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wife-of-all-dilfs · 5 months ago

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burning pt. 2 | b. blake

part one | masterlist

summary: season three — a daunting decision is to be made. multiple cups of grounder celebration juice, an arrogant bellamy blake, and a desire to prove oneself cause an inevitable outcome.

pairing: bellamy blake x reader

warnings (including all parts): alcohol consumption/intoxication, sensual dancing, jealousy, sexual desecration??, mild possessiveness, arguments, bellamy speaking in trigedaslang (giggling and kicking my feet), dialogue-heavy, manhandling, mild angst, smut, unprotected p in v (do not), reader is short because i’m short, deal with it <3

notes: THIS IS PART TWO OF FROM THE FLAMES!!

word count: 2.6k

No.

Way.

There was absolutely no way I was going to join a horde of drunken warriors dancing around a ten-foot-tall bonfire.

At least, that was what I had told Raven ten minutes ago.

Given the current position in which I was standing (which was just outside the crowd of dancers by a barrel containing a brew that I told myself was just really strong moonshine) and the alcohol oozing through my veins like sweet, molten honey, I think it’s safe to say that I had contradicted myself.

How many drinks had I had now? Two, three? Somewhere around there.

I wasn’t drunk, I swear. Although, I was certainly working my way towards being so. Raven had gently coerced—threatened—me into joining the raunchy dance circle. I had at first refused, but when she began to suggest telling Bellamy my ‘little secret’ if I didn’t do it myself, I reluctantly, very reluctantly, agreed.

So, that was that. I was going to dance. With Grounders. Around a bonfire. In front of Bellamy.

Hence, the drinks.

The only times I had ever danced were during parties back on the Ark, but those were so tame and regulated. This was vastly different. There were no rules, no sophistication, and certainly no guards keeping tabs on how close a girl danced with a boy. The latter was clear as day, taking the form of a couple dancing together a few feet in front of me.

A woman with dark, slicked-back braids and deep bronze skin pushed herself against her partner, a tall man with lengthy facial hair and spike-cuffed fists that must’ve been the size of my head. One of his hands was on her back, the other on her hip, ruching up her long skirt so that it exposed her thighs as she glided her chest up his torso. They grinded and swayed and flowed together in time with the pulsating beat.

Dread grappled me. I had to do that? How the hell do you dance like that in jeans and a tank top?

Through the ever-migrating crowd, I spotted Raven standing with Monty and Harper on the opposite side of the square. Of course, she had already been watching me the whole time. The fear on my face was unmistakable, yet she only sent an impatient nod of her head that said, “Get on with it already.”

If anything, you could always rely on Raven for her persistence.

“Christ, help me.” I plunged my cup into the barrel, fervently bringing its contents back to my lips and down my throat.

“Didn’t take you for a religious one,” came a deep voice from behind me.

I swivelled around, my cup still craned to my lips, and found the incentive for my drinking habits standing before me.

Bellamy.

Gracelessly, I choked as a much too-large mouthful of liquid streamed down my throat. My innards recoiled in on themselves. “Bellamy,” I said, attempting to compose myself. “Hi.” Unfortunately, the abhorrent aftertaste still lurked on my tongue, causing my expression to sour into one of disgust. “God—makes moonshine seem like apple juice.”

Apparently, he found this amusing. A hum of a chuckle bobbed in his throat. “Looks like you’re enjoying the party then.”

A few variations of how I wanted to reply: “I wasn’t until you started talking to me,” “Not really, but if you take me into a back alley right now, I might,” and, just a plain and simple, “I need you.”

What I really said: “Oh, yeah, I’m having a great time. You meet this guy?” I patted the barrel behind me. “Really supportive. We’re becoming good friends.”

He nodded, eyeing me with a quizzical smirk. “I can see that. Maybe you should branch out a bit. Have you met the one called Water yet?”

“You’re funny.”

“Alcohol tends to have that effect on me,” he said, and I laughed. His freckled cheeks rounded into apples and his teeth made a rare appearance; he looked away as if to hide his smile, as if Bellamy Blake couldn’t possibly be anything but serious and brooding. He’s kept my secret; I’ll keep his.

We both observed the crowd and the fire as a new song began to play, standing comfortably, wordlessly, side by side. Maybe ‘wordlessly’ was a bit of a stretch—there was a magnitude of words filling my mind, especially when he began unzipping his jacket and shrugging it off to expose his contoured arms to the fire’s fervour.

His arms…

“How many drinks have you had?”

I blinked. “What?”

He stared at me with a mischievous glint in his eye, draping his jacket on an unlit makeshift barbeque. “I said, what do you think of all this?”

The veil of lust-ridden (let’s call it what it was) fog lifted from my mind, and my brows creased deeply as I attempted to piece together what he was talking about. It took me a few belated seconds before I realized he had been referring to the Grounders and Sky People uniting as one people. I could hardly contain an idiotic smile from breaching my lips—my opinion was important to him.

“It’s—well,” I stammered, “it’s different.” It’s different? If only he knew how badly I wanted to club myself with a brick at that moment. Despite my obvious mental stagnation, he expressed nothing but patience, waiting with a visible longing for my input. So, I tried again, slowly working around the alcohol and shrewd blockages in my brain. “Honestly? It scares me. Their first impression of us was that we were cold-blooded killers and ours of them was the exact same. Ever since we hit the ground, we’ve been at each other’s throats; we’ve all committed so many acts of war.

“I’m scared of how fragile this peace is, how one tiny mistake could lead to the annihilation of our kind or theirs, or even both.” Bellamy watched me with silent contemplation. I continued, “And I’m scared if this peace does break, you’ll be on the front-lines because I know you’ll refuse to be anywhere else. And I know you and I tend to… disagree more often than not, but if you were to die—” I looked down, bashfully scrutinising the toes of my boots “—I think I’d be lost.”

He didn’t speak. He didn’t move. I immediately wished to snatch the words my loosened tongue had released and shove them back down my throat. His silence was writhing excruciatingly through the air, surrounding us like a constricting serpent.

Say something, Bellamy. Say anything.

“I think I’d feel the same,” he finally spoke, and the relief I felt was instant. I looked up at him. His pupils were bowls of sweet melted chocolate as he cocked his head to the side. “What would I do without my favourite sparring partner?”

My heart soared.

My favourite sparring partner.

Favourite.

So much for not smiling like an absolute idiot. I could only pray the fire’s orange light masked the jeopardising tinge of my cheeks, though there was nothing I could do about my blatant staring. Maybe it would have been embarrassing if I were the only one, but Bellamy had the same problem.

Someone seemed to hit ‘pause’on time.

The blood in my veins moved like a tranquil river; my heart expanded and subdued with each slow beat. The voices and bodies around us blurred into one big mass of nothing. All that seemed to be moving was the music drifting down towards us from the tower and Bellamy’s face, which was leaning closer in microscopic intervals, almost unnoticeably. But I noticed.

And then the bonfire roared with a loud crack.

Voices mingled. Bodies shuffled. Time restarted.

Bellamy cleared his throat and looked away, just as I began inspecting the cup in my hand. What was in that stuff? It was supposed to give me the confidence to dance in front of him; he ruined—a term I’ll use loosely—my plans by greeting me directly, so now I was just tipsy for no good reason.

At least now I didn’t have to join a wanton circle of dancing grounders.

Wait.

Was Bellamy going to kiss me?

“Didn’t think I’d see a grounder mating ritual tonight,” muttered Bellamy as he watched the scene with crossed, disapproving arms. The light spirit he had been in before had obviously been overthrown by his usual brooding nature. Funny that—that his mood only soured after hemade it seem like he was going to…

You know.

I turned towards the crowd, away from him (and his damning muscular arms that bulged impossibly over his chest). “You don’t approve?” I asked flatly. His sudden detachment had pissed me right off. “Everyone,” I addressed the partygoers in a hushed tone only Bellamy could hear, “stop dancing right now. Bellamy Blake doesn’t approve of fun.”

“I didn’t say that,” he countered.

“Then go dance.”

“I don’t dance.”

For the second time that night, I contradicted myself. “Well, I do.”

Now that regained his attention. I could see him staring at me in my peripheral vision.

“Right,” he scoffed. “You’re gonna dance.”

Ouch.

His words struck a chord deep inside me, causing my expression to wilt into something defensive. My arms folded promptly over my chest and I turned to stare him down. “Is it so unimaginable?”

“I just can’t picture you dancing,” he spoke with an arrogant grin, as if his viewpoint originated from the truth and mattered above all else.

It was moments like this one that pushed me to judge whether I should indulge in my attraction to Bellamy. Maybe it was the booze talking, but I really just wanted to slap him across the face. If not literally, then maybe figuratively, by proving him wrong.

I’d had this problem ever since I met him: he would tell me to do one thing, and I’d do the complete opposite; it felt like an unspoken rule at this point. Which led me to my next decision.

My arms dropped to my sides. “Good thing you won’t have to in a minute,” I snapped.

I began making for the bonfire and dancers, each of my curt steps fuelled by spite and a chemically altered brain. I just can’t picture you dancing. Yeah, right. I’d give him something to picture, the smug asshole.

“Hey.” A large hand caught my wrist, pulling me back half a step so I that had to stop.

I shot a fiery warning over my shoulder. Bellamy’s eyes reflected regret and a touch of submission; he knew it had been the wrong move and immediately let go of my arm, withdrawing half a step himself in placation.

“Look, I’m sorry,” he spoke cautiously like I was a spooked animal about to attack. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Well, you did upset me.”

“Princess, I—"

I whirled around on my toes and we came face-to-face (well, face-to-collarbone). The swiftness of my actions must’ve caught him off-guard because he cut himself short mid-sentence and the bulge of his Adam’s apple bobbed nervously in his throat.

The scorching intensity of my gaze was pointed directly up at him now, just daring him to speak another word. He didn’t. His mouth had set into a hard, impenetrable line that represented his oath of silence. It was a smart choice, but, god, he had gotten me so riled up that whether he was smart no longer mattered.

I just couldn’t help myself.

The gap between us shortened as I took a smooth step forward, keeping us connected by the eyes. A challenge in the form of a scornful smile broke across my lips. “No leaning in this time, huh?” I spoke.

Bellamy’s eyes twitched into squints, his jaw clenching in unison. It was strange how he took offence to being called out on something he had done—a common trait in those affected by frequently un-called-out arrogance, no doubt. I’d have to start helping him out with that.

A bomb was ticking beneath his skin and I knew firsthand how short the fuse was. Subconsciously, I think I wanted to blow it. Subconsciously, I think I enjoyed it: the arguing, the tension, the heat. I enjoyed how we knew exactly what set each other off and how intimate knowing such information about one another was. I enjoyed getting in his face and him getting in mine.

I enjoyed the moments when it would become blatantly obvious that the tension between us never originated from a place of hate or malice, but from somewhere deeper, fleshier.

Or was I so impaired that it was really just me?

Thoughts calculated behind his hooded gaze—of hate, of malice, of flesh, I wasn’t sure. And just when I thought he wasn’t going to reply at all, his neck hollowed with a deep inhale, and he leaned down to my height. My heart dropped to an unspeakable place. His breath was hot on the tip of my ear, “Did you want me to lean in?”

I stared at his shoulder, trying to conceal the shiver trickling down my neck and over my breasts and much, much further below. He lingered in place for a half-second longer before returning to full height. Can you guess the shape his lips made as he scanned my perplexed expression? It’s not difficult.

I was going to slap him. Not out of dislike: but because how dare he make me want him so badly? And in front of so many people? And without even knowing that I actually did want him and it wasn’t just the alcohol that was making us both sexually frustrated?

I swear to god I was going to slap him. My hand flexed, but before I could act, the universe made evident that it was on Bellamy’s side.

The sudden bellow of horns signalled a change of song. Our attention was dragged away from one another, turning to the celebratory howls and shouts echoing between those surrounding the bonfire. The flames had exploded to new heights as someone fed more wood to the base. It burned so brightly, so dangerously that if I didn’t know any better, I’d have mistaken it for a god.

