#i think its a hippie but its hard to tell when youre watching a show on a 10 year old vcr rip

[adeliasecretfiles]

OH MY GOD???

[gyusfavlibra]

THIS IS MY WORK! PLEASE DO NOT COPY OR REPOST ON OTHER SITES/APPS!!!!

Warnings: +18, smut, fingering, hand job, sex in bathroom, language, jealousy, fighting, arguing.

Y/n and Sarah sat quietly on Kie's bed as they waited for Kiara to stop degrading the lavender dress she wore while standing in her large mirror. Mrs. Carrera coming through the door to make sure the girls were all dressed. "This is disgusting."

"I know it's just horrible."

"I'm asking you guys to just relax and go to a fun party."

"I look like a bourgeoisie pig."

"I think you look beautiful," y/n said while shrugging at Kie. She just gave a smile back to her, still hating the look no matter what compliments were given.

"Will you please not worry about socioeconomic injustice for one night?"

"Mom, people not three miles from her have no power, no running water, and we're going to Midsummers."

"That's so tone deaf."

"Y/n," the mother scolded at her niece. "Do you know how hard we had to work to get into the Island club?"

"Yeah, mom. How could I forget? You had to grovel for, like, ten years--"

"Twelve years, and we also had to cough up a huge chunk of dough-"

"To keep up with the Joneses-"

"No, so you had the same experiences that I had as a child."

"But weren't parents as teens out, like partying, getting drunk, making out in the backseats of their cars at drive in movies," the cousin listed while putting her things in its bag. "Getting pregnant."

"That doesn't sound fun," Sarah added.

"Do you girls even know what the Island club is?"

"A factory farm."

"For debutantes," Y/n raised her eyebrows.

"It's a nice place, with nice people where you can do fun stuff."

"With out-of-touch rich people, while the island sinks slowly into the ocean."

"Water filling the poor's destructive lungs while the wealthy ones get away on million dollar boats."

Sarah sat quietly laughing on the comfy blanketed mattress. Mr. Cerrera sighed, saying one last thing before walking out. "Okay, I want you to put on your party face, girls, if you want to live."

"Did your mom just threaten to kill us?"

"Maybe. I think so," she nods as she turned around to the duo, fixing the flower crown that sat on her cousin's head. "You nervous to see Rafe."

"Why did you have to bring that up?"

"I was curious. I know it's only been two days, but-"

"Hey, he broke up with me. So if he wants to talk, that's in his duty. Not mine. I did nothing wrong."

Sarah got off the bed, swinging on it's pole. "Except flirt with JJ, or so he says."

"I was not...flirting with JJ. He has a crush on Kiara. I'd never."

"But Rafe doesn't know that."

°°°°

*flashback*

"What if she doesn't like it?"

"She'll love it. She's hippie."

Y/n and JJ sat on John B's porch, smoking a blunt. The girl was trying to help him do something nice for Kiara so JJ could ask her out without feeling weird. He's liked her for the longest and he was finally ready to tell her how she feels.

"Alright, now practice what you're gonna say."

Just as Y/n finished saying the statement, her own boyfriend, Rafe Cameron showed up. Standing behind them listening in.

"Okay, uh, hey I have to tell you something...uh important," the blonde began speaking, using hand gestures because of his nerves. "I really really like you. Like not like friends like, but I have feelings, uhm, strong feelings for you. Because you're like super hot, andnyou're like a really cool chick. So I was wondering if maybe you'd wanna...go out with me."

"Yes, t-"

"What the hell!"

The manly unknown voice shocked them both, their figures jumping at the sound because they thought they were alone.

"Rafe, what're you doing here?"

Y/n asked confusedly as she stood from the steps. The Kook just scoffed and walked back out. Ignoring her question. She shared a glance with JJ before going to follow after him.

"Hey! Where you going? What's wrong?"

"A pogue!? Y/n, seriously?!"

"What're you talking about?"

"You're cheating on me with a pogue?" He shouted. Y/n scrunched her eyebrows, looking at the unnecessary upset individual.

"What do you mean cheating? I'm not cheating on you. We were just talking."

"Bullshit. That's bullshit! I heard it all."

"Rafe, it's not like that. Jj was just-"

"I should've known better. I should've known," he fumed. His right foot swung to kick the dirt near his truck that he was so very close to getting into.

"Known what?"

"I should've never trusted a pogue. I knew something like this was gonna happen. You were just gonna throw me away like Sarah did, Topper. Right? Huh?"

"You sound ridiculous. I was never throwing you away. I was helping him out."

"Yeah, while you're at it. Might as well help sleep with him too."

Y/n scoffed, taking a step back from the angered boy who's brain had just functioned what he said. Part of him regretted it very much. But the other part thought you deserved it because of his cheating accusation.

He opened his vehicle door. Stepping one foot inside. "We're done."

The girl just laughed with held tears reaching for the openess. She turned around to head back inside as Rafe just drove off.

°°°°

"Hey, no tearing up today. Go to this stupid thing and show him that his little cheating accusation act didn't hurt you at all. You're stronger than that."

"Thanks, Kie."

The girls finished up their last minute touches. That includes sweeping their dresses with roller for no hair, any makeup redos, or hair finishes. The ride to the country club was quiet. Well, y/n was quiet.

This would be her first time seeing Rafe since their break up a three days ago. They've been doing everything in their mighty to avoid each other. And it definitely worked. But like her friend told her, she wasn't gonna get worked up. Letting Rafe see her weak was like telling him he was right about everything. But he wasn't.

"Jesus, Kook land."

"I forgot how packed this thing is every year."

"Well, let's go. I gotta walk out with my family."

The Cameron family walked out with their heads high and the Kook crowd cheered for each one. Y/n kept her eyes gazed to Kiara since they were in the middle of a conversation. Not caring if that family came in or not. That excludes Sarah.

Rafe watched from his spot by his dad, as they exited to outside. Breath hitched when he saw Y/n and her dress. It was a dark toned red, had tulle, and a revealing  chest opening.

A red flower crown on her head, complimenting her beautiful down hair. She looked amazing and hot to Rafe. He had to clear his throat before excusing himself.

"Hey," the red dresses girl heard from beside her as a hand landed on her lower back. She removed it before her eyes retracted to theirs. Kie just pursed her lips before leaving to hangout with Sarah. Y/n internally screaming that she left her there.

"What do you want?"

"Uh, you look nice."

"Okay. Thanks. You don't too. What do you want?"

"Nothing. Just saying hi."

"Bye."

"Wait, wait, wait. Why are you mad at me? Shouldn't I be the mad one here?"

"Why?"

"Because of what you did," he said with furrowed eyebrows. Y/n shrugged.

"I didn't do anything."

"Do- do you not remember what happened on the cut three days ago? The fight."

"You slut shaming me and accusing me of cheating with JJ. That? Yeah, I remember that."

"Accused? I heard you."

"Heard what exactly?"

"JJ, was telling you he liked you and thought you were a cool hippie chick, which you are not. You're not hippie. And then he asked you out and you said yes. As soon as I walked in."

Y/n stared at him blankly. Before bursting out laughing. A few guests behind them staring with a look that showed they weren't used to loud talkers or laugher. "Oh my god. You thought? Jesus that's absolutely hilarious."

"What is?"

"That you think- you think that JJ was confessing feelings to me. Whew that's rich."

"I heard it, Y/n."

"He wasn't confessing anything to me you shit head. He was practicing for when he asked out Kiara."

Rafe was confused. Majorly. Inside and out. "But she-"

"He likes Kiara. And she's my cousin. You think I'd really hurt anyone like that? How low of me do you think? Have fun at this party."

Y/n walked off to go look for her disappeared friends. Not wanting to spend another second in a spot with someone who was so rude over something he knew nothing about. Just assumed. Never asked.

As she walked down the corridors of the porch that many people stood on drinking, a hand grabbed her shoulder, turning her around. Her eyes fixated on the blonde in a black tux and a bow tie.

"Holy shit, JJ. You scared me. What're you doing here?" She asked as she hugged him.

"Well, Sarah somehow convinced her dad to let me in tonight to hangout with Kie."

"Have you seen her?"

"I was just looking for her myself. C'mon. She's probably inside."

She grabbed his hand. Pulling him inside. They found Kie just minutes later with Pope. He was working the grill with his dad. Sarah was getting raided by Topper about their own stupid shit. Y/n decided to go get herself a drink and maybe find someone to dance with.

The straw rested on her lips as she stood against the porch railing. Gazing over all the people who say around laughing, probably bragging about their money, summer vacations, their older kids getting into a good college. Typical kook things.

Her eyes focused on a specific couple talking off to the side. Her eyes burning a whole in the back of Rafe's head as he tried to flirt up a storm with some Kook she didn't know whatsoever.

Her body was fuming. Was Rafe really gonna sit in front of her and flirt with a whole other girl that isn't her. Just a few days after their breakup. It's like he's trying to play victim. And she's had it.

"Hey, Sancho. Lassie."

The brunette Rafe was talking up a storm to laughed. "I'm sorry who are you?"

"Oh, you gonna introduce me to your side piece here?"

"Would you stop? We're just talking."

"Talking? Yeah, okay," Y/n laughed. The girl just looked at her dazed. "Hi, I'm his girlfriend. Y/n. And you, yeah you're excused."

Rafe was truly enjoying this scene. Internally rooting for Y/n. He wasn't gonna object to that fact that she called herself his girlfriend. Because now that he knew the truth, it changed his perspective.

"Who do you think you are?"

"I already told you. Wh- can you not hear correctly?"

"He said he was single so, why-"

"He lied. So, you can go away now- Rafe. Let's go. We need to talk."

"What're you his mother now?" The rando questioned. Y/n turned to her and gripped her face.

