with an understanding of narrative and pacing to tie all the threads together or give them an idea of where to go next.

The Inquisitor struggles to get into it sometimes because they feel like the weight of the world is on their shoulders yet again. Occasionally, they'll sighs heavily and insert their game piece onto the board (Blackwall carved it, so it's as close s a completely different style can be to their true likeness) to be like "so anyways, THESE are the problems happening in Southern Thedas, in case anyone forgot" only for their message crystal to light up and Dorian's voice to filter through.

"I hear you're working on an astounding number of hypotheticals. Do you think it would be feasible to form an undercover group that works to liberate slaves?"

And then suddenly they spend the rest of the night working through how effective such an organization might be (through Rook's eyes, of course), but because Dorian isn't there to stop them they give him an insane new hairstyle and mention it every time they're giving a description of the Shadow Dragon leader. He is horrified.

Harding gets to be a self-insert because everyone unilaterally agrees that a fictional scout wouldn't hold a candle to her skill level. All the not fleshed out dwarven plot points come from their scrambled theorizing, but it does inspire her to look deeper into the mysterious Kal-Sharok during her real travels.

The reason Morrigan acts so out of character is because they're all like "we have no fucking idea what she gets up to when she isn't saving the world, but we know she'd be there in some capacity."

Leliana is busy busy busy but when she hears about what they're doing and that Morrigan is involved, she finds the time to send a letter saying "let's give her different hair :)"

When Morrigan finds out she brings Kieran for a visit (he missed all of his friends at Skyhold anyway) and is like "seems a most inconvenient waste of time..." and then finds out Leliana is the reason her game piece looks crazy and is like...make a character who is nosy and up in everyone's business all the time but still super reserved and afraid to trust others. (Boom, hi Neve).

Kieran gets really into the story and is critical to designing Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain. "She has sooOOoO many arms!" he explains, miming it out over the sound of a muffled voice crystal shaking as Dorian yells "you could've killed me! You could have made me evil! But you made me UGLY?!"

Even the Inquisitor, exhausted as they are, still finds the time to check in and ask if brown-haired Varric is still dead. The answer is always yes.

They all have a good laugh about the idea of Treviso and Minrathous being full of zip lines, but how else are they going to get to the parts they actually care about?

Minrathous gets destroyed instead of Treviso because while they're deciding the stakes for Rook to be faced with, Fenris stops by to check in with Varric because he heard they might need to go to Tevinter. He takes one look at the board and goes "hanging bodies. Everywhere."

"Fenris, that means the venatori will take over."

"...this game is stupid anyway."

Iron Bull definitely said "this story needs a DRAGON HUNTER" so boom. Enter Taash. A Dorian that romanced him sighs heavily and decides to play along if only to get to spend more time with his amatus another way. He models a character after one of his favorite professors from when he was a child.

Solas looks so yassified because the Inquisitor's love interest (or Sera, if they're pining after the Dread Wolf himself) came by and threw his actual war table piece into the fire during a particularly rough evening after his agents thwarted them yet again. To replace him, they let Kieran draw on a spoon and add a new cursed detail every time he pulls some bullshit to try and cheer each other up.

Fenris goes back to Kirkwall and complains about the stupid game Varric is running instead of spending all of his time on saving the world. Merrill overhears and is like "oh! They're incorporating eluvians? That's nice!" until she hears about how many there are and her eye starts twitching.

Harding only dies because everyone over-celebrates when Rook finally gets a win over on the stuffed squid animal being used to represent Ghilan'ain and her game piece topples over. Varric insisted that it be canon because he's tired of being the only dead one.

Blackwall gets Sera to be a little more invested by promising they can make a character together, maybe an elven Grey Warden! She washes her hands of anything too dalish, even though Blackwall makes it clear that there's more to him than that, but insists he should have a loyal griffon friend in honor of his rocking toys.

It's one of the Inquisitor's fondest memories as they prepare to actually find Solas for real, and one of the only unifying threads keeping everyone sane.

[bluejutdae]

Under the surface | Kim Seungmin x you

notes: this is for @chvnmax, cause she deserves a sleeper build Seungmo. Wanna know something fun? I spent 20 minutes on google trying to discover if Seungmin can raise only one eyebrows because ✨credibility✨

Warnings: suggestive.

You left work late and you’re tired, dreaming of a hot bath and the soft comforter on your bed. You have promised Chanbin, though, and there can be multiple things said about you, but you have always kept your promises. So you do what you have to. You send a message to Changbin, informing him you’ll be at the gym in 15 minutes tops, and you send a message to Seungmin, asking how his day was. You only talked to him for 5 minutes in the morning, and that’s not enough Seungmin time for you.

The thing is: you’re crazy about him. He’s your boyfriend, so it’s not weird, but it’s still all so new. So you would love to go directly to his dorm, but you still keep walking towards the gym.

This gym isn’t half bad, it’s clean and bright, there’s never too many people and, when Changbin is not here, the gym instructors are always kind and professional. Today the gym is not too crowded, as usual, and after getting changed into workout clothes you can easily spot Changbin in the room. He’s not alone and it wouldn’t surprise you too much. The surprise lays on the identity of his companion.

Because the fact is that near Changbin, squatting an amount of weight you can’t even start to imagine, is Seungmin.

Seungmin in a tight gray shirt, sweaty and clinging to his back and arms, and black joggers.

He’s mid squat, hands around the barbell, his biceps are bulging and shoulders are bigger than you ever noticed. Despite being together and being attracted to one another, you have never seen each other naked. Seungmin insisted on going slow, to do things properly because when it’s right, you gotta do it right. His words, but you liked the idea of dating and courting, so you had a couple of make out sessions, clothes always on and hands not roaming too much.

Seungmin’s breathy laugh travels to you and a moment later he’s raking his weighted barbell. You might die for a moment: his biceps are to die for and you hyper focus on a drop of sweat descending on his neck.

When the fuck did you boyfriend become a muscular man? You clearly appreciate his lean figure, you like to put your hands on his forearms and caress him, making him shudder and squirm under your ministrations, but this is such a surprise you don’t know what to do. Can you just go there and steal him, apologize to Changbin for abandoning him and take Seungmin with you, hide somewhere and never let him be seen by people? He’s too hot to be left in the wild.

You must have said something or made a noise, because while you’re there ogling your boyfriend, two sets of eyes rest on you.

“Hey, you made it!” Changbin boisterous voice welcomes you, and you smile taking a few steps towards them and in lieu of a greeting, your mind comes up with: “what the fuck Seungmin”.

He wasn’t expecting this, so he bends his head on the side and raises an eyebrow in an inquisitive expression. “Hello to you too, my darling. What a pleasant surprise.”

It’s not a normal behavior and you know it, but you’re transfixed on his arms and your mind provides you with fantasies about his legs and abs and his back and whatever else he might be hiding under his clothes. Almost as an out of body experience, you see your hand reaching to his arms and squeeze.

“Puppy?”

Changbin emits a dry cough, and it seems like it’s moking you, “I forgot something important so I really have to go. I’m sorry guys, we’ll work out together another time, uh?”

Your hands are still groping Seungmin’s arms, but you’re conscious enough to answer him. “Be careful on the way home.”

“I’ll see you later, hyung”, your boyfriend's voice is laced with humor. “Are you done?”

“No.”

“You’re being ridiculous. If you want to grope muscles, you should have took the opportunity while Changbin hyung was still here…”

“I don’t want to grope him!”

“But you want to grope me?”

“Of course.”

His laugh is so pretty it almost distracts you. You still manage to turn your eyes towards his face and smile at him. “Puppy, since when are you muscular?”

“No, no. Let’s not ignore when you said you want to grope me.”

“We’ll circle back to that later.” You finally detach your hands from his arms and poke at his tummy. “You’ve been hiding this from me?”

He scoffs. “I hid nothing.”

“Are you sure? Doesn’t that mean you’re gonna let me see everything?” You know you said you were gonna go slow, but thinking about Seungmin sweaty and his arms bulging made you incredibly horny and a little wet.

“Puppy” he warns, looking around at the gym. It’s true that there’s almost no one, but a couple of trainers and at least three customers are present. You shrug with a wink. But Seungmin hasn’t finished with the surprises tonight, and in a flash he bends at the knees and puts you on his shoulder, your face now staring at his back and your ass in the air. Your response is a loud yelp and a threat.

“Put me down. Put me down or I’m gonna kill you.” Truth is: you didn’t expect Seungmin to be able to lift you like this and if you were only a little wet before, you are scared you’re gonna embarrass yourself if he keeps doing stuff like this. He puts you down only when he reaches the man’s locker rooms.

“Wait here for me, uh? I’m gonna walk you home tonight.” He looks around and, having assessed you’re alone, he kisses you hungrily, nipping at your lips and panting in your mouth.

Later, you’ll ask him to come up to your apartment, you’ll kiss wildly as soon as the door closes behind your backs and, for the first time, you’ll undress him. His shirt will lay on the back of the couch, joggers on the corridor floor. In return, he will get to have you naked too. Clothes scattered on the floor and on some pieces of furniture, it won’t matter tho. What matters is that you’ll make it to the bedroom and, most important, to your bed. He’ll show you how his biceps bulge when he’s over you, torso raised but hips fucking his cock inside you, making you bite your lips to stop the loud noises he’ll try to coax out of you. Later, you’ll worship his body, asking him to flex this or that muscle to lick it or gently nip at it. He’ll tell you about his gym adventures with Chan and Changbin, sometimes Minho, and he’ll promise you can go with them if you don’t act feral and try to get him naked.

Later, but for now you run to grab your bag from the lockers and come back to wait for him. Who would have thought your boyfriend had a sleeper build?

[isaidyoulookshitty]

idk it is so upsetting to me that veilguard is the first dragon age game i won't be replaying. when i was 15 i played origins so many times (almost a dozen) it is one of the only games i have ever 100% finished. da2 was the same! and while i didn't make it through as many playthroughs of inquisition i put hundreds of hours into it and made an effort to get to the bottom of everything the game threw at me. until veilguard, i had bought every available dragon age dlc for all games, tried to play almost every route given in the story choices, and spent hours reading through codex entries to soak up as much lore as i could.

veilguard has rendered all of that completely null.

it feels almost spiteful at this point that this new frakenspliced bioware cared so little to honor the bones and meat of the first three games. 15 years i have spent loving and cherishing (and criticizing) this franchise and now i feel like a fucking idiot for it. my grey warden? canonically awol and never addressed again. hawke? irrelevant and, for some players, potentially stuck in the fade forever. inquisitor? stripped of any complexity or depth i had given her in favor of the most syrupy, out of character fairytale true love's kiss ending with a man that shattered her worldview and broke her heart. how do you take 10 years to craft an ending this dissatisfying and thoughtless?

and the world i spent a decade and a half fighting for, shaping with player choices, and calling home? gone. "overwhelmed by the blight." literally scorched earth for the next game to build on with whatever the writers pull out of their ass to make players forget all about the original dragon age. it's tragic! disrespectful to longtime fans at best, at worst it feels intentional and like i am being made the butt of a joke told by writers who in the promotional material sound like they could not even be assed to play the games they're attempting to draw from. veilguard is just a product to be sold, not a story worthy of The Dragon Age Setting.

and i haven't even touched on all my gripes with the game's writing, the sanitization of any canon conflict that could be uncomfortable or difficult to address, the stale and cutesy therapyspeak and lessons in basic morality that are baked into every in-game interaction (most of which are shallow and all the same anyways) compared to the dialogue trees from the other 3 games. it is so frustrating to see that the devs chose to cave to a decade of vitriolic fandom politics in favor of addressing the kettle they wrote themselves into.

instead of hand-waving racism toward elves, the panic over qunari, the isolation of the dwarves, the corruption of the chantry, the abuse in the circles of magi, and slavery in tevinter, we should have been given the chance to confront all of it. to put a real end to it. we will never get to do that now. in fact, in their failure to follow through, bioware has only succeeded in exacerbating all of these issues. they have made the elves, which they have openly ADMITTED were "inspired" by Jewish and indigenous peoples, their mouthpiece for white guilt and shame passed down from one's ancestors (while also gutting elves' religion, culture, history, social differences, etc. i could go on). they PERPETUATE the same stereotypes of barbarity, violence, and warmongering imposed on the qunari by the rest of thedas by continuing to make them an opposing enemy force with the exception being a couple of friends they have neatly packaged for us. the unsatisfying conclusion to the mage-templar schism in inquisition is inconsequential. who the player chose to HEAD THE SOUTHERN CHANTRY as divine is deliberately made irrelevant. the dwarves are still isolated and ignorant of their origins save for harding (assuming she doesn't end up killed) and a single closed-off group. and the slaves in tevinter (again, mostly elves)? conveniently kept out of sight and conversation when we finally get to minrathous. everything that happened to fenris to make him the character he is, arguably the most impactful and sympathetic out of all the da2 companions, is not even addressed, much less tackled. all of it is swept under the rug.

i wanted dragon age: dreadwolf. i wanted a solid conclusion to a story almost 20 years in the making. a dragon age reboot might even have been a great idea somewhere down the line, but this was not the game to do it with. it was supposed to be a sequel and they couldn't even get that right. did i enjoy parts of it? of course! i finished it! but i won't be doing it again. the game clearly intends you to, considering a significant portion is locked away by decisions players are forced to make pretty early on, but i can't make myself do it. it makes me way too sad.

i could go on about how i, a queer and nonbinary adult fan, thought their handling of gender and LGBTQIA+ identities was heavy-handed, infantilizing, and felt so out of place within the setting it makes easy fodder for the "woke=broke" crowd that wouldn't have been receptive to queer rep anyway, but that would need to be another post in itself. not to mention the romance! unfortunate that i chose to romance lucanis not knowing his is now notorious for a lack of content, meaningful dialogue, pacing, and actual development. i won't even get to see the other romances in comparison because, as i have said, i will not be replaying.

[estrellami-1]

If I Should Stay

Part 1 | . . . | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11

Nancy gets back with Jonathan not too long after. He barges in and makes a beeline straight for Steve. “You know where Will is?”

Steve nods. “There’s a lot to explain.”

“Then you’d better start soon.”

Robin, his savior, steps in. “C’mon, Jonny-boy, let’s go for a walk.” She leads him outside, and Steve can hear her start. “What do you know about time travel?”

He smiles and looks around. He can hear Eddie upstairs, practicing the song. The boys are occupied with planning, Nancy’s looking over Mike’s shoulder, and El’s watching him with big brown eyes. He focuses on her and lets his smile grow. “Wanna help me make dinner?”

Her eyes widen a little, but she nods. “What are we making?”

“Probably sandwiches,” he shrugs. “I’m not sure what else I have. Can you find the bread in the pantry? And there’s butter knives in that drawer over there, we’ll need two.” He winks. “One for you, and one for me.”

She does so, and he pulls out the condiments and lunch meats, as well as the jelly. “And the peanut butter, if you can find it,” he calls from where his head’s stuck in the fridge. He looks around for anything else he might need and grabs the pickles before closing the door.

“Y’know the best part about making dinner?” He asks her, impish grin growing on his face. She hums inquisitively. “We get to make ours first and eat while we make the rest.”

She giggles and accepts the high five he holds out.

They get to work assembling sandwiches. She pauses, mayonnaise slathered halfway onto a piece of bread. “Steve?” He hums. “I’m scared.”

He sighs and puts down his knife. “I am too, El. Terrified, if you can believe it. But I have faith in us. I know we can do it.” He wipes his hands off and rounds the counter, taking her hands in his. “You are the strongest person I’ve ever met in my life. Even stronger than Vecna. And this time he won’t know we’re coming. We’ll have the element of surprise on our side, and we will defeat him. We’ll find Will and Barb, and after this we’ll never have to worry about it again.” He strokes a hand over her head and sighs. “There’s something else, too. I know where Papa is.”

She pulls back, eyes wide, posture stiff. “Whoa, hey, it’s okay,” he soothes. “I’m not going to take you back there. Ever. Okay?”

She nods hesitantly, but allows him to pull her closer again. “I was going to ask if you want us to take care of him,” he murmurs. “Lock him inside and set the building on fire, or something.”

She shakes her head. “He loves me!”

“Oh, El,” Steve whispers. “I thought the same thing of my parents for a long time. No matter how mad they got, how much they yelled, how much they hurt me… they said it, so it must be true, right? They must love me. I must be the problem.” He shakes his head. “That’s not love. You fear him, El, and for good reason. He made you into what you are, but you never asked for this, and it’s okay to be angry about it.” She looks up at him with wide eyes, and he sighs. “I’ll give you some time to think about it,” he murmurs. “If the answer is still no, that’s okay. But if you change your mind, that’s okay, too.”

She nods, steps out of the hug. He lets her go, feeling like he’s almost knocked a vase off a table. His heart’s still thumping oddly, eyes wide, scared to make the wrong move.

But then she looks up at him and offers him a small smile. “Thank you,” she says. “I know the way you treat me is different from how Papa treats me. I do not know yet if they are simply different forms of love or if you are right. I think you are, but…”

“You need to see for yourself,” Steve nods. Moves the metaphorical vase back from the edge of the table. “Let me know if there’s any way I can help prove it.”

“I will,” she says, and picks up her butter knife again, spreading mustard onto a piece of bread. He goes back to his side and smiles at her.

“Steve?” She asks after a second. “When my hair grows back. What does it look like?”

He thinks for a second. “It’s fluffy,” he says. “Very soft and light. Like cotton candy.” He puts his head to one side. “Floofy,” he decides, and grins.

She giggles. “Like you!”

He opens his mouth to tell her no, she’s wrong, except… he can’t. “Yours is even more beautiful,” he tells her. “And kids in school nicknamed me ‘the Hair’. That’s how famous this was.” He tilts his head her direction, and a lock of hair falls in his face. He splutters and shakes his head, grinning when she laughs again.

“I am very glad you came back, Steve,” she says suddenly, seriously, a little at odds with the smile still quirking her lips up.

His heart breaks and mends all in the same second. It feels like absolution. “Me too,” he says, and means it.

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[joudama]

And that’s that for Veilguard. Got all the achievements and got the four main possible endings (didn’t bother with the bad ending where you do none of the side quests, everyone dies, and you end up trapped in the Fade forever with Solas).