The horns vibrated in the air, repeating over and over as more instruments were introduced to create something dark and haunting. Slowly, I began to smile. I knew what I was going to do now, and it certainly wasn’t slapping the smirk off of Bellamy Blake’s face.

“Sorry, Blake,” I voiced over the music. We were looking at each other now; somehow in those ten seconds we were distracted I must’ve sucked him dry of pride and consumed it myself, because I now wore the smirk, and he wore the confusion. One last time, I downed a gulp of my drink and said, “Places to be.”

And then I was gone, heading straight for the crowd of orange-skinned dancers, slick, sweating bodies, and pulsating horns. I’d hoped that last drink would kick in fast, especially if Bellamy’s eyes were to be as vigilant as ever.

part three {to be written}

#bellamy blake #bellamy blake fanfiction #bellamy blake smut #bellamy blake x reader #bellamy blake x you #bob morley #wife of all dilfs ✍️#bellamy x reader #bellamy blake fluff #bellamy blake x clarke griffin #bellarke #the 100 #raven reyes #bellamy blake imagine

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vyainide · 8 months ago

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ㅤㅤㅤgratefulness (i'm sorry, can this be over now?)ㅤ౨ৎㅤ12.9k

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ2024 ©1864RERUNS

oneㅤ/ㅤtwo synopsis. luffy loves you— you know this with how abundantly clear love is in every ministration of his outstretched hand and a grin— yet your traitorous heart demands more, even though you're in no place to give him your loyalty. you know this so you do not demand his love nor to be saved, even when met with a relentlessly stretched hand.

warning(s). gn! reader, hanahaki disease, but some creatively liberated variation of it, angst, hurt/some comfort, slow burn, but does it really count if nothing happens?, unrequited love, pining and the works, background character death, blood, violent imagery, vague allusion to an unspecified mental disorder that involves eating habits (pls be careful!!!), luffy tries his best to be kind but it's cruel, reader spirals 🙏; minimal editing and proofreading (these are basically my thoughts raw and unadulterated)

from vyon. the card game they play is a vietnamese one also known as smth like thirteen in english and has too many rules to explain but it doesn't really matter :3 i was a beast at that game though i fear; this fanfic has been in my drafts for so long, it also grew into too big of a project than it was meant to be. i also had to split this up into two parts, it was getting too long, i'm sorry ＞︿＜

do not repost / copy / translate.

Once you know Monkey D. Luffy, you'll know his heart not a few minutes after. He's welded the unmoving, burning ingot to his bicep, always on display due to his amassing collection of armless vests; rubber skin melted around the golden gem, oozing past the lines of his beating heart to staple it there, an anomaly on the expanse of skin not otherwise susceptible to bullets or cannons. Your captain is a man that lives with his heart on his tongue, always ready to dictate the lay of your next move with an irregular beat that drums against the skinned men of war and an impulsivity that makes his crew scramble after him exasperatedly; oxygen taken from his cerebral arteries to his brain are stained in the grease and oil that stick to the meat he handles so carelessly. In the same endearing way, he's careless with his heart, allows for the small stuff to momentarily prick his heart, for judgement to cloud into anger before it picks up on the bitter taste of agony.

It's always easy to get a frown onto Luffy's face. Feign disinterest in his stories; make yourself too busy to help him look for strange insects; force him to shower, scold him after he does something he wasn't meant to; keep him away from something he seems interested in; starve him for more than five minutes— he makes it all exceptionally too easy. You're not audacious enough to claim to know Luffy any more than the Strawhats, especially not those that he had met in East Blue; you try not to let it bother you that they managed to meet a younger Luffy who had so many holes in his defence, whose smile threatened through skin more, who had yet to find scars in his palm from how hard he had to clench his fists.

To you, it seems unfair that Luffy had managed to uncover so many of your firsts. His unwavering presence by your side as you learnt how hard it was to live on sea, the intonations of your screaming when a marine canon was pointed at you, to live so freely away from the confines of restrictive justice, how it felt to have a hand in yours to promise forever and then some. Luffy has no preferential treatment when it comes to people he loves; he treats them all the same, no hierarchy could dream to disrupt that.

With the same sandals he uses to stomp on the faces of Marine's, he could demand food from Sanji, money from Nami, Zoro to play with him— instead, you watch him whine Sanji, food and dissolve into a puddle when his cook orders him to wait, he allows Nami's fists to fall onto his head when he makes any financially impulsive decision (or even thinks them), and he idles himself with drawing on Zoro's face with Usopp and Chopper, with the previous two of them taking the psychical brunt of their consequences. (Chopper is let off with a mere promise that he won't join in with their shenanigans again when it involves making Zoro into a fool and a growing bump underneath his hat.)

Luffy, from second to fourth gear, is tender aggression when it is love.

His form is bizarrely respectful when the door opens and light dawns upon your face; you see him through the gaps of Nami and Sanji's legs and towering forms over him, his hands on his thighs and feet tucked underneath his bottom. He slurs out an I'm sorry that lets you know that his face is definitely messed up and then follows up with an I was hungry though!

Then Nami messes him up some more for his shitty justification.

She leaves him— some caricature of her anger— on the floor with her hands on her hips and Sanji trailing after her with hearts in his eyes at her dominant display of power. As she passes Brook, he asks for the colour of her underwear and earns himself the same treatment. It's then that you laugh. Luffy snapped his head up, following after the trembling air of your laughter and then calls out your name, the syllables are all messy around his swollen cheeks and a missing tooth that will come back after a few minutes but you cannot rid yourself of the thought that it's sticky with love that you only remember hearing when you were just a babe, screaming and crying in the arms of a tired and ill mother in a hospital. You were introduced to a group of midwives with same love you hear now, their idle finger catching into both your small hands; Luffy's hand dances across the air, breaking apart your laugh with urgency and catching onto your wrist.

You're not sure if it's you who had been pulled to him or if he'd managed to catapult himself into you but you both end up a mess on the floor regardless. Limbs tangled around each other in a wave as you both fall to the deck, Luffy does not correct the length of his arm and takes to wrapping the limb around you like a vine snaked around the trunk of a tree. You don't know a start nor an end as Luffy nuzzles his beat–up face on your shoulder. "Hey captain," you raise your head to look down on him, trying to wrench a hand through the tight spirals he's coiled around you.

"I'm hungry," he whines in lieu of a response, "and I'm bored, Usopp kicked me out after I ate one of his ketchup stars." He doesn't relent with his hold on you, simply loosening the coil that you're trying to work your hand through before tightening again once your arm makes it past to trap it against your side. You don't question the fact that Usopp's ketchup stars may be laced with gunpowder or what the small dose of gunpowder may have done to Luffy's internal organs.

You guess even Usopp has his limits when it comes to his childish captain. "I can't do a lot about either of those things if you're keeping me hostage here." He looks up at you, his exaggeratedly large lips in a pout that matches the swelling of his cheeks and then says your name again, like you’ve done him wrong. It's a disordered collection of the letters again but you find you can't really do anything to fight against it. Instead, green tendrils sprout from your trapped arm, each vine wrapped in a light of leaves and strain against his extended limb before he gives in and, instead, laughs as he wraps his rubber arm around the spindly, twisted branches splitting open layers of skin on your bicep. His skin coloured against the green runner keeps the bine from wilting down to meet gravity.

You let Luffy do whatever he wants, with an expression that you're not sure you're too familiar with etched out on the lines of your face. Thinking back on it, you could've simply done as Nami had or Usopp, ignore or scold him enough into submission but his fingers catch one of the fronds and it curls between the meat of his fingertips, reaching out to tickle his palm and something soft blooms inside you. You know it must be you, not the work of your devil fruit, because as much as you've tried in your lacklustre pursuit of beauty, you've never been able to sprout any kind of flowers.

When Luffy finally lets you go, you find your way into the kitchen and give Sanji a smile. You apologise for interrupting him and tell him that you know that lunch had been served only an hour ago but, if he wasn't too busy, you were still a little peckish. Sanji shoots up immediately and asks you what you've got a taste for— you assure him any leftovers from lunch will do and he tells you, though this doesn't come as any surprise, that Luffy had worked his way through any grain of leftovers with a laugh. You laugh along with him and well, you seemed to be craving meat right now.

The plate he prepares seem to be more about quality rather than quantity, with sauce underneath the red meat drizzled across the white ceramic, a slab of meat already cut into bite sized pieces for you and a decorative herb stuck between the fatty slices but when the light oozes down into the stretch of meat, you don't think Luffy will complain too much.

You, of course, were right about that.

The shattering grin he greets you (the plate of meat, however small it seemed) with gives you the faint smell of sticky rain drenched in the light of the sun, and you almost give him your hand when he reaches out for the plate. Brook's guitar strums in the background and your heart shakes in time with his strings and Luffy's incessant chewing.

You've really no problems with Usopp asking you to help him with target practice, it's fairly common for you to help the crew with their unique fighting style— save Nami and Franky for fear of losing your life with their less than particular aimed area of damage— it's easy enough really. You don't even have to be mentally present for it; shaking through layers of flesh, vines grow across the deck of the Sunny and rise up straight to tower over Usopp as he fixes his goggles over his eyes. You keep a quarter of your mind instilled in every chloroplast that shivers across the skies so you can keep them moving but the other three quarters are focused on the card game you play with Robin, Chopper, and Franky.

You hear the snapping of elastic and your finger twitches against the back of playing cards as the particular vine shot to the left, glancing curiously at Chopper's hand across from you when he turned to Franky and accuses him of looking at his cards.

"It's not my fault!" Franky frowned, fixing his comedically small glasses to perch on his metal nose. "Your cards just happen to be in my view when I'm looking at the pile 'cause you're tiny!"

Chopper takes to this horribly (you reshape a vine that has fallen to one of Usopp's stones and keep it relentless across the wave of air) and he grows into the much less cute and broader, more human version of himself to hold his hand out of Franky's view. (Two vines snap together and they take the path to slice through air to where Usopp stands, you hear the cracking of wood as Usopp shouts at you, saying he only wanted to focus on offence. An apology is drawn out with the green arm in the air.)

"Ivy," your eyes flicker to Robin and she gestures to the pile of discarded where the two of spades had been placed on top. "It's your turn." You glance down at your hand, eyes flickering over the collection of 7's in your hand.

"Bomb." (You feel a vine break apart into pieces, think about the fact that it's lucky you've no nerves attached to the tendrils, and keep the one down to give Usopp a little win.) Franky curses your name as Robin chuckles.

Chopper glances at the four 7's with a sense of wonderment that you're sure is too dramatic for the moment. "No wonder I had no sevens!" You give him a sly grin and watch Robin pass her turn, ignoring Franky's levelled glare behind his glasses.

In the end, Robin wins anyways, ridding herself of her hand with her final card being the two of hearts. The loss is taken bitterly by both you and Franky though you think Franky definitely takes it worse than you do as when he stands to sulk away, cards fall out of his speedos, and they leave a trail after him. Robin, in all her morbidity, laughs behind a hand as you and Chopper drop your jaws in disgust.

Chopper collects the cards, hesitating with the ones that had been on Franky until Robin points out that you've all played many rounds and there's a chance that all of them had shared the same fate. (Another vine shutters down to the floor, broken apart and particles flown across the deck.) The cards slowly fall to the floor as Chopper cries out in disgust. Shaking your head with some colourful amusement, you use the two vines fallen to pick up the cards and start shuffling them.

Responding to Chopper's call, Luffy shoots his way from Sunny's figurehead. "What're you guys doin'?" He falls graciously to where Franky had previously been sitting; his eyes are ever so impatient to glance over the cards being shuffled. "Oh," he says with great interest, "are you guys playing 'go fish'?" He leaned towards you— the cards in your possession, actually— and blinks at the shuffling. "Lemme in!"

"We weren't playing 'go fish', Luffy." The little doctor has since calmed down, taking a seat between Luffy and Robin and shaking his head. "We were playing—" he turns his head up to Robin, to which she supplies 'bài tiến lên' with the intricate accents and all, "that!"