"If you wanna keep these teeth, then I suggest you stop talking. Go find somebody else's boyfriend to mack on."

She dragged Rafe by his hand into the upstairs private bathroom. Locking the door behind her. "What're you doing?"

"Just having a friendly conversation. There a problem?"

"You were flirting, Rafe. That was flirting," she paced. Hand against her for head.

"Like you're any better. You lied to me."

"I've never lied about anything."

"You said JJ liked Kiara."

"Yeah. He does."

"Then why is he holding your hand, hugging you, and leaving inside with you instead of the girl he supposedly likes," Rafe argued. Gripping onto the large counter.

"Rafe, I grabbed his hand and brought him inside to find Kiara. And I hugged him because I was happy for my friend. God, Rafe how many times do I have to tell you that I am not cheating on you."

"It's kind of hard to believe that shit when I keep seeing things with my own eyes."

"Then stop assuming and come ask me. Jesus, do you not trust me or something. Because I trust you. Anytime I hear that you're at a party doing lines with hot blonde's next to you, I brush it off because I know you'd never. Why can't you just do that for me."

Rafe stood from his seat. Pinching the bridge of nose. The guilty conscience grazed through his mind as he listened to her words. He had issues with trust and with others, but he knew it wasn't a reason to take it out on the only person who's loved him for him.

"I'm sorry. Okay? I'm sorry. You're right. I should trust you. Just like you trust me. I'll work on it. I promise."

"Don't promise me that. Just show me that you love me just as much."

The words clicked. He did love her. And he cared about her. More than anyone in this world. And he wanted to show her. In the most physical way possible.

"C'mere."

"Why?"

"Just c'mere," he repeated as he grabbed her by her waist, pulling her closer to him. She stumbled, but Rafe's grip kept her in place. He moved his face closer to hers, lips almost touching as they grazed against each other.

He used the hand placed on her waist to grip the fabric of her dress. Pulling it upwards. Her breath hitched as he hand snaked under the red tulle and right onto her now soaking core. His pointy finger swept across the waistband of her panties.

Y/n wasn't expecting this as the outcome from their miniature argument but she wasn't complaining. And neither was Rafe.

He pushed her underwear down as much as he could from their position, before going back to her walls and making circular motions. Rafe finally closer the space, kissing her lips practically roughly as he continued rubbing her.

He kept a firm hand on her waist to make sure she had a gripping support if he legs gave out, which they indeed will. The motions stopped as Y/n pulled her lips away from his. Rafe stared at her daring eyes, questioning if she wanted his to continue.

"Put them inside me," she whispered. The Cameron smirked before obliging to her demand. He stuck to fingers into her wet cunt. A soft moan escaped her lips as he did so. Pumping them in and out of her. Y/n rubbed her hand against the erection in his dress pants.

"You like that, yeah?"

She nodded as the locked her lips. Not being able to speak because knowing if she did, she let out a loud moan and even at this club would hear.

She unbuckled his pants, putting her handninside to grip his penis and pump it as he slipped his tongue into her mouth. The hand he held to her waist was now gripped on her neck, gently. Y/n clenched around his fingers. Feeling her high come close. "Dont stop."

Rafe began pumping faster just as Y/n did so. The teens were so horny that they were both already reaching their extent. Rafe's shaft twitched in her hand. "I'm cumming."

"Do it for me."

That's all it took for Y/n to finish. And Rafe too. His liquids filling her hands as they both let out moans due to their intense actions. In one swift motion, Rafe snaked a hand around Y/n's waist turning then so she was against the counter. Her pulled the straps of her dress of her shoulders, leaving kisses as he did so before connecting his lips to hers.

Her pulled his tuxedo jacket off him. Snapping the bowtie off as well. Y/n moaned at the tluchnof his hands on her breast. Massaging them in his hands over the fabric of her strapless bra.

Y/n unbuttoned the spots on his shirt before pulling it off his shoulders and onto the floor. Rafe stop his gripping motions and pulled down his pants and boxers. He sat her up on the counter. Her bare ass connecting to the coldness of the marble designed setting.

Rafe rubbed his tip against her fold once or twice before pushing himself into her. Not giving a warning, but Y/n loved the suddeness. Y/n let a moan into his next as he began thrusting his hips. The girl gripping her black painted nails into his back.

Rafe's eyes rolled to the back of his head. Enjoying the feelings of Y/n's cunt wrapped around him.

"You like that?"

"Yes, god yes."

Y/n sat up, wrapping her arms around his neck. Each moan and huff she exposed in his earn make his whole body shiver. Rafe let out a grunt before answering. She clenched her walls around his dick. The dirty blonde groaned slamming into her body. "Do it again."

She did so. Clenching around around the boy as he slammed into her again. This time, hitting the spot that made her whole body go insane. "Tell me I'm yours."

"You're mine."

A moan escaped her lips after he said what she had wanted. Her hand smacked down onto the edge of the sinks counter. Grilling onto it for dear life. "Tell me it again."

The feeling of her finishing was fastly approaching. As well as for Rafe. The moans she let out made his go over the edge as he fucked her hard. "Tell me, Rafe."

"You're fucking mine, ah-"

Each of them let out a loud moan as they finished. Covering each others mouths. There shouldn't be anyone upstairs but for precautions they covered either way.

Rafe's head fell forward onto her chest. Taking large breaths as y/n did too. "Shit, y/n."

The Cameron pulled out of her. Helping her get redressed and cleaned just after he did himself.

"You're still on the pill right?" He asked as he zipped his pants.

"Yeah. It's fine," she smiled up at his 6'4 figure. Rafe reached down to kiss her passionately.

"I love you, Y/n."

"I love you, too."

[theeyeofinfinity]

Hallowed Ground

I know you check these, but i don’t know how thoroughly... I’ll leave this for a couple days and if you’re meant to see it you will. If not you won’t. Either way it won’t be up long. I’ve come to enjoy these games of chance.

Theres so much that i want to say but at this point whats left unsaid? I’ve felt a lot more at ease the last few months. Whenever i feel myself becoming consumed by myself i sit outside and listen. I find my refuge in mother earth and she cradles me in her warmth and wisdom when i need to find guidance. Its what led me back to this place. I felt so happy finding it again. I felt like an explorer, a pioneer. None of those paths felt familiar and i took a lot of wrong turns and strayed off into the paths that were less travelled. But i found it. I had that rock face engraved into my mind and there were still remnants of its use as a camp site. I swear that even that old pan that was lying around was the same one i had picked up when we first found it. That was the first time i felt like i was living my calling. The thrill of the unknown. The satisfaction of finding what was lost. It also showed me a glimpse of myself. The paths I’ve taken are less that travelled. Theres really no guide for my road because most don’t know it exists. Yet, i find my mark at the end. I end up where i want to be. Where i need to be. When i got there i felt happy, i sat there and imagined you holding my hand while i droned on about the good things. I felt like you were there. But the you that loved me. The you that i loved. 16-17 year old us. I went back in time and told you about all the stuff we’d go on to do and the fun we’d have together. The fights and the intensity that would come. I pictured you looking at me all puzzled saying “yeah right, what could we possibly have to fight about?!” To which I’d counter with “surprisingly, a lot.” I’d tell you about all the things I’ve learned, about myself, and life. The theories and life lessons. Watching you laugh at me, giving me a playful punch and cuddling me. A grin on your face from ear to ear because nothing else mattered but the moments we were sharing. I had come to clear my mind and had found you. I felt this urge to find this place. I saved it on here so i wouldnt forget it and set up a stone pile to mark it incase i became if it was the same spot. What i didn’t count on was you still looking here. You came to find it and left me a piece of you. I’d come back on the weekends to keep talking. The walk to and from imagining you holding arm and leaning your head on my shoulder. At some point my arm started getting warmer than the rest of me and it genuinely felt like you were there. I’d have a smile on my face the whole time i was there and the last time i went i truly felt like a ghost. I felt like i was haunting that place. I’d sit out there whittling while i imagined what we’d be up to if we hadnt both died. Those two were so in love. I slowly started separating myself from him. The guy who belonged with her. It eventually became more of me watching us than me being part of it. I got into the habit of bringing flowers I’d find to leave on the stone guarded heart. I knew how much you loved flowers. A fun loving hippie girl isnt complete without flowers. They were hard to find too. All the more satisfying when i did so i could go back and show you. Youd wear them behind your ear and we’d keep on talking. It seems a little crazy when you think about it. Have i lost my mind? Doubt it. I’m not more sane now than i was before. At least this way i don’t have to feel anything but joy. I’d finish my time by hugging the tree that bears our initials. It felt like i was hugging you sometimes. As i finished up my totem, i left it there to have some sort of physical embodiment of it all. We have to say goodbye at some point tho don’t we? Whether its after a few days, months, years, or when we die. We say goodbye eventually. That much is inevitable. Its a shame ours was so soon. i feel better dealing with it this way. But my soul will never forget. It can’t because it sits out there playing with you as if none of this had ever happened. I’ll probably tend to the site for a while, during the weekends so i can enjoy the river before it gets cold. I can rest easy knowing part of me is out there with you.

39.05739° N, 77.32746° W

[arcadejohn127-9]

Sorry the post reached its word limit so I have to add the undateables in a different post! Happy valentine's everyone!!!

Pt.1 = Demon brother's

UNDATEABLES↓

Diavolo:

Mini golf, it was both surprising and unsurprising

He was able to ditch the suit he wore normally to more comfortable clothes

Enjoying the strange golf courses Wincing everytime he shot one too far and completely lost the ball

You were getting better scores than him and he a better player!

"will you guide me on this one? I think I'm going to hit it too hard again."

You smiled, happily moving behind him and putting your hands on his

You helped him control his swing and to no surprise it was a perfect shot

"perhaps I should guide you every turn, you're a pro."