My four Rooks:

Female Shadow Dragon elf mage - saved Minrathous - romanced Harding - punched Solas in the face

Female Antivan Crow human rogue - saved Treviso - romanced Lucanis - tricked Solas into using the fake dagger

Male Grey Warden dwarf warrior (this was originally going be a Qunari, but I couldn’t get over the yassified look of all the qunari I tried to make and I gave up) - saved Treviso - romanced Davrin (meant to romance Bellara and lol welp, that didn’t happen) - big softie who sent Solas into the Fade with the Inquisitor

Male Mourn Watch elf mage - saved Minrathous - romanced Emmrich (meant to romance Bellara or Neve and lol welp, that didn’t happen) - told the Inquisitor she could do better and made Solas go off into the Fade alone.

My Mourn Watch one is probably going to be my “canon” run, since I liked it the best (that’s not saying much) of my runs. I went with a life leeching run for him, including using the unique items that made health potions/companion heals not work, and beefed up leeching. Literally the only time I died was when my controller ran out of juice in the middle of a dragon fight. The Elgar’nan fight was over so fast I was like, “Wait, is that it?” It was like the curb stomp fight in Inquisition with Corypheus before they let you have enemies scale up with you.

And now for my thoughts. And oh boy, do I have a lot of them. Hoo.

I have…so many issues with this game. It is a very good…whatever the gaming equivalent of a popcorn flick is. It’s great if you go in with your brain turned off and enjoy all the shiny. But that’s not what I want in a Dragon Age game. I’ve been replaying DA2 - the game that DATV is basically trying to channel - while playing these, and the difference in writing quality and intricacy of plot and world building could not be more sharp. The first time I played DATV, I thought it was fine. Almost aggressively fine. I had fun with streaming the game and seeing where it went. I loved the reveals with the wolf statues. I had some major issues with the writing being as subtle as a brick to the face at times (more on my thoughts about the dialogue LATER, because oh boy), but it was serviceable. And I genuinely thought Veilguard had been robbed by not being nominated for Art Direction at the Game Awards, because say what you will, the areas are fucking gorgeous. But, even then, I was like, “Yeah, this would not have deserved a GOTY nomination had it gotten one,” and placed it at a 7 or 8 out of 10. A good enough, enjoyable game that ran well, but was not by any means GOTY material.

Then I made the mistake of playing it again, and the cracks began to show. By the time I hit the middle of Act 2 of my third run, I was just so done. I hated every time certain companions had anything to say at all. I hated that you couldn’t call people out for being a jerk but had to be the supportive nursery school teacher at all times to them. And for the first time playing any BioWare game at all, I found myself wishing I could either not recruit certain people or kick them out of camp. The cracks were beyond showing at that point, and I no longer thought the writing was even “serviceable.” Things that hadn’t seemed so bad on that first popcorn flick run suddenly became a problem - not being able to actually talk to your companions to get to know them went from “it feels more natural to have them saying this stuff while out in the field” to “what is even the point of going around the Lighthouse if all it gets me is a line spoken at me or overhearing bits of them having ACTUAL conversations?” It legitimately hurt replayability. I missed being able to actually talk to my companions, and I realized I cared more about Manfred and Assan than most of my companions because Manfred and Assan actually seemed to like interacting with me. I will take Manfred’s rock-paper-scissors game over a “hey Rook” and dead-eyed stare.

By the time I hit late act 2, I couldn’t wait for it to be over so I could delete the damn game off my hard drive…only for the last achievement I had yet to get to NOT pop when I finished the game. I looked it up and discovered it wasn’t set by triggering a certain end state, but was tied to picking some flowers in Act 2, and wanted to cry. I don’t usually 100% games, especially if I feel like some of the achievements are bullshit I don’t want to do (‘sup, MELE needing you to do some Armax Arena Spectre-level fight - I would sooner chew off my own arm than do that, as anyone who watched me stream Veilguard would have guessed watching me kvetching the whole time I was doing that Hall of Valor shit), but that was just frustrating. I decided to try to get it on a fresh run as a Mourn Watcher, since I’d heard that was one of the surprisingly good faction backgrounds, and that was a good choice. Mourn Watch became my favorite faction, when it had been Shadow Dragons until then. It added so much to a lot more conversations than I would have thought, and made it so I actually enjoyed the sadly few times you get to actually have conversations instead of eavesdropping/being talked at. I’m glad I decided to slog through one more time for that achievement, because if I’d ended it on that third run, I know I would have never played it again. It turned back into a popcorn movie again, aided by me knowing when to put on a YouTube video and watch or scroll through Bluesky instead of listening to a certain character be the fucking worst. If I ever play again, it’ll be a Mourn Watcher (I already know the Veil Jumpers and Lords of Fortune are considered, shall we say, lackluster background factions.)

Which brings me to some of the big, fundamental problems this game had.

This is not a CRPG. It’s just not. It’s an action RPG now, with the focus on “action” not “RPG.” It’s part of the whole Mass Effect-ification of Dragon Age. And I say this as a huge Mass Effect fan:

Dragon Age should not be like Mass Effect. And vice versa.

When Andromeda came out, they decided to ditch the Paragon/Renegade system, and instead went for DAI-style emotion-based options. Which seems great! More speech choices to make a more nuanced Ryder instead of picking up or down! Great! Only no! A lot of people hated it because it didn’t feel like Mass Effect. They had taken away something that had seemed like a major part of how you roll played in the series, and replaced it something very different. It was the first time they took a mechanic from one game and ported it into another, and it didn’t really go over well with a lot of ME fans because it didn’t feel like a Mass Effect mechanic.

And now with Veilguard, they basically made a Mass Effect game with a Dragon Age skin on it. And it just doesn’t work.

Combat: They copied the combat wheel from Mass Effect, but did it kind of badly. I honestly hated it because I tried to play like I do in Mass Effect - pull it up, use it to look around and get a handle on my environment, then pick an enemy or a safe space to bolt to - and the camera snapping the enemies meant I couldn’t. It drove me crazy because it was like the Mass Effect wheel but fundamentally not, and the camera drove me mad because I’d pull it up trying to find where the nearest blight boil was, and it would snap on enemies instead of just letting me look. It’s like they wanted to get rid of every little bit of tactical game play and replace with smashy smashy bang bang instead. Don’t think, don’t plan, just attack…which fits in with the popcorn flick-ness of DATV. Don’t think, just do. Turn your brain off and look at the particle effects.

Another Mass Effect-ification with regards to combat is dropping from taking 3 companions to 2. Which you need to do to have that Mass Effect style combat wheel, and the Mass Effect 3/Andromeda style primer/detonation style interaction of companion powers. Detonations were very satisfying, but not very Dragon Age-y, and requires throwing out some of that DA lore to make it work, because now everyone uses magic-based abilities even if they aren’t mages. Assan attacks deal fire damage. You can spec a warrior who calls up a giant lightning hammer to twirl around, and…how? That’s not enchantment, that’s plain ol’ magic, and how?! Warriors didn’t deal magic-based attacks unless their weapons where enchanted before, but now, everyone is just tossing magic attacks at everything. That’s not how the world of Thedas has worked until now, but you can’t have those flashy explosions or particle effects otherwise, so shhh, turn off your brain and don’t think, shhh. Look at the screen light up and the pretty lights. It worked in Mass Effect because they had already set up tech and biotic attacks, but there’s no way to make hitting something hard with a sword cause it to blow up and damage all the other baddies around them, so now everyone has magic. OK.

As an aside, it was also a really bad idea of get rid of how aggro worked. Dragon Age had always worked by warriors drawing aggro because they had the heavier armor (or could use taunt on enemies targeting squishy mages or rogues). Rogues had lower aggro because they had lighter armor, and could sneak. Mages had even lower aggro because they had the lightest armor and were distance fighters. DATV threw that out the window, and Rook draws all aggro because they are the only ones with a health bar. Your squad is immortal in fights, which means there’s no reason for enemies to ever target them. Which means god help you early game when mages and rogues have no real skills yet. Enjoy dodging while your companions hit the enemies with what seems like attacks as powerful as spitballs. It also means that there are times what the game tells you and the fight you just did are completely at odds. Remember that fight with the Wrath of the Stone in Harding’s companion quest? That thing is on your ass the entire time, but then at the end of it, Rook says something along the lines of “It really hates Harding,” and…are you gaslighting me, game? That thing ignored Harding the whole damn time in favor of trying to stomp me like a cockroach. Harding did not exist to it during my fight. It had a hate boner for Rook and Rook alone, no matter what the game tried to insist on after.

Now, imagine how that would have felt if Harding actually could have been killed/knocked out during the fight, and it was only going after her? What if you couldn’t damage it if it took her down, so you had to make sure she stayed alive? Imagine how different that fight would have hit then? But no, that would mean the devs have to think about how to rez characters and how healing would work, and would mean players have to be tactical, and shh, no, no more of that, no thinking, just dodge and hit things and look at the particle effects. Shh. Have some more popcorn.

Story: DATV wants so badly to be ME2. It wants to recall the companion loyalty quests and the big suicide mission where you have to have everyone ready or you’ll all die. But you can’t copy what you did before and get the same flowers and results. You just can’t. You can try, and all you’ll get is diminishing returns. They tried to do the big cosmic horror of ME1, complete with a Virmire choice, then have the big final stakes of ME2, and no. You can’t follow a template and get the same greatness. That’s not how it works.

And speaking of following templates…

Romances: The romances in Veilguard are just dismal. And I think it’s because they decided to follow the Mass Effect pacing formula instead of the Dragon Age one.

Dragon Age: You start flirting in Act 1. You usually flirt with everyone because hey, why not? Some time in Act 2, things start getting serious, and you have to settle on who you want to go for. Things start to get serious, you get together, and then you get happy fun adult time with your new LI. You get the option to break it off or commit to them fully. By Act 3, you’re in a committed relationship. People comment about it. You can go to them and spend time with them - nothing major, maybe just a kiss. There might also be a special scene that’s just with them and unique to the romance. And by the end, after the lengthy amount of time that’s passed, you are Together.

Mass Effect: You start flirting in Act 1. You usually flirt with everyone because hey, why not? In Act 2, you keep on flirting with everyone. By the end, you might have to make a choice if you’re flirting too hard with everyone and the two LI options tell you to pick someone already, but you’re just picking who you’re interested in. Early in Act 3, there might be an almost kiss, but it’s mostly just the occasional anticipation of eventually boning and nothing really happens until right before the final big fight, when your LI shows up to your cabin for “oh shit, we might die in a few hours, so let’s go out with a high note” happy fun adult time. The only time you get that “committed relationship” vibes is in ME3 if you’re romanced the same character for at least one other game, and you choose to continue the relationship.

The Mass Effect pacing works in the Mass Effect trilogy because each game is only 20-40 hours long. Veilguard is a good 80 hours long. That means using that same amount of romance you use in ME is going to mean you’ve got too little butter to spread over too much bread. It’s why you have a good start for the romances in Act 1, then act 2 is a such a desert of nothing after you commit that I genuinely wondered if I’d hit the wrong option at said no at several points during the very long third act. There’s not just enough content for that long of an Act 2. Near the end everyone starts commenting on you being with them, but it’s not actually happening in the game. There’s no flirting, there are no extra scenes, and even the scene when you commit to them is based on a scene that happens with everyone, just with a romance option tacked on. The only person (of the ones I romanced, so I can’t speak to the others) who really get unique scenes was Emmerich. He actually takes you out on a unique date. It helped a lot to make Emmerich’s romance feel more fleshed out than the others. And Davrin had so many little jaunts out in the woods that those turned into romantic trips out, which added a lot to his. But Lucanis’ and Hardings? With both of them, like I said before, I genuinely wondered if I had accidentally opted out. Their romances most used the Mass Effect format, and it just doesn’t work for a game this long. BioWare knew that once, long ago, because Andromeda did not use the ME trilogy format for romances and was closer to one they used in DA. But DATV is trying to be ME2, so they used ME2’s very thin romances as a guide.

And we can all see how well that turned out.

The Executors: Fuck me, they feel like Cerberus reskinned, and I absolutely hated when Mass Effect shifted from sci-fi/Lovecraftian horror to space opera with Cerberus as the main bad guys you have to fight with the Reapers functionally falling to the background. The Executors are a secret, shadowy organization pulling strings from behind the scenes like the Shadow Broker codexes in ME2 retconned Cerberus into having been doing in ME. Ugh.

The Andromeda-ification of dialogue: Remember Peebee? Remember how she talked? Give her long hair and pointy ears, and she’s Bellara. Down even to the techno-babble. It’s like they’re trying to change magic to just “sufficiently advanced technology.” Everyone speaks in that modern, quippy style that was annoying in a game set hundreds of years in the future because it felt dated by the time the game came out (Ryder makes a Frozen joke, y’all). And it feels completely out of place in a game set in an early modern setting (I don’t think DA is medieval, honestly - it’s more a pre-industrialization/early scientific revoltution setting, so more 1500-1700s, and I’m gonna stop now). It was jarring. You can only let one quirky character break the rules about how people talk (Alistair in DAO, Varric in DA2, Cole in DAI) but when everyone does, it’s jarring. You can be anachronistic, but you have to know what you’re doing and how to do it when you do, and I’m sorry, but the current crop of BioWare writers don’t. They wrote the dialogue like it was a modern day YA novel, not a Dragon Age game. It would have been fine for a modern day urban fantasy game. It was not fine for a DA game set in the same time period as people using the four humours for “modern” medicine (remember the surgeon in DAI? Talked about the four humours? Yeah.)

OK, I did not intend to go on for this long, and I haven’t even gotten to what the game did to how religion is handled or the sociopolitical aspects of Thedas, and how they threw out so much that made Dragon Age unique in their urge to do a soft reboot, so I’m just going to end it here. I wanted to love this game, and I can only do that if I turn my brain off, and that’s not what Dragon Age should be.

[hoseoksluna]

SMOKE, iii. | myg

pairing: idol!yoongi x smoke!oc (ft. jungkook, bespectacled girl)

genre: angst

word count: 10.3k

summary: everything that has begun hurts. 

pinterest board: smoke / taglist: join

warnings: heavy yoongi angst, a rundown of the smut from the previous chapter (oral sex, humping, making out), importance of consent, hearing voices, anxiety, borderline thoughts of not wanting to be here in this world, covid and the pandemic, anger, hyyh yoonkook, yoonkook smoke together.

note: i'm sorry for this chapter. :( i will make it better, i promise. as much as it was pain to write the rundown, i still think it's beautiful and so vital to this story. i hope my babies enjoy it. luv yah. <3

side note: i recommend reading smoke 2 before this chapter, so you don’t forget about anything! i didn’t use much detain in the rundown, the chapter would’ve had 20k words if i did. 😔✋🏻

I don’t believe in God, but I prayed to something bigger than me when our chauffeur drove us through the rain.

I’ve known the man for years and I would drift through my precious slumber whenever he would get behind the wheel and not awaken. And as much as I trusted him, I didn’t trust the damned, despicable rainfall that seems to be infested in my life like liquid anthropoids. 

And as much as he meandered through the streets with utmost care and slowness, my muscles tensed and wouldn’t let up, my internal pleading words to someone up above coiled, choked out and strained. What’s worse, I feared she, the kitty girl, would stray away into her pain in all that quietness and melancholy that the condition of the weather emitted, and her bodily need to vomit would bash against the shattered pieces of my heart until only dusky powder remained. 

I folded her into my pathetic prayer. 

Seeing her so lost, unknowing of where she is and what is happening, seeing her eyes so absorbed in the nightmare she was facing, so awfully unfocused, then looking at me with such veneration once I cupped some cold water and let it drip down her noble spine—my heart failed and tore apart in two, her plea not to tell Jungkook severing it into smithereens. 

I would do anything for her, anything she’d ask. 

And I did. 

The car stopped at her apartment building, and it wasn’t until then that my muscles dissolved into a state of calmness that allowed me to breathe evenly. 

We didn’t crash. 

No vehicle appeared in front of ours. 

No muscle tear. 

My consciousness ceased being one of such smothering vigilance, melting into inquisitiveness about her energy and how she was feeling, into a territory that is ruled by her bergamot and mandarin perfume, by her beauty and dangerous femininity laced with girlish shyness that twists my stomach into knots. Thankfully, the downpour crept out of my solid and unyielding atmosphere and I felt the clouds part. 

The moonlight sliced through me when she asked me to come up. 

I didn’t hesitate. 

Tranquility surged through me, passing into me by those moonbeams. 

I glanced up at the moon when I held her purse up in the air for her, at a comfortable level for her arms as she rummaged through it. Once I heard the clanging of her keys, I looked down—meeting the same face that those clouds above revealed. Little moon kitty girl. 

But she wouldn’t connect her eyes to mine and my own mistake from earlier poked at my heart, her fear of me my everlasting demise. 

I was willing to do anything in effort to erase it from her body, never to be found again. Smooth out what I’d molded in her, reconstruct it into something new, mild and mellow. 

She held the door open for me and I perceived she had the power to pump blood into that wretched flesh of mine and deflate it all the same. It sparked something within me that I didn’t know how to identify. Something way beyond respect, enfolded with care, despite the fact I just met her. 

Fate has been too, too merciful to me—and I wasn’t sure if I should trust it. Sun-mi wouldn’t speak to me, still, even when I would call out to her.

Only radio silence echoed back to me. 

What was difficult to wrap my head around was the fact that I wasn’t reluctant to trust the kitty girl. It came to me with ease, filled up all parts of me that there simply wasn’t any space for any skepticism, nor for any ambivalence. If there was anything I was sure of, it was her. 

Me misjudging her in the beginning may have brought it about, but I firmly believe that it has now enclosed it with a protective layer of stability. One I hold dear to my heart and find myself headstrong about nurturing, protecting it further. 

She’s good. 

She’s the same as me. 

And she was wearing my sneakers.

It was all I could fixate upon as she led me through another door, out of which a high set of stairs emerged and by which she stopped. They suited her so well, downright belonged to her that I thought about letting her keep them. My heart swelled, making it difficult for me to breathe, and I went in first because I knew if I had the full package of her round femininity, her spine and the sneakers in front of my eyes, I would’ve collapsed and broken my neck. 

And I didn’t want to regard her like that. Especially not when I’d attached myself to Sun-mi. 

Even when she was lifeless, voiceless, seemingly not with me at all. 

And yet, whatever it was in me that asked for the kitty girl, didn’t leave me be until I checked, multiple times, if she was with me. If her heels weren’t slipping out of my shoes, or if the laces weren’t unraveling. If she wasn’t drifting away from me. 

She wasn’t. 

She was conscious, attentive to me and flushed under her black dress. 

My hands itched, remembering the feel of her icy cold skin warming up to me as she came to her senses. The memory engraved itself into the lines of my palm and I saw it, the film of it, all over again, when I looked down at my hand, full of pins and needles. 