A flash of thinking places itself on Luffy's face, crossing his arm and tapping the side of his sandals on the deck, then it's gone. "Let's just play 'go fish' then."

Chopper whines, saying that 'go fish' is boring and that Luffy always snatches more than one card from other people's hands, which is cheating, and that he doesn't want to play.

Luffy turns to you with a pout, eyebrows furrowed at the dip where his nose bridge starts and then straightened out towards the end. The two vines that had been expertly dodging all of Usopp's shots and taunting him by doing silly dances and twisting into words in the air both crumple down to the floor at the same time, they follow the curve of your spine as you double over, a breath stuttering in your throat. You hear Usopp call your name and the deck of cards slip out from the vines that had been shuffling this entire time, your hand wraps around your throat and you hack out a cough you've managed to choke on.

"Are you dying?" Chopper shoots up, frantic as you keep coughing and choking— both violent in temperament, and scampers around, shouting for a doctor.

Footsteps tap closer as a shadow forms over you, Usopp's hand patting your back ferociously comes after the sound of shoes stop.

The blur that came with tears invading your eyes gives you the confidence to look at Luffy again before you're calling Chopper to a stop. "I'm fine, just choked on air."

You don't mention how it felt like you were breathing through a cheesecloth, how your lungs feel so restricted with every inhale as you all compromise on 'chase the ace' and how easier it feels when Usopp pushes his way between you and Luffy, too intimidated to pick from Robin's hand; when you all finish up for dinner, Robin is looking at you in a way that makes you think she's caught onto how you've been struggling.

Dinner is a strange ordeal. It's characterised with its usual events: Luffy sneaking his hands into people's plates though his stands full, Usopp trying to hold his plate out of his way, Zoro tending to his glass bottle of beer, Sanji making some quip about Zoro's show of alcoholism, Nami getting increasingly annoyed by the noise around her, Brook's laughter, Zoro escalating the situation with Sanji, Chopper screaming when Luffy clears Usopp's plate and then goes for the doctor's, Robin watching the scene with the patience of a saint, Franky pretending he was better than the rest, Usopp exacting revenge on Luffy by swapping their plates. It all ends with Nami telling them all to shut up and Luffy taking one final chicken leg from Zoro's plate. You stare down at your plate and count the missing bits, Luffy hasn't really touched any of the potatoes or asparagus, so you finish them up.

Two chicken thighs sit in stark contrast to the plate, thinking about having them anywhere near your mouth makes you a little sick for some reason, the weight of them in your stomach, the taste of caramelised skins, crisped with wells of juice sat next to a tinge of burnt flesh; you push the plate over to Luffy and detest the way he can take the colour of well–done oranges between his teeth and not care about the juice dribbling down his chin.

Luffy says thanks with his mouth full of chicken; Nami glares at him and turns a more concerned face to you (that also makes you sick) and inquires about you not eating. You mumble out some excuse about not being hungry, not feeling well, having a little bit of a headache, feeling tired— something along those faux lines, you don't remember but you remember that you don't tell them the truth exactly. "Sorry Sanji," you fix into your shitty excuse after, running a hand through your hair, to make yourself feel better about the entire ordeal.

He offers to make you a more palatable porridge or soup instead.

You take a cigarette and a red apple, going to bed hungry and angry at some unknown thing that brews on the tip of your tongue.

The next island is of great interest to Luffy.

The entire crew knows that its history nor culture was not either reason behind his excitement, only the mere prospect of digging his sandals into new, uncharted land is why he's running around the deck, filling up the empty spaces with bubbling laughter. Sanji finishes up bentos for those that are leaving, taking unnecessary extra care with Nami’s, and wishing he had it in him to starve Zoro whilst Nami is giving everyone an allowance. You take two bentos, yours and Chopper's, and head out onto the deck. Luffy only seemed momentarily sad that you were going with the doctor but bounced back immediately after when the trees come closer enough to intimidate so you push down the offer to join him instead. Franky joins up with Usopp, Luffy'll run off alone regardless of who he ends up going with, Nami ends up going with Zoro (to Sanji's displeasure), and you and Chopper make plans to find a pharmacy and a library for Robin.

Being around Chopper is easy enough with this unsettling prick of poison that's forced minimal responses, curt words, a flurry of tiredness, a sickening chill through your days recently. The little doctor is a lot more mindful of changes in mood, it's not any imminent injury either so he doesn't press to know why. Out of guilt (for being a brooding asshole lately), you ask him about his rumble balls and all his different forms. He answers cheerily and you can only pick out every other word with a persistent headache as the smell in the air changes from salty skies and bloody fish to sweetened foods and something unfamiliarly clean.

It's a bright island. You hear a faint bell in the distance that is traced over with the sound of children and stall owners; Chopper's hooves rhythmically sound beside you on the pavement and you find yourself counting them in groups of four. "Ah, there." You pick up your head and turn to follow the direction of Chopper's eyes. A sign is hung on the side of the building, the library. "Robin wanted a book of North Blue diseases for some reason," Chopper mumbles to himself as you two push open the door.

It's a small bookstore, walls lined with books and the paths carved with more standalone bookcases. "North Blue diseases?" You repeat, confused, "do they have North Blue exclusive illnesses?"

Your question goes unanswered, though it looks like it opens a vault of new questions for Chopper. Books aren't of great interests to you, so you follow behind Chopper as he walks through each section and grab whichever book he tells you to bring down for him. On the way back, you tell Chopper to keep going and change your course in search of something you're not too sure of.

You stray away from the town centre and head deeper through the small alleys of the town, there's no destination in mind; without the urgency of a fights and with the domesticity of a small knit community, you wander adrift. There's a dampness in the air to the walk around a shadowed hide of the place that loosens up the tension below your ribs, many different eyes follow after your form as the heel of your shoes click against a null path; shadows ooze around the soles of your shoe and lacquer up between the carved maze of black rubber of your soles until you find your way into a dead end.

It's a little bit of a cliché to be met with a ragtag group of delinquents when you turn to go back. Your eyes trace over them. In the hand of the one closest to you sits your wanted poster.

Something blooms inside you again— it's a much more pleasant feeling than the unmoving sap of ire that's been invading lately. Each man before you is physically bigger, towering over you ominously and shadows eating you but they all have swords and guns in their hands and that's why they lose. You, to the detriment of all life around you, are a weapon in and of itself; you choke out the vitality from others and steal their nutrients. They strained against their confines as their skin blossoms through shades of blooms, you are not the merciful rubber of a human, so your constraints don't relent, they squeeze and squeeze until the bark splits apart, until blood is cut off at the source, until they wither, until you are full.

On the way back, you buy a gift for everyone with the money you hadn't used and when they take to it, all in their varying degrees of joy, you feel less bad about the dead end alley full of brothers and sons. You tell yourself, handing Zoro a gift of alcohol, if not them, then it'd have been you.

You end up staying anchored to the island for a week to your displeasure. The longer you're stuck there, the closer you are to exploding; you always keep an eye out on the log pose strapped to Nami's wrist like you could quicken the process if you stare enough. Usopp starts avoiding you out of fear you'll blow like a poorly constructed cannon, Zoro makes you train with him to see if it'll help blow off some steam, Sanji brings you iced drinks at a rate that keeps you dizzy but you always feed it to Luffy or redirect it to Chopper's or Usopp's office with a little note.

On the third day, you follow in Zoro's example and sprawl out on the deck to rest your tireless mind. You've always wondered how sleep was ever a possible option for him when the feet thundering across the deck came with obstructive vibrations, no doubt slapping any chance of sleep away from his mind, but you find that it's almost pleasant. Beats all from familiar loves translates through the groves of wooden planks and etch through the back of your spine, you feel a bone fall back into place after Nami's heels against the floor and the thunderous kick that lands where Zoro was standing manages to work its way up your head to ease a headache.

The sun burns cries into your eyes and the skies move fluidly, they don't ripple as clouds shrivel against a light blue you're unfamiliar with; even as you close your eyes, you continue to feel the burn of the sun. The slapping of weaved straw against a sticky, sweaty sole then the deck comes as you slip into sleep.

Dreams have never been so amicable enough to become a recurrent in your life; more often than not, you're shown memories all blended together into a mess that leaves you sick, the abhorrent now and the nostalgic then bleeding past their confines until you see your mother stood next to that deceitful Marine admiral, both with that same look in their face. You wake up with a start when a loud bang scours its way through a flurry images you're unfamiliar with and then your body escapes you. Your head weighs with the heaviness of the bodies dropped to the floor, arms cold as if dipped into the river Styx, bones locked in place with a restrictive pain, muscles burning, aware of every breath that shivers through your suddenly odd body.

"Owww," three Luffys blur around each other as you pushed a hand to the floor to straighten up, you try blinking away the other two, but they're glued to the captain reflecting in your eyes; he looks down at what he's tripped on and follows it back to you. Your hand is met with something curved in shape when you go to push yourself up and when you look down, you see vines underneath you. You realise then that a burst of them had grown beneath you, splitting through the lawn deck and uplifting some of the planks underneath the greenery and inching upwards towards the guard rails of the ship. They take the form of something you think you met in your most recent sleep.

Luffy has managed to crawl his way towards you in the time you spend wondering why your devil fruit had been acting up— in your sleep no less and he wraps a hand around your ankle to get your attention. "Hey, you're really cold." He pointed out, eyes flickering down to the flesh between his fingers and then trailing his fingers up your thigh as he shifts closer to you on his knees.

The touch makes you violent and tender. "Really?" You managed to puff out, giving too much air back to the world with how much you're panting, "I feel a little warm though."

Luffy hums, clapping his hand over your cheeks with gentleness he only shows to those he loves, and it feels wrong. You get an itch underneath your skin that urges you to move, move, move but you can only push Luffy away with a ferocity he'd never shown you as you tremble under the bursting of violent air hacking up your throat, your shoulders strain as you wrapped your arms around your stomach, trying to heave out something that wasn't there.

Luffy scrambles back immediately, not caring for you shoving him away, and soothes away the rattling of your core with his clammy hands on your arm. "Are you sick?"

No, you think as a retch comes up your mouth; maybe, you correct as the path is marked by drool slipping down your chin and tears streaking across your cheeks. You shake away Luffy again. He's less submissive this time, his legs open over yours to plant his knees by your thighs. You hear him call for Chopper and it's obvious he has something of a frown marked on his face; you keep burning beneath your skin, but Luffy keeps rubbing his palms over your arms like you're cold.

You realise what your vines had drawn underneath you when Chopper comes out, fretting over you as he takes Luffy's place close to you. A grave. The image makes you laugh as the reindeer instructs his captain to haul you up after you'd ignored his inquires on if you could walk; your arm bends around the shape of Luffy's shoulder and your laughter erratically convulses into a collection of coughs from the skin on skin high.

You forced into bed rest after Chopper does a preliminary round of tests on you and declares you've simply gone down with a cold. You take to the diagnosis apprehensively, though in Chopper's defence, how was he meant to accurately diagnose you if you don't tell him all your symptoms? Instead, you sit in his office and spend the minutes, all alone, trying to retch out the feeling of having a piece of hair down your throat; you claw at the blanket and keep hacking until you've got a blanket full of tears and spit. The feeling does not pass.

At lunch, you get a visit from Franky who comes by to complain that you've made unnecessary work for him. "—seriously, how did you manage that in your sleep? Were you having a nightmare?" He ranted, legs crossed and leaned back in the visitor chair in a way that pushes his skinny, hairy legs close to your face.

Scrunching up your face, you sit up. "It was the future." You rebut, in between all his fantastical stories of his nightmares and talking about how he'd never attack Sunny even if Chopper grew a mechanical, giant arm and overthrew Luffy to become their captain. "A future," you correct yourself before turning to Franky with eyes judgemental, "are you scared of Chopper?"