"if it isn't (Y/N), who's this? I don't think we've met."

"go away, I don't have time for you."

Dia immediately recognised your ex, hiding his annoyance behind a smile and shook their hand

"I'm their boyfriend, we're currently on a date, so if you'll excuse us."

He tried to usher you both along but your ex grabbed his hand

"let's not end this so soon, I was close with them, don't you want to share stories?"

"No-"

"I'll go first, as an ex wanting to help you out! Don't bring up a single issue to them, they won't help you at all, they always told me I was overreacting."

You groaned, clutching your golf club tightly

"because you were, threatening to hit me over not wanting to hear you complain about your side girls not texting you back is an overreaction."

"always spinning stories! This what I mean, you just need to be prepared to be in that kind of relationship with them, they'd only Respond to yelling."

"you're the only one who would listen when yelled to and would just yell at me because you could, you're a horrible person and you should leave right now-"

You wanted to hit them with your golf club, fuming at how they talked about you

"they've been very good to me and I've never had to raise my voice at them, perhaps you were the issue."

His voice was still so kind that your ex almost didn't realize what he said

"such a shame they've already gotten to you - oh we need to move, watch me play okay?"

They winked at the demon, strutting off to their new golf site

"let's play but I won't bother you to guide me."

"it's no bother-"

Dia took a strong strike, the ball flying off and hit your ex in the head

But another flying golf ball was already being sent their way

"Sorry! You just look like target with seeing how much you open for mouth, here I'll give you my club as an apology."

He 'accidentally' did it too hard and sent his club flying in their direction, they just missed it

They screamed at him for being crazy but he just kept his sweet smile

"so you're actually a great shot on your own."

"guilty, I just wanted you to hold me."

Barbatos:

Aquarium, it feels fitting seeing he's also a serpent demon .

You held his gloved hand, pointing out towards the colourful fish that caught your fancy

"there are remarkable species I'm sure you've yet to have seen in the Devildom, Perhaps I'll take you to see them."

"really??!! I'd love to!"

He admired the dolphins that swam across the open space around the hallway, watching the way it delved back into the water

"this is embarassing, is that really you?!"

"oh no...."

"it is! When I found you disappeared I thought it was because of me! But here you are and with you're- whoever this is."

"I'm the boyfriend."

He nudged you away from your ex, his mood already sour

"boyfriend?! Already...? What a shame you moved on so quickly, I've been thinking about you."

They caressed the side of your cheek but you just slapped their hand away

"yeah right, leave us alone - I don't want to be around you."

"don't even think about insulting them, are you really going to bring up the past as a way to hurt them just because they've refused you?"

"h-huh-?! What are you- I wouldn't do such a thing!"

"oh...? So you weren't thinking of bringing up the time they use to 'love' you Touching them and was just 'shy' about it? Knowing it'll get a rise because you know that they didn't like your touch."

"how did you-?!"

"I know alot about you and what you plan to do, it would best you step away now before I set your fate in stone - swimming with the fishes."

He towered over them, their back pressing against the tank glass,

their eyes glancing to the fishes behind them

They let out a nervous laugh

"right....well I'll be going then, goodbye (Y/N)."

Solomon:

A fire works show - meant you could spend the mornings doing whatever you want but the night?

That's when you two went Speeding

You kept your scarf close to your face, it being a chilly night

You kept your hand intertwined with your boyfriend's, in awe at the fireworks

"They're not very close are they? i could make fireworks."

He shook his star wand, you were thankful it looked like a toy

"Sol, you can't just use magic when there's a small inconvenience."

"fireworks-!"

Soon enough fireworks came bursting out closer to where you two stood, still a safe distance away but seeing as you didn't get the best spot in the crowd

It was much cooler to see them closer

"No way!!! You're back in town?! I thought you left for good!"

It was almost hard to hear your ex over the fireworks

Solomon gave them the side eye as he clutched your hand

"I know have devastated you were after the breakup, seriously didn't think you'd disappear, I bet that you died or something!"

"do you have nothing better to do?! I'm trying to enjoy the fireworks with my boyfriend."

"Him?! You going for witchy hippies?! Wooow your taste has just stayed shit, hasn't it?! This is why you need me back, I actually gave you good taste!"

"You made me listen to country rap that all sung about beating women - I've upgraded!"

You shuffled closest to Solomon, ignoring your ex as they kept trying to pester you

"Can you stop being such a- are you kidding me?! You're never going to change- don't - ignore- you stupid bi-"

The more they began to yell the more powerful fireworks Solomon set off

Almost completely blocking out you exes screams

It got to the point there had to be a fireworks break due to how hectic it got

"this is dumb, I'm leaving." They huffed as you continued to ignore them

"how fortunate, I'm sure I could of started a fire from all that."

"like a fire would of stopped you, thanks for blocking them out."

He kissed your cheek, smiling

"my pleasure~"

Simeon:

He took you ice skating, unfortunately you were terrible at it whilst he was fine

You were both wrapped up warm as he helped you skate across the rink

Your legs wobbled and you slid to face your almost fell over

"hahah, you're adorable but don't worry, you'll be a master of it by the end of tonight."

You slowly got the hang of it, gripping his arm whilst he just smiled, enjoying being so close to you

"i think I got it-! Wait no no no don't let go!"

Just as your small victory gave you a big smile it immediately dropped when your ex skidded over

"What are you odds of you being here, I see you still can't skate."

"so what? You want to bother me about skating? Why not go back to your girlfriend and leave me alone."

They just laughed

"so insistent, if that's what you want~"

They skated past you, bumping into you and you immediately went flying into the ice

Happy you kept your hands close to your face as another skater zoomed by

Simeon hastily helped you back up, dusting Ice off you

"Let's sit down, maybe they won't be here for long."

He helped you off the ice and you both sat on a bench, he got you a warm drink before sitting down

But it wasn't over, your ex coming to where you were sitting still in the rink

"sorry about that, it was a total accident I swear - tell me (Y/N), what made you come here? I bet you were stalking my page again, wanted to see me?"

"no, I just wanted to have a date with my boyfriend."

"It would be best you left us alone, your presence clearly isn't wanted."

"neither was your opinion, from past lover to new, watch yourself because they will destory your heart and your life - nothing will ever be comfortable or happy with them."

"that is untrue-"

"really? Is it? We all know they just like to use people for their kindness and leave them because of a stupid mistake - don't you understand what parties do to people? Huh?! I'm glad I got with her at that party because she's a better partner than you ever were."

You pounded the side of your first to the table, glaring at them with tears in your eyes

"you cheated on me and blames it on alcohol, when I forgave you - it only made you feel happy to keep going back to her! Don't talk to me like you're the victim-!"

Simeon, rubbed your back, frowning at your ex

Your ex just scoffed, skating off

Your boyfriend suddenly stood up and began to march over to the rink

You tried to ask what he was doing but he didn't respond, quickly skating over to your ex

When he caught up he skidded so far they got covered in ice, grabbed your ex with a smile

And suddenly, you didn't see what happened but your ex screamed, darting off the Ice trying to get away from Simeon

When he finally came back he took a sip of your drink and smiled

"let's head back on the ice, I still have to make you a pro."

[aggressive-positivity-network]

Okay, so you said I could send an ask for headcanons about the childhoods of some specific merc(s)... I think I would really like to read your headcanons about Soldier’s and Engineer’s childhood :)

Thanks in advance and I hope your well.

Ooooh…I’ve been waiting for this! And thank you for being specific and not just saying “the rest of them.” Sometimes I get overwhelmed with nine specific mercs to write for. Your specifics are much appreciated.

****************

Soldier:

Soldier doesn’t talk very much about his childhood - whether it’s because something happened or he just doesn’t remember it, no one can tell. It’s nowhere in his file, either…he refused to do anything except tell fantastic tales of a fictional youth.

However, in a rare streak of almost lucidity, he spouted off the entirety of his younger years, much to the team’s surprise. Usually, if anyone asked directly, he changed the subject.

But now he described everything in vivid detail. And, with a bit of research from Miss Pauling, everything fell into place.

Apparently he had been born in a small military town in Georgia. His father was overseas, leaving he and his mother alone in their small yellow house.

In order to make ends meet, his mother worked at a nearby factory, mostly leaving Soldier to fend for himself and the house.

“Can you be a big, strong soldier like daddy for me?”

Soldier would always agree, finding his own food, his own entertainment, and his own friends. No matter what happened, he never bothered his mom. If anything, his job was to protect her.

That’s why, when his stomach started hurting and his arms and legs ached, he said nothing about it.

When he forgot the chores he was supposed to do and even the names of his friends, he didn’t bring it up.

When he felt tired all the time and some days could barely get out of bed, he just chalked it up to laziness like his mother did.

It turns out the factory they were next to was polluting the water next to the house with dangerous amounts of lead, which soon overcame Soldier’s immune system of steel.

He could barely remember anything anymore, and he became more and more distraught every day. Sometimes he would forget where he was and run outside, then get lost in the woods, only coming back once he remembered where he was supposed to be.

Soldier began to wear one of his father’s old helmets after his mom commented on his red eyes and the dark circles around them. He didn’t want to worry her. Besides, it helped bring back a few memories if he ever got lost again.

Finally, it got to the point where he didn’t even remember his mother, or his promise to her. He began to wander farther and farther away from home.

One day, he didn’t come back at all.

Out in the world with not a single memory to his name, Soldier wandered far and wide. He usually slept in barns and old, abandoned houses, cut off from most people.

Occasionally, he would find a family that wanted to “raise him as their own,” only to turn him away after finding him too difficult to care for.

He had frequent nightmares, ate little due to his unresolved stomach issues, and could barely walk ten feet without forgetting where he was going.