It went away when I propped it on the wall while taking my shoes off, watching her small feet emerge out of the spaciousness of the sneakers. She blushed and wouldn’t reciprocate my gaze, her flush shooting to the apples of her cheek that only grew upwards to her temples like the prettiest of wild roses. Without a word, I followed her further into her apartment and I thought about how I’d follow her anywhere she went. 

Her living room was a place of utmost, ivory rest—as if she was inspired by the heaven she must be often visiting in her dreams. White walls, white couch, pristine lilies and undying vines of greenery lining each corner alongside a drapery of twinkling bulbs of lights. When she switched them on, I found myself in the middle of her personal heaven, considered it haven and I didn’t wish to leave. 

I didn’t know why she invited me upstairs and the only reason that came to my mind was one I wasn’t allowing to consume my weakened heart. 

I was willing to stay, even if she possibly needed a person to be present with her. Even if she needed to go non-verbal in the other room while I would bask in the purity of her eternal personality sunk in every detail of her apartment. I yearned to sit on her couch and take it in. Take in the perfume of her lilies, the soft and mellow mellowness of the lights that were so reminiscent of the core of those flowers. Her magazines and her books. Her cooking utensils and the reality show programs that must be burned into her TV. 

I yearned to sit and breathe her in. 

And I did when she poured me a glass of cold water and we drank it, wordlessly. She went to cleanse herself off the nightmare that had clung to her so vividly and deftly and I sat down in the middle of her plushy couch, her squishy pillows supporting my back. I ran my fingers through the different fabrics of those small cushions of hers, her blanket. Felt as though I was touching her, knowing she would repose her body using those objects of softness and something of great importance and emotional value, that I wasn’t really ready for, clove to my bones. 

I longed to be her object of softness, snoozing and idleness. I pitied her for going through something so pernicious, especially in front of Hobi. Especially in front of such a stranger like me. 

I didn’t understand how those tender feelings towards her infiltrated my lungs when I didn’t breathe enough of her air. I wasn’t in the right state of mind to feel towards a girl, not when I still had my tendencies to attach myself to my Sun-mi. I had tried to date after her, but I never developed feelings for the other person, not even a hint of them. I was indifferent to their personal stories as they were to mine, which made me realize in the long run that people in the current dating scene do not search for a long-term connection. The only connection they seek is the physical one and I regretted, for quite some time, for moving on the traditional way. Sun-mi was a treasure of gold and I was a fool for touching girls with gold-powdered hands. 

They condemned it and I was pushed towards a death of loneliness. 

Sitting here, listening to the murmur of her shower, abusing her special beige blanket with my gold-stained fingers, I wondered about her view on modern relationships. Was she the casual type and was I doomed? Or was she a love-fool like me? 

A boom reverberated out far in the corridor, tugging me away from the false sanctuary of my high hopes. The kitty girl had flung open the door to her bathroom, but she didn’t walk out. My stomach zapped with the temptation of the reason that still crouched somewhere, tentatively, in my brain, one that I’m holding back with all my strength. But then the notion that she might have been feeling faint and needing my help crawled all over my scalp with icy legs and before I knew it, my feet paddled down that corridor. Somehow, they had the knowledge of where to go without a sliver of doubt. 

Like all my thoughts, the notion had been false. 

She was perfect and erotic in her night slip, cleansing her face off the last detail of her nightmare. My heart forgot all of its regulations when I regarded the end of her ebony dress, grazing just right the curves of her bum. My mouth parted and vehemently dried, another notion slipping in that only she could be the source of water that my throat miserably needed. 

And then she turned around, a glowing torch of all my desires, dressed in silk and lace that hardened me so painfully my knees nearly wobbled. The sheer fabric pressed against her feminine peaks, baring them to me, my freed heart whispering to me that she was fully naked underneath her nightwear for me—and that she wanted it that way, wanted my eyes to see it. 

My hands acted out of habit—unzipping my jacket to cover her. My hands that didn’t connect to my heart, nor my mind. My hands that seemed to have remembered my high hopes. The only smart part about me. 

But she disagreed with them, and her own threw my garment down to the damp floor. She might as well have stomped on it to crush them further because wherever she was placing me right now, she was ensnaring me in her danger. In her femininity, in her eroticism. But she didn’t realize that she was tormenting me, opening my high hopes wide, exposing them and scratching them raw. 

And by doing that, she was making me want to torment her with pleasure so great that she would submit to my traditional ways. To my golden powder that would eventually broaden the slits of her cat-like eyes. 

Jungkook’s voice rang through me, however. At the cusp of my decision to manipulate her right back by giving her precisely what she was pining for. 

He had warned me, with maximum carefulness that she didn’t hear, to not take advantage of her. Jealousy washed over me like a stream of iciness—that he knew something I didn’t, as if he truly knew what was going on in her head while I didn’t, and that he had claims on her and a certain possessiveness over her that I had no business being bothered by. But I could only nod as he poured that cyanide into my ear, held back as I was by outside forces. And it held me back now, forcing my hands behind my back, forcing me to rethink my decision. 

She grasped that force, though. Pressed herself against me. And I could feel the ropes of that translucent obstacle ripping apart in her hands as they wrapped around mine, unfurling them, inviting my decision to come forth all over again. The hardened peaks of her breasts provoked the fight occurring in me and I sensed myself losing, losing Jungkook’s warning in my body, losing his respect—and losing his love. 

The latter is what drove me to tell her the truth—tell her that Jungkook said no, divulging to her the picture of the mountain of respect I bore in my lungs for him, despite the fact I kept holding her delicate hands. And she responded with such a piquant wit that it quaked through that mountain, debris falling off, tumbling to my feet. 

Since when is Jungkook the boss of me?

The fight loosened with her words, but it brought about the awareness that while Jungkook wasn’t the boss of her, he had been—for the longest time—the boss of me. It dawned upon me, along with the notion that it didn’t have to be this way, so intensely that my grip flexed around her hands. And the feeling of ultimate liberation, scented by her raspberry body wash, descended upon me, hushing to me, ever so softly, that because she’s become a new character in this following chapter, I didn’t have to cling to Jungkook any longer. 

And I recognized that voice. 

It was my Sun-mi speaking to me, guiding me. 

And I tried, with all my might, to conceal the evidence of the relief and the dull elation surging through me due to the fuzzy impression she had given me—a headstart to my decision. But then she reminded me of the possessiveness Jungkook had over the kitty girl and she encouraged me to ask her about it. 

And I did. 

Sun-mi took my thumbs and brushed them over the girl’s nails, showing me how before letting me take over. And the way she reacted to the feeble touch, it made me see her in a slightly different light. 

She was dangerous and erotic, yes. But deep within, in the dust-suffused corners of her being, there dwelled an abandoned kitten. Starved—starved of touch, of love and care. With a hollow belly and a bony face. And it stared right back at me after it brushed its soot-stained features against my neck, asking for more with eyes that were no longer seductive, but sorrowful. 

She was a kitten I ached, ached to take care of. Adopt and bathe and feed. Make pretty and fill up with life, joy and colors of the rainbow of emotions she could meet and get to know with me. 

And Sun-mi validated these thoughts of mine, expanding that warm feeling in my gut until it reached my heart. 

My breath shivered. 

And Kitty, Kitty expanded her wit, hauling my decision forth—to the edge of reality, provoking me further, but I saw right through it. She wanted my care for a different reason, using the same manipulation technique, and Sun-mi nodded in me. 

Would I ask you to come upstairs if I were?

Sun-mi warned me a second before Kitty untangled her hand from my grip and went to feel up my groin. I caught it just in time, putting it back to my side, and her dolorous regret pierced through me; pierced through Sun-mi’s voice, shutting the half of her sentence that advised me to be cautious. I was struck by the realness of her contrition, maybe because it seemed like a mirror of mine—maybe because it shredded the intoxication of her eroticism and the kitten in her revealed herself, fully, to me. 

That naked kitten, belonging to me. 

And just like that, I was willing to give her what her body asked of me. If I was supposed to get to that kitten through the murky waters of her desire, then I was willing to get myself wet. Because if I was to reject her, she’d close up that corner of her and I would lose her. 

The real her. 

I unattached myself from Sun-mi. 

I reopened what I had closed. I echoed the words that her body provided me. 

Are you needy?

And it wasn’t just the outside shell of her that lit up. The kitten glimmered in the shadows, turning onto her back and exposing her belly to me. That was enough for me—to know that the inner her was listening to me—and so I repeated the question in her dumbstruck silence, focusing on the her that needed me, though differently, at that moment, calling her by her name. I allowed myself to be influenced by her allure, by her former manipulation—dipping my hands in her waters. And her continuous wit affected me, properly, for the first time. 

What would you do if I said I was? 

My brows twitched and so did my cock, her words letting in a whirlwind of ideas of what I would do to her. But when I enabled my body to act out however it wished, my legs wading in her desire, only one remained. 

I set my heart upon punishing her for what she did to herself. For the way she sabotaged herself by using the fading beauty of lust and neglected the real her, the poor kitten, in the process. For submitting to the society’s detestable ways, when she was more than deserving of love and respect. 

I craved to punish her for meandering through this world like I did, with multiple earth-shattering orgasms that would satisfy her enough to be herself, unabashedly. 

Even if it made me a hypocrite. 

I’d make you come so hard you wouldn’t have to touch yourself for days, I whispered to her, folding myself into the snugness that was created between us earlier in the venue, feeling her body tremble in my hands. And before I turned my rationality off all the way and submerged myself, fully, in her waters, I echoed to her the words that rushed through me. Is that what you want?

Did she want me to discipline her enough that she would come back to herself? 

Did she want me to help her? 

But she didn’t answer me. She didn’t give me her words. Only a carnal, maddened noise of agreement spilled out of her and bound me deeper to her. I willed someone up above, silently, to make her see through my words. I persisted, vocally, encouraging her to consent to me, but the more the seconds of our time drifted on, the more I began to fall under her spell. And the more she studied the shape of my lips in a way that no one had ever done in my life, not even Sun-mi, the more my body submitted to her. 

We collided in a mutual kiss. 

And she tasted like the unnamed thing I sought in all the vapid girls I had touched after Sun-mi. Like the fruits of curiosity; like the sap of humanness. I delved into her—felt her refreshing my throat, my stomach. And her influence sank one more layer below, rejuvenating my bones. 

It wasn’t merely a kiss. It was a final connection, and I wanted her. 

I wanted her, crucially. 

The kitten clawed at the walls of her being and I felt her, shushed her inertly—told her to stay patient for me because I needed to continue with my decision, with my plan. Needed to get to her. 

Needed the same things that the outer shell of her did—without having anyone to give it to me. 

Except her. 

But when I broke the kiss and gazed into her eyes, I detected a streak of sunlight protruding through the thick dust. Lily-white and impeccable, her seduction tearing at the seams. And when she began to ride my thigh, the pleasure she received from me ripped it apart, wholly. She plummeted, an inch below, and I swam in gladness, parting her waters with my arms. 

I still needed her consent, though, so I persevered. 

She wouldn’t listen to me, as wet as she was, and I yearned to take her chin and make her listen to me, but I respected her well enough to not do that. And I lost the timeline of my impending need of her consent to help her when her hair sailed upon the surface of her lustful waters. She rubbed her pussy so well against my thigh. I could hear the squelching noises of her flesh riding her dripping slick and I sailed with her. 

I lost my mind when she came against me, the frenzy bursting in all parts of me, and I no longer saw the real her and the cracked outer shell of her. 

I merely saw her. 

And she was beautiful. 

She wasn’t erotic, seductive, nor lustful. She didn’t personify a girlish sinfulness. She exuded a pristine beam of pinkish innocence, laced with a love so great that it thrummed within my chest. My morals, my decisions, my ways and thoughts blurred and blended into my desire to have her. 

Just her. 

Her vulgarities and praises for me spilled out of her like her slick and it hydrated me, gave me a long, brisk sip of life and I was dumbstruck, mirroring her. She was unbound in her release and I wished I could cup that euphoric freedom and pour it down her throat in social events when she would need it the most, a little sugary drink of courage that would untie her from anxiety. Her beauty bloomed in front of my eyes and I couldn’t avert my gaze away from her. 

It was physically impossible within the bond that pulled me closer and closer towards her. 

And when she came back to me, dazed from the high of her vital orgasm, I couldn’t help but to be inspired by that stream of liberation. Just like she praised me, I praised her. It was important to me that she knew of what happened to her when she burst in her pretty release. 

It aroused me deeper, the words I uttered her way. And the way she blushed, the way she smiled—I knew right then and there that she threw a rope around me, ensnaring me to her for all eternity. 

And I was delighted. 

That’s the most I’ve heard from you all night. You’re alive when you come. Raw and articulate. No shyness to you.

I caressed her extended claws.

And I want them dug deep in me. 

Despite my lost mind, I kept going, kept persisting, wondering at the words that dashed out of my mouth, the one that knew how to kiss her and coax out of her those sweetened, delicate noises of hers—and her following words. 

Neck. Nipple. Thigh. Cunt. 

I became aware, wholly, of the suppleness and softness of her body. Of the authenticity and authority that it held as I kissed and licked all of those tender, sensitive parts of her that she asked me to get to know my tongue. 

And I was doing just that. 

Learning the depth of her intellect as I closed my mouth over her clit, as I drank from her sopping heat that gave me the final notion of the night that I would never thirst again. Not if I had her legs over my shoulders. Not if I had her bent in half. 

Not if I had her asking for me, provoking me. 

I enjoyed it too much. Thought I’d never enjoyed something like that before. Her taste, the heady scent of her arousal that I desired to have under my nose at all times, her wetness dripping off my chin and landing just right on her bare, squished tummy. Her neediness, her courage and her bravery. I enjoyed it all so much that I forgot all about myself and my own needs, finding her lust more stimulating and gratifying than the thought of me getting anything in return. 

But all too soon, while I was holding her in such a vulnerable position, the spell withered. In a snap of one’s fingers. 

Mine. 

The final question, the only smart one within the heated realm of our frenzy, trickled down my chin along with her wetness and I gravitated back down to my lost rationality, to the disconsolate existence in this wretched world. Kitty rolled her eyes and I floated, like a pallid cloud, in and out of our lust. One foot there, the other in reality. 

You really want this?

She bounced for me, tugging on the rope she had wrapped around me. And I toppled, harder than I anticipated, when she murmured that she wanted me inside of her. I toppled forward into our aphrodisiac haven, but my foot stayed submerged in the mud of reason. 

You’re not getting it tonight. 

But the little minx liked that I had said that. Liked that I was such a fastidious giver—a man in charge of her that knew better. And I liked that she did. I liked the way she touched me. Her fingers heartened me. And when she poked her toe in my cheek, I blazed in such joy and passion that I gave in. 

I gave in, entirely, to her. 

I kissed her like I never kissed Sun-mi. Grabbed her by the back of her neck and smashed my mouth into hers, sucking on her lips so hard that my cock twitched and she moaned in response. Moaned so vivaciously that I sensed it taking roots in each corner of my body and soul. 

Kitty dragged me out of reason, sprawling me over her. I ground my hips against her pussy, meeting her little thrusts, and I found something beyond the principle of haven in that mutual collision. Something safer, something more solid. And despite the fact I had unattached myself from Sun-mi, she, somehow, thundered in me. Her jealousy contaminated me. I felt icy fingers hooking into the back of my shirt and yanking me away, sinking into my flesh. And right then and there, I almost yelped in pain. 

Sun-mi’s voice plagued me in antipathy.

Get away from her. 

Get away. Get away. Get away. 

Go now. 

She screeched those revolting words in me until her shrieking voice melted into a ringing that rid me of my hearing sense. But as ensnared as I was, I perceived that wasn’t my Sun-mi. That wasn’t her voice, for it wasn’t effulgent with her gentleness. It was something greatly sinister that had crawled upon me in my vulnerability, disguising itself as my precious girlfriend. Though as aware as I was of its trick, it wouldn’t let go. On the contrary, it rose in volume and intensity until it forced me to let out the rottenest words I could’ve ever given her. 

I can’t. 

But because of the bond between us, I was able to give her a tender kiss to make it better. And when she took it, she gave me the strength to fight. 

And so I did. 

I settled between her legs, but the worst thing that could’ve happened did come up for air between us. 

She saw through me. She was a witness to the demon’s psychological terror inflicted upon me and she respected it enough that she began to back away. 

I couldn’t let her. I couldn’t let the demon win. 

So I pushed her hands away that had gripped the silky fabric of her night dress and covered her from me, and I flipped the hem so hard I nearly ripped it. I couldn’t afford to have her close up on me—to not have her like this and the awareness of how important she had become for me in the little time we had together descended in the pit of my stomach. The thought of never having her close like this shook through my organs and I simply could not let that happen. 

I begged her. 

I begged her to let me forget about the enormous obstacle that hid within me and wished to draggle me through mud and shit just so I wouldn’t fall deeper into her. 

And when she allowed me, when she pinned her legs back the way I wanted them, and gave over that intimate part of her that I had discovered I needed in order to survive, I discerned that her willingness, her consent and her kindness was something that attenuated the voice of the demon in me. 

I submitted. 

And in total submission to her, I devoured her and finger-fucked her until she, seemingly, washed me clean of all my darkness, sprinkling me with her wetness. I would’ve continued had she not reached the fairyland of overstimulation. And all my false pretenses were revealed to me when she sat up and palmed my cock. 

I wasn’t washed clean. I wasn’t well. And I wasn’t strong enough to fight. 

My fear quaked in my bones while she was undoing the strings of my sweatpants and it was me who felt like vomiting at the thought of being on the receiving end. 

I grasped her hands, my vision clouded with my tears, and I could only shake my head ‘no’. I had pleaded with her to give me her words, yet I myself wasn’t able to do the same.

I didn’t understand what was happening to me. 

I crumbled and shrunk. Was smaller than the kitten inside her that meowed to me. Didn’t know whether to leave or to stay over, only that if I were to remain in the closeness of our lessening frenzy, something ugly would occur. I found myself in a state of mind where I needed to be taken care of, but letting her do it strengthened my fear. I needed Jungkook to come, but that meant he would get the wind of the fact that I betrayed him. 

I was paralyzed on the spot, with my cock hard and aching, and Kitty studied me as if she could read each and every horrendous line of the decadent poetry of my mental state. And then she tied back the strings of my sweatpants, careful not to touch my private parts, and folded her hands on her glistening thighs. 

“Can I make you something to eat?” she asked, her eyes as shiny as the traces of her arousal, round and softened, the slits wide and innocuous. So different from the way they looked when I first regarded them. 

The large, hot tear that plopped onto my cheek answered her for me. As if she called it out, my stomach grumbled. 