"You weren't there at Enies Lobby," he tells you, which serves as a cruel reminder of sorts. You think about all the scars you've seen littered on the crew's skin and wonder which ones they've collected while they were with Luffy and who knows of which. The faint, protruding marks underneath Nami's tattoo, the stitches around Zoro's ankles, the ones pulled across his chest; you wonder if Sanji's got one hidden underneath his bangs. "The future?" Franky repeats after a moment, "are you a prophet?"

"It's a working theory," you brush off instead. "Though I can see in my mind's eye that Luffy is currently eating all the food and you’ll be left to starve if you don't go back."

Franky scrambled up from the seat not a second after your words.

With him gone, you settle back onto the bed and wonder about too many things to recall.

Between the hours after lunch and before dinner, Luffy comes by. He settles himself on the bed and forces you up as well, the shifting causes another cough to burgeon in your throat and you turn your head the other way to spit it out in an uncontrolled group of four. "You're not feeling better?" He frowns.

You see now that he's holding two pieces of barbequed meat in his hand, he's got the bone in his palm as he holds it upright like a sword, juices from the flesh dripping down to his hand and the smell gives you a headache. "Do you want this?" You move your eyes to Luffy, he's got his eyebrows furrowed together and his lips straightened out in a line when you don't answer. "Both?" He looks over at you, then the meat, and then you. "You," he swallows, "you can have them," his knuckles turn red around the bone, "since you need energy and you're sick." You think he's trying to convince himself to give them up.

You reached out and watch Luffy's face turn sour as his expression squeezes altogether around a midpoint trapped in his nose; you retract your hand and watch his face relax and his body unwind, you think he's moved his hand back a little. You repeat it again a few more times until laughter comes up and dislodges the uncomfortable feel of hair set deep in your throat. "It's fine, Luffy, you can have 'em."

"Really?"

"Mhm, go for it."

He moans around a bite of meat, crying your name as he chews and says thank you. The feeling is back as soon as it left.

No one comes to visit after that. Chopper comes by before he heads off to bed to make sure you're all set for the night and tells you that he expects to be woken up if you feel any symptoms get worse. You agree to his conditions, though can barely make yourself seem like you were taking him seriously with his cute face scolding you, but it seemed to work well enough as he's gone after he leaves a cup of water by your side. Sleep lingers around the corner, shirking away from your twitching fingertips and restless eyes; you give up after a few minutes, thinking about Robin who'd been thrown on watch tonight.

After going back and forth on the details, you bundle up yourself in the blanket (not wanting to have to mimic any semblance of serious guilt to get through Chopper's less than intimidating scolding if you get any sicker in the morning) and wander to the deck. The darkness of the sea would be safe for you, twisting around every limb extended to grope your way through your chosen path and oozing out from strands of hair to empty at your feet if not for the lamp of the moon ahead of you. Its light a forecast of tragedy, reflecting off a blade that would drive through the blood of a man who faced an unlikely love with only disgust and betrayal. "Robin?" The light hangs onto your word with a vehemence to uncover your unjustifiable deeds.

"Ivy," a shudder of surprise rattles your head to duck to your shoulders as you turn around. "Sorry, did I scare you?"

You give Robin a frown, tugging your lips down. "Yeah, my weakened bones nearly fell to the floor." She huffs a laugh. "Please announce yourself before you appear." Robin traces over your palish face and your features soften into a smile when your eyes meet.

"Can't sleep?" She asks once you two settle at the side of the Sunny where you'd napped earlier today, some of your vines still wedged between planks and parts of the floor haphazardly missing. You lean your back against the side of the ship and lower your eyes to the floor.

It's a total void, welcoming you back home. "No," you answer, a little breathless. The moon doesn't shuttle into the hole of the deck and something reaches a hand out for you between the atoms of a black hole. Roots twist out, easing close to your feet and sinking beneath the soles of your shoes. "I napped a little earlier." It's safe.

Robin hummed— I know rattles through her hum— and her elbow falls onto the guard rail of the ship. For the next few moments, you regret coming out. Robin's always been more receptive to the details and fine lines; it's not surprising that she can nitpick through a flurry of fronts and covers to the feelings you want to hide. They beckon out to her, wanting to fill that hole that's grown smaller with every day she wakes up to the open seas and the lively sound of her crew. "Chopper said you were sick?"

"A cold," you sniffle, bringing the blanket closer to you. Finding some semblance of confidence inside you, your eyes flicker over to Robin but she isn't looking at you— only turns when she feels your gaze levelled on her. You hesitate, searching for something to say and land on extending an arm and opening the blanket to invite her into your bundle. "You cold?"

She laughs, "it's fine, you should go back in if you've got a cold though." Her head tilted with a smile, "it'll be bad if the night air makes you worse."

Not wanting to find yourself softened in moonlight nor her eyes, you nod and bid her a goodnight before shivering your way back into your room. The door opens and light from Sunny's hallway is swallowed into the darkness of your room before it's banished out with the slam of your door, you shuffle around odd things thrown on the floor and slip into bed.

Your sleep is broken through with intervals with coughing, curling into yourself, shivering still though you burn in the night like a sibling of a star. When you wake up, sometime in the afternoon, you're heaving and reaching out your arms all around your duvet to haul together the skin that feels like it's melted down. Your palms prick against the leaves of vines that have overtaken your room, they fluoresce around your body and branch outwards to all corners of your room. The mess all blur together as your brain thrashes in your head with every splutter, you shake and twitch, trying to make sense of anything. Skin burned raw as you attempt to kick away the shrubbery that's keeping the blanket contorted around your body.

Your throat skinned and crude with its imminent thoughts of water.

A hand reached back blindly to grope at your bedside table for the cup that Chopper left for you last night. What you find instead is the burning touch of the sun, it seeps through the micro wounds stabbed through lines of your fortune and inflames every nerve straight to your heart. Your hand snaps back towards your body, the bones shivering from the imminent heat. Your entire body twitches at different paces, an invasive and hungry need drowns your senses. You need water, you need not for this to happen, water, you need for your sleep to be calm, you need to stop burning, you want to stop losing control, water first. You want water. Water— you turn your head to find the water, you need— Luffy?

Luffy is sat on a chair that you don't remember being there and when you look a little closer, you see that your vines had granted him a throne to comfortably lay on, other than that, they avoid him like the near plague. His body is leaned forward, his chest laid against the side of your mattress and arms crossed on your bed to sleep on like a pillow. You retch up some acid and, like the bowed head of a priest, a gentle petal disrupts the stream, flowing against the tide. It's a beautiful purple colour that's light against the transition to white towards the middle and an eye-catching yellow streaking against the white; lines of a deeper hue stretch through the petal and it's oddly reminiscent of veins.

The petal sits on the puddle of stomach acid that warms your thighs, your head bowed down to stare at it; you feel your soul unfurl at the sight of it, branches stretched outwards over a riverside, the heavy head of buds pulling weighted branches down to drink from the stream. Everything else blurs with a ripple, the petal is withstanding no matter no much you try blinking away an oncoming headache. The river near dries up in your attempt to wash down this unnerving disgust; you hunger for more.

Little changes when you find out what this 'cold' truly was. The lighting in Sunny's library is several shades warmer than the light of the sun, it draws upon the hunched shoulders down to your back as you tilt your head to hear the bones crack under your ear. Four syllables, that's all your death is. A lot of words are four syllables. Anonymous; unfortunate; hilarious; adventurous; hanahaki. It doesn't mean a lot by itself, so you try giving it some context. You pretend to tell Chopper that you're dying, you have hanahaki and that it's something he can't cure in a way you'll accept and you still feel nothing. You think about Chopper's face. He adamantly tells you that he'll cure you, he'll do it. The you in your imagination tells him no. Faced with your refusal, Chopper cannot do anything. In the end, it is a grave that cures you.

Death, as it stands, was something you had accepted when you stepped onto a pirate ship. Even someone with as stubborn a character as Zoro could be welcomed in by death, even Luffy. For a while, you wonder about death. The air in the room pauses as if to grace you with the silence to ponder on it, all you hear is the sound of your own breathing.

The closest thing to death comes searching for you a few minutes later.

You've always been interested in Brook. A skeleton with nothing but a sword; he has no lungs yet still sings, no heart and still smiles, dead but human in all his actions and behaviours. "There you are." He sneaks up behind you, bones falling onto your shoulder as you think, he smiles down at you. "Luffy asked if I’d seen you earlier.” He looms over you for a moment before he's straightening back up and calling out loudly, "but I'm a skeleton so it's not like I have eyes to see anyone anyways!"

It's the two syllables 'Lu–ffy' that shakes you the most. You stifle a cough in your chest and feel it tear through your ribs instead, searching for a path out. "For what?" The breaths rattle in your chest and shudder through your words.

"He wanted to show you a beetle." He takes the seat next to you, peering down at the picture book that you have open. You wait for him to make a comment about seeing what you were reading before disregarding it all with a lack of eyeballs so he wasn't seeing it really but he doesn't say anything, so you're forced to talk instead.

"Brook."

"Yes?"

It takes a single breath to prepare you to say this, it's warm and evident that you've not yet truly succumbed to your illness. "Do you see yourself as dead?"

Death is the art of those who do not live. It's something that keeps people tethered to the moment; it's the one thing that keeps humans humane. It's evidence you've lived, no matter how full nor how long. She's beautiful in her own right.

"I cannot see myself as anything because I am a skeleton with no eyes!"

Brook does not get to elaborate because Luffy shuttles in moments later, whispering loudly. (He'd learned somewhere that you're meant to be quiet in a library when he was younger but his whispers still manage to shake the room somehow.) "You're here! I found a beetle to show you!" He tip–toes to your side, "what're you reading— oh, hi Brook! The flowers here are pretty!" He points a finger down to a sunflower; his index covers an entire petal and he strokes it upwards to the middle. "Do you think they're edible?"

He turns to you with a smile.

You meet him with the same, "their seeds are." He gasps and picks up the book to scour through the letters in search of a name of these seeds. You take in a shuddering breath and when you feel another urge to cough, you cannot stop it.

When vines splatter around the room, they uproot the place; they've always been disruptive in this way. A wave of them washes various bouts of furniture to the floor, through the pounding of your ears, you hear the sound of books thudding as green appendages snake through bookcases and rattle them at the base; Brook's chair collapses as a vine chokes out one of its legs into splinters, the world blurs into a hue of greens and purples. A hand reaches from down in your throat, you heave around gaps of allowance for air and gag, cough, retch up more acid and some tea that Sanji brewed earlier this morning in lieu of breakfast. It's unpleasant. It's ugly in a way death should not be, though you guess the dead don't get to choose how to live in the same way the living cannot choose their death.

You're hauled off to Chopper again.

Chopper's voice comes as the hollow sounds of keys on an old piano. He does another round of tests on you— this set lasts a little longer than the previous and he takes extra caution with some. He finds that your heart is a little faster than it should be, he nitpicks at the bluish tint around your fingers and notes the concerning amount of weight you've lost in the past few weeks. When he asks you, what's wrong, you tell him that that's what he should be telling you.

Hypoxia; another four syllables for your cause of death. "Some of the symptoms are there," Chopper frowns, mumbling to himself. "It's when your tissues aren't getting enough oxygen, do you have difficulty breathing?"

You placed your cheek into your palm, elbow on Chopper's desk. "You're a pretty good doctor, Chopper."

The effect is immediate, he starts blushing and kicking his legs in his seat, a hoof goes to rub at the back of his head and nervous laughter comes from him. "That isn't distracting me at all, you bastard." You smiled and watched the compliment break any semblance of professionalism in him.

He gets back on track a little while later, placing a stethoscope on your chest and asking you to cough. You're not sure exactly what he's looking for but you give a soft cough into your elbow and you can say for certain— just based off the way he jumps back and looks at you a little quietly for a second, it's nothing good. Chopper spends a few minutes looking at your fingertips, then your lips, then some other parts of skin already exposed and humming to himself, troubled.

For now, he says, he wants you to try not to exert yourself— maybe leave fighting to everyone else and focus on resting until he can figure out a better way to confidently diagnose you. His lips are pulled into a frown, hands in his lap and trying his best to be professional and keep his emotions at bay. Before you know it, your hand is on top of his pink hat and fondly rubbing over the material softly. "Thanks Chopper, I'll keep that in mind."