If he accidentally wandered into the same house twice, he would be chased out with either a broom or a gun - usually the latter.

He became “the demon child” in some counties, and “g*psy kid” in others, due to his long, unkempt hair, hidden eyes, and odd habits.

It even got to the point where Soldier couldn’t sleep on anyone’s property because he would be actively fought off like a wolf or a bear.

His only pleasure was an old movie theater that, as he recovered from his lead poisoning, remembered the location of and frequently snuck into.

The only thing that played were romance movies - which, like many children, Soldier hated - and war movies, which he watched over and over again with starving eyes.

Because of these movies, a single memory from his mother’s house came to him. A woman, tall and muscular from hard labor, giving him a shiny badge to hold, asking him to be a strong soldier like his father.

And thus began his life-long dream of becoming a military officer.

He trained according to what he knew from the films…which was mostly running, doing jumping jacks, and occasionally rolling around in the mud.

This only served to distance him further from his fellow human beings, but he didn’t care. Soldier had a mission, and he was going to do it well.

But the biggest change was his hair.

He had started cutting it off with sharpened rocks, but he was always saving up coins he found for a “proper army cut.”

Finally, he had quite the collection in a dirty mason jar, and marched into the barber shop in his town to ask for a haircut.

The manager was appalled, and at first refused, but Soldier stood his ground.

“Civilian, I’ll have you know that by denying a soldier with a haircut, you are denying America one of its best fighters! I can’t curdle the enemy’s blood looking like a hippie!”

After a short yelling match that, of course, Soldier won, the manager decided it would be in his best interest to comply.

He walked out of that shop with no hair on his head, but a huge grin on his face. Next stop, the ranks.

Soldier went from draft office to draft office, applying for and being denied entrance to the army for his obvious lack of mental stability.

This is when the personal retelling ended, since Soldier became very upset by the memory of his recruitment failures, but Miss Pauling concluded that he just bounced from state to state until Mann Co. found him, quote, “sitting in an alleyway, eating army draft paperwork while sobbing uncontrollably.”

Engineer:

Engineer also never really talks about his childhood, but both Medic and Spy (Spy knows everything about everyone on the team) know that’s for a good reason.

He grew up in a trailer community near an almost ghost town in Texas.

His father was an abusive car mechanic with a mean streak a mile wide and a shop full of failed inventions. His mother wasn’t any better - she was bitter and reclusive, only really coming out of her room to pick a fight with her husband.

However, what Engie lacked in family, he more than made up for in friends.

He had a rag-tag, Rugrats-esque team of pals from all walks of life: Rhapsody, the daughter of a struggling porn star; Tom, the son of two farmers wiped out by blight; Cici, an adopted girl that could barely walk into her trailer without a black eye and a string of slurs; Quinn, the nervous child of a single mother that serves as guidance to the other kids; And Fred, who didn’t seem to have any family, but had become a greaser big brother to all of them.

Together, they explored the desert near the trailer park, pooled their resources to feed and support each other, and used their individual strengths to get through each day.

Engineer, whom everyone affectionately called “Big Dell,” snuck parts from his dad’s workshop for his own creations.

By the time he was twelve, he could make a small, running engine for the soapbox cars his friends frequently raced.

No toy, piece of clothing, glasses, or tool was out of his line of expertise.

One day, though, upon finding that some of his parts were missing, Engineer’s dad gave him a terrible beating that broke a few of his fingers and left a huge gash near his eye.

Since then, he refused to fix, make, or even touch a tool.

He wouldn’t tell anyone what happened, but they could make a pretty good guess, since they knew where the scraps and parts had come from.

The whole group was furious with Engineer’s dad - their Big Dell was funny, smart, and was more loving than every family member they had combined. Even Quinn was red in the face.

They wanted to break into his dad’s workshop and destroy all of his inventions, just to teach him a lesson, but they knew Engineer would take the fall for it.

Instead, they rummaged through trash cans, searched their toy chests, and looked under their trailers to find things Engineer could use.

They waited until his birthday to unveil the massive pile of supplies they had stowed away.

Engineer immediately dropped to his knees and began to cry, and everyone else dogpiled him for a huge hug.

As the creme de la creme, they gave him a pair of welding goggles - the same welding goggles he wears to this day, having modified them so they still fit his growing body.

With his healed fingers and renewed spirit, he made each of them a gift: a toy car for Rhapsody, a skull ring for Fred, a full set of candle wax crayons for Cici, a chewable necklace for Quinn so they wouldn’t chew on their collar, and a mini-planter for Tom.

But Engineer was given the greatest gift - confidence in his own abilities and that he can be and was appreciated for more than his services.

This gave him the drive to build bigger and better things, which his friends happily assisted in creating.

Engie’s best memories are with that motley crew of scrawny, beaten-up kids.

But, as he became a teenager, the abuse grew worse by the day.

He was often kept in his dad’s garage to fix cars in sweltering heat and with nothing to show for his work except threats of what would happen if a customer complained.

His mother finally grew bitter enough to pick on him, wondering aloud and pointedly if she had made a mistake by having him, then immediately contradict herself by wailing in his arms about how she’s the most awful mother in the world, and how she would be gone soon, and then nobody would have to deal with her anymore.

Engie grew more and more distant from his friends as they either moved out, ran away, or, in Rhapsody’s case, died.

He thought of just shutting the garage door and turning on a car a couple times, but he would always return to his memories of the hidden cave of goodies his friends had collected or the many inventions they had helped him build.

It just wasn’t worth it.

On a night when his depression and self-doubt was especially bad, he decided to build a personal invention for the first time in years - a small, robotic chicken made out of bent gears and empty oil cans.

He worked on it for a few weeks, but made the mistake of leaving it on a work table once it was finished.

Engie came to work the next morning with his dad ready to chew him out. But, before any finger could be lifted against his son, he was interrupted by a sweet older couple that was having their tires replaced.

“Now, Ethan, ain’t that just the cutest thing you’ve ever seen in your life?”

“Hm?”

“That there chicken statue over there! It looks like it could very well get up and start peckin’ for worms, don’tcha think?”

Engie looked at the couple, then at his dad, then at his chicken. He slowly lifted it from the table and turned the key.

It started to slowly lean forward, then took a few steps on it’s long, spring-loaded legs. The neck went down, and the chicken’s rusty beak began to scrape at the pavement.

Now he had the husband’s attention.

“Didja build that yourself, son, or did your daddy help ya?”

Engineer looked at his dad for a split second before answering.

“My own sweat ‘n blood, sir. My daddy says I should stop wastin’ time on ugly thing-a-ma-jigs an’ put my hands to somethin’ worth doin’.”

The man smiled. “Well, this ‘ugly thing-a-ma-jig’ shows real skill. We could use somebody like you, once we train you up a bit.”

“Now hold on a damn - !” his father interjected, but was silenced with a cold stare.

“We’ll put ya through a state-of-the-art school, then put ya straight inta the work force. You can build whatever you like…and you’ll have a lot better materials than rusty tin. Whaddaya say, son?”

Engineer just nodded, and the man grabbed his hand and shook it.

“We’ll keep in touch.”

Engineer left that trailer park at age seventeen, leaving his fuming father and drunken mother behind.

He only stopped to visit Rhapsody’s grave before embarking on his new life.

There is still a stone plate with a message carved into it next to the headstone. If you brush off the leaves and dig out the moss, you can see Engie’s parting words:

“A friendship with you and the rest of the gang is the greatest thing I ever built. -Big Dell”

[keilemlucent]

the sex party: i

 (r18+)

shinsou hitoshi x reader

ao3

part 1 (you’re here!)   ||    part 2

word count: ~7.1k

You and Hitoshi definitely have a thing for each other, but who would've thought that a 'sex party' would produce a confession?

warnings: 

COLLEGE AU! characters are explicitly aged up to college students as early 20 year olds!

not really a sex party, mutual pining, friends to lovers, confessions, reader is canonically bi, brief momo x reader, light dom/sub, spanking, references to drug use, smoking (cigarettes, salem trademarked fic thing), drinking, and smut

there is a scene where there is attempted sexual assault. it is marked with ***** before and after. 

---------

this.... this piece is a monster. i’ve been wrestling with it for a month and now its here for y’all. the second part is already out ;^)) thank you to @keiqos for being an absolute king and beta reader this monster. enjoy y’all!!

||||||||||||||||| 

You never imagined that you would be where you were. It was under weird circumstances, but god if you weren’t going to try and enjoy it. 

The party you found yourself attending was lit with flashing lights and rainbow projections. There were two different DJs on various floors of the suburban mansion. They bumped out remixed club music, making the walls hum and thrum and bodies writhe and sweat. One of the kitchen counters was loaded with bottles and bottles of hard liquor and mixers. 

You were quickly making a third mixie. Just a vodka soda, boringly. There were certainly more fun options, but you weren’t exactly sure how to feel about this party just yet. You were having trouble discerning whether this was a ‘gin and tonic millennial’ party or a ‘jungle juice in an old cooler’ party. 

Denki and Jiro had convinced nearly two car-fulls of your friends to roll up. It sounded so fun, so wild!

  “Yo! Our friends from the EDM scene are throwing a SEX party! You all should come! It’s at a mansion across town!”

 Their ‘friends’ were two middle-aged, white hippies who did a lot of molly for their age. 

Nonetheless, you found yourself in a massive, odd house and managed to lose your friends fairly quickly (and accidentally). All the rooms stayed dimly lit and loud. You could hardly keep track of your own two feet. 

Someone pressed you into the counter, a hand grazing against your barely covered ass. 

You whipped around, watching as a couple walked away, one of them giving incredibly loud bedroom eyes.

Oh yeah, the ‘sex party’ part.