She rose on her bare, wobbly feet and pulled my head onto her lace-adorned bosom. Brushed a hand down my hair at a snail’s place like she internally knew that it wasn’t possible for me to linger in her tenderness, that once she reached the nape of my neck that I would withdraw. And she gave me a radiant smile once I did—as if I wasn’t vile, worthless and loathsome. 

Reassured me that it was okay like I deserved it. Like I deserved her. 

And while she made me ramen and boiled two eggs for me, the demon in me pressured me to leave without a word. Almost pushed my muscles into action, my legs to take a step back, but I resisted. I resisted with the little strength I had by crossing the distance, no longer watching her from the dark corner of her kitchen. I stood behind her, not holding her, not caressing her—because I couldn’t. I couldn’t draw closer. I couldn’t touch her in a non-sexual sphere because I feared what would have happened to my mind if I did. 

In spite of that, I said the words that she deserved to hear. 

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry for not being able to give you what you want.” 

She turned her head and gazed up into my eyes. It was so intimate that I couldn’t understand how we ended up here, how we ended up acting like this when we knew each other for merely hours. I couldn’t understand why it felt the way it did when she was merely looking at me and I longed to scratch off the outer layer of our bond that it gained from our lust, that protected it so well that even I couldn’t erase it. 

“You don’t have to apologize for anything.” 

I couldn’t say anything to that. My hands agreed with her, but my abused heart didn’t. I could only sit down at her table and eat the food she made me, thinking about how everything our bodies did was natural, yet those actions left an unnatural aftertaste within that the food couldn’t flavor differently. I existed in oxymorons with her, ones that I took to bed with her. 

And I held them instead of her. 

I awake with a jerk. 

With the brass, sharp and strange feeling that I did something wrong, that I made a mistake so enormous and calamitous that it will take a lifetime to pay its mending debt. With a long wave of Kitty’s turquoise strand loosely wrapped around my hand resting between the snugness of her pillow and mine. With her spine protruding towards me while she’s curled on her side. With a surplus of the dream I have emerged from as it drifts with me towards the bright light of consciousness, where I’d rather not be right now. 

And the memory of it opens against my eyelids when I close them. Her straddling me, her bouncing on my cock as her eyes flutter in the middle of her perfervid, red-hot orgasm that might as well have been mine. I sense her weight on me as if she wasn’t softly snoring beside me, but sitting on me with my length sheathed inside her to the hilt, shuddering and praising me, her breasts following the movement of her hips and—

I sit up and fist my hair, trying to breathe out evenly, but I fail. The damned air comes out in pathetic staccatos that permeate me with a zealous anger. And when I rip the covers off of me, I see that I was right. 

Her orgasm was mine. 

A large wet spot stains my boxers, the white fabric translucent due to the quantity of cum that oozed out of me in my sleep. It’s not sticky, nor is it dry, which means the dream caught up to me right before I woke up and came like a fucking teenager that has just discovered women. 

What makes this even worse is that I’m rock hard and so needy that I’m willing to wake her up and beg for her. Beg for her kindness. Beg for her softness. 

But I can’t. 

Anger and lust might lace well, but I can’t do that to her. I can’t use her when I know I have to keep my distance now and not allow us to step over the threshold of our desires. I should’ve listened to Jungkook and not let her shatter that mountain of respect for him, not let her set me free from my fixation on him. I should’ve stayed in the car and kept my promise to him that I would come back. 

I stand up to my feet and I detect the silky ghost of her dyed strand on my palm, the only singular softness I might ever feel for the rest of my life. And I wish it would end now, so I wouldn’t have to face her and the possible heartbreak I would clothe her in—and so I wouldn’t have to face Jungkook and clothe myself in regret and shame. 

I go and search for my Sun-mi as I walk over to the living room to put on my sweatpants from last night, but I stumble upon a dead end. The realization that I had been tricked by my demons for all these long years swathes me in iciness so cold that I shiver and my vision blurs. The realization that I’m all alone are the ropes that stifle my lungs and they swell against it, the flesh overspilling. I call out to her from within, a feeble high hope, and radio silence greets me upon this fine morning. 

The only honeyed good morning I’ll ever receive. 

I sniffle, willing the tears to fuck off because I’m exhausted of feeling so much, of being so vulnerable in this world that seems so be so set on destroying me. My girlfriend is dead. She’s not with me, nor will she ever be. She hasn’t been sending me guidance and fuzzy feelings. She’s buried six deep under and I dispersed the soil over her with the same hand I used to make another girl come, the same hand that still feels her hair like a knife I seem to be clutching, despite the excruciation I give myself, despite the blood that pours out and splatters on her stark white carpet. 

I sit on her couch and check the notifications on my phone. I have one text message from Jungkook and two missed calls from him. It’s so like him. Had it been any other member, the bar would’ve been spammed so much that I myself would have to get out of bed and silence it. 

I click on the message and read it, carefully. 

We need to talk in the morning. Coffeestand at 11 am

Fuck this shit. 

I check the time. It’s 10:20 am. I haven’t slept this long since the pandemic. Which reminds me that I haven’t been to that small coffee shop with him since before this fuckery ingrained itself in the face of this doomed world. Jungkook knows what I’ve done, but I don’t allow myself to feel. 

No regret. No shame. 

Nothing. 

I place my head in my hands and do some breathing exercises, anxiety invading my boundary and my decision to be numb. I fight, even though I’m so weary of it, and my mind spins. There’s not enough air in this room and when I go to look around to see if her AC is on, I find her standing by the doorframe of her bedroom. 

Puzzlement twists her puffy, morning features. The light glimmers in her eyes so glaringly that there’s simply no need for the sunlight right behind me that I now sense cradling my back. It has awoken hand in hand with her and I have to stop myself. 

No feeling. Numbness, only. 

I feel nothing towards her and I want nothing to do with her. 

Last night was a mistake. She was horny and I was lonely, vulnerable. There’s no bond between us. She’s merely Jungkook’s pretty friend. And I don’t see the starved, neglected kitten out in the open of her being, her former seductiveness a mat beneath her that she’s resting on, purring. She’s not lifting her small, bony head at my attention as I peer into her eyes and watch her tense features melt and relax under our spellbinding eye contact. 

And her words don’t affect me when she asks me if I’m okay. 

I don’t disintegrate when she walks towards me, her bare, sleep-kissed breasts bouncing underneath her pellucid, lacy night dress, ruining me, reminding all over again of the wet dream I had, of the way she pinched them right before I stirred awake. 

I stop her halfway with roughness that I regret as soon as it digorges out of my mouth and I wish, with all of my own godforsaken being, to take it back. 

“Can you, please, put something fucking on?” 

I palm my forehead, tearing my gaze away from her and the way her face falls, and when I run my hand down my eyes, I encounter the traces of my weakness still wet and very much visible to the naked eye on my cheeks. I’m hot all over, regretful, shameful and hateful of what I’ve become because I believe that, deep down, I’m not my anger. 

I may believe it faintly, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe it at all. 

I’m not my anger and I don’t treat people like this. I exude respect, self-control and kindness. 

This is not me. 

And yet I still act like this. I hurt and I’ve hurt the beautiful girl in front of me that I can no longer face. I grab my things and I walk over to her corridor, sliding my foot into my shoe while staring down, with even blurrier vision than before, the red Jordans I let her wear last night. 

“I have to go,” I mutter, willing my voice not to betray me, but to be smooth, steady and gentle—unlike me. Jungkook’s image flashes in my brain and how he must be already waiting for me in the coffee shop, as punctual as he is. And I don’t hurt just his friend further, I sink the knife I still clutch inside my heart so deep that I lose my life in front of her. “Do you have a spare mask?” 

She untangles one of her arms crossed over her breasts and rummages in a little, white, polyester box perched on her kitchen bar. Wraps that forearm tighter around her when she hands me a new, ivory mask without looking at me. 

I twist the knife deeper in my heart and I long to take her face in my hand, instead of the mask. Take her and kiss her for her kindness until she moans into my mouth like she did last night. 

But I don’t. 

I thank her for the mask and I leave. 

Jungkook is waiting for me outside the coffee shop with a pink umbrella. A tall Statue of Liberty dressed in black, holding up a torch of my failure. He reminds me so much of her that it might as well have been her, standing in his place. 

I had texted him that I was on my way, even though my doleful heart begged me to dial his number and vomit all of my feelings into his ear. Cleanse my guts of the regret that gorged on it. Despite the fact that’s not something I normally do. Jungkook is the one who does and I’m the one who listens, who fixes, who comforts.

I could never let him know that I’m the one who needs it now. 

It had rained softly when I stopped by my apartment to take a quick shower so I wouldn’t have faced him with cum stains on my sweatpants. Gooseflesh marred my skin when I walked through it with my head dipped low, the cloud my very contrition that poured down on me. I was shivering as the liquid anthropoids crawled upon my bare arms because I left my jacket on her bathroom floor. None of us went to wash up before bed. 

They seemed to have fucked off to another city, but once I went by foot to the coffee shop, they descended again. Taunted me. Obscured my tears from Jungkook who was as kind as her, running up to me once he saw me to shield me from the rain. 

No wonder they’re friends. 

I don’t greet him, nor do I listen to him tell me off for not bringing an umbrella. I focus on burying my feelings the way I buried my girlfriend, six feet deep, and the final sifting of the soil is the cigarette I wordlessly pull out of my pack. Jungkook blinks at me. 

Then, holds out a hand. 

No wonder he’s my brother. 

I give him one and light it up with my white lighter, studying the way his brown pools zero in on tip flaming up in a soft orange tint. And when those gentle eyes shift to mine, I feel like weeping all over again. 

He puffs the smoke out away from my face. I follow him, hiding my tears by flicking my gaze in another direction, sucking on the cigarette as I bring it to life and pocket my lighter. And as the fume blackens my treacherous lungs, I have to rub my eyes in order not to reveal my emotions to him. 

But Jungkook sees through me regardless of my efforts. 

“Start talking,” he encourages, crossing his arm over his chest like Kitty did and my heart pivots on its axis, slicing through my flesh. The smoke curls around us in the pink shadow of the umbrella. “We don’t have much time. We have to be back at the company in an hour. He wants to talk to us.” 

He doesn’t have to mention his name—I know full well who he speaks of. If the said person saw what we were doing, he’d have a stroke and it makes me suck on my cigarette harder. 

“About?” 

Jungkook sighs, takes a drag and puffs the smoke sideways through pursed lips, his eyes lost in the distance somewhere behind my legs. “He never said. Just acts all high and mighty. Demands our time when we need it to rest in order to give our best before the concert tonight. I’m sick of him.” 

I humorlessly chuckle because I don’t think I ever heard him admit something like this. Hobi and I, we have these discussions nearly on a daily basis, but Jungkook never had the guts to admit the unfair, inhumane way we’re treated by the company we keep alive and thriving. Not just for us, but for the other groups under the management.  

I take a little happy drag of the poison, feeling a little more at ease with him. Enough to dig up my feelings and stain his hands, so I wouldn’t feel so alone. 

And I do. 

I prepare it, my nails black and muddy. I dig out the regret over my words, the ache in my heart from the way Kitty’s face fell, the mental agony from the fact she may never want to see me again and that I may never see her—that she won’t come to the concert tonight. 

And in the silence, as I look at my dirtied hands, I get an eyeful of the way I’m holding not just the fragments of the earth, but of wildflowers. Wildflowers of her scent, the heady perfume of her arousal that I can still smell under my nose because I didn’t have the heart to wash that part of my face. It was all I had of her for the time being. Petals of her beauty, her giggles and her moans quiver in my palms and the memory of her poking me with her toe in my cheek resurfaces in my mind. I smile so vivaciously that it hurts, though differently. I don’t regard it as sexual but as something innocently delicate, precious and endearing. And it deepens my regret that I spoke to her that way, that I made her feel ashamed of her breathtaking, picturesque body by lashing out my anger at her. 

It deepens it to the point that I lament it. And my smile falls—just like her face. 

Jungkook watches me. Has been watching me this whole time while I dipped inside myself. And he brings it back up, stubbing out his cigarette with his sneaker on the wet ground. I follow him—ready and not ready at the same time, but I feel vastly in me that I should tell him. And that he won’t ostracize me. 

“Let’s go inside so you can tell me.” 

I merely nod.

Jungkook takes the first step in front of me, keeping me shielded from the rain that begins to thicken. Maybe it grew tender from my memories—maybe it’s not as sinister when it comes to her. Maybe the rain can be mellow when she’s in my life. 

Except that she no longer is. I pushed her away. 

Under the roof of the coffee shop, Jungkook shakes the umbrella off of its sopping wetness and I can’t stand the sight of the rain. I walk inside, squeezing through him, mutter a quiet hello that the person behind the counter doesn’t hear. She’s tapping away her heart on the screen of her phone, her long nails clicking loudly, her round glasses pinched at the ball of her nose that fog up with each of her breaths due to her sagging mask. Tufts of hair spread out in all directions from her messy updo and she doesn’t lift her head at the sound of the bell ringing once Jungkook comes in. Her typing movements gain more speed and verve and I can’t help but to laugh to myself. She must be fighting someone on the other side—and I wish I could fight Kitty, just so I could talk to her. Just so I could still have her in my life. 

“What are you having?” Jungkook asks, a glistening puppy drifting his big pools on the menu suspended above the girl’s curled form. He doesn’t take the humid weather well. Invariably sweats like a dog. A cute puppy dog that never stinks. 

I was too busy being jealous of the girl possibly fighting her boyfriend to notice what she offered to make. I glance up, noticing the words are written in white chalk and some western options are embellished in a pretty cursive that must belong to her, which reminds me that one of our mutual friends worked here before the pandemic. I wonder if he’s still here or if someone else manages the place. There’s no way Beomseok was able to write in this pretty lettering. The man has problems with Hangul and to this day I don’t understand how he graduated with honors. 

Kudos to him. 

I reread the options and find only coffees with so much milk to make you sick for days. The only strong coffee is an Americano, but I need something stronger. 

“Don’t they have anything with whiskey in it?”

Both heads turn simultaneously in my direction and I laugh, dryly. The girl’s thumb hover in the air before she blinks, flings her phone to the surface of the counter and stands up, drawing close to us. 

Jungkook elbows me. “It’s 11 am.” 

“If we have a meeting after this, I need the whole bottle.” 

He laughs through his nose. “Fair enough.” Pivots to the girl, leaning his elbow on the counter and fixes his mask. “One americano for me. Do you, guys, still do flavor shots?” 

The girl taps in his order and only looks at him with her eyes while her chin keeps facing the monitor. “The times have changed but our brand coffees haven’t. What flavor shot would that be?” 

Jungkook nearly springs into the air. I swore I could see his puppy tail wagging. “Banana, please.” 

I scoff. If I were to drink a banana-flavored americano, I would’ve spent my day on the toilet. Jungkook throws me a dirty look before he focuses on the girl again. I shake my head, smiling, lightweight. 

“Okay, so, one banana americano for me and one bland americano for the grumpy guy. I’ll be paying for both. Can we sit here or is this to go only?” 

She proceeds to tell him that the mandate is still rubbing its shit all over these walls, but since we’re the only ones here, we can sit with our masks down. Jungkook thanks her and leaves her a tip, asking her if Beomseok still comes around. My ears perk up. I would’ve loved to see the guy. 

“I had to take the shift for him this morning, actually. The poor guy has some kind of a stomach bug. Are you, guys, friends?”

Jungkook nods, but doesn’t say anything else, which I’m grateful for. Beomseok was my classmate, the only friend I had in Daegu before I moved to Seoul. He didn’t support my decision to leave everything behind, but we reconciled, years later, when he followed my footsteps and we met at this very coffee place that he rebuilt with his own hands. Helped out the ahjussi who owned it; sweated blood, sweat and tears. And when the old man died, he left it in Beokseok’s hands, legally. 

I sit by the front windowsill once Jungkook brings me my coffee and sets down his, the banana flavor sailing through my nostrils as I take off my mask. I make a face at the sweetened scent and Jungkook raises his eyebrows at me before he shakes his head in dismay. I take a sip of the dark liquid, basking in the warmth that clings to my bones. 

But when he mentions her name, I spit out the coffee that I had yet to swallow. 

“What?” I ask, embarrassed. I didn’t hear the rest of the sentence and my cheeks flush. Jungkook’s forehead wrinkles—his brows quirking as far as they can and I wish the ground would swallow me up. 

Choking at the sound of her name? What has happened to me? 

“I said—” His bunny smile forms and I know I’m fucked, knee-deep in a quicksand of shit. He won’t let me live it down. “That she loves this flavor as much as I do.” 

I run a hand down my face. Jungkook chuckles into the plastic of his drink, wiping down my coffee on his plain black sweatshirt. 

“Which reminds me that you have stuff to tell me.” 

Anxiety pinches my fingertips. I was ready—or half ready—outside when he loosened the tensity of the atmosphere. But after the way I embarrassed myself in front of him, I don’t think I’m capable of telling him how much I fucked up. 

I’d rather suffer in silence and on my own. 

I look over at the girl. She’s sat back down on her stool and she’s reading the messages, her thumb trembling in the air before it swipes up, the other one in her mouth, her teeth nibbling on her long nail. 

The way I caressed Kitty’s fingernails bolts through my vision and my throat dries. I’ve shifted to the point that I begin to miss her and like the girl’s thumb, my jaw shakes. I still it, I hide it by propping my fist against it. 

Jungkook stares me down, urging me with his eyes and it works on me. I work well under pressure and he knows this. That guy is a puppy-fox hybrid and I hate him as much as I love him. 

“I don’t know where to begin,” I admit, and it’s true. It’s as vulnerable as I was last night and I can’t grasp how that emotion still breathes in me. I’m hoping it disappears as soon as I let it out, disappears into Jungkook, where it will be safe and locked. 

Jungkook takes a long sip without taking his eyes off of me. Smacks his mouth right after. “Did you fuck her?” 

It’s me who raises their brows at the brazenness of the question and I wish it were as simple as that. I wish I had fucked her and left her while she slept. Ended the story like that without any strings attached—without any additional chapters. But what I feel for her, the bound that is irrevocably unrelenting between us, exceeds a saga. That exceeds this entire lifetime. And I can’t admit that to him. 

“No,” I mumble, unable to reciprocate the eye contact, unable to tell him what we did because I don’t want him to know. I don’t want him to see her the way I did—let him in on her horniness. It was private and it was for me. I want to honor that and protect that privacy for her. It’s the only thing I can do now. The only right thing. My hands have gone mute. “But something did happen between us. I slept over and in the morning I fucked it up.” 