He nods. You hesitate for a second before you're getting up to leave so that everyone else can see that you're not dying— or maybe you should tell them you are, you're not sure you could take another session of Franky accusing you of destroying the Sunny to create more work for him.

Your hand wraps around the doorknob and twists, stopping when Chopper speaks again. "You're not hiding something from me," he accuses gently, "are you?"

Your hand tightens around the doorknob. A flash of that imaginary Chopper comes back to you— heartbroken and confused at your refusal to be cured— you steal an unnecessarily large breath from the world. "I get sudden cravings for sweet things if that means anything."

Chopper, unbeknownst to you, takes those words and carves them true and raw into himself. His eyes are unwilling to leave you for more than necessary during the times you eat together, he watches you push aside the food on your plate, tearing small bits of meat off the bone to chew on it for a couple minutes too long before swallowing. He makes note of the way you have no problems finishing up everything but any sort of meat, sliding them over to Luffy, or one of his victims.

You're met with another blossom soon after lunch. You've made a bad habit of leaving the table early to escape the smell and resign yourself to the open deck, sprawling out on the grass like Zoro usually does. You're certain you're about to fall asleep shivering but the slap, slap, slapping of your captain's sandals are nearing closer so your brain kicks awake with a start; your eyes twitch, eyelashes shuddering in the wind. The darkness over your eyes morphs into a shadow of Luffy hovering over you, head tilting with a hand on his hat— your mind supplies you with the frown— and then you hear him taking a step back and sitting down next to you.

A troubled melody hums through his lips and when you open an eye to peek at him, you see his hands wrapped around his ankles, legs loosely crossed; he turned back to you and you quickly close your eyes. Here is where you finally learn that when Luffy touches, he's never placated with a simple tap, a light knocking between skin— no, he must stroke, he drags his fingers up the side of your thigh, he shivers from the coldness of your flesh and, even then, crawls closer. Then he's silent for a worrying amount of time and for a moment, curiosity takes you over. You find yourself wanting to draw light upon the disgusted features when he's met with someone he thinks close to him is growing closer and closer to a grave amongst the roots.

He leans his forehead against yours whilst you shuffle through the despicable crawl of your heart through your bones, something shifts in you and when you reach to itch at your side, it dislodges. It takes no more than a simple flip for your entire world to shift; you think you saw Luffy hovering over you momentarily before you had snapped to the side.

A fragment of the world greets its end.

Something strangles you, a hand of a giant pressing two fingers against the sides of your neck until everything in you bursts and splatters against parts that have gone unknown until now. There's nothing new to the tremor of vine that erupts through your skin, bubbling through the surface of flesh like a geyser; the tentacles claw their way your throat until you're choking around them, searching for an allowance for air. Your knees shuffle up to find some balance, head ducked to meet the lawn across the deck and elbows digging deep into the dirt. Your spluttering comes in time with the sound of Luffy calling your name, shouting for Chopper; there's a knot tied inside your mouth, you shake away tremors and tears all the same. You erupt yet there's nothing to be burnt, it's only ash that leaves your mouth— only the colourful petals of the wisteria plant that wash over the green of the open deck, burnt in hues with blood.

The next island is a spring island, known for their sweet peaches and sweeter music.

You watched Luffy devour two peaches in his hands, the ripe skin melting underneath his teeth— pale with a dusted blush until it snapped into a bloody red, melted at the pit. Then he's gone with a rustle of mikan trees as you held out a basket for Nami to delicately place her mikans in; apparently, she'd managed to catch the attention of some peach vendor with her sweet tangerines and swindled the poor man out of his money for a basket.

The streets are lined with lively hums and a strumming of odd instruments, music escapes through every crevice of a worn-down building as Luffy jumps from stall to stall, drooling over the goods before you're beckoning him back with his lunchbox and a promise of meat after you finish this errand for Nami. On your way to the stall, you hear faint chattering that doesn't interest you but Luffy straightened up beside you and turns to stare at the people as they argue on who had managed to grow the biggest peach this year.

You sigh, grabbing hold of Luffy's collar when he stops to stare at them and drag him off to the stall vendor who had fallen victim to Nami's schemes. The exchange is easy enough— give him the basket (ignore the fact that Nami had managed to make it look like it was overflowing by artfully bunching up a cloth on the bottom and filled gaps between the fruits with flowers) and make sure you've got the correct amount of money. It's when Luffy asks the stall vendor who has the biggest peach this year that things begin to go downhill.

Rather than answering Luffy's question, the man goes on a tangent about some kind of festival for a God and how the biggest peach will be the offering to said God this year— apparently, Shumi (the woman who owns the fabrics shops) had managed to get her hands on this, that, or the other to help her husband grow a peach large enough to bring doubt to the fact that Gyupuri had managed to grow the largest peach (again) this year.

Luffy insists on tracking them both down to help the people come to a decision as he wiped away the drool on his chin. Resigned, you managed to find Shumi first with her shop being the only one in town that sold fabrics and she denies you both permission to see the peach; Gyupuri, on the other hand, is more than happy to show you to the peach he grows. He takes you straight out of town, into the forest, and then up the mountain to where there's a clearing full of nothing but flesh coloured peaches.

As you listen to Gyupuri's story on how he was merely taking after his father to grow these strangely sized peaches, you have to keep Luffy in your hold so he doesn't go running to the giant peach and take a bite out of what could be for a God. Somehow though, he manages to get a handful of flat peaches when you weren't looking and when you attempt to apologise to Gyupuri, he doesn't seem to be fazed, shoving a few more peaches into your hand and telling you it's fine.

"So, who is this God anyway?" Luffy asks, his legs wrapped around your waist and chin hooked on your shoulder as he leaned back, satisfied with cheeks full of the peach you were holding in your hand. You turn to give him a look, but he merely stares at you back.

The people here must have made a unanimous decision to answer questions from the left side of the field because Gyupuri only tells you the name of this God when he drags you and Luffy up a hill to stare at a statue of this God carved out of generic stone.

To be polite, you call the statue pretty; Luffy feels no need to be polite, so he says it's not really. When you look at him to furrow your eyebrows at him, he's already looking at you.

When you're back on the ship, money handed to Nami, you think about that moment so much that it grows moss in your mind and vines burst through the crevices of the worn–down artifact you've made out his gaze to be. You throw up everything you manage to eat and feel hollow and worthy when you meet Luffy's eyes in Chopper's office again.

There's a chill that follows your days after that.

It's persistent and stubborn in a way that cruelly reminds you of Luffy. On a brighter side, you've got an excuse to be lazy in bed though it irks your bones not to have the weight of you walking thrumming up your body. You get visits from the Strawhats, get your food delivered to you, some of the crew shuffling into your room to keep you entertained with some card games and the likes— you get Luffy consistently making his way into your room and treating it as any other room on his Sunny. He comes in, always makes himself home on the bed, and talks about what he did today. At some point, it becomes less endearing and more annoying to be treated as though you were actually dying. (You hadn't told them for a reason.)

Four days after Chopper had resolutely punished you with bed rest, Luffy decides that he was going to start sleeping in your room. Apparently, your face had translated over what your head was thinking too quickly because he starts whining, saying that he wouldn't get to see you enough if he doesn't do this and, well, since you've always had a tender, raw, skinned soft spot for the boy, you end up saying yes.

He spends his first night telling you what he was going to spend tomorrow doing and you come to the realisation that every other sentence contains you. (Going to find more beetles to show you... Chopper told Sanji it'd be good to get more meat into your diet... Zoro accidentally cut snakes and ladders in half so Nami is giving me money to see if we can find one for you so we can play... Robin said there's a really pretty flower on this next island… For you… For you...) It’s all there laid bare and you cannot face it. You hide your face into the crook of your elbow and wretch out a cough. Luffy frowns but doesn't mention it. He talks himself into sleep and you lay awake to him, trying to keep yourself from blooming throughout the night so he doesn't wake up, cold and still.

When you're startled awake with misty embrace in a dream, you see that Luffy has gone.

What he has left is his straw hat and a mouthpiece of his greatness. The straw is rough against your fingers, resembling the thorns that grows along roses and you stare at it in your lap until you can feel the roughness in your throat— just when you think you need to get water, Sanji shows up with breakfast. You eye the cigarette in his lips and ignore the settling of the tray on your bedside table, watch the smoke fight the smell of scrambled eggs and bits of bacon to take over your room.

"We're at an island?"

Sanji walks around your bed, finding himself comfortable on the couch across the foot of your bed. "We docked early this morning," you watched his smoke rise, ash falling to the wooden floor of your room, waving and grasping hands up to God. Sanji keeps himself entertained by looking around your room, his foot pushing around odd leaves and petals on the floor before he nods over to the plate. "Eat." Then he's gone.

You stare at the tray, settling Luffy's straw hat aside, you shuffle to the end of your bed and take the fork in your hands— you look at the plate until you swear you can taste the eggs in your mouth and the slight bursts of saltiness that'll come from the bacon and you have to wash it down with the glass of water he's given you. You push it aside and opt to go back to sleep.

You dream of a still life on top of a hill, overlooking a dock as the Sunny pulls back out into the sea; you thrash but find every part of you rooted down to one spot, the wind picks up and you feel tangles of what could be hair or leaves hitting against a part of your body. You're still rooted despairingly in a garden of silks and duvets when you wake, Luffy had found himself unable to keep away from your breakfast but when you sit up and look a little closer, you see a pile of the diced bacon bits shoved off to the side as he shovelled eggs into his mouth.

Shattering free from the earth with a faltering cough broken into four, you shuffled yourself up and spit out a cluster of wisteria. At this point, you do not need to look at Luffy to know what his face looks like; he turned to face you, cheeks full and quickly finishing the eggs to shuffle closer to you on the bed with a book in his hands. "You left your book under the plate."

It's a hardback children's book, pulled out of Sunny's library and coloured a light blue that resembled the sky and broken apart by a sunflower in the middle and petals around it, the title curled around the sunflower. You know that the book was left in the library when you were having your episode. The cover is smooth to the touch as Luffy gives it to you and ends up knocking his shoulders against yours in his attempt to get closer; your eyes moved over to the tray of food and you think of Sanji, who'd grown up in the North Blue where this children's story was more popular amongst the romantic commonwealth.

He knows, you think, and it fills you with a dread that the wisteria blossoms feast upon delightfully; he knows, and he could tell everyone, the vines throb over your heart as Luffy opens the book over your lap and looks up, expectantly at you.

Myrsa was a pretty girl, enough so that praises sang for her ended up calling upon the scorn of love's Goddess. The depiction of her getting cursed is almost comical, stricken by lightning as she returns from a forest with a basket full of flowers and mushrooms. "What happens next? What happens next?" Luffy pushes his face closer to the book, tangling a rubbery leg with yours as he moves impossibly closer. "How does Myrsa beat up the God?"

It's the certainty he holds that Myrsa will beat up God that makes you laugh, it's the fact that she does not beat anything that makes you tremble, shaking coughs and petals out your throat. Luffy seems to think that the book is too excitable, trying to pry it away from you and saying that he can ask Robin to read it to him later so you should just rest. "Don't you want to know if Myrsa will beat up the God now?" You ask instead, knowing the answer will be yes.

Perhaps they were the wrong words to convince Luffy because when you're on the last page, Myrsa buried in a forgotten land and her love used as fertiliser for a field of sunflowers, he's threatening to beat up a God made up to exact revenge for Myrsa. It's a lot more cheerful than you had expected— all the characters drawn with round faces, small bodies, and black dots as eyes. It makes death seem redeemable.

After Luffy hauls himself out of your room, in search of the God had turned Myrsa into sunflowers, you force the bacon down your mouth and bring the tray out to Sanji. You linger in the kitchen, eyes watching him as he scrubbed the dishes and danced around the kitchen, no doubt knowing why you were there. He doesn't seem to want to be the one to approach the topic just based on the way he refused to stop even for a moment for the past fifteen minutes you've been there.