It wasn’t a kink party, or really a sex party at all. Sex was encouraged and provided for, but not necessary. The mansion’s massive attic was where most of the sex acts were happening with its five beds, three bondage rigs, a wall of toys of all types, condoms, lube, whippits, and even Viagra in decorative bowls. You had yet to venture up, but Denki had already spammed the group chat about it.

(It had been the first place he went upon arriving.)

You took your drink down the stairs (the place had three fucking basements) and turned into a small hallway that led outside.

It was cold, but your somewhat drunk body hardly minded. The sobering bite of wind gave a nice reprieve from the thrumming heat inside. 

You immediately spotted Hitoshi leaning on a retaining wall, half a cigarette hanging from his lips. His face lit up, when he saw you, waving you over.

 You smiled back at him, glad to find a friend and best of all Hitoshi. 

You two were quite close. 

In addition to both being sociology majors and having a lot of overlap when it came to classes, you’d known each other since freshman year and only grew closer with time. You’d spent many nights at his house off-campus, sipping cup after cup of black coffee in the midst of a paper writing and studying. You also definitely didn’t ever have close calls of affection though, no. 

No. 

Never.

You and Hitoshi were obviously just friends.

...

“Wild party, huh?” Hitoshi quirked an eyebrow, nodding to the house. He offered you a cigarette that you took greedily. 

You placed it between your lips, Hitoshi ever so casually leaning forward to light it with his signature clipper. He’d nabbed it off some ‘milf’ at the casino which he and Denki had gone to for bingo ‘for the meme’ freshmen year. 

You let out a puff, “Thank you! And yes, very wild. I’m on drink three and I still feel overwhelmed.”

Hitoshi sipped his own, nodding in agreement, “I know Jiro and Denki know some wild people from the scene, but this seems over the top.”

“It is kind of fun? But definitely an ‘I need to be a little more fucked up’ kind of fun,” You remarked.

You set down your cigarette on the cement wall, attempting to boost yourself up onto it. You nearly had it, except you really didn’t and slipped back down. You anxiously turned around, checking your dress over for any sort of tears. 

Hitoshi set down his own cigarette, standing in front of you. You looked up at him and felt very small and very horny all of a sudden. It certainly wasn’t an abnormal set of feelings, given how the two of you teased each other relentlessly. 

“Need some help there?” He chuckled at your struggle as you frowned up at him.

“If you insist.” You expected him to offer a hand to stabilize yourself on but no, Hitoshi’s big hands were suddenly grabbing at your waist, lifting you on the walls with little effort.

You swore you almost felt him squeeze you before letting go.

“You’re welcome,” Hitoshi just smirked as he returned to his spot, taking a deep drag to look at you through lowered lids.

You glared, but in good fun. 

At that moment, a few other of your friends poured from the door to the patio. They were all shouting, jarring and drunk, and very happy to see the two of you.

You unconsciously shifted a bit closer to Hitoshi on the wall, bare leg just barely touching his shoulder.

You didn’t notice it, but Hitoshi definitely leaned into you too. 

“(Y/N)! Hitoshi!” Momo addressed you firmly as Denki and Hanta snickered behind her. “You both are smarter than to smoke, aren’t you?”

“Nope,” You popped the word from your mouth to take another drag.

“We’re drunk, give it a rest,” Hitoshi waved his hand dismissively. You were both her friends, but she did have a pole up her ass sometimes. 

Almost to emphasize the point, Jiro withdrew her own pack and started offering to other people. 

As the ever-important smoking ritual continued, you couldn’t help but shiver from the now-painful gusts of wind. You abruptly hopped off of the wall, only wobbling a little on your heels as you hit the ground. Hitoshi moved to steady you, a firm hand on your shoulder.

(God, you wanted to melt into him.)

See, Hitoshi had been smart enough to wear a warm outfit. A pair of black jeans, a form-fitting, well-cut sweater, and a jacket which was slung over his arm. 

He offered it to you, eyebrow raised, “If you’re cold, you’re welcome to this. I’m gonna stash it when I get inside anyways.”

You shook your head, pushing back on his arm, feeling the hard muscle beneath. You almost shivered. “No, no it’s okay. I’m gonna head back in.”

“Mind if I tag along then?” Hitoshi asked, eyes scanning around you. He seemed well aware that there were some creeps at this party.

Most of the time, you wouldn’t feel great about needing some tall, beefy dude to casually stand around as a deterrent. But, honestly? You appreciated it immensely. 

“Right this way, smokestack,” You just had to give him shit, it was part of your cute dynamic right?

(It made the incessant flirting easier to hide.)

...

You couldn’t help but continually notice how Hitoshi had bulked up. He had been hitting the gym a lot and working on himself physically. 

God, did it show. 

His body had been a bit lanky and wiry before, but he’d filled out so well. With his cute sweater on, you could see how the fabric stretched tight around his biceps and his chest. You couldn’t look at his forearms in any setting or risk drooling all over yourself.

Not that you would mind drooling for Hitoshi, but you’d prefer it to be in a different context. 

(But, you’d never admit that.)

 The two of you wordlessly winded through the house, finding a somewhat less feral living room in one of the basements to relax in. Most everyone occupying the space was just mingling, save for a few couples making out. It seemed manageable. You settled for a spot on the carpet against a wall.

Hitoshi raised an eyebrow, “Really?”

“I feel way safer sitting on a floor than a couch here,” You couldn’t help smiling when you saw him snuff out his own amusement. 

You both watched as a couple was grinding and audibly moaning on one of the aforementioned couches. Hitoshi relented, “Point taken.”

He slid down the wall next to you, shoulder to shoulder, drinks in hand.

You both sat in silence for a minute, just taking the sounds and sights of the party. People-watching could have been an olympic sport at this shindig. 

“Hey,” Hitoshi broke the mild tension, tapping your upper thigh over your dress. “I’m not saying this to be a creep, really, I promise. But, I really like your dress.”

You turned your body slightly, towards him. Oh, now you needed to give him shit— “Oh, how complementary. Not creepy at all. Just my very sweet, male friend telling me how I look pretty in my party dress.”

Hitoshi leaned closer to you, mirroring you by lying half on his side. His breath and heat curled over your face and neck, “Oh, (Y/N), now you’re putting words in my mouth. I said that I like your dress. Because it’s one of Mei’s designs, right?”

You looked down, heat filling your cheeks. 

Fuck your drunk mouth.

“Though,” Oh, Hitoshi was closer. He had leaned to your ear, steadying a hand on your shoulder. “I do think you’re pretty in this dress. I’d use a different word instead of pretty though.”

“Like?” 

“Mmmm, gorgeous,” He hummed too casually. “As strong of a word as I can use without being a creep, right?”

“‘Toshi,” You groan, swatting his hand away. “You’re a bastard, you know that?”

He just beamed at you, “I’ve been told.”

Hitoshi drew back and met your eyes.

Once more, you mirrored each other. Both of you bore comically dilated pupils, wet lips, flushed faces and slight tremors in your hands.

“You know, I think I referred to you as ‘sweet’ too...” You raised an eyebrow at him. You couldn’t help the way your gaze flickered down to his lips. It flitted back up, “But, that’s nothing, right?”

Hitoshi bit his lip, taking a big breath. 

Suddenly, he was standing up. 

“Hey, wait—” You stammered, standing as well. “I’m sorry, that was a lot. I only meant to tease.”

“No, no, it’s okay,” Hitoshi put his hands in front of himself, creating distance between the two of you. “Same. You know I can’t help giving you trouble, (Y/N).”

Ouch.

You cracked a smile, rubbing your arms, “Of course, yeah. Silly friend shit.”

Hitoshi was quick to redirect, pointing a thumb out of the room, “I’ve gotta hang this somewhere. See you in a bit, or you can come with me if you like?”

“Nah, I’ll wander,” You patted his shoulder, waltzing off your churning gut by cutting in front of him. “Take it easy, smokestack.”

You couldn’t hear if he replied.

 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

 You did, in fact, wander. With meandering feet, you moved through room after room. You poured yourself another drink, but it’s not nearly as strong. Your run-in with Hitoshi soured your mood. While not fully ruined, you were definitely feeling weirder than you wanted to be.

Hitoshi and you obviously had energy, yeah. But the most either of you had acted on it was ‘seemingly meaningless’ flirting. It was always followed up with a ‘no homo’ or ‘aha, got ‘ya!’, yet it always felt real in the moment. You weren’t a dumbass. You had caught Hitoshi eyeing you a few (read: many) different times. There were so many close calls and contacts between the two of you.

 There was one time while you were making a box of mac and cheese in Hitoshi’s kitchen circa 2 AM. You had borrowed one of his shirts and a pair of joggers to sleep in, a common act of yours. He walked past you for a glass of water, keeping the cup under the tap until it ran over just to look you up and down. 

His gaze wasn’t prying or predatory, not even close. You trusted Hitoshi with your life and you knew that he wouldn’t ever breach boundaries like that. Rather, he regarded you in a way that made him lose time, something soft and gooey in his eyes. That time, it wasn’t lustful attention. It just felt-

(Like the way lovers look at one and other, enamored.)

 Another time was during one of his performances. The house venue had been dimly lit and musty as fuck, but that didn’t distract Hitoshi. As Jiro’s vocals shook the basement, you met eyes with Hitoshi as he slammed on guitar. His gaze always returned to you throughout the whole set. When you had teased him about it, he claimed that looking at you helped keep his stage fright in check.

The reasoning didn’t calm the butterflies in your stomach. 

 There was another particularly telling occurrence where you had fallen asleep on Hitoshi’s floor in the middle of working on your final paper for your theory class the semester prior. He returned from his smoke break to find you curled up under the first piece of cloth you could find (which, in that case, was one of his hoodies). You weren’t fully asleep, and you certainly weren’t when Hitoshi hefted you into his arms, laying you so gently down on his bed and covering you with a throw blanket. 