The vagueness of my words graces me with the fuzzy feelings I was used to before today, but I don’t trust them. I don’t fall for it—and my anxiety skyrockets, enough that a lump lodges in my throat. 

Jungkook doesn’t blink and I don’t wish to know what it means. “Fucked it up? How?” 

How do I tell him without spilling the entirety of me? Without disclosing that I coped with my girlfriend’s death by falsely believing that she was transcendently still with me, guiding me? 

No one can ever know that about me. Not even the being up above. 

“I wasn’t in the right mind to see her bare, so I had a go at her,” I mutter, my voice breaking and I take a sip to camouflage it, the warm liquid heating up the incoming of my past anger. “I regret it and I wish I could take it back.” I caress the fabric of the mask, crumpled on the wooden windowsill, and my lamentation blackens. “But she doesn’t wanna see me anymore.” 

Jungkook pulls his phone out of his pocket and places it beside his coffee. It startles me, but I concentrate my gaze on the only physical, tangible presence I have of her. 

“Did she tell you that?” 

Something opens within me, but once again I don’t trust it. 

“No.” 

“What makes you think she doesn’t wanna see you again?” 

I don’t answer, finding the question stupid. I toy with the ear strings of the mask, recollecting the way I did the same movement with her fingernails. And I don’t want to drink the coffee anymore. I don’t want to go to a work meeting—nor do I want to be here at this coffee shop. I don’t want to be anywhere; I don’t want to exist. 

Jungkook sighs. I still don’t look at him, gripping the string so hard against my knuckle that my thumb turns white. 

“You like her.” 

I do, but I don’t profess that, vocally. It’s pointless. As pointless as the course of my personal life. 

“Did you exchange numbers?” 

I shake my head ‘no’, the corners of my mouth naturally rounding in a frail pout. The thought of having her number and having the opportunity—

“If you see Yoongi sometime before work, make sure he’s well.” 

My head shoots up. Jungkook is bunny-smiling at his phone while holding his bizarre drink in his other hand. The remnants of my past anger magnetically affixes within me, creating a dynamic windstorm in me that really pushes me to lash out at him for taking the piss out of me like that. I grit my teeth, clench my fist, hold back with all my might that I feel my shoulder act up, paralyzing me with a pain that forces me back down until I curl in my seat—like that bespectacled girl. 

Defeated. 

“I can’t believe this is happening—”

I pinch the bridge of my nose, willing my softness back for him. Clutch my shoulder while he’s distracted. “Don’t fuck with me, Jungkook-ah. I’m not in the mood.” 

He hums in question, flicking his eyes at me. Seeing the state of me, he grows serious and locks his phone, setting it down. “I told you not to touch her, did I not?” 

I open my mouth to say something, but I run on empty, closing it back down. This is the reaction I anticipated and now that it’s here, it feels right. It feels like I deserve it—like I deserve to be told off. So I listen, my knuckles against my mouth, and I stare, numbly, at him. 

“I shouldn’t have let you take her home in the first place. I knew this would happen. I saw the way she looked at you when I introduced her to you. She was in a trace, hyung. And when you were the one to tell me she felt sick, I knew this was bad news,” he breathes out, his shoulders as broad and menacing as his words, and my guard collapses. I know where he’s going with this and I brace myself against it, brace myself against the cold, hard truth that will sever me in half. But I’m wrong. What he says next is something I never expected to hear from him. “Having a go at her is the worst thing you could’ve done to her, but she’s strong. She’s the strongest person I know besides you—”

His voice recedes and the background of this brown coffee shop dissolves into a pitch blackness. I sit in the middle of a tunnel, beaten and overpowered, his silenced words driving past me like cars, and I can’t move. A myriad of scenarios that explain why she’s the strongest person he knows darts through my brain, connecting with the big question mark of why she evanesced in her body in Hobi’s presence. And the reason why Jungkook disapproves of us fluxes over me like those liquid fuckers. 

She was hurt, badly, in her last relationship. And it feels as though I’m back on my side, on the hard ground, while it pours, the lights of my scooter streaking through it. 

“—but she obviously cares for you, unlike the others. She wouldn’t text me that if she didn’t, so take her fucking number from me and fix this. Grow a pair.” 

I blink at him with fluid sight. Brown evaporates through the black. 

“Don’t make me regret this.” 

And all of a sudden, I’m aware of what I’m doing when I seize his phone. See for myself that he wasn’t fucking with me like I thought he was. And I copy her number into a new contact. 

My thumbs hover in the air—just like the girl’s behind me. 

𓂃 ౨ৎ LOVE-KISSED BABIES: @tkslovechild, @jjk7k, @parkinglot-nights, @bethvar, @Sexytholland, @yoongibaybee, @crystaleah,@fennecnco, @lil-kpopstan, @euphoricmyth, @jungkoock, @cinmmongirl, @hobiberrystuff, @kam9404, @fr0ggieth1nk.

© 2024 hoseoksluna, all rights reserved.

BACK to masterlist | READ second part here

[ddejavvu]

Hi Mei!!! I Hope you’re well 🧡

I’m just watching the first season of criminal minds for the first time, and I was on the episode where they go to Mexico. Elle’s ability to speak Spanish made me think of Aaron and reader where he just assumes reader can speak Spanish and tries to get her to interview witnesses but she’s like no babe I said I could get through a resort if we took a vacation!

Thank youuuuuuuu for sharing your writing with us 🧡

i also do not speak spanish so i did use google translate for the pet name that i put in at the end my apologies if it's awkward </3

--

Your brain has managed to tune out Elle's fluent Spanish conversation because you can't understand a word of it, but when the pair approaches you, you stiffen, throwing a kind smile at the woman beside her.

Elle says something to the woman, what you're not quite sure, because she's still speaking Spanish. But she looks expectantly at you, and you stare blankly back at her.

"Hello," You offer cautiously to the woman, wondering if she can manage an English interview, and maybe Elle needs to focus on those who can't, "Can I help you?"

"In Spanish," Elle prods, looking slightly inquisitive at you, "She doesn't speak English."

"I don't speak Spanish..." You shake your head ever-so-slightly, hands hanging limply at your sides.

She rears her head back, "You don't? Hotch said you do."

Your brows raise, "He did? I don't."

"Oh." She laughs lightly, and you assume the Spanish phrases that she offers to the woman beside her detail your predicament, because her words ease the nervous woman into relaxed laughter. Elle places a hand on her shoulder, bidding you goodbye, and resumes talking to the woman in Spanish.

You turn as soon as they leave you, eyes scanning the building you're stationed in for your boyfriend. He stands tall against the wall opposite you, filling officers in on the warning signs that they're looking for.

"-above all else, be vigilant. This person seems to know about our proceedings here, which means it could easily be someone in this room. Stay alert, and be careful who you trust."

With that bone-chilling warning, he dismisses the officers, and you feel bad for them when you see their paranoid glances to each other.

"Aaron," You step up to him once they disperse, "Did you tell Elle I could speak Spanish?"

"Yes I did," He nods, brows furrowing a fraction, "Did you not want me to?"

"Uh, well, I can't," You laugh, and he blinks blankly, "So, no, I'd have preferred for you not to tell her."

"Oh." He offers, "But I thought- When we were discussing our vacation plans..."

"I said I could survive a Spanish-speaking resort," You correct him, "Because anyone can download Duolingo. But I haven't yet, and I don't know an ounce of Spanish."

"Oh." He repeats, lighter this time as he chuckles sheepishly. He pulls you into an embrace, keeping it casual and quick as he bends down to kiss the grin off of your face. He backs away before he can give into his urge for more, but his hand stays clasped around your own, "Sorry. I didn't-" His shoulders shake with a chuckle as he glances at the floor, "I guess I should know that about you. I don't know why I assumed."

"It's okay, Aaron." You lean against his shoulder, "I'm not upset. But maybe we should download Duolingo."

"Maybe we should." He chuckles, "We'll do it in the car when we go for lunch."

"Deal," You nod, reluctant to let go of his hand even though you know you need to get back to work. Your eyes light with an idea, and you retrieve your phone, typing with the screen facing away from him while he watches, waits. Then you pocket it again, grinning devilishly at him, "See you then, mi amor."

[comfortless]

Outside

but you’re mine (chapter 2 of ?)

🌱 PAIRING: König x fem!reader

🌾 CONTENT: 18+ MINORS DO NOT INTERACT. fae au. blanket warning for death, violence, very light horror elements <— comes with the territory; all of this being said it’s still cozy and sweet here!!, not even remotely canon compliant, slow burn, eventual smut. chapter specific warnings: ambivalence, pining, vague mentions of murder/abduction, very slightly suggestive.

🍃 NOTES: this is so much later coming out than i hoped it would be— apologies! wc: 7k.

<- prev ; next ->

Sleep addled eyes open to reveal the orange glow of a hunter’s moon, soil and clover beneath your nude flesh, the tickle of a dead fern rubbing against your bare calf as a gentle breeze pulls dying leaves from trees and leaves a wake of goose pimples on your flesh. Beneath the light of the moon, you gather your bearings well enough, the velvety dark creating illusions dancing at the corners of your vision. The shadow of the large antlers of an inquisitive buck pacing about, a woman swaying as a giggle escapes her parted lips, the sound of a pan flute playing some lively tune somewhere off in the distance.

As you sit up, taking in what you’ve believed you’ve just seen, it all quiets. The forest is as silent and still as always. Eyes wide and panicked heart palpitating wildly, you think to cover your most vulnerable parts with a cupped palm and the cross of your arm over the swift rise and fall of your chest.

How you managed to find yourself out in the dark, nude as any animal, is beyond your comprehension. Rationalizing seems futile, since you arrived not a thing has made any sort of sense to you, anyway. Inexplicable things happen, and frankly, it’s becoming quite the nuisance. Whoever has done this, dragged you from your bedroom to leave you in the darkened forest, can very well bet on the fact that they’ve made an enemy out of you. You stand to your feet, brushing dirt and fragments of leaves from the backs of your thighs and rear before concealing yourself once more.

What started as a series of harmless events seems to steadily build like a symphony as the days pass, and you only find comfort in knowing that it’s yet to reach any sort of crescendo. In your previous life, occupied by a mundane job and gray city skylines, if anything were to occur like this you would think your sanity had slipped. Convincing yourself you’re deluded wouldn’t change much here. You’ve tried already, only to find a man you’ve yet to properly meet curled against you in your own bed.

That night, only a week ago, felt like a distant memory now. He hadn’t been back. You had told Kate about it, of course, and in turn she spoke of her nightly visitor too. Someone who called himself John, who kept a cigar on his person when he anticipated speaking with her throughout the night. A loyal friend he was, she had told you, but you hardly had anything kind to say about the monster who had appeared from no where to steal your things, leave a dead bird in your bed, and invite himself beneath your blanket in turn. The only positive you could think of was that he had returned your lily in better health than it was when it had initially vanished. Kate hadn’t seemed particularly concerned, these things don’t usually harm humans in their own realm. It would give too much away, and they liked their secrets, their games.

Vulnerability looks sweet on you as you stumble about, careful to avoid the jagged edges of broken twigs and loose rock against your soles. You’re hopelessly lost, and god only knew how far from home you truly were. A part of you doesn’t want to play, to give whatever did this the satisfaction of seeing you break down as you spend your night desperate to return to shelter. It’s strange to feel such fear and anger at the same time, the sort of complex mixture of emotions that had you gritting your teeth as tears stung the corners of your eyes.

“Alright, come out, already! Take me back!,” You shout in a moment of weakness, realizing you’ve not progressed whatsoever. You could have sworn you’ve passed this same crooked oak twice already, it’s trunk bending so oddly it resembled someone kneeling in prayer. The air only seems to grow further still at your outburst, and your mind supplies a thought that rids your anger and only increases the fear. You shouldn’t have done that. How could someone so helpless be making demands to something capable of doing something like this on a whim, after all?

To your horror, your exclamation is answered by the metered sounds of footfalls in the darkness, heavy and deliberate. The worst of them only liked to come out at night, Kate had warned you over tea the morning after your visitor had made his appearance. Not all of them, but most. Some were perverse, foul-tongued and inhumanly horny. Some were volatile and quick to anger. Some were simply hungry, luring people out just like this to drag them back to whatever pocket of unreality they had stalked out of to bring so many just like you back to devour in the comfort of their lair.

The sounds draw nearer, coupled with a deep intake of breath, no doubt to take in your scent. It’s the gnashing of teeth that spurs you to run, clamoring through prickly nettles, shredding the soles of your feet on pine cone and loose stone. It gives chase, maneuvering with ease through the woodsy terrain, uprooting bushes and tearing through clover beds in its wake.

“Come…” The voice is a warbled mockery of human speech, fluctuating in a tone that seems it’s speaking from its belly rather than its throat. Even a well taught canine could speak better.

“Come...”

A shriek is ripped from your throat when you hear the creature no longer behind you, but in front of you. It chitters loudly, breathes deep once more. You brace yourself for the feeling of clustered, crooked fangs piercing into your exposed flesh, but… that pain never comes.

Your eyelids flutter when you hear an inhuman wail of pain, see the silhouette of two massive beasts scuffling about before you. Some morbid shadow puppet show, filled with grunts and screeches. There’s a distinct, wet ripping noise followed by the blackened spray of entrails hitting the bark of the trees that surround.

The thing that had been in pursuit of you sounds like a squealing pig as it falls into a puddle of its own blood, weakly thrashing about until a prolonged gasp leaves it. Silence would follow, if not for the sounds of your own ragged breathing.

The victor merely rolls his broad shoulders, tilts his head to look at you as you take a step back. You catch sight of a veil hanging over his head, and as your gaze travels lower you see the glimmer of blood on clawed fingertips. The creature from your room, the irony of the thing you had feared so now becoming your savior.

Perhaps seeing how easily he ripped one of his own kind apart should have terrified you. Yet you find yourself oddly consoled, eager to see something familiar in the dark.

“Thank you,” you huff out before you can catch yourself. No thanking them. There’s no taking it back, even as Kate’s voice rings out in your mind, you don’t even make the attempt to correct yourself. In spite of her warning, nothing happens. The man takes a slow step toward you, careful almost, as though the thought of making you flee was something he actually considered. It’s entirely opposite from how you know him to be, forced cuddles and gifts of rot. Still, you’ve been lucky to avoid some grisly end on this night, and the consequences of your gratitude quickly fall from your mind just as a tear slips down your cheek.

He seems lost in thought as the glow of blue irises lock onto you, reflective under starlight visible through the holes torn in his veil, before he removes the cloak covering his body and places it gently over your shoulders. His hands linger as he gently strokes your arms only to reluctantly draw away.

“Reizendes.” You don’t need to ask what the word means, the way his gaze softens as he stares down at you tells all. It’s the same look you saw Ghost give to Johnny’s grave. Albeit, a little less tame. His stare isn’t just appreciative, something carnal lurks beyond those eyes.

You don’t know why this man, this creature, is drawn to you. Why he looks at you the way that he does, why he came here to save a defenseless human woman. There’s so little reason, so little time given to be worthy of such a strange devotion. Simple curiosity seems an impossibility, Kate’s been here longer than you and she didn’t seem to know just what you referred to when you described him to her. There’s a pleading in your tear-filled eyes as your gaze meets his own. Why me?

The man takes another step, lowering himself just enough to look into your eyes as his widen. It’s the first time you’ve been face-to-face, somewhat. His hand raises, claws drawn inward toward his palm as he considers reaching for you, though he drops it back to his side the moment you dart your tongue out to nervously wet your lips.

“I need to get home.”

“Ja. I will come with you.” He says it as though it’s the most obvious thing to suggest, the only logical way to end a night like this.

“That wasn’t an invitation.”

His eyes seem to crease at the corners in amusement, you imagine a sharp-toothed grin beyond the fabric hiding himself away from you. “You have already slept with me.”

Your reaction seems to be exactly what the fae expects, your lips parted and face warmed from embarrassment as your eyes go wide in surprise. “What— no, don’t say it like that!” To your chagrin, he has the audacity to laugh, a gravely rumble from his solid chest. A pretty sound, a haunted church bell, something you can’t place.

“You can stay with me.”

“Why would I do that?” You’re glaring at him, but you get the sense he knows there’s no bite to your harsh look whatsoever.

“You owe me, ja?”

You’re caught in a strange stasis between comfort and disgust, really. Your room’s felt colder at night since a week ago, even with your window shut tight, curtains drawn, and every blanket you owned piled atop you, none of it could bring back the warmth you felt tucked against him. Yet, here, beneath a pumpkin moon, you still can’t put together what exactly he is and your mind is like a banshee, screaming out for you to leave. Even with his cloak pulled tight around you, fur lining soft on your flesh, you still shiver from the breeze. The running, the confusion and fear. The defiance is clear in your eyes, but the exhaustion is evident everywhere else, from the rapid rise and fall of your chest to the blood staining your bare feet.

The fae doesn’t hesitate as he plucks you from the leaf-ridden ground and tosses you over his shoulder as though you weigh little more than a twig. His hand curves over your lower back, keeping you in place. Though you make your displeasure known with a grumbled string of curses, you’re only met with the touch of his clawed thumb flittering along your side as if in consolation. His touch is something that brings you an odd calm. You’ve considered that since your impromptu meeting if he’s got some sort of magic laced into his fingertips, making you pliant, or perhaps you’re a bit more accepting of his strange courtship than you would ever allow yourself to believe.

“You’ll take me home in the morning,” you whisper, a sulky request.

He huffs, his shoulder seeming to deflate almost imperceptibly beneath your bare tummy. “Ja.”

His strides are great as he begins to walk, clearing through the forest with ease, and he’s careful, careful not to allow any outstretched branches to even make contact with your body. He clutches you tighter when the howling of coyotes could he heard in the distance, rubs at your side each time you shiver. How a monster could be so soft, so attentive is beyond you, but subconsciously you begin to relax just a little more with each passing moment.

He places you back on your feet when you reach a small clearing, a circle of trees surrounding and grass that feels pillowy beneath you. His hands move to your hips, pushing you back as a whine of protest leaves your lips before your back hits a soft nest of furs, cleared away of any debris, right below the lofty gaze of the moon.

“I didn’t like the bird,” you speak up as he sits at your side, you pull his cloak tighter around yourself. The fae cocks his head at you, moving a hand far too large to rest on your knee. You’re confused, so confused. You both want to shield yourself from this titan and open yourself up to him, in bloom. Submissive, but withdrawn.

“I will leave deer next time,” he answers, his blue eyes crinkling again as he grins and leans in to nudge his nose against the side of your neck. “Little doe. Like you.”