You know nothing about Sanji past the fact that he's blond, he's a cook, and he used to be a prince from North Blue's Germa Kingdom.

"You know Myrsa didn't die because she had hanahaki." Your hip meets the edge of an island, arms crossed over your chest as you watched Sanji finally slow to a halt, throwing a glance over at you. He takes his cigarette between two fingers, breathing in for a moment and then takes it out, holding it out to you. "What she was cursed with, wasn't ever meant to be able to kill her."

"I know."

Sanji takes the cigarette back after you shake your head, shrugging a little as he continued. "Myrsa died."

You laugh a little, "I read the book."

There's a point he's trying to make that's as foreign to you as the notion of a love that doesn't hurt but he turns a glance to you that almost reads like he's disappointed in you and it settles nicely against the vines choking you through. You straighten up, uncrossing your arms and his visible eye wanders back over the pots he has boiling on the stove. "You liked the ending?" The ending of the North Blue story was a two–page spread of a sunflower field, a planet of bright yellows and a dull light blue, clouds breaking apart overwhelming tones of sunny golds and drowning diamonds.

A tree split awkwardly in half due to the spine of the book, curved in shape and pinched in the middle until you held the pages at the edges and pulled to straighten in down. "It was pretty," a gentle breeze running through the leaves shedding from the tree, a shiver to the wooden flesh that split apart if looked at the right way by the right man. Myrsa was beautiful, even in a death she didn't pick treated her well.

How could you hope to live when she did not?

You find a lot of things pretty now; you wonder if that's the dead crawling in you that is beginning to appreciate the life around. Robin sat on the deck with a cup of cooling coffee on a table in front of her and a book in her hand, Nami stood between her rows of mikan trees, Zoro straining under the weights of his responsibilities, Brook with a violin to his shoulder. The sky drowned over the ocean as Luffy leaned his head against you on Sunny's figurehead, his voice a soft beat over the water rushing against the hull of the ship. He's talking about Shanks and his dream and your heart aches selfishly; his skin gulps down the orange light of the dawning sun and you resigned yourself to a death loving him.

You wonder if Luffy still thinks of his dead brother, your tongue slips against the bark of your gums, and you open your mouth without thinking. "Luffy," you hear spoken into the wind, "will you tell me about your brother?"

"Sabo?" He's clapping his feet together excitedly, turning from the sky to you with a large grin on his face, "he's a part of the Revelation Army— no, wait revocation? Revenge Army? Renovation Army! Wait— that's not right."

"No, the other one." A whisper haunts the wind, 'the dead one' written in its movement.

There's a certain hesitation to his words that brings you to the realisation that being loved by Luffy is a wonderful thing. He's never been one to be articulate with words, picking the simple ones that come to mind first without a moment's hesitation but strangely the simple–minded way served him well when it came to love. Love is not articulate either— it's one of the simplest things in the world— so when it's met with someone like Luffy, it blossoms into an art form of all things beautiful.

You regret have not meeting Luffy when Ace was around. Dancing around his features is a tender skip of tightness; his shoulders pulled up to his ears, head ducked down, lips awkward and tongue thick as he told you the story of being accepted to be Ace's brother. Hues of embers fluoresce, dripping down on Sunny's figurehead as you reached an arm around him; his words are stained in blood and adoration, strained and slow but Luffy persists, his love persists.

"You should've met him!" He finishes, turning to you with a light chuckle. "You would've loved him."

Your hand falls onto his shoulder, pulling him closer despite the crawl of vomit up your throat and you leaned your head against his straw hat. "Maybe I will."

Death is another thing you think is simple. It's as easy as slipping into Chopper's office to find him hunched over his desk, his hooves holding onto a pestle as he circled the butt around in a mortar. "Ah, you're here?" He glanced over his shoulder as you walked around him and settled onto one of the beds he has in his room. "Give me a second! I nearly have your medicine ready."

"Chopper," you think you've played this out in your head before, "I have hanahaki."

His arms slow down to a halt, his face dropping by several degrees; the previous petals that made up his hopeful and cheerful expression flutter to the floor, guided by the winds you'd altered with those four words.

"Hanahaki?" Chopper's words are slow as he settled the pestle down, "I thought— but it doesn't exist?"

"Funnily enough, it died off." You tell him with a little laugh. "As more people took to the seas and chased after the one piece, less people fell victim to hanahaki." The Chopper you've told this to before in your mind was definitely less devastated and surprised to be greeted by the fact that you have hanahaki.

He's stumbling over his words, trying to pick something to focus on first as his face was scrunched up, eyebrows furrowed, and lips open into disbelief. "How long have you known? Why didn't you tell me? You'll have the surgery, right? You can trust me; I'll definitely save you. When did it first start?" Your head is pounding with the incessant questions he spits at you, unable to answer any of them as any allowance for a response was filled in by another inquiry. Suddenly, he's pulling his mind to a stop as he turned back to you, solemn and sad and asks, "who is it?"

It's easy to tell how Luffy has touched people, Chopper makes note of the way your head tilts and you smile and it's obvious that there was no one else capable of calling upon your love.

"And the surgery?"

The look on your face, although foreign to you, tells him all he needs to know.

That doesn't stop him though, he keeps himself by your side and urges (pleads) you to have the surgery; his constant presence becomes a problem when he makes a point of forcing Luffy away from you. It's small at first, trying to distract Luffy with other things, claiming to want to be the one to watch over Luffy when you all dock so you're not given the chance, clinging onto your arms and demanding your attention when Luffy threatens to take it away from him. Then, when Luffy notices that he's been holding onto this flower for hours, fingers pinched around a sunflower stem to ask you how you get seeds from the flower to eat, and every time he's seen a speck of your colour from corners, Chopper shows up to drag you away or points a finger somewhere to shout about a meat mountain, he has a problem.

You notice it's about the meat mountain at first though.

He's slamming the door to Chopper's office after the fourth time, shouting, "Chopper! Where's the meat mountain you keep talking about?" He doesn't seem to care about the fact that Chopper is checking up on you as he stomps into the room, plopping himself down right next to you. Chopper pushes him away when your shoulders brush against each other and you're coughing out bloodied petals. His attention diverts when he hears the shaking of your cough, how you knock into him uncontrollably as your torso leans to meet your thighs, hands deep into the foam edge of the mattress. Petals splatter onto your shoes, clinging to the leather with saliva and re–painting the laces in a sickly red. Luffy’s touch is intrusive, a hand tightened on your thigh that burns your skin to ash and forces vines to splutter out your skin. They attack him, you reel yourself away from Luffy in hopes that they don’t reach him but in some disgusting way, they force themselves to new lengths to coil around his limbs. Spindling up and up and up and you can’t see his face anymore as a thick rope of vines in the shape of his hand reaches out for you, they keep moving up until you only see his hat— your back knocks against the wall. You sternly tell yourself this death is acceptable; the vines grow limp.

When you’ve calmed down enough, the first thing Luffy asks you is, “why aren’t you better yet?” And you feel as though you’re being scolded for some reason; your eyes flicker over to Chopper, fingers tangled together in front of your thighs from the corner of the room you’ve forced yourself into. When Luffy catches the wandering glances— as if you’re trying to keep him out of something— he treats you exactly how you’re acting. Like a criminal.

“Chopper?” It’s unnerving how his eyes are still on you, no trace of expression on his face, “out.”

“But—”

“Out.” Chopper throws you an unhelpful glance as he passes you to get to the door.

You’ve always had the wrong impression of Luffy— everyone that doesn’t know him has the same image; he’s a pirate that has taken down warlord after warlord, who has brought horrifying change and shifts the balance of authority wherever his feet take him. Hearing hushed whispers of him and his close affiliates in the lightened haze of booze, to distract from a tooth getting knocked out of place never does much for his image either. Though it wouldn’t be right to say that Luffy is wholly good either— he’s selfish. Selfish and impossibly kind and downright disgusting with the handling of his own needs; the sound of your name fizzing between his teeth has you startled, nodding your head back to him on the bed you’d left him at.

“You’re hiding something.” It’s not a question nor is it an accusation of any kind. It’s an observation. Luffy slides himself off the bed, his sandals comically slap against the floor of Chopper’s office, “tell me.” His hands fall onto your shoulders, one stays there and the other slides down. He treats your skin like an amusement park for his pleasure; his nails drag across the goosebumps of your bicep, pressing down on raised scars and then splashes into the palm of your hand, dragging ripples in the centre.

You hesitate, twisting your fingers together and pulling as if to attempt to dislodge the odd feeling that follows his fingertips. “Are you asking as a captain?” Despite how general expectations of Luffy remain pretty low to those who do know him, it’s also known that Luffy has a nerve in him that’s impossibly receptive to hurt. There’s a certain way to activate it and when it’s on, it doesn't quieten down until its idiot owner is pleased. Luffy scrunches his face up in an odd way, displeasured at your question as if he couldn’t believe you’d ask him something that hurtful, and his head tilts.

“Tell me.” You’re met with an unwavering stare, the hand on your shoulder tightens and there’s a hardness to it that you’ve never associated with your rubber captain— you can feel the bone in his fingers, stern and undeniable. Your eyes trace over the exposed, tanned skin of his bicep and you wish that you could force your vines through his skin to crawl into his chest and listen to the tremors that’ll run up your devil fruit from his beating heart for some kind of answer. There’s a sudden breath that’s available to you that isn’t tainted and clogged, trapped before it even meets your lungs, but it burns in a new way as you stare at Luffy, scared and terrified of a new life that’ll be forced upon you if you tell him what’s wrong with you.

You open your mouth with an excuse, but Luffy huffs and the words shrivel in your mouth, collapsing to a grain on your tongue and when you close your mouth, you taste dirt. “Luffy,” you beg, “I can’t— just, I’ll be fine.”

There’s a hint of some anger in his gaze before it turns into a haunting realisation, “Chopper knows, doesn’t he?” He pushes you aside, “I’ll just ask Chopper.”

There’s a ringing distant in your ears that chimes like the bell of the church from that place two islands ago, maybe three— you haven’t been too good with time recently. Sunny shakes like the earth as a body hits the pavement, you feel disgusting and heavy and an itch claws through your palms where Luffy’s hand has just been. You’re sure it’s Chopper he’s shaking an answer from but you hear Robin’s voice, calling for him to calm down and when that doesn’t work, Sanji cuts in. It all gets further and further away, you think about the planks of Sunny opening to welcome you back into that darkness from nights ago, you think about being choked by one of your vines, you think about the wisteria blooming whole in your lungs— you think and you think and think and suddenly, it’s all nothing. You’re dying, you think, that’s a fact, what else? Luffy is the reason. Or maybe you’re the reason.

“Luffy,” were you the one talking? “Luffy.” The voice comes again, stern and your eyebrows furrow with the same tension that the voice is carrying. “Thank you for being my captain.”

Not that it surprises you, Luffy punches you.

#op production: circa. 1864 #one piece #monkey d. luffy #one piece angst #one piece x you #one piece x reader #luffy oneshot #luffy angst #luffy x reader #luffy x y/n #luffy x you #op luffy #monkey d. luffy x reader #monkey d. luffy x you #op x reader #op angst #one piece one shot

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hanluex · 5 months ago

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♡ NO AIRPODS FOR YOU — RAFE CAMERON

bf!rafe x gn!reader | wc : 0.8k words | content : possible grammar and spelling mistakes, lowercase intended, established relationship, swearing, somewhat morbid threats, crack / comedy (?) | loki's lines — for the way i love this man, this drabble didn’t really include much of him 😭

“jj, i’m serious! you are always taking my things and leaving them everywhere!”

you grumbled in annoyance, tired of the blond troublemaker hijacking your items.

the two of you were having your daily banter outside the chateau, next to the hot tub, while the rest of the pogues and your boyfriend, rafe, sat on the patio, watching everything unfold.