Oh, god, the sweetness, like something you’d never known when you felt his hand on your face, smoothing over your cheekbones, your nose, and then your lips. His gentle voice, deep with the late-night, “You work too hard, you know.”

He nestled next on the floor next to the bed, leaving you to sleep undisturbed the rest of the night. 

There were, of course, many more instances of Hitoshi’s way-too-kind kindness, and a pile of your own moments as well. 

It was all damning, but relatively ignored. Your friendship was more important than any stupid feelings the two of you had right? You refused to acknowledge your own feelings beyond semi-sexual remarks, jabs, and jests. You couldn’t jeopardize your friendship, right?

...

 You eventually found yourself at the foot of the stairs that led to the attic. Even from the landing, you could hear various rhythmic slaps, moans, and laughter. 

You ascended the stairs and took in the sight greeting you.

There were various bondage rigs that were free-standing, all occupied at the moment you entered. Loops for ropes and chains to be tied to drilled into the ceiling. Flogs, whips, canes, and other implements hung heavy on one of the walls.

The room was lit dimly, yet nothing seemed obscured. A few rainbow lights illuminated the sweaty bodies about the room. Not everyone was having full-on sex. Most people were actually clothed. A lot of folks it seemed were just there spectating. 

Speaking of most people, your party peers were all lounging on the beds. Sans, Hitoshi, of course, standing and laughing with Kaminari. 

The lot saw you enter and flagged you down. You walked past a heavily-tattooed man getting pegged by a woman in a tutu and a crowd of costumed partygoers doing whippits which were being handed out by a man in an elaborate steampunk top hat. A cute girl with silver hair was strung up in a nearby rig, moaning as a leather-clad man fingerfucked her. 

You stood next to Hitoshi, bumping into his arm with your own, “Didn’t take you for a voyeur.” 

He snorted, joshing you back, “I have my moments.”

“I didn’t take you for a prude, (Y/N)!” Denki snickered, bringing attention to you. “You looked like you’d seen a ghost when you walked in here.”

“Denki, please,” You rolled your eyes. “I walked into a room made for very wild sex acts. That’s a very different expression than the one you’re describing.”

That made him snort and fall back onto the bed, along with Hanta and Mina. 

(How high were they? That wasn’t even a good joke.)

Hitoshi chuckled himself, something low and lumbering.

(Don’t think about how hot that is.)

“This makes me think back to that night, in sophomore year,” Hanta spoke as he sat up. “You know, kink night.”

“Oh, yeah! I forget about that,” Denki turned towards you and Hitoshi and raised his eyebrows.

You flushed.

Momo, innocently, asked, “Kink night?”

Hitoshi cleared his throat, looking anywhere but you.

“Oh yeah!” Mina piped up, hugging Momo’s shoulders from behind. Jiro was sitting in Momo’s lap, head on her tits. “We made a drinking game of exposing our weird sex acts and kinks to each other.”

You laughed uncomfortably at the memory, avoiding the very embarrassing and horny part that involved you, “That was the day that we found Mineta was into scat.”

“Oh wow,” Jiro gawked. “That was before Mineta got canceled?”

“Oh, yeah. He got wasted and ran off after that. Thank god.” Denki snickered. “You know what else happened that night?”

“Denki, please, stop talking.” It was Hitoshi placing a firm hand on the other’s shoulder. 

Denki just looked at the two of you like he was some old god of mischievous, turning back to the girls, “That’s when we all found out about Hitoshi and (Y/N)’s suuuuuuuuuper compatible kinks. Like, scary compatible.”

“They got sooooo awkward about it too!” Mina snickered, looking at your and Hitoshi with matchmaker in her eyes. 

You would kick her ass for it later. In that moment, you tried to keep a somewhat neutral expression as you recalled the night in question.

Sure, it was a year or two back and you and Hitoshi weren’t half as close back then. 

The lot of you had been sitting on the floor of Denki and Hitoshi’s dorm, passing around a bottle of cheap, flavored vodka in a fucked up, horny game of truth or dare.

...

  “You’re next (Y/N)!” Mina passed the bottle to you and fell back against the carpet. You swallowed thickly, swishing the content liquor inside. “Dare or sex act?”

The rules of the game were simple. Choosing ‘dare’ meant that someone else chose a sexually-charged dare for you and ‘sex act’ meant exposing either a kink or a sex act you’d done. It was a roulette either way, but one option gave you far more control than the other. 

After the last dare consisting of Denki giving a very messy lap dance to Eijiro, and you weren’t really in the mindset to repeat anything even close to that.

“Sex act,” You sighed in defeat.

Denki snickered in the corner, “Spill it!”

Hanta cheered you on as you bit your lip in thought.

The liquor swirling in your stomach was affecting your inhibitions, and with one shy, half-glance to Hitoshi, you spoke up. 

“I have a spanking kink, what of it.”

You drowned out Hitoshi’s red cheeks and the cheers of your friends with a deep chug from the bottle.

The bottle was passed to Hitoshi as you asked the question, “Dare or sex act?”

Jiro giggled from the bed, sipping at her own drink as well. 

“Sex act,” Hitoshi groaned, rolling his eyes at Denki, but you all knew he loved what was going on.

“Reveal yourself, Hitoshi! What gets your rocks off!?” Mina shouted drunkenly as she rolled on the floor. You made a mental note to cut her off from having any more of the trashy vodka.  

Hitoshi gave you a fleeting, but very horny look before regarding the group.

There was a twitch in your lip that made you think his smirk was all for you.

“I love pulling a cute girl over my lap and turning her ass purple while she’s begging for more.”

As everyone around you jeered and cheered, you gulped. 

And so did Hitoshi.

...

 “Yeah!” Hanta fell back. “That was so fucking funny. Like, all night it was all (Y/N) being like ‘I’m a filthy masochist!’ and Hitoshi being like ‘I’m a filthy sadist!’”

“Hanta, for the love of god,” You interrupted him, face burning with a fucked up mix of shame and lust. Hitoshi was mirroring you. “Why do you have to bring that up?”

“Oh, dude, because whenever we talk about it, you and Hitoshi get so embarrassed, it’s hilarious!” Hanta fucking giggled and reached for his drink. 

“Are we gonna talk about how you and Denki both like fisting—” You give them a taste of their own medicine, watching the two of them choke and gawk. To the side, Momo whispered to Jiro, eyeing you. 

Hitoshi barked out a laugh, losing some tension in his shoulders. You met his eye for a moment, only to see the jewelish purple taken up by his blackened pupils.

Fuck.

Momo spoke up, brow furrowed, “Can I request something a bit odd of you, (Y/N)? It’s perfectly okay if you say no.”

“Shoot,” You reply, sipping your beverage. 

Momo bit her lip, eyes going to Jiro, then you, “Can I try spanking you?”

Everyone collectively choked. You especially.

You took another nervous sip of your drink, avoiding eye contact with the group.

You regained composure, refusing to look at Hitoshi, but letting the fucked up idea brew and brew in your mind, “Uh, I mean, is Jiro okay with it?”

“Oh yeah, totally,” Jiro nodded, kissing her girlfriend’s jaw. “Pain isn't my thing, at all, and she’s always wanted to try it. And hey, if you’re a ‘filthy masochist’, be my guest.”

But, would you be her guest?

Your drunken mind considered.

It was the most acceptable setting for it to happen in public. You really did like getting spanked and were a raging masochist, so it would, at the very least, be fun for you. A little humiliating, but that was also a turn on. You’d also get to indulge Momo, who was dating Jiro, but they both seemed perfectly okay with a bit of platonic pain play, so what was the real harm? 

Your gaze flickered to Hitoshi.

Oh, fuck.

His face was lit up with a deep blush even in the irisian hues of the sex attic. His eyes were pointed distinctively opposite of you, a hand literally over his mouth as he crossed his arms over his chest.

Your mind lit up with ideas.

Terrible, sinful ideas that you would be the peak of you and Hitoshi’s teasing.

Fuck it.

“Sure, I’m down,” You smirked and Momo lit up. Immediately, she was up and scouting out the area for a spot to go to town. Momo even seemed to be eyeing up a wall of toys. 

“Hey,” Jiro whispered to you as you truly realized what you got yourself into. “Thanks for this. She’s really into this kind of stuff, and I like indulging her, but I can’t handle too much.”

“Oh, of course!” You spoke so brightly. “I have a high pain tolerance, so I’m sure I can take what she dishes out, too.”

You heard Hitoshi clear his throat behind you.

You let yourself take another glance at Hitoshi and it made you want to die on the spot. His eyes glared in anger with the sinful intensity that was entirely directed at you. You could tell by the awkward way he was leaning that he was trying to hide the bulge in his jeans.

Is... Is he that turned on by just the thought of me getting spanked?

Oh, this truly was your best teasing yet.

(Were you taking this too far?)

Kaminari was gripping the sleeve of Hitoshi’s sweater, not allowing him to leave. Judging by how the latter was looking and staring, he wasn’t going to either way.

Momo walked back over, tugging you by the hair to a bed that was a lot higher than the others. It was the perfect height for you to bend over.

“What’s your safeword?” She asked, running her hand down your back to push you against the comforter like she’d done this hundreds of times before. Your chest fell against the bed, forearms giving you a bit of leverage. 

You hummed, “Just ‘red’ should be good.”

“Perfect,” Momo smiled before pressing the back of your neck, forcing your face into the sheets. “I’m gonna give you ten with my hand, okay?”

“I trust you, Momo, do your worst,” You spoke so confidently, but truly you didn’t know what was coming.