Your hand rises to press against the front of his veil, to push him back. He tenses for a moment, but resigns only to push himself closer, nosing at the side of your jaw as he grasps at your waist. It’s futile, really, trying to shove him away but you don’t give up as you twist and writhe against him. “No! Don’t leave dead things in my bed.”

He pulls you tightly toward him, just like the night before. An arm tucked under your neck and one hand splayed over your womb. Your battle lost, banner raised by way of fluttering lashes and parted lips.

“Women like fur and feathers, ja?” There’s a lilt to his voice, both amused and desperate as he practically vibrates against you. “I will give them to you always.”

You busy yourself trying to pry his hand away from your abdomen, making a show of nothing as you weakly push and shove until clawed fingers slot themselves between your own. The simple act of holding his hand snuffs out any bit of fight you had left in you, because damn it all, your heart flutters.

“I don’t want your gifts.”

“What is better then?,” he huffs against your neck, the warmth of his breath leaving goosebumps in its wake, and you could swear you felt the graze of teeth just beneath his veil. “To fuck?”

You shake your head furiously at his suggestion, pulling your hand from his and wriggling away from him. “Absolutely not,” you hiss, eyes narrowed as you glare at him only a few inches distance away.

He laughs, and to your horror— your excitement, crawls over you, his hands resting on either side of your head. It’s hard to see in the dark, even as your eyes adjust somewhat, but as the veil flutters with his movement, you don’t catch sight of any monstrous face beneath it, only a man. The glimpse is brief, hardly enough to paint a proper picture, before he softly knocks his forehead against yours and brushes against your face. It stifles you, how a man like this, one that leaves gifts of death and has the stature of a beast could be so very gentle.

“I have missed you,” he breathes against your cheek as he lowers himself atop you, and for the first time you’re realizing he’s just as nude as you are, the cloak the only article of clothing between the two of you. But despite the feel of his regrettably impressive manhood against your thigh, he makes no move to ravish you. In fact, he seems content just covering you like a weighted blanket.

You bite your lower lip, chewing at it as an unwanted surge of arousal pools between your thighs, pressed so tightly together it’s almost painful. Unwanted and quickly over looked. This isn’t simple lust, your heart aches.

“You are so soft,” he continues, lowering his head to hook his chin over your shoulder, a hand stuffed beneath your lower back. “Softer than fur. Softer than feathers.”

“What do you want?,” you ask him for the second time since your meeting. It’s not that you don’t have an idea. He makes it painfully clear with the way he showers you in affection and stares at you as if you’re the only star in the night sky.

Still, he humors you with a response, “Keine ahnung.” Follows it up with a shrug of his massive shoulders and a soft whisper, “I don’t know.”

Yet, he dips his head down, with his lips pressed against yours from just beyond the veil, kisses you softly through the fabric as his hand moves to cup your cheek. The urge to tear yourself away is still there, but quieted, lulled into some sort of comfort. You find yourself reciprocating a little dumbly, unsure of just how to properly kiss with the curtain of fabric in the way. The warmth spreading across your face is dizzying, almost. The sole thought of this feeling predestined beds down in the recesses of your brain.

You think to request that he remove what hides himself from you, yet he pulls away before you can murmur it into his mouth.

“Give me your name.” The words are a demand, indefinitely, and with his size it’s hard not to view them in a threatening light. There’s something else, too: desperation. You’ve already given enough, your gratitude, a debt to be repaid.

You’ve thumbed through some of Kate’s books, the ones separated from the stock of romance novels on her shelves. There wasn’t as much material as you had hoped about these creatures, though you supposed that finding truths about what was not even supposed to exist was bordering on the impossible, anyhow. However, one sentiment seemed to ring out as fact between each meager source— giving him your name is reducing yourself to a possession.

“Show me your face,” you counter, to which he shakes his head with a breathy laugh.

“Not on this night,” he whispers. You find him at your side instead, tugging you close as he hums that very same song that slipped you into sleep just like before.

“Then you won’t have my name tonight, either,” you murmur against his broad chest, languidly pulling yourself closer as you toss the side of the cloak over the both of you like a blanket.

— — —

You don’t want to think about it, the tingling on your lips as though it were truly your first kiss, the way your heart stutters in your chest. Speaking of it seemed somehow worse, as if it would breath life into the memory. The way it weighs on you makes it feel as if it’s already something tangible, a snarling black cat with its claws buried into the shoulder of your coat. It’s raining when you pull your car from the driveway, your keys having turned up digging into your side beneath the sheets after the night you willingly spent wrapped so tightly against him. All the gray somehow made the vibrant oranges and reds of the trees seem dismal, too. You entertain the thought that it’s truly the fact that you’re being haunted by something that rips the intestines of creatures out with his bare hands that’s really causing this wave of misery, but something tells you that it’s the attachment you have to such a monstrosity that truly does it.

He’s done something and you just know it, cinched your heart with some otherworldly fairy bullshit, made the weeks waiting for him to reappear seem utterly unbearable. You feel like some poor housewife, loitering around doing menial tasks while your husband is either gunned down in some foreign battlefield or fucking into some pretty lady a sea’s breadth away. It’s been a month and there’s no sign of him, even visiting with Ghost you no longer feel the stares of the unseen up the walking trail. Just nothing but a hollow in the pit of your gut that taunts you with the suggestion that he won’t be back.

You drown out your thoughts on the ride into town with music, skipping every love song that plays on shuffle with a diligent tap of your thumb on your phone screen. You’ve put no effort into looking nice, a t-shirt several sizes too large and pair of pajama pants beneath your coat. Your eyes look deadened when you meet your own gaze in the rear view mirror. A stupid thing about heartbreak, really, is that you don’t even need too much to feel it. A friendship spanning a mere week could hurt just as badly depending on the circumstances. Feeling some affection for something no other person could possibly get their hooks into only to have him vanish like this almost makes the feeling seem justified. Almost.

Kate and Ghost have been good company. You haven’t told them, but there’s an odd sympathy in Kate’s eyes when she looks at you, she speaks with her passerby friend outside rather than in at night now, and Ghost… Well, he appears more often as a devil dog, shows his teeth and keeps his distance from you. You still have talks, from time to time he tells you about Johnny. He tells you that he’s been lost for a time, but he waits there knowing he’ll come home like any good dog would. It’s just the way he looks at you now, like there’s something looming over you that even he can’t properly detect.

Your solitude helps on dreary days like this, when you can’t pry it out—him, clawing at the corners of your mind.

The town feels just as hushed as everywhere else in this place.

A small street houses old buildings nestled tightly against one another, the brick crumbling and some corners blackened as though some angry soul had tried to burn it all down. It’s the kind of place that feels haunted, you think as you park your car on the mostly empty street, catching sight of your reflection in a shattered window. The thin blue curtains of the building billow outward as if beckoning to you and you tear your eyes away immediately. You don’t want to see anything again. Not him, not another giggling and twirling through clusters of bramble and fern. None of it. It’s decided, a bitter force of your own will.

Yet, when you step foot into the old bakery your mind races with his gift, his promise of more and… would it really be so bad to get him one too? A proper offering, not one that harmed a single living thing. Something soft, like your shared kiss. You step to the counter, noting how coldly the older woman just beyond the pretty cabinet of glazed buns and slices of apple pie eyes you. These days, you don’t feel welcome anywhere, caught in a loop of misplaced pity and loneliness. It’s one or the other, sometimes they overlap.

You pay for a coffee and a sugar bun, tucking the brown paper bag holding it into the deep pocket of your coat before you head back outside and choose to have your coffee on a bench. The wind and rain have lessened, somewhat, falling into a mere drizzle and a featherlight breeze instead. The sound of the earth is much more pleasing to the ear than the void of silence you’ve felt lost in.

Approaching footsteps draw your attention as you take a sip from the paper cup. Your eyes meet a sincere face as he steps towards you, looking a bit uncertain. A cop, no doubt. Perhaps even a rookie. He doesn’t have the hardened face of the standard city police, just a polite smile across his lips, a sort of kind twinkle in his eyes.

“Mornin’,” the cop says to you as he stands to the side of the bench. It’s nice to see someone normal, not unearthly. You offer him a slight pull of your lips, a half-smile.

“Good morning.”

“Kyle Garrick,” he introduces himself, offering his hand out for you to shake. You accept, shaking it twice before drawing your hand back. You hesitate for a moment, but inevitably give the man your name in turn. He is just that, you realize, a human man. “Haven’t ya… well, you’ve seen the news, yeah? Shouldn’t be out on your own like this.” You shake your head slightly, the hand wrapped around your coffee cup falling into your lap. The officer goes on to explain that disappearances occur somewhat frequently around this place. He has the courtesy to spare you the bulk of detailing the state these folks come back in, but your mind can fill in the gaps well enough. Dragged into the dark, a lair filled with teeth. It almost happened to you.

He looks down at you a bit sympathetic for a moment, before he brings himself to continue on. “Not tryin’ to scare you. Just want to make sure you’re aware.”

A shaky sigh leaves you before you bring your cup back to your lips, a long sip lost in thought before you meet the officer’s brown eyes once more. “I’ll be careful,” you respond quietly. “Can’t say the thought of dealing with a serial killer sounds fun at all.”

That earns you a laugh from him. It sounds sweet. Maybe you’re not the most trusting, but Kyle seemed like a good man.

“Can’t say for certain if we’ve got a serial killer at all, but ah— I shouldn’t be tellin’ you all of this, yeah?”

“Sounds like you’re trying to scare me off.”

“No, not at all,” he responds with a shake of his head. “Don’t fret too much. Probably just the grizzlies, the wolves… you know how nature can be.”

“Cruel?”

“Not quite.” He pauses as his brow pinches in thought. “Just… hysterical.”

If only he knew. You don’t have the gall to tell him that what he’s in pursuit of likely wasn’t an animal or a person at all, but some other thing. Kate probably would have outright, you imagine, but you’re not Kate.

He tips his head at you, tugging his black cap down by the brim. “I’ll be seeing you, then.”

You nod him off in reply. The wind was starting to pick back up, the sugar bun in your pocket growing cooler with each passing breeze.

— — —

Kate’s been absent more often lately, a small pile of sticky notes left on the countertop all with hurriedly scrawled out ‘Be back soon!’s. When you arrive home, it doesn’t come as a surprise to you to see yet another stuck onto the refrigerator door with the same words written over the blue paper in black ink.

Visiting Ghost proved fruitless. The cemetery was completely empty. It was rare that he wasn’t stationed there, seated like a statue amongst the rows of headstones. Waiting around for him to return seemed irrational. Though he tolerated you well enough, Ghost was an enigma, and seeking out his company felt almost pathetic on your part.

Your hands clench at your sides as you walk the trail back home.

Your frustration is misplaced and you know it, but you’re exhausted with the same scenery. The same four walls surrounding you, the dreary little valley town, the cemetery. When things happen here they spark up your adrenaline in a way nothing else ever could, the high far better than any vice or pleasure you’ve ever accepted. The reverse is a pensive, horrid wait and coupled with this longing, it’s become unbearable.

Kate and Ghost had their secrets that you choose to leave well alone, and you… You realize you’ve got your secrets too as you place the sugar bun on your windowsill as a small offering for him.

‘I’ve missed you,’ he had said.

“I miss you,” you breathe out into the empty air, staring out the window as the rain begins to pick up again.

The sugar bun is gone the following morning and you find flowers in your bed. A bouquet of harebell and Queen Anne’s lace haphazardly tied with a short length of twine.

Late November drags itself in silently. The glass of your window is frosted most mornings, a hand print far too large left against it from the outside. Otherwise, everything is just quieted. Though you’ve rarely seen much wildlife around the house, it seems even more desolate now.

You help Kate set up a Christmas tree in the corner of the den, right by the hearth. The baubles and lights adorning it bring a warmth to you that seems uncanny this time of the year. You stray from your room more often, finding it nice to sit by the warmth of a roaring fire with one of her books in hand. (She tells you that John kindled the flames each time, yet you’ve still never seen them.)

Though you bide your time during the day, nights are your favorite. You leave gifts of honey and small stones, you wake to them gone and often in their place, blooming flowers tied with thin lengths of string. Flowers from someplace far away and less cold, someplace that doesn’t exist for you.

“Leave it alone.”

“Have you ever left it alone?”

Ghost huffs, ears flicked back and eyes narrowed. Try as he might, looking intimidating as a dog was just… impossible for him at least, especially now as he stands on his back legs, paws resting on your windowsill as he inspects your new gift, some strange cluster of unnaturally red pearls and flowers so golden they didn’t seem real. He sniffs at your gifts, black lips drawn back in a very canine expression of disdain. Perhaps you would still think him entirely cute, harmless, if you didn’t know what he had the capability to look like.

“I just want to know… where they’re coming from. You should know.”

“Why would I know what you’re invitin’ in?” Ghost counters as he places his big paws back onto the floor before padding over to your bed and jumping up to snuff at your sheets.

“I just thought I would ask.”

His diligent sniffing pauses for a moment, and you swear you see some recognition in his dark eyes. It’s distant, well guarded, but you feel certain he knows something that he just refuses to tell. The dog falls entirely silent, and you know you’re not getting another word out of him. Not tonight at least.

You had invited him in in hopes for answers, not for more questions, even explained in depth what had occurred that night in the woods. If your eyes were filled with tiny stars as you recounted it all, he hadn’t said a word to acknowledge it.

“Leave it alone.” Ghost repeats when he meets your eyes, dreamily thinking back to him again. Always, a constant gnawing at your mind. “It’ll want more.”

“My name?”

“More.”

“I don’t understand. You don’t want anything more from me, John doesn’t want more from Kate. Why would he be any different?” It sounds pitiful, even to yourself. You wouldn’t know more than Ghost, you’re just desperate. Desperate for the same thing as the fae you spent your nights missing.

Ghost barks out a laugh, surprising even to your own ears. He doesn’t need to say a thing. Black shulk, harbinger of death. A friend, for now, but he knows you’re reckless, knows your time will come eventually. It’s the reason he exists.

He gives you a nod when the recognition floods your face, and almost sympathetically places his massive head in your lap.

Tonight’s the first time he allows you to pet him, trailing your hand down the length of his spine as his wiry fur parts beneath your fingertips. He’s colder than you would expect, colder than the bite of winter outside. You ask him, again, to tell you about Johnny, and in turn, he tells you he’s on his way home.

The chill of Ghost’s stiff body is replaced by the warmth of the fire in the hearth as you lead him back to the door to let him roam into the night after little talk, little introspection.

But something is better than nothing.

The smell of coffee pulls you from sleep, Kate’s humming could be heard from the kitchen, a soft song, one you had heard her play on her record player some nights when sleep dodged you. It’s mornings like these that remind you of just how peaceful things could be here. She hadn’t even seemed to mind how you had fallen asleep on the couch, or Ghost’s dirty paw prints tracked across the hardwood floors. As you stretch and pad over to greet her, a mug of warm coffee is pressed into your hands and she smiles.

“I’ll clean the floor,” you murmur into your cup, a bit sheepish.

“Why? He’s got two hands, doesn’t he?”

You could never grow tired of her laugh, not hers. It’s sweet and so gentle, it almost reminds you of his. There’s love there, an affection born of two lonesome souls finding solace in one another through silly talks of monsters and shared cups of comfort. Kate really has become family to you after only a few short months.

“I suppose so. Want me to drag him back?”

She raises an eyebrow at that, flashes you an unknowing smile, to which you immediately shake your head.

“Oh, come on!”

“I’m teasing you,” she says, gently nudging your shoulder. “I know you’ve got someone else in mind.”

“How did—”

“Ghost.”

You place your mug on the countertop, looking utterly flabbergasted at the fact that he of all people would run telling your roommate about your infatuation with some suspicious stranger. Your face warms, a swell of embarrassment rising from your chest to your temples. It’s not petty, really, he might have your best interest at heart if he truly had one at all, but you weren’t quite ready to tell Kate about the strange gifts or the depth of your longing after a simple kiss. It was more than that, the danger you had been in, the way he had saved you. It felt like much more.

“I should have told you about it all,” you respond tinily.

Kate shrugs her shoulders a bit, idly tapping at her mug as she studies you. You’re stuck feeling like a child again, telling your guardian about some silly crush at school. Thankfully, she doesn’t pry. The look she gives you merely suggests that she wants you to be careful.

— — —

Careful isn’t what you would have called yourself when you pried open your window in the dead of night. You remembered the kneeling tree, the way it slumped over in its prayers to the earth and if you could just find it again, perhaps you could find him. The air outside was frigid, but you prepared as well as your impulsivity would allow; several layers of clothing and a blanket pulled tightly over your shoulders. It isn’t snowing, not so early into the winter here, yet the ledge of the window is still slippery with frozen condensation. You manage to keep yourself stable as you make your descent, grappling at the wall of the cottage to keep yourself upright.

You leave the window open, the light of your table lamp bathing the room in a warm glow, so inviting you nearly forget your motivations to crawl back in. Before the thought takes root, you turn on your heel and storm out into the dark forest.

Nights are a bit more lively, you find. A woman sings someplace far off, an eerie song telling the story of a carriage traveling a dangerous road, something long-forgotten and old. Hoofbeats thunder past you, accompanied by a breeze that chills you down to the bones, yet nothing could be seen, even with the glow of your phone’s flashlight lighting your way. When you do see something, it’s limbs are all crooked and long, mouth wide and filled with sharpened teeth. Its fur cascaded down its back, brown and covered in a light dusting of moss. It merely scuttles past you without a word or so much as a glance.

You know better than ever that this is dangerous, of course, but you can’t bring yourself to turn back. Some part of you believes that if danger comes, he’ll be there to fight it off, time and time again, just like the last.

The bent tree is still in its place when you arrive and try to retrace your steps from that night. Several meters to the left, a desperate sprint forward, and… just as anticipated, your light illuminates the darkened splatter against the bark of the trees where the fae had torn the other apart before your very eyes. There is no carcass, of course, the dried blood is just confirmation that you’re on the correct path. You turn to your right and set off in the direction that the man had carried you.

The glade is empty of pelts when your arrive. In place of the makeshift bed you had shared are only fallen leaves. You expected warmth, the familiar greeting of a figure too tall and broad to wrap you up in his arms, careful with his claws. Careful with you.

You’ve been holding back tears since he disappeared, little exchanges of gifts doing nothing to protect your heart from the weight of what you feel. When you begin your walk home, the dam breaks. Your face is cold from the wetness, the chill of each gust of wind. Heartbroken after a month, but shattered in the winter, unfortunate and weary, perhaps it was best to follow Ghost’s advice and leave it alone. Curious whispers fill the night air, another song and giggles and chimes start up in the distance. In better spirits, maybe you would have followed the sounds of the gathering, lost yourself in silver tongues and mischief.