“dude, calm the fuck down, jeez.” jj rolled his eyes, grabbing his bag off the tree stump next to him. “i literally didn’t take your airpods! i don’t have them! see!”

he turned his bag upside down over the hot tub, shaking it to show he had nothing inside.

you almost felt bad for blaming your missing airpods on jj when suddenly the small white box dropped from the bag, falling into the water.

“jj maybank!” you yelled out in shock, seeing the surprise on jj’s face as he quickly scrambled into the hot tub to retrieve your airpods that he happened to have. “you fucking asshole!”

john b, sarah, and pope stifled their laughter upon seeing what happened. while kie and rafe winced, knowing they were about to witness another showdown between you and jj.

“shit, shit!” jj grabbed your airpods from the hot tub floor, holding them up as water dripped out of it. “i really didn’t know it was in there, y/n. i swear! i wouldn’t have shaken it over the hot tub like that. i promise, i didn’t know.”

you narrowed your gaze at the blond, raising your finger angrily. “you better start running, maybank. because when i find you, i swear on my life, i will fucking skin you alive and feed you to the magpies alive so you can—” a surprised gasp left your lips as you were lifted off your feet.

as soon as you started threatening jj, rafe walked towards you, somewhat fearing for the blond’s life as he knew of your abilities to scare a person shitless with just your words.

without another word, rafe simply wrapped his arms around your hips and picked you up, throwing you over his shoulder as he walked you towards the chateau.

“we’ve talked about this before, darlin’.” he drawled. “you shouldn’t use that pretty mouth of yours to say such morbid shit.”

he sat you down on the patio, arms crossing over his chest as he looked at you. sarah and kie smiled teasingly as they made eye contact with you, knowing that all this was routine at this point.

john b and pope simply shook their heads, walking towards jj, who still stood in the middle of the hot tub, completely stunned by your threats — no matter how many different variations of them he heard.

“but you really can’t blame me!” you grumbled under your breath, avoiding eye contact with your boyfriend. “he’s the one who just dropped my airpods in water! if i could, i would burn him at stake and—”

“i’ll buy you new airpods.” rafe interjected, an amused look on his face. “only if you promise to never let another morbid threat ever leave your pretty lips. ‘kay, sweetheart?”

your eyes gleamed with excitement at getting new airpods. “i promise! not a single threat will ever escape me. i’m a new person now. threats are not my thing anymore, i solemnly swear.” you raised a hand as if you were taking an oath.

sarah and kie couldn’t help but burst out laughing at your antics, shaking their heads as they watched you become complete putty in rafe’s hands with just a few words.

just as you took a deep breath, about to let go of your old self, jj threw your airpod case at you, a teasing grin on his face as he noted the smile on your face.

this blondie really couldn’t stand seeing your smile.

“you dipshit! i swear, test me one more time and i swear i will kick–” you froze upon seeing rafe’s raised brows, an amused look in his eyes as if he challenged you to continue your sentence. “–away your worries and shower you with love because you are my bestest friend in the entire world.”

rafe snorted at your quick thinking. “great save, darlin’. i almost thought you were gonna break your promise there for a second, you know?” he smirked.

“as if i’d let jj ruin my only chance of getting new airpods.” you scoffed in disbelief and shook your head confidently. “because if that happened, i’d pop his eyes out of his head and make him eat them.”

the realization hit you as soon as the words left your lips, cursing under your breath. you covered your face with your hands, groaning in regret at your stupidity.

rafe bit back a laugh, nodding to himself. from the moment he made you make that promise, he knew it wouldn’t be long until you broke it.

“and … you broke your promise. great job holding back for the last three minutes. also, just so you know, no airpods for you.”

taglist : @maverick-wingman @loving-and-dreaming (to be added, please send a dm or ask!)

#[📝] works #rafe cameron x reader #rafe cameron fluff #obx rafe #rafe cameron imagines #obx imagines #rafe cameron scenarios #rafe x reader #rafe cameron drabbles #rafe cameron x y/n #obx drabbles #rafe cameron #outer banks #obx #rafe

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teatreeoilll · 10 months ago

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𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐄𝐥𝐞𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐨𝐫𝐲 (𝐇𝐢𝐠𝐮𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐚 𝐇𝐢𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐢 𝐱 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫)

˚• . ° . • . ° . • . ° . • . ° . • . ° . • . ° . • . ° . • . ° . • . ° . • . ° . • . ° . •

w/c - 1.2k content - fem!reader, hurt/comfort??, ain't nobody really gonna divorce this man i mean, please

• . ° . • . ° . • . ° . • . ° . • . ° . • . ° . • . ° . • . ° . • . ° . • . ° . • . ° .•

For the past two months, once every two weeks on Thursday afternoons, Higuruma Hiromi finds himself on a leather chair in the stifling offices of Hayashi Divorce Law. Hayashi himself is a walrus-looking man with nicotine-stained fingers and an expensive wristwatch, who leans back in his chair across the desk from Hiromi, unbuttons the top button of his Italian blazer, and eyes him with a grin that says “I’ll clean you out before you can finish saying divorce.”

The worst of it comes when you enter the room. You sit down by Hayashi, getting trapped by the scent of the walrus’s sour cologne and stacks of papers on the desk, without so much as a glance in Hiromi’s direction.

Hiromi’s throat dries up the more he sits and nods along to Hayashi’s words. He doesn’t remember much about equitable distribution from law school and he doesn’t care to - the only thing he does is tug on the wrinkled fabric of his suit and mutter variations of “Alright” and “You can have it”.

After the first meeting was over, and you left the room leaving nothing but a whiff of perfume that soon dissipated into nothing, Hayashi turned to him and furrowed his bushy brows “Didn’t your ex-wife say you’re a lawyer, Mr. Higuruma?”

To which Hiromi replied “My wife,” while clinging to the last unsigned papers that would make this statement false.

By the fourth meeting, he’s a wreck. While he sits and nods along, Hiromi notices you’re looking at him with a hint of concern in your eyes. As you open your mouth his mind fills with hope. He’d drop to his knees without a second thought for a “It’s a mistake” or just a simple “let's go home” - even though it’s your home now since he’d forfeited it a month ago.

But when you finally open your mouth, after two months of silence, the only words he hears are “What about the car?”

Hiromi looks up at you. The car. A navy blue Ford Sedan with it’s best years behind it much like himself. A Ford Sedan which only four years prior got its old wheels stuck in the wet sand of a Kanazawa beach, causing the both of you to stay the night in a nearby motel.

He remembered the motel room's crumbling ceiling and the scale models of ships that lined the shelves - below them a bed with azure sheets - which you collapsed on with a grumble, cursing out both the damn Sedan and its fucking wheels. All he could think of was how beautiful you looked with that shade of azure surrounding your skin - and by morning you’d called out his name so many times he forgot it had a meaning outside of your lips.

He’s silent for a long time. So long your confidence wavers a bit, “We can sell it,” you say, “take half of the money each.”

Hiromi awakes from his mind trip to Kanazawa and reality knocks the wind out of his lungs. “You can have it.”

“I mean it,” you shoot a look at Hayashi who looks displeased with the sudden display of kindness, “we can sell it and split the money.”

“You can have it.” Higuruma says, and Hayashi grins.

It’s already dark by the time Hiromi steps out in the hall. It takes him a few steps towards the elevator and a squint of his tired eyes to see you standing by it. It’s alright - he’ll just take the stairs.

“You don’t have to do that,” you tell him when he passes behind you. You press on the elevator button again. It’s been stuck on the 17th floor for a while now.

“It’s alright.” He assures, continuing his path to the stairwell.

“No. It’s not alright. Nothing’s been alright for a year now. Now wait here for the goddamn elevator.”

By the tone of your voice he knows he hasn’t got a choice. He takes his place next to you, shifting his gaze between the silver elevator doors, and the little screen that keeps showing “17” without any sign of movement.

A few minutes go by and there’s still no sign of the elevator. Your leg bounces on the marble floor and your lips purse before you let out a silent “What’s wrong with you?”

“Huh?” Hiromi blinks. The elevator doors ding open. The man and a woman inside move to make room for you, but you motion to them to go down, mouthing ‘we’ll take the next one’. The elevator closes.

“I said ‘what’s wrong with you.’” You turn to him. “I’m robbing you blind and you don’t say anything. So what the hell’s wrong with you?”

“You can have anything you want.” He says, noticing you haven’t pressed the button to call the elevator again.

“That’s not what I asked -”

“You can have anything you want,” He repeats. “Just don’t make me come and listen to which bits of our life you’d like to sell and which to split. Take what you like, really - Whatever’s left will remind me of you anyway and I don’t think I’ll be able to stand looking at it without -” Going insane, he wants to say, but when he sneaks a look at your face he swallows the words. The crease he got used to seeing between your eyebrows vanishes.

“I’m not making you come, you know.” You say, “If you signed it all away after the first meeting we wouldn’t have to go through this.”

He can’t make himself tear his gaze off of your face, “I know.” His fingers press down on the fabric of his suit, “But if I did that I wouldn’t have a reason to see you again.”

“Don’t say things like that.” You press the elevator button again. This time, it arrives in a flash. You step inside, and Hiromi follows. The doors slip shut.

“Then don’t divorce me.”

The floor numbers change, a rapid countdown - 12 - 11 - 10. Hiromi’s mind races. He really pushed it this time - and even though he doesn’t have anything left to lose - his heart plummets together with the elevator.

“Fine.”

“Huh?” Hiromi’s eyes stick to the numbers still, 10 - 9 - 8. He’s not sure if it’s an auditory hallucination that’s speaking.

“I said ‘fine.’”

His hand finds the emergency stop button and smashes it in. The elevator rattles before it halts.

“Did you say -”

“I won’t repeat it again.”

And you really don’t need to. A moment later you’re pressed between his warm body and the cool metal lining the elevator car. His kiss is a desperate one - open-mouthed, all teeth and tongue - with his hands running under your blouse to relish in the warmth of your skin. You tangle one hand in his hair while the other’s clinging to a fistful of his suit jacket.

Hiromi detaches from your mouth, only for a second - which is enough for you to catch a glimpse of his flushed face - before leaving a trail of gentle kisses down your neck. Unlike his lips, his hands aren’t gentle in the slightest, they hold a tight grip on your waist under your blouse - as if he’s afraid you’ll disappear the moment he releases it.

Hayashi stands by the elevator, looking at the screen that shows “7” without any sign of movement. His face grows tomato red. Two interns stand at the edge of the hall, looking at him.

“What’s he so pissed about it?” One asks.

“It’s the elevator.” The other motions to the number on the tiny screen, “If it’s stuck too long on one floor it means a couple’s doing it inside. If they’re doing it inside they’re not divorcing - and if they’re not divorcing Hayashi’s not getting paid.”

#higuruma x reader #higuruma hiromi x y/n #higuruma hiromi x reader #higuruma hiromi x you #higuruma x you #higuruma x y/n #higuruma hiromi #hiromi x reader #hiromi x you #hiromi x y/n #jjk hiromi x reader #jjk higuruma x reader #jjk x reader #jujutsu kaisen x reader #jjk x you #jujutsu kaisen x you #jjk x y/n

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hibiscusseaart · 3 months ago

Text

huge ass post with MadaTobi Babies

its finally done, its almost 1 am, I started at 7 pm

OK SO HERE THEY ARE

So a little lore and then I'm gonna introduce them.

As you may remember from my earlier post, Tobirama (they married when he was 19) after the marriage, decided to create a child to tie Madara to him and the village stronger just in case Madara would try to leave the village. He couldn't destroy the village if there's his kid running around, right?

So Tobirama started learning biology pretty early in their marriage + Itama (@oh-no-its-bird 's one) helped a lot too. Mito helped with the seals to make an incubator. Tobirama didn't want a surrogate mother just because he was afraid that Madara would get attached to the mother of his children and he didn’t want that (plus he's jealous but doesn't realise it 🤭).