Momo smoothed a hand over your ass, hardly covered due to the angle you were bent over. The pretty fabric of your dress, pulled over your curves, was hiding less and less. Momo hummed, running a firm hand down the zipper of the dress, “Do you have a preference as to if I pull your dress up or not?”

Oh, holy fuck. 

That was beyond teasing.

Fuck it.

“You can pull it up, but keep my panties on. I need some dignity,” You winked back at her. 

Momo blushed. She delicately pulled the fabric back, resulting in a round of wolf whistles from your friend. Sober you was going to hate the fact you did this, but drunk you? Thriving.

(Though you wished it was Hitoshi delivering, but you digress.)

Without warning, Momo brought her hand down on your ass, a loud smack resounding around the room, causing a slight hush.

Oh fuck. 

You were already drawing some attention.

Despite the pleasant haze of painful pleasure that was beginning to swirl in your mind and gut, you couldn’t help but notice the looks and stares. 

Particularly, you got a nasty feeling from the figure in the far corner eyeing you up from ass to toes. He looked fairly nondescript, but the aura he was giving off felt like poison. Something sticky and unpleasant formed in your gut when you looked at him. Your drunken mind chased it away by turning your head the other way. 

And then all you could see was Hitoshi’s gaze on you.

It was damn near feral.

His cheeks flushed and dewy. A bit of sweat was dripping down his temple, reflecting the party lighting like some sort of sick joke. One of his hands was raking through his violet locks. His teeth dug into his full lips as he stared you down. 

Your eyes met and you refused to look away.

So did he. 

Another hit, harder, made you bite your lip to suppress a cry.

Three more and you couldn’t help the bubbling sounds that were spilling from you. Soft cries and moans, maybe a whimper or two leaked from your bitten lips. Momo wasn’t holding back, and you were sure your ass would ache tomorrow.

Good.

Two more and tears leaked from your eyes. You were sure your friends were just waiting to give both you and Momo so much shit, but you couldn’t care less. All you could do was drink in the hungry way Hitoshi eyed you. 

It was definitely not the way people who were ‘just friends’ looked at each other. 

“Last two, make ‘em count!” Mina shouted from behind you with a cheer. Some of the others in the room were clamoring to watch.

Momo ran a soothing hand down your back, “You doing okay?”

“I’m peachy,” You push out, voice clearly tear-stricken. “Finish me off, Momo. Bruise me.”

That apparently set her off. Momo smacked your ass with such a force that your face pressed harshly into the bed, obscuring your view of Hitoshi. 

The last slap was, by far, the worst. Momo decided to tease you, torturing the raw skin of your ass. She would wind up only to pet your lower back or stroke the tops of your thighs. When she finally gave you the hit you deserved (for torturing Hitoshi and yourself), it sounded across the room just as loud as your sob that followed it. Tears leaked from your eyes as your breath came out in shudders. You loved the feeling of numbness and pain that emanated from your abused cheeks. You relished it.

You turned your head upright, vision blurry. Momo pulled your dress down, helping you sit up. 

You didn’t get much of a chance to catch your breath as Hitoshi dashed away and out of the sex room, very tense and very distressed judging by how Denki was shouting after him.

Oh fuck.

You kicked yourself mentally, cursing your stupid fucking hubris.

You took it too far.

He’s either turned on, uncomfortable as fuck, or both.

Probably both.

 You start to sit up, ignoring the sobering pain heating up your ass. Quickly, Momo pressed you back down to the bed. A solo cup of clear liquid was offered to you. 

“Aftercare, obligatory. Drink this, it’s just water,” Momo stated curtly, watching you down the water. You rubbed the tears from your eyes. 

“How’s my makeup?” You asked, ignoring the rising panic in your chest. 

Momo inspected you for a moment as the others came over, jeering. She quickly rubbed away smears of mascara, running a hand over the side of your face, “Do you feel okay?”

“Yeah, totally. Shit was fun,” You prayed you were disguising the turning of your gut well enough with your nonchalant tone. “I’m gonna find Hitoshi and make sure he has an extra pair of pants.”

Momo frowned, pressing you down and squeezing your shoulders, “Somehow, I don’t believe that. Please rest for a moment, (Y/N).”

You faltered, following Momo’s command without much thought. Your mind was still in a somewhat of a fog as you sipped at the water she gave you. Her hand rubbed at your shoulders and back, dropping praise every few moments. 

The rest of your peers filed over, cheering, flopping on the bed around you. 

“Holy fuck, (Y/N),” Hanta whistled, clapping your shoulder.

“That was so hot,” Denki sighed, red-faced and wide-eyed. 

Momo ran an affectionate hand through your hair as Jiro fell into her lap, winking at you, “She’s so good, right?”

“Yeah, holy fuck. If y’all ever need a third, you have my number.” You breathed, shaking out a laugh. “I think I need to find Hitoshi, though.”

 You stood up, wobbling for a moment, comically aware of sets of eyes on you as you dashed away. Your friends shouted encouragement from behind you as you descended the stairs.

Truthfully, your intent was to smooth things over and make the routine, ‘but we’re bros!’ comment. You knew that this wouldn’t be enough, considering how far you pushed it.

You fucked up.

Took it too far. 

What does Hitoshi even think of you now?

...

Your mind was sobering with the help of the water and pain. 

You had to find Hitoshi.

So, you quickly moved about the house.

You scanned room after room, checked the front and back yard, but couldn’t find him anywhere.

  Where the fuck was he?

 You passed by a room upstairs, door shut, and you swore you heard his voice inside.

The panic that had been brewing in you was spilling over. Your ass ached and walking hurt like hell with the bruises that were forming. All you wanted was a cigarette and to apologize to your best friend for taking things way too fucking far—

You swung the door open and was met with a scene that did not include Hitoshi Shinsou.

A mess of four very cute, very high girls, mostly but not entirely clothed, were writhing on the bed, all popping up to look at you. 

You flushed, body tensing as you tried to laugh it off, “Oh, wow, sorry about this! I thought my friend was in here. I’ll let you all get back to it.”

The girls hardly seemed perturbed by the sudden intrusion, rather they seemed quite complimentary. 

“Aw, you don’t wanna join?” One of the girls pouted, giving you puppy dog eyes. “You’re so pretty!”

“T-thank you,” You shook your head, “You are all very sweet, but I have to find my friend.”

“The one behind you?” A different girl asked. 

Your hazed mind hadn’t even picked up that was anyone behind you. 

You couldn’t help lighting up. Hitoshi had to be behind you, of course, this silly anxiety attack would come to an end—

You turned.

Your face fell.

***********

It was the creep from the sex room, grinning down at you. There was a nasty glint in his eye.

Your heart started going faster. Your gut soured with a feeling far off from drunkenness.

“Actually, uh, no, I’ll be going, thanks.” You tried to sidestep the man, but he quickly blocked the doorway, boxing you in.

“No, I think we’ll stay,” Oh, the man’s voice was sick in your ears. 

You were too shocked to move at first.

His reached for your shoulder, but you managed to stumble back from him. 

“No, hey, dude, don’t touch me,” You barked back, pass your growing fear. 

He scoffed, muttering something about you being a  ‘cheap whore’ and stalked you down. 

Your back hit a wall. You froze.

You felt trapped. 

His cheap cologne was choking you.

He was just inches away. 

You looked helplessly to the girls on the bed, but they had dissolved back into each other. Their hands were grabbing at each other's writhing bodies, clothes being torn away with light moans filling the air. They were far too fucked to be bothered with what was happening to you. The deafening music of the party drowned out your senses beyond the small room. 

You tried to slip away from him, out of the door, but his arm slammed beside you.

He caged you. 

His hand shot to grab your wrap, squeezing hard and shooting pain into your shoulder as you tried to rip yourself away. 

“Get the fuck away from me!” You snarled, trying to wrench out of his grip, away from him. You fell deeper into panic. 

You could feel his breath on your ear, and your heart dropped in your chest. With the thrum of the party, it felt far too loud for anyone to hear you. Even if you shouted for help, would anyone come? No one even knew that anything was wrong—

A voice cracked like a roll of thunder through the man’s actions and the drone of the party.

“Get the fuck off of them before I break your fucking fingers.” A familiar, blessed voice cut the air from behind you.

Thank fucking god.

Hitoshi stood in the doorway. 

You almost sobbed in relief.

His broad form took up most of the door frame, chest puffed out in his anger. His brow was lowered, mouth twisted in revulsion and fury, all directed at the man who had you caged. Only rage colored Hitoshi’s features. Until he caught your gaze, anyways. 

Then, it all dissolved to fear. 

“We’re busy, she’s fine, fuck off.” The guy said, digging his hand into your side. 

You kicked at his shoe, relishing the way he hissed in pain. 

The man glared at you, then looked to Hitoshi. The man scoffed, looking him up and down to assess whether putting up a fight was worth it.

Apparently not, as the man shoved you roughly towards Hitoshi.

*********

You tripped into the latter’s chest as he caught you easily. 

Without missing a beat, he steadied you and crushed you to him. One of his broad hands moved up to almost shield the side of your face. You were surprised to find that his body was shaking just as hard as your own. You both mirrored each other in rage and panic. 

You pressed your face into his sweater as tears remained dangerously close to falling from your eyes. Fear still tore through you and everything about Hitoshi made you feel a hell of a lot safer.

Hitoshi’s arm tightened as he continued his stare-down.

The man grumbled, exiting the room in a huff and harshly pushing back Hitoshi (and you). You flinched, wincing. A low, rumbling growl rumbled in Hitoshi’s chest as he stared death at the man. 

You knew that this was probably all too much. There were details of intimacy and boundaries that were being broken without thought from both of you and that was very bad, probably. 

But, you also were drunk on fear as opposed to vodka, and having someone safe to hold you felt better than any hit you could’ve found at the party. 