Your window comes into view after some time, you’ve lost track of how long you’ve been out in the cold, but you’re excited to return to your bed, to creature comforts. You reach your hands up to the windowsill, fingers curling over the inward slab of wood as you try to pull yourself back in. Your leg kicks at the side of the house for purchase, only to find none. With a small yelp, you fall onto your rear.

Sneaking out was for children with curfews, not an adult— why hadn’t you just used the door? You’re beating yourself up for your own silly decisions, trying to climb up again when a pair of strong hands reach behind you to tug you back against a firm chest. Your breath catches, panic settling in your guts until your side is stroked with a touch so tender a new wave of tears prick at the corners of your eyes.

“Little one…,” a voice coos behind you, a veil pressed against the back of your head as he lowers himself down to your height, his arms still curled around you protectively.

“Where have you been? I… I missed you, and you didn’t…” You trail off, feeling so small, so caught up in your own feelings. The sentence is left unfinished as you twist around in his grip to wrap your arms around his middle, face buried into his chest.

“You told me not to come to your room.” He sounds confused, hurt. He tilts your head up to catch your eyes and his soften in time with just a look.

You hadn’t expected him to take the comment about an invitation so literally. His consideration almost stings. The words were said with conviction at the time, assured that you hadn’t wanted a monster in your bed, but couldn’t he see how that had changed? Hear how your heart fluttered now? He’s different, so unlike you in a way that confuses and enraptures you, some long-forgotten god out of touch with human conventions.

“I liked your gifts this time.”

His grip around you tightens momentarily, as though trying to embrace you further, pull you deeper into his chest to keep you locked tight in his heart entirely.

“I loved yours, little one.”

“Tell me who you are and you can come in whenever you like,” you huff out in promise, a cloud of your own breath puffing between you and the broad chest you had grown to admire so.

He curls a hand at the nape of your neck, cradling you against him as he lowers his head to kiss you through the veil once more. It’s warm, even as your blanket slips from your shoulders and falls to the ground. The fur of his cloak drapes around you in a better replacement as you return his affections. The kiss is just as chaste as the last, but the sentiment in it far out measures the contact.

He’s still yours. He never truly left.

“My name is König.” He tells you as he pulls away to carefully lift you from the ground and raise you up to the windowsill with so little effort it makes your knees weak. You pull yourself in and turn to look back at him. His gaze is adoring, yours must be too. You feel the way your eyelids slacken, the smile pulling at your lips.

You accept your blanket from him as he offers it and slot your fingers between his once the cover is cast aside. His hand covers yours almost entirely as it curls over yours. The claws look even more wicked in the low light of your room, but you don’t fear him. Not even a little. This time is so much different. It’s scarier to imagine spending another night without him wrapped around you.

It’s not the flowers, the furs, or the feathers that you want. It’s shallow kisses and blackened claws and the feeling of having a titan at your beck and call. It’s the way your heart flutters and your stomach twists with the thrill of falling in love that you long for.

“Come in, König.”

[just-jordie-things]

[part eight] to build a home - gojo satoru

word count: 5k warnings: !!manga spoilers!! swearing, jjk-verse style fighting series summary: when (y/n) (y/l/n) catches wind that the notorious sorcerer killer, toji fushiguro, has children, she makes it her personal mission to find them. the catch being she couldn't tell a soul about them- the risk of the zen'in clan learning about them was too great. keeping the secret isn't the hard part, it's lying to her friends, shoko ieiri, geto suguru, and of course gojo satoru, that she struggles with. especially when satoru has suddenly become so keen on keeping an eye on her lately.

series masterlist

[part eight] : "Bury A Friend" ___

(y/n) knew she wasn’t the ideal choice of mentor to Megumi.  But she was the only choice.  So she did everything she could to teach him everything she knew.  Megumi wasn’t always fond of spending his after school time learning, especially the more boring lessons (y/n) provided like history, or the specifics of the prominent families.

“This is important, Megumi” (y/n) said to the boy that had thrown his head down against the table.

“I’m tired of studying,” He groaned.  “I want to learn more about cursed techniques!” 

“And you will,” (y/n) told him.  “But I need you to understand this” 

“Why?” The boy whined, turning his head so his cheek rested on the kitchen table, staring at her.  “Who cares about a bunch of old people?” 

(y/n) laughed at him, reminded of Satoru and his distaste for the elders as well.

“These old people control everything in the jujutsu world,” (y/n) said.  “They’re in charge of all the rules, and they have the money to enforce them.  They’re very powerful, Megumi, and they don’t take kindly to those who defect” 

“Defect?” He asks, confused.

“It’s what they call sorcerers who… don’t play by the rules” She says carefully.

“Bad guys?” Megumi asks.  (y/n) nods.

“That’s one way to think of it” She sighs.

Her hands are wringing together, and she can barely look at him.  The young boy frowns.

“What’s wrong?” He asks, lifting his head.

“Nothing, honey, I just want you to pay attention” 

“You’re bad at lying,” Megumi deadpans.  “Are you defecting?” 

The question makes her eyes sharpen, and she stares at his inquisitive face.  She doesn’t want to tell him the truth.  She knows he won’t accept another lie.

“There’s a lot of things that won’t make sense right now,” She explains to him.  “I’m not trying to lie to you.  I’m just trying to keep things easy-” 

“Well then make it make sense,” Megumi cuts her off, shrugging his shoulders.

(y/n) gives him a look, shaking her head.

“Is it because of me?” He asks.  “Are you going to be in trouble because of me?” 

“Of course not,” She lies with ease.

Placing a hand on his shoulder, she leans closer, staring at him with complete sincerity in her eyes.

“Of course not” She repeats.

Megumi nods, a little bit.  He believed her.

It was the first time she’d told a decent lie.  And it was probably the most important one.

“Okay,” He sighs.  “Then what’s so tricky to understand?” 

(y/n) sighs, and she wishes she had spent more time practicing her cursed technique so that she could teleport away.  He was too young to be told the complete truth.  Even if he did understand it all, it was a harsh reality to bring a seven year old to

“Let’s just say your Dad had a knack for making things complicated, okay?” (y/n) says.

Megumi snorts.

“Yeah.  He sucks” 

(y/n) nods, smiling endearingly back at him.

“I’m not trying to lie to you,” She tells him honestly.  “But there’s a lot you still need to learn, and it can be complicated.  Is it okay if for now, we just take this all step by step?” 

The child nods in agreement,

“Yeah, that’s okay” He says.

“Okay.  So let’s go back to the big families” (y/n) says, drawing a chart on a scrap piece of paper of the big three.

The rest of their little study session goes well.  Megumi is a good learner, who picks things up quickly once he’s shown them.  (y/n’s) grateful he’s such a smart student, because she knows she’s a terrible teacher.

Once he’s got an understanding of the important families in jujutsu society, she decides to call it a day, with the promise of practicing with his shikigami over the weekend.  Megumi seems excited enough by that, before he runs off to tell Tsumiki about everything he’d just learned.

(y/n) stayed at the kitchen table, and once he was out of sight, she allowed herself to hold her head in her hands.  Her eyes fell shut, and she let out a shaky breath.

The idea of telling him the truth one day makes her gut twist into sharp knots.  Had there been anything in her stomach, she certainly would have rushed to the kitchen sink, keeled over it, and emptied it out.

Was this a mistake? She asked herself.  If I hadn’t gotten involved, could Megumi had happily gone with the Zen’in Clan? Now that I’ve harbored him and Tsumiki, have I made their lives worse? 

Her fingers dragged against her skin as she lifted her head.  Just as she opened her eyes, she noticed her phone was silently ringing on the table, the screen lit up with a photo of Satoru.  

She answers it, bringing her phone to her ear.

“What’s up?” She asks.

“(y/n)...” Satoru’s voice is serious.  

She sits up a little straighter in her chair.

“Satoru, what is it?” She asks.  It wasn’t like him to hesitate.

“How quickly can you come to the school?” He asks her.

“What happened?” (y/n) ignores his question.  “Is something wrong? Is someone hurt?” 

“I can come get you.  Where are you-?” 

“Satoru,” (y/n) cuts him off, standing from her seat suddenly, causing the chair to knock over and clatter to the ground.  “What happened? What’s going on?”

“(y/n), I don’t want to tell you on the phone.  Just- please, I can come and get you right now-” 

“Just tell me!” She’s yelling now, not thinking twice about raising the attention of the others in the house.

Unbeknownst to her, Megumi and Tsumiki had rushed into the kitchen as soon as she’d knocked over the chair.  They stood in the doorway, watching her with worry.

“It’s Yu,” Satoru sighs.  “He went on a mission with Nanami, he’s-” 

“I’m coming” She says firmly, before ending the call.

She turns around, about to go straight to Megumi and Tsumiki to tell them she had to go, only to find them right in front of her.  She startles, not having heard them come into the room.

“Hey, guys,” She sighs, crouching before them.  “Something happened, I have to go a little early” 

“Is everything okay?” Tsumiki asks worriedly.  (y/n) forces a smile on her face.

“Everything will be fine,” She tells her.  “But I need to go” 

“You’ll be back on Saturday?” Megumi asks, his voice small.

“Of course,” (y/n) assures him.  “I can’t wait to see your Divine Dogs, Megumi” She adds, bringing a small smile to the boy’s face, even though he knew she was hiding something, and things weren’t alright as she was trying to make them seem.

“Be safe,” She tells them as she stands.  “I’ll be back on Saturday” 

They both bid their goodbyes as (y/n) goes out the door as hastily as she can without running.  She mutters the incantation to lower a curtain hurriedly, and as soon as she seals the house under her protection, she brings her middle and forefinger to her forehead.

___

(y/n) appears suddenly at the school, stumbling on her feet a bit from the messy and sudden teleportation.  Her mind had been anything but clear when she’d summoned her cursed energy to bring herself here.  However this was the fastest way she could get here.

Her mind grows foggier, and eyelids heavier as she takes a few steps forward, dragging herself to the front doors.  Sleep threatens to overcome her, but she pushes forward anyways.

Teleporting like this was a risky choice, knowing she had yet to keep herself conscious after doing so.  But she had no other choice, and she was here now.  All that mattered was finding-

“Satoru” 

As (y/n) opens the door, she finds her friends, along with Nanami and Yaga right at the corridor.  She stands in the open doorway, or rather, she’s leaning on it, desperate to keep her body upright.

Shoko, Satoru, and Suguru rush right over to her, assuming the worst.

“Are you hurt?” Shoko asks, scanning her for injuries.

“Where were you?” Suguru asks.

She doesn’t answer either of them, she can’t focus on calming their worries when she knows something terrible has happened.

“Satoru,” She says to the man who hadn’t torn his gaze away from hers as soon as she’d arrived.  “What- what happened? What happened to Yu?” 

The room is silent.  Shoko and Suguru step back a bit, realizing she wasn’t in any danger, she was just wiped and starting to lose consciousness as a result of prematurely using her cursed technique.

The white haired sorcerer frowns, and reaches out to try to help her stand better.  She shuffles back against the door, shaking her head.

“Tell me,” She mumbles, her throat tightening, and burning.  “Tell me what- what happened to Yu?” 

“I’m sorry, (y/n/n)” He says softly.

There’s tears pooling in her eyes as she stares back at him.  She starts to shake her head in disbelief, but no words come out.

“Yu is dead” Another voice answers her question.

She looks past Satoru’s shoulder, to where Nanami is hanging his head, eyes focused on the floor.

(y/n’s) breath catches in her throat, choking her.  She sputters out a few shaky pants, before her knees give out and she’s crashing towards the ground.

Satoru’s faster than her fall, an arm wrapping around her shoulders to keep her steady on her knees in front of him.  Her head lands on his shoulder, tears seeping into his shirt as she begins to cry.

Shoko and Suguru look at each other, while the Six Eyes user silently tries to comfort her, his hand rubbing circles over her back in smooth motions.

“I don’t- I don’t-” (y/n) stammers over her words, despair, confusion, and exhaustion clouding her ability to form a proper sentence.  “I don’t understand- how- why-” 

Satoru shushes her quietly, knowing any minute now she was going to close her eyes and succumb to the fatigue.  He dropped his head so he could speak quietly to her.

“I’ll explain everything” He murmurs into her temple.

Her body shakes against his.  He has to close his own eyes to keep himself from tearing up just from seeing her in so much distress.

“Satoru- don’t-” (y/n) mumbles, fists weakly grabbing at the front of his uniform.

“I won’t go,” He assures her.  

Her body starts to feel a little heavier in his arms.

“I’ll be right here when you wake up, I’ll tell you everything” 

Her eyelids feel too heavy to bear, and when their weight is too much, she finally lets them close.  Shortly after, her breathing evens, and her body is slumped in Satoru’s arms.

“She teleported here,” Yaga says as Satoru gets a better hold on her, lifting her up with ease.  “That was the longest I’ve ever seen her stay awake after teleporting without a hex” 

“She was anxious” Satoru replies, about to walk away.

“When she wakes, tell her when she’s ready I’d like to speak to her” His teacher says, before he could walk too far away.

Satoru turns on his heel, his eyes fixed in a glare.

“She was only able to keep herself awake so long because she was grieving,” He said with a harsh tone of voice.  “She just lost someone she cares about.  And when she wakes up, she’s going to go through it all again,” 

Nanami watched Satoru intently as he spoke sharply towards Yaga.

“Don’t you dare try to get her to use that to perfect some stupid cursed technique,” He continues.  “Not a word of this to the elders” He says, head jerking around the room to make sure everyone present understood he was meant to be taken with absolute seriousness.

Everyone slowly nodded their heads.

“Understood” Yaga sighed.

“Good,” Satoru muttered.  “Now I’m taking her to rest.  Tell everyone not to bother her, or I’ll rip their head off” 

He finally leaves, teleporting himself to (y/n’s) room.  It’s dark, but Satoru leaves it that way as he carefully tucks the dozed off girl into her bed.  She doesn’t squirm or make a single noise as he covers her with the blanket.

Once he deems her comfortable enough, he wanders over to her desk, grabbing the chair from it and quietly placing it beside her bed.

He rests his head in his hands as he sits.

Why wouldn’t she just let me come to her?

Selfishly, he doesn’t want her to wake up anytime soon.  He doesn’t want to face her and relay to her how Yu’s mission had gone wrong.  He doesn’t want to be the one to bring her such bad news, to break her heart.

Yet at the same time, a part of him does want to be the one to tell her, so that he can be there for her if and when she needs him.  To dry her tears and tell her good, sweet things to comfort her.

It’s all a mess, he thinks, bringing his gaze up to the sleeping girl before him. ___

[TWO YEARS AGO]

(y/n) leaned further out the window of the classroom she was currently hiding in, making sure that all of the smoke she blew out her lungs went out the window.  Sneaking a cigarette on her first day of being at Jujutsu High was a bit reckless, sure, but her nerves needed to be relaxed and so far this was the first method that worked.

“That’s a bit stupid, isn’t it?”

She jolted at the sudden voice behind her, the cigarette in her fingers falling from her shock.  It fell straight out the window, and onto the ground.  Her jaw dropped as she watched a group of jogging upperclassmen run right over the thing.

Well, at least it was stumped out and she didn’t have to worry about starting a fire on her first day.

Annoyed, she spun around to see the perpetrator that had so rudely interrupted her.

It was a boy, standing in the doorway of the classroom.  He had lightning bright hair and an even brighter grin.  The oddest part wasn’t even the sunglasses he chose to wear inside, but how it seemed that even when she scowled at him, that grin remained.

“Having a cigarette on your first day here?” He chuckled.  “Do you know what they would’ve done to you if you’d been caught?” 

“Kicked me out?” (y/n) scoffed.  “Don’t you think I already knew that consequence when I lit it?” 

The boy laughed.  It was bubbly, and as annoyed as she was with him, she found herself fighting the urge to laugh as well.

“You’re right.  I owe you one.  Luckily I’m friends with the biggest nic addict here, so you’re lucky” 

“Lucky?” (y/n) repeated in a monotone voice.

“Sure are,” He replied.  “You’re the new first year right?” 

(y/n’s) brows drew together, disturbed that this overbearing boy already seemed to know who she was, and she had no idea who he was.

“Yes…” She answered slowly.  “I’m (y/n)” 

“Gojo Satoru” He introduced himself, walking into the classroom with his hand outstretched.

With a huff, (y/n) reaches her hand out to meet his, only to find something stopping her just an inch before touching him.

She retracts her hand instantly, and suddenly his name clicks in her mind.  He seems amused that she’d reacted to his Infinity in such a way.

“Shit,” She mumbled, her wide eyes staring up at him.  “So you’re the Six Eyes everyone’s been talking so much about” 

“Oh yeah?” He raises a brow, tucking his hands into his pockets.  “They sayin’ good things?” He asks.

“They’re saying you’re the most powerful sorcerer,” (y/n) replies.  “So I suppose it depends on who you ask,” She answers.  “Whether or not that’s a good thing” 

Satoru scoffs, his grin faltering for a brief second.  He had not expected such a cryptic answer.  Usually people flocked to him, always wanting something from him.  Clearly he’d gotten off on the wrong foot with this one.

“Normally being the best at something is a pretty good thing” He said smoothly.  (y/n) raised a shoulder and cocked her head to the side.

“Maybe,” She mused.  “But I can do something you can’t” 

He leans forward with a smirk, entering her personal space and peering down at her through his shades.

“And what’s that, sweetheart?” He asks slyly, clearly expecting some sort of sexy response.

(y/n) doesn’t give him the reaction he was looking for, instead keeping her face blank as she responds.

“Fly under the radar,” She answers.

His brows pinch together, chuckling to himself.  As if he’d ever want to do that.  What a stupid thing to brag about.

(y/n) steps around him, heading out of the classroom.  

“Don’t forget you owe me a cigarette, oh powerful Gojo” She calls over her shoulder as she leaves.

[PRESENT DAY]

Back when he’d first met (y/n), Satoru remembers that more than anything, she confused him.  She was probably the first person in his life to ever treat him like he wasn’t the most important person in the world.  She had weird opinions and a weirder personality.

And he was enamored with her.

It had taken him some time, maybe more than most, to figure out what she’d meant that first day they met.  He spent nights awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering why he’d want to fly under the radar, as she’d said.  But as he found his friends, Suguru, Shoko, and found himself in the meantime, he finally figured it out.

By that point, she’d already written him off.  Perhaps she didn’t hate him, but she certainly didn’t want to spend time with him if she didn’t have to.  Lucky for him, their mutual friends brought them together more often than she would have liked, so she had to get to know him anyways.