He created some sort of very real transformation jutsu that would trick his body to think that he has ovaries and he'd get the eggs that way! But he couldn't keep uterus and ect for 9 months, plus this jutsu is HARD to keep on for very long periods of time. It's easier to make a few organs from chakra that could produce real eggs than a whole new system. Plus Tobirama really didn't want to get pregnant and he wasn't sure he wouldn't fuck up his own body. Tobirama, with as gray morale as his, could just scrap failed embryo and start anew. He can't do that with his own body.

Anyway, incubator it is!

At first he did all of that in secret, stealing Madara's sperm (that's... a thing now) for his first experiments while they had sex. (Tobirama fucking Madara real hard that he’d pass out after and then take samples) ANYWAY

So he announced about his plans when the first stable and pretty healthy embryo was ready.

The first baby, Motoko! The melanin quee. She got all of it. Nothing left for her brother or sister. Ofc she's not THAT dark skinned, but she is for an Uchiha who are mostly white as a paper in canon.

(Tobirama is 21 for reference)

Her name literally means "Experiment seed first". Tobirama named this project this way for secrecy if someone would overhear his talks with Itama and Mito. It’d be Uchiha clan head’s child so hush-hush.

The name meanings + kanji! Hope I got them right, I have no japanese knowledge

oh and there is flirting with past and time in general in this name so it might be Tobirama reminiscing his first timeline. Like Motoko didn't even EXIST before.

So when he presented the embryo to Madara and Hashirama, they were ecstatic of course.

Madara almost cried. Hashirama became a river of tears.

Madara never really hoped for his own children since he married Tobirama cuz, well, they're both men. Doesn't really work that way. But Tobirama made it work and Madara is in love all over again.

Madara refuses to leave their future baby for a long time, just looking at them in the incubator. But the baby doesn’t need much there so Tobirama makes him leave and live a life while they’re waiting when the kid is ready.

Oh and Madara was SO against the name that basically means “experiment seed 1”. But when Tobirama asked if he got smth better, he ran away to his compound and tried to find the PERFECT names. He got lost in so many variations and never really decided. So when the kid was “born” (Tobirama just… took her out of the incubator*) and medics checked her, Madara took her in his hands, started crying and while he was having “A moment” Tobirama wrote her name as Motoko, cuz they needed it for administration and Uchiha clan.

*come to think about it, wouldn’t it fuck up a kid a bit? i mean, children develop under pressure of their mother’s organs and they’re in tight position. maybe test tube kids don’t really like to be wrapped in cloth? as i know ppl do that with newborns to imitate feelings like they’re in the womb.

But this name also can be read as “Festival child” so its kinda cute? Madara def told her that that’s exactly what her name means. No seed 1.

Interesting thing, when Tobirama made the baby, he thought he’d make a boy first, a heir. But something went wrong and the kid developed to be a girl. Tobirama was confused why. But technically, the kid is a boy with XY chromosomes but bc of their development and being a genetic experiment something went wrong and they developed as a female (its a real thing btw).

In the long run it didn’t really matter except that Motoko can’t have her own kids bc of all hormonal weirdness. And I don’t think that Tobirama would figure all of that out. He’d think he made some mistake when choosing gender, but kid was born healthy after all. Ofc when they found out that Motoko can’t have kids Tobirama will blame himself, that he ruined his daughter’s life. But she’s would be ok, she had her little siblings growing up and other clan kids so she’s done babysitting.

Okay for her personality! I think she’s kinda like Shisui? Very happy kid, spoiled rotten by her uncles (Hashirama and Izuna compete who is THE BEST uncle) and Tou-san (Madara). Btw Tobirama refuses to be called Kaa-san or any motherly terms. He’s barely holding a kunai in his pockets when Madara calls him wife.

But she’s also very Uchiha with temper and protectiveness. She was trained to be very much Uchiha cuz she’s the future clan head so her jutsu’s are strongly fire natured. Oh and her secondary nature is eath! She took it from the Senju side :)

Good sensor, but not as strong as her other siblings. Have really good chakra reserves and vicious on the battlefield.

Surprisingly looks really like Madara and Izuna’s mom. Her face is all that. Has soft dark hair and soft features. Considered to be very beautiful among Uchihas.

Oh and as you can see, I wrote that she has the Mangekyo. She got it when she was around 14. She was already really strong and cuz of her family, she got cocky. So, you ask me, who died? I think it’d be her female teammate (maybe from Hatake clan? idk I take suggestions) who she was in love with.

So yeah, she got a reality check. Because she got Mangekyo, Tobirama didn’t want her baby to lose her sight, so he improved his own seals that helped him with his albinism. Seals improve his sight and protect from the sun. So he drew Motoko tattoos on her face, like his. Years later it’d be a new feature of the main line.

But before that, when Motoko is 12 and Tobirama is 29, after 8 years of research (and possibly sealing/killing Black Zetsu in the meantime) he decided to try to make another kid. He still wanted a boy.

And he was successful. Meet Akemori! The Music King

The name was suggested by Hashirama. It means “red forest”. Red eyes, plus he sensed that the kid has a bit of mokuton!

But on the downside, Akemori was born an albino. Tobirama himself was really lucky, cuz he had a strong health and I hc that he still has healing abilities, but not as strong as Hashirama’s. But it still helped him in his childhood.

Not for Akemori tho. He was a sickly child, almost blind and burned on the sun easily. Tobirama had to put seals on him when he was about 3 years old. But even then his eyesight was still poor. Seals can’t fix everything.

Tobirama, once again, feels guilty that he didn’t notice any mistakes when he was creating the child.

And being born almost blind in Uchiha clan of all people wasn’t really nice. Though he is still clan head’s child and has a whole bunch of very powerful adults to protect him. Plus his older sister who loves him very much and wants to protect him from any harm.

But because of health issues Akemori was never really trained in shinobi arts. Well, he was trained (his fathers are literally… them) just that he could protect himself, but no one expected him to go on missions or even become a shinobi at all. Uchiha elders treated him as a potential political marriage pawn (even though Madara and Tobirama would never let them do that). Akemori caught on that and never had the motivation to become a shinobi at all. He was offended and said that he’d NEVER become a shinobi.

Madara was a little mad at that, cuz they’re SHINOBI clan, what the hell. But he shut up the second Tobirama sent him The Look. Tobirama was ok with Akemori’s wishes, like his twin and himself are shinobi by necessity, but they finds more joy in research.

Akemori was trained in Mokuton by Hashirama of course, even though Senju elders bitched about him selling clan secrets to Uchiha. But Hokage does what he wants.

Akemori’s mokuton isn’t as strong as Hashirama’s, plus he never really wanted to fight. But he was good with plants so he joined Itama-oji in his research a lot! Especially since Hashirama is busy with Hokage stuff, Itama was delighted to get a new helper.

Akemori is also a really good sensor because, like Tobirama, he had to compensate his bad eyesight. Basically, Akemori is a very Tobirama’s kid.

Surprisingly, he awakened the Sharingan! He was 6 and some foreign ninja (prob Kumo) thought it’d be cool to steal a kid with the Sharingan. Because of his naturally red eyes Akemori got stolen. Ofc when Tobirama felt his kid out of Konoha bonds, he sounded the alarm in the whole Uchiha clan to check on their kids whereabouts and was first to chase the kidnappers.

Kumo nin were killed by a very mad Tobirama and bc of the stress Akemori awakened the Sharingan. It wasn’t much of a use for him, since he’s not a shinobi. But at least Uchihas acknowledge him as a fellow Uchiha and not just Tobirama’s carbon copy.

(btw noone outside immediate family actually KNOWS where the kids coming from. They don't see any pregnant women in the main line house or anyone in the clan with the same time who gave birth these days. Tobirama himself or god forbid Madara aren't ever seen pregnant. Where the fuck kids are coming from? Do they just spawn in the house or what)

(they basically do spawn)

Sharingan helps Akemori to actually see! At least he could see something and could read. But stll, its not really strong, cuz not trained enough.

Basically Akemori is a perfect mix between Senju and Uchiha with Sharingan and Mokuton, but he was nerfed by albinism.

Being almost blind boy who can navigate only with his sensing, doesn’t gives him much hobbies. Ofc he helps Itama and he studies plants and medicine a lot with him, but he still needs a hobby. Books don’t work for him, any type of handicrafts too cuz he can’t just use Sharingan all the time, his head hurts and sometimes he doesn't want to remember a whole book perfectly. He’s also not very interested in training as a hobby.

So in his tweens while Itama and he were traveling (with Uchiha escort (prob Motoko) just in case) to the near town for some medicine and plants, he noticed (heard) a group of musicians and he fell in love.

Itama immediately bought him an instrument (maybe Biwa?).

And now the second son of Uchiha Madara became a musician! Isn’t it fun. Elders are furious.

Madara was baffled but “You do you, son. When you learn, show us? Oh and maybe you can copy someone else’s playing, but be discreet. They may not like that you’d try to copy their music. Shinobi don’t really like when we copy their jutsus too”

With age he learned to play several instruments (I take suggestions on which ones). Some people even thought that he’s trained to become geisha (he's not, he's just a pretty boy who plays music for fun).

When he grow old enough, Itama started to give him weed for inspiration and to relax. Akemori is prone to quiet anxiety attacks after he was kidnapped.

Okay, the final kid. She was born 4 years later after Akemori.

Nari! The pout queen

Madara finally got to name his kid. Her name means “Calm, harmonic village”. Yeah he decided to name his kid after a village. It's still better than Konohamaru

And she’s the final kid, because Tobirama finally got it and produced a “normal” healthy kid. Plus he's not sure how many kids (3) and students (another 4 and Kagami) he can actually handle.

She has very Uchiha coloring, but Tobirama’s facial features. She also inherited his stare.

She’s the baby of the family, but she grew up slightly strict and serious cuz she stayed a lot with Tobirama, cuz he decided he won’t spend another maternity leave out of the Tower. The first two times were a disaster when he came back.

Tobirama left on maternity leaves just cuz he needed to monitor his kids health, especially Akemori’s. Idk about Konoha maternity leaves, but they should be really short, since well shinobi are needed all year long and they can’t wait for mother-shinobi to spend a whole year on that. Though on the other side, mothers need time to recover or they won’t be able to perform good on their missions (plus they probably have a milk smell lol). Who knows, maybe Tobirama was the one who drafted a law about at least one year maternity leave. He got very popular among kunoichi (can you believe that I just remembered that this word exists)

Nari is really like Izuna, but got her temper under control. Maybe think of teen Kakashi but without dead fathers and angst. But also brat.

Her chakra is water nature and she has 0 affinity with fire. Still she did produce great fireball as their traditions dictated, even though it took her many trials and errors. After that she decided that she hates traditions like that. Got really rebellious in her teens, about 13 and even tried to challenge her sister (25) for the clan head position. She didn’t win ofc and was bitter about it.

Also because her sister and brother both have seals, she always dreamed of the same, cuz as a baby she thought that it’s something special for their family. But Tobirama doesn’t think she needs them cuz her sight is perfect and her skin is pale, but it doesn’t burn like Akemori’s.

It triggered interest for seals in general cuz “FINE if you won’t give me seals, I’ll just make them myself!”

Tobirama was completely okay with it. He always strives to encourage kids when they want to learn something new. So he sicked her at Mito. Though his aunt was quite happy to teach her niece sealing art.

also idk why i write evil near her. she's just a brat. though she has the potential to become Azula ish

And that’s it!

I will write more about them later cuz im tired. I have some other ideas I wanna expand. Like Tobirama introducing his pups to his Hatake aunt (did i tell you that i LOVE Hatakes?),

Oh and fun little sketches close ups for a treat

i love this Hashirama with the kids, ugh he's so father

if you have any questions you can send them to my ask box!

#madatobi #hibiscusseaart mdtb time travel marriage au #my art #senju tobirama #madara uchiha #madatobi babies #mdtb #time travel #tbmd #tobimada #naruto #btw Izuna was so baffled when Tobirama made one kid #what’s to say about others. Though he loves them very much cuz they’re still aniki’s kids.#pls be nice i spend a lot of time on this post #tobirama and itama are twins #@oh-no-its-bird 's weed itama

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