You surrendered to your very obvious reality. 

 When the man was gone, filtered back into the party, Hitoshi looked down at you, his mood entirely changing. 

His anger dissolved. His face softened as he tenderly (and quickly) assessed you. Concerned, but earnest eyes searched your face and body for visible signs of harm. When he was satisfied, Hitoshi linked your hands and pulled you from the room. 

He walked you through the party, quickly but gingerly. Your mind buzzed, still panicked and anxious, but the thought of cold air and a less stimulating environment was like aloe on a burn. 

Finally, you reached the front door, walking onto an empty front landing. 

You fell into Hitoshi. 

Your sweaty, shaking hands clung to the back of his sweater as you buried your face into his neck. The familiar scent of his woodsy cologne and natural sweat was more of a sedative than any drug you could find at the party and you fucking needed it.

Hitoshi wrapped his arms around you from the small of your back to your shoulders, squeezing as he buried his face in your hair. 

You stiffened but relaxed a moment later. You couldn’t keep pretending. You didn’t have it in you. 

You were surrounded by him and the cold air, and nothing felt more comforting. 

You decided to forget the semantics of your relationship for a little. 

(You hoped, prayed, that he would too).

Hitoshi suddenly tensed, “Is it okay that I’m touching you?”

You could only nod, voice weak and small in the back of your throat, “Y-yeah, it's cool. It’s been cool.” 

Hitoshi grounded you, turning the two of you so you were protected from any potential prying eyes. He moved you just right so that his cheek rested on top of your head. 

You allowed yourself to close your eyes and focus on the calming beat of Hitoshi’s heart. 

He soothed you by existing; he always did. But, in that moment, after such an uncomfortably close brush with something fucking disgusting, his presence was almost cleansing. It purged you of the incessant clawing in the back of your mind.

You’re safe. 

You pulled away just enough to look up at Hitoshi’s face. You felt him give you a squeeze which made the smallest, unlikely smile form on your lips. 

Slowly, like he was trying not to spook a wild animal, Hitoshi cupped the side of your face. The hold was firm, like it had power to it. You sank into his palm. 

(Fuck that feels nice—)

“How are you feeling?” Hitoshi asked softly, gaze warm and honey-like.

You laughed weakly, leaning into his palm, “Like shit. Holy fuck.”

The hand cradling your lower back stroked a thumb idly, “I can only imagine. What happened back there? That guy had been in the ‘sex room’ with us, right?”

“Uh, excuse you, ‘sex attic’, I think you mean?” You still managed to joke. “And yes. Must’ve been following me or something, fucking creep.”

“If you want, I’ll go back in there and kick the shit outta him. I’m sure the others will help. It’d be so worth getting him thrown out for,” Hitoshi snickered, turning his head towards the door as he did.  

As he turned back, his eyes widened as your fearful expression returned.

“P-please don’t leave,” You knew it was too much, right? Obviously. But, you didn’t care. 

You felt fairly certain Hitoshi didn’t either by that point. 

You pressed yourself back close to him and buried your face in the crook of his neck, clutching at his front. “Please don’t go.”

You weren’t sure if he’d return any affections (obviously earlier gestures were just to comfort you, right?). 

He did. Immediately, he squeezed as much of you as he could reach, nuzzling his face into the side of your head. 

“I’m not going anywhere, I’m right here.” Hitoshi reassured you with his voice as well as his touch. You shuddered, feeling his lips and breath so close. 

The two of you stayed like that for a while.

You retained your death grip on Hitoshi, contemplating it all. Perhaps it was the setting or the way your body was thrumming, but something was forcing you to come to terms with how you really felt about him.

You enjoyed teasing Hitoshi too much for it to just be platonic. You knew this.

You wondered how Hitoshi felt considering all of those heated looks and smirks he loved dishing out.

(An insecure thought or two crept about only being a fuck to him. You tried to repress it, though it certainly didn’t calm you.) 

 Despite these thoughts, you held Hitoshi with everything you had, fearing that whatever long-cultivated connection the two of you would slip away by the end of the night.

After a few minutes of slow silence, Hitoshi offered you a cigarette, which you took graciously. He leaned forward to light it, silently regarding you with warm eyes. 

You took a fat inhale, breathing out with shaky lungs. 

“I’m sorry.” You spoke abruptly. 

His eyes widened and he shook his head, gently grabbing your shoulders, “No, (Y/N), there is literally nothing for you to be sorry about.”

“No, there is. The thing with Momo,” You shook your head. “That was bad. I’m sorry, I was teasing you and I took it too far. Way too far.”

Hitoshi went still, averting his eyes and biting his lip. 

“I appreciate the apology,” Hitoshi's face erupted in red. “B-but, you don’t need to be sorry.”

He’s... embarrassed?

Oh.

(You truly were a dumbass, but god love ‘ya.)

You took another puff, nodding. 

Hitoshi pulled you to him again, this time wrapping an arm around your shoulders. His thumb rubbed idly at the bare skin of your arm as he whipped out his phone.

“What do you want to do?” The air was cold as Hitoshi spoke. It nipped at your skin and made you crinkle your nose.

With a moment's hesitation, you replied in a hoarse voice, “Can we go home?”

Hitoshi visibly softened for you, “Of course. I can call us an Uber. To your dorm...?” There’s a question in his voice that you both already knew the answer to.

You shook your head, “Your place?”

He nodded, “Of course, (Y/N).” 

You leaned into his shoulder, letting yourself relax. 

[mypoisonedvine]

First Chanukah Together (Night 2) | Ari Levinson x reader

(you can read night 1 here, it’s not at all necessary to understand the plot of this one though!  this one doesn’t really have a plot anyways skdjghakjghsd)

summary: you really, really like ari’s beard.  he reminds you why.  (basically there’s no plot at all it’s just smut, guys.)

word count: bit over 1.3k

warnings: smut!! (oral f receiving), beard kink, other than that just fluff and religious references (all of these are gonna have religious references it’s chanukah themed!!)

"Anything good on?" you asked as you sat down on the couch, watching Ari on the floor as he adjusted the dials on the TV, flipping through the channels mindlessly.

"Just Christmas movies," he frowned.

"We need a good Chanukah movie," you realized.  "Are there any?"

"There's Fiddler on the Roof,” he shrugged.  “That one's also a Rosh Hashanah movie, and a Yom Kippur movie.  And a Passover movie."

"So it's sort of an all-purpose Jewish movie."

"Pretty much, yeah," he laughed.  "At least, in my family."

"I guess they don't show it on TV out here," you realized.

"Nope," he agreed, "just a lot of White Christmas."

"Oh hey, that Rudolph special is kinda cute," you commented as you saw him flip past it.

"Cute?!  Those clay people freak me out," he shuddered.

“You may be the most fearless man I know, but you’re afraid of a stop-motion baby reindeer,” you chuckled.  “You’re a trip, Ari Levinson.”

"It's getting pretty dark out, would you light the second candle?” he requested as he motioned to the menorah in the window.  You nodded and got up to do so, realizing how dark it was from the way you couldn’t see much of anything outside through the glass— just the reflection of the candles, and the light cast by the TV behind you.  Ari’s profile was always stunning, but in the faint blue-ish glow of the screen, you found yourself ogling a little bit.  You didn’t get many chances to look at him uninterrupted; he usually noticed and started teasing you, but now he couldn’t see you staring at all.  

“Please never shave your beard,” you blurted out suddenly as you turned to face him again.  “Or cut your hair.”

He looked up at you from the floor, smirking a bit.  “Really?  I was kinda thinking about at least getting an inch or two off the hair,” he admitted, running his fingers through it.  “It’s gettin’ sorta shaggy.”

“I like it that way,” you announced as you knelt down to join him on the floor, only to yelp in surprise as he wrapped his arms around you and pulled you into him suddenly, both of you toppling onto the ground.

“Do you?” he pressed, leaning in to kiss your neck— his beard tickled you a little when he did that, and it made you shiver in his strong embrace.

“Y-yeah,” you nodded weakly.  His body weight pressing you into the floor was relaxing in one sense, and invigorating in another.  As his arms reached up to rest on either side of your head, caging you in, and his hips slotted in between your legs, you found yourself biting down on your lip without realizing you’d done it.

“You don’t think it makes me look like a hippy?” he chuckled, kisses trailing down to your collarbone; when the neckline of your sweater got in the way, he pulled it down and kept going.  You couldn’t find the energy to worry about him stretching out your favorite top, focusing instead on the way his lips felt against your skin— and the way you could almost feel him getting hard through his jeans when he pushed up against you just right.

“Kinda,” you admitted, barely able to keep track of the conversation as he kept moving lower and lower, “but it’s… I dunno, it’s hot.”

“Sounds like you do know,” he mocked as he moved his body down on top of yours, his head resting just above your stomach.  Your disappointment must’ve shown on your face because he started laughing.  “What’s wrong, pretty baby?”

“Um,” you stalled, having to focus to keep your hips from bucking up towards him.

“Just tell me what you want, sweetheart,” he shrugged.

A pang of need hit inside you, as if you needed reminding of what you wanted.  “Ari, need your mouth, please…”

He smirked and slid down that last little bit, grabbing your fuzzy pajama pants and pulling them down to your ankles— and your underwear along with them.  “What are you all wet for?” he cooed, stopping for a moment to kiss inside your thighs.  You could tell he was intentionally rubbing his beard against your sensitive skin, letting the ends of his long hair tickle you in a… specific place.

“Fffuck,” you stammered in lieu of an answer.

“Is this all for me?” he pressed.

“Yes,” you nodded quickly.

“You smell so good,” he purred.  You couldn’t be sure if it was the way his voice got deeper and darker that made your spine tingle and your nipples harden instantly, or if it was the filthy words