Years of training together, class together, hanging out with their friends, going on assignments- little moments and inches of steps brought them closer together.  Eventually he saw her give in a little, and (y/n) let him care about her, even if she wouldn’t reciprocate.

She stopped ignoring his texts, started laughing at his dumb jokes, and sometimes, Satoru swore that he would catch her smiling at him.  She openly enjoyed going on assignments with him, even if it was just from her competitive nature.  When Yaga would hand them the same mission, she’d smile at him, followed by her typical attitude.  But there’d be a bounce in her step.

He had been there the first time she’d tried to teleport without a hex.  She had been trying to save someone.  A kid.

The poor thing had been standing before a Grade One curse, trembling, frozen in fear.  Satoru had seen him first, but (y/n) was acting before he could.  She was too far to make it on foot, but without a second thought she did something she didn’t even know she was capable of.  It was as if human instinct and cursed energy merged in that moment, her drive to save that child overpowering her body and teleporting her there in the same instant she’d seen him.

In a second (y/n) was no longer by Satoru’s side, and was a few hundred feet away.  Her arms wrapped around his small body, and she stood there just long enough to scream for Suguru to exorcize the curse.  He came just in time, and once more, (y/n) disappeared from where she stood.

Kneeling at Satoru’s side, she kept her hands securely on the young boy’s shoulders.  He remembered the rushed, worried way she’d spoken to him.  

“Are you hurt? Are you alright? Do you know where your parents are?”

Satoru remembered when the boy finally ran off to where his parents were just a block away, (y/n’s) hands were shaking.  Just as he was about to congratulate her and help her to her feet, her body gave out.  Her eyes were shut and she was passed out before she’d even hit the ground.

That was a year ago.

Now, Satoru thinks that his stance with (y/n) is even messier than before.

He’d thought that he’d made some progress, redeemed himself a bit in her eyes.  At least he’d hoped he had.  She spent more time with him than she had before, and it wasn’t completely against her will.  Satoru had been overjoyed when she’d agreed to join him for breakfast.  He’d spent the whole day with her after that, and not for a second was he able to stop looking at her.  She’d only grown more beautiful, more confident and sure of herself, and as they matured bit by bit together, Satoru was certain he was only going to fall harder for her.

He’d known her for years now, and every day she challenged him in some new and exciting way.  He used to enjoy that about her.

Now, it brought him an immense amount of stress.

Not knowing where she was going when she snuck into town, not knowing what she was up to when she snuck back in late into the night, it had him worried sick.  He knew she was capable of protecting herself, she was a strong fighter, and loved her cursed tools almost as much as her friends.

But no matter how slowly the curiosity killed him, he knew he had to drop the subject.

After a lengthy discussion with Shoko, where she told him in all seriousness that she was certain (y/n) was meeting up with a lover, someone she cared about deeply and wanted a future with, he had buried every last feeling he’d had for her.

He’d decided he had to.  If he didn’t want his heart broken, he’d have to move on from her.

That was easier said than done. ___

(y/n’s) eyelashes fluttered for a brief moment, followed by a small groan.  It took a few minutes of stretching her tired limbs before she finally opened her eyes, and to her surprise, Gojo Satoru was sitting right there.

“You’re awake” He said softly.

(y/n) sat up and looked around herself, just to be sure she hadn’t woken up in the infirmary.  Just as she thought, she was in her own bed, her own room.

And then it all came flooding back to her.

“Yu…” She mumbled, her voice cracked over his name.  “He’s really gone?” 

Silently, Satoru nodded his head.

(y/n) leaned back against her headboard, her eyes on her lap as she processed this information rather slowly.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Satoru said quietly, reaching his hand out to her.  “I know you were close” 

To his surprise, she took his hand when he held it out, her thumb pressed to his palm and her fingers wrapping around his securely.

“He just wanted to be nice and walk me home,” She said softly.  “He was just trying to be a good person and I- I pushed him away” 

Tears pooled at the corners of her eyes as she remembered the last time she’d really spoken to him.  She’d seen him in passing since that day in Tokyo, but she’d been in such a rush all the time that she’d barely said more than a hello to him.

And now he was gone.

A tear slipped down her cheek.

“Don’t blame yourself for anything,” Satoru said, his thumb stroking over the back of her hand gently.  “What happened was an accident, no one could have known” 

She looks up at him, her tears falling freely now.

“What happened?” She whispered out.

Satoru sighed, pushing his sunglasses to the top of his head.

“Him and Nanami went on an assignment.  It was supposed to be a Grade One… but…” 

“Special Grade…” (y/n) mumbled, eyes falling away from his, glazed over as she thought it over.

Her hand that wasn’t in his tangled in her sheets, fisting them tightly until her knuckles turned white.

“Did they exorcize it?” She asks, her voice dropping an octave.

Satoru shakes his head.

“Nanami brought Yu back as soon as it happened.  They sent Suguru first thing this morning” 

“It’s morning?” 

“Almost seven” Satoru nods.

“It’s Friday” (y/n) confirmed, and he nodded again.

She nods back at him, the gears in her head turning.

She didn’t have to be at the Fushiguro house until tomorrow.

“Have you heard from Suguru since he left?” She asked.

When her eyes meet his again, there’s something there that he’d never seen before.  Something cold, and calculating.

“Don’t even think about it” He told her before she could even suggest what she was thinking.

(y/n) releases his hand, shuffling off the bed, but as soon as she stands, he grabs her by the shoulders to stop her.

“I said don’t even think about it-” 

“I’m going” She cuts him off, staring him directly in the eyes so he could see that there was nothing that could stop her.

“(y/n), Suguru will take care of it, you know that-” 

“It has nothing to do with that,” She snaps back at him.  “Yu was my friend.  I cared about him- and- and now he’s gone and he’s not coming back and I can’t just sit here and-” 

She’s getting choked up over her tears, and she raises her hands to violently wipe them from her eyes.

“I can’t just sit here and cry about it!” She wails.

She falters then.  The tears spilling over her cheeks won’t stop flowing no matter how much she wipes them away, she’s sobbing now, her whole body trembling.

Before she can fight him, Satoru pulls her into his chest.  She doesn’t put up a fight.  She lets him hold her and she doesn’t hold back a single sob that wracks her body.  He carefully sits them down on the edge of her bed, and she throws her arms around his neck as she continues to break down.

They sit together for quite some time.  (y/n) doesn’t leave his arms.  Satoru doesn’t let her go.

It’s a long day spent in the darkness of her room.  He brings her food and a new box of tissues every few hours, but for the most part, sits with her while she lays in bed.  Sometimes he holds her hand, sometimes he rubs her back.  She falls asleep here and there, but never longer than half an hour.

When it’s well into the middle of the night, she calls to him.

He’s sitting in bed with his back to her headboard while she’d been laying on her side, faced away from him.  But suddenly she turned over.

“Satoru?”

Her voice is strained, tired.  Her throat was surely sore from her day of grief.

He looks away from the book he was reading, something he’d stolen off her shelf.  Her eyes are sad, but no longer filled with tears, as she looks at him.  He hums softly in response to her, his hand sliding down the mattress to find hers.

When her fingers weakly brush into his, she tangles them together, slotting her own through the spaces between his.  His hand is warm, and comforting.

He’s warm and comforting.

“You’ll stay?” She murmurs, briefly looking from his eyes to his hand in hers, and then back up to his eyes.  “Through the night?” 

Satoru sets the book down in his lap, and now that it’s in her line of sight, she can see that he’s reading her copy of Charlotte’s Web.  The smallest of smiles tugs on the edge of her lips.  She had pulled it out of a box of old storage from her childhood just a week ago, having a newfound soft spot for the story after reading it cover to cover for the Fushiguro kids.

“Of course, sweetheart,” He tells her, and when she looks back up at him, she can see that he means it with every ounce of sincerity.

He picks the book up again, only to slide it onto her bedside table.  She watches as he then throws back the covers, sliding his long legs under them, and then the rest of his body.

He’s eye to eye with her as his head hits the pillow, and she can’t bring herself not to stare at him.

They’re incredibly close, since her bed wasn’t exactly made for two people, but the nerves that she would normally feel having him so close to her that she could feel his soft breath on her lips is nowhere to be found.

In fact she smiles.  It’s small, and her lips tremble in the slightest, but it’s a smile for him nonetheless.

Satoru squeezes her hand.

“I’ll stay as long as you’d like me to,” He tells her, his voice a hushed whisper.  “I’ll stay until you force me to go” 

She squeezes his hand back.

“Can I request one more thing?” She murmurs.  He nods.  “Would you read to me?” 

He turns to reach for the book right away, double checking what it was he’d been mindlessly reading just moments ago.

“Charlotte’s Web?” 

She nods.

“It’s grown to be a favorite of mine” She tells him.

“Then of course I will” 

He rolls onto his back, and he lets go of her hand so that he can open the book, flipping back to the first page.  Once he’s found a comfortable angle, he slides an arm around her shoulders, tucking her in close to him, to keep her comfortable, before he begins to read.

Satoru doesn’t even make it through the first chapter before (y/n’s) dozed off, her head resting on his shoulder, the rest of her body completely curled into his.

He finds himself getting tired shortly after as well.  When he finally gives into the drowsy feeling, he places the book on her bedside table, and lays his sunglasses on top of it.

He forgets all about how he was supposed to be burying his feelings, he forgets about the stranger she’s been going out with, and all that’s on his mind as he falls asleep beside her is the hope that tomorrow will be a fresh start for her.  He hopes that she’s able to work through her grief, and begin the journey to move past it tomorrow.  He hopes that she’ll let him help her.

Satoru falls asleep listening to the soft, steady buzzing of her cursed energy beside him.  It pulls him away like a lullaby.

___

xoxo - jordie

[mamawardentotherescue]

Okay, so I've slept and gathered my thoughts more and I'm going to explain why I don't like da:v (because some of you have assumed a lot about me and my relationship with the series)

First off, I have been in love with dragon age since I was 13/14 and have been obsessed with it for 12 years. It was my muse for writing and creating art; I read every book I could get my hands on and lived on the wiki and forums for everything else; when I got my first pay check I bought the lore books (which was hard to find in Australia). When I was depressed or so lonely my heart felt like it would burst, I would come back to the companions I would call friends. This game saved me from killing myself more times than I could count.

I have loved this game series for all it's writing and lore - the good, the bad, and the ugly. So, for me to be upset and disappointed in this game is not to be taken lightly.

Straight up, da:v felt wrong (I'm not going to mention why I don't like the inquisitor creator because I feel like at this point you should know why). They launch you straight into the middle of a plan your character has apparently known all along, but it left me feeling confused. I had so many questions! It's been 8 years since Trespasser, 10 years since the beginning of Inquisition and 20 for Origins; a lot has changed and I want to know what's happened in thedas since I've been away because I've invested a lot of time with that world, regardless of whether or not you respect my input on the world building...but the writing doesn't care about that.

I had a constant thought of "they're trying to recreate Mass Effect but have forgotten why people play Dragon Age, and they're not even respecting ME while they do it" and the more hours I put in to this game the more obvious this became.

"But MamaWarden, it looks so pretty and the combat is fun!" I hear you say, and yes, I do agree. The game was built really well in comparison to past games, but good hair isn't a good enough distraction from shit writing and a lack of respect for the series.

Before finishing the game I would often say that the best part about the game was the companions. They felt familiar and I enjoyed what I had with them but wished I had more. I was prepared to stick with that until they made me choose between Harding or Davrin (and Assan)...

Let me explain very simply why I fucking hated this:

1. It was another "look at us trying to be Mass Effect" moment but done shittily

2. Feels sus to say the least to pin Harding, the first female dwarf we've been allowed to romance and have a pre-existing relationship with (as the player), against Davrin, the first black elf we've encountered that wasn't just an OC of the player

3. Doesn't matter if you complete their companion quests, gain max approval and send what I would argue the "right" one to survive to a mission, only to have that person die because they were the other group's leader

As soon as it happened and the companion (I felt like I was forced to choose because I was romancing the other) was killed, I felt like nothing mattered. Again, it felt like someone tried to recreate the OG ME trilogy into one game but completely misunderstood what made those games ironically heart wrenching. I wasn't given a choice where I knowingly sacrificed a companion the way they did with Ashley and Kaiden, I was instead given a "who do you think will be best for the job?"

You might think it's a taste or preference thing, but it's not. It's a "dragon age has followed a particular pattern that's different to mass effect but now they've subverted expectations" type of thing. I might be autistic, but doesn't that bother you?

I hated that unless you were romancing Solas, your inquisitor really doesn't matter much to the story. I hated that your Lavellan felt like she was reduced to an additional underling to Solas instead of being his equal. I hated that characters like Mae, Dorian, Isabela and the Inquisitor had NOTHING to say about Varric, regardless of whether everyone knew the truth about him or not. I hated that bioware spewed "no unnecessary cameos" but barely used the old companions for anything useful outside of Varric and Solas pushing the story. I hated that shit is blowing up in the south of thedas but it feels like no one cares except for me, the player who has spent literal years invested into Ferelden and neighbouring countries.

Nothing felt like it mattered and that's the worst part of all of this. That might the intended meta commentary but fucking save it for a different game. This series has always been about hope in times of darkness, but this game feels like it cheapened that ideal and abused it so they can give this half-baked "morally grey" shit of a story and expect us to eat it

[cissyenthusiast010155]

heyyy!! im back with another idea🤭

with this can you use prompt numbers 31 & 44 with narcissa x reader? like maybe cissy is the readers teacher but can you make it really smutty? like cissy is the dom obviously but you can make this anyway you like🤭🤭

Togetherness Through Hard Times ~Dom!Teacher!Narcissa Malfoy xFem Sub!Student!Reader ~Holiday Bingo

Summary— Narcissa and Reader comfort each other through a xmas alone. Anon Response— Hi hi @mxmmyviolet !! Of course I can write this, thank you for the request! Hope you Enjoy 💞💞

Previous Bingo <—found here!

Holiday Bingo <—Here!!

Mommy… Master List

Requests & Prompt-List

Prompt- Spending X-mas Alone

#31. “What’s the dirtiest thought you’ve had about them/me?”

#44. “That’s right, grind down on me…”

Warnings: NSFW, 18+!!, light smut, grinding, teasing, dom/sub relations, fluff, happy endings, etc.

Enjoy (;

It was Christmas morning. Bright and early. And most of the campus was deserted. There were a few straggler students and staff, but most people went home or on vacation for the winter break.

But not you. You were on your way to the library. Spending Christmas on your own.

You entered the vast, multi-story building quietly. It had the same deserted feeling as every other area on campus. You walked directly to the Philosophy section on the second floor.

To your surprise as you entered the section of shelves upon shelves of philosophical books, you saw your Paideia instructor Professor Black.

God was she terribly attractive…

You had thoroughly enjoyed her class on Greek Philosophy last semester, and you had already signed up for her Ethics and Morals Class in the upcoming semester.

She was always wearing something that hugged her curves perfectly. And she had mentioned her being divorced with a kid, the divorce part not helping your mind…

The woman caught your rather long lingering gaze, and she smirked. You had really no choice but to walk over to her.

“Hi Professor Black…!”

“Hello Darling, Narcissa is completely alright when we aren’t in the classroom.” Narcissa purred.

You gulped and nodded.

“Are you spending today alone?” She asked, her face contorting with concern.

You shuffled your feet back and forth.

“Yes” you muttered, kind of ashamed you had nowhere to go for winter break.

“That’s alright, love. I am as well. There is nothing wrong with that. Would you like to join me…?”

You bit your lip and blushed lightly, nodding profusely.

“Yes please”

Narcissa nodded in understanding, motioning you to come over caringly. You gingerly sat next to the woman, shuffling around in the seat anxiously.

“Do I make you nervous, Darling…?” Narcissa chuckled in a teasing manner.

“Maybe…” you squeaked, your face going redder.

Narcissa chuckled again, this time darker, her eyes sparkling with a newfound edge. She placed a hand on your leg, near your knee.

“Is this alright…?”

You nodded bashfully.

“I expect words, Darling.” She commanded.

“Yes Ma’am, I like it…” you whimpered.

Narcissa smirked, slowly moving her hand up your thigh.

“You are adorable…” she purred.

You blushed even harder at your words.

“What’s the dirtiest thought you’ve had about me…?” Narcissa purrs inquisitively, “Tell me your naughtiest fantasies…”

Your breath hitched and you were caught off guard by her question.

“I… I— you fucking me…” you stuttered.

“That’s all…?”

Narcissa quirked an eyebrow at you.

“N-no…”

The woman then grabbed ahold of your hips, swiveling you onto her lap. You gasped, but eagerly started lighting grinding against the professor. Narcissa chuckled once more, halting your grinding, earning a whimper from your lips.

“Use your words…” she ordered.

“D-don’t want to be alone… need to feel w-warm n loved…” you whispered, filling your face with the crook of Narcissa’s neck.

Her hold on your hips relented, letting you start grinding down on her once more.

“That’s right, grind down on me…” Narcissa purred, “Good girl. Let mommy take care of you…”

You whimpered desperately at the woman’s words, nodding fervorously.

“Yes mommy, please mommy…”

“Shhhh, I’ve got you, sweetness…” Narcissa cooed comfortingly.

Her hands helped your hips grind down against her thigh.

Your breathing got increasingly uneven, as you chased your high against the woman’s thigh. Your eyes rolled back and you let out a string of breathy whimpers. Narcissa’s fingers slipped underneath your shirt, getting a burger hold of your figure and more effectively helping you get off on her thigh.

The friction between your panties and your pants against her tensed thigh was delicious and clouding your mind more and more. You let out a particularly breathy and lewd moan.

“M-mommyyy mmmm close…!” You whined.

This woman had melted you into a desperate sex puddle so quickly…

“Just like that, Darling… Cum for mommy.” Narcissa cooed, tensing her thigh even more for your frictional delight.

You huffed and groaned, hunching over and into the woman’s embrace as your first orgasm crashed into you. Narcissa comforted and lead you through your high, holding you close and tight afterwards.

“Such a good girl…” she purred in your ear.

You hummed with delight into the woman’s embrace.

“I’ve got you, love. Neither of us will be spending this Christmas alone.” Narcissa cooed.

“Thank you…” you whispered, nuzzling even further into her.

~~~

Next Holiday Bingo Fic <—Here!!

Narcissa Malfoy nee. Black Masterlist

Holiday Bingo 2023 Masterlist

Tag List: @storiesofsvu @lunala-rose23 @willowshadenox @aemilia19 @vexed-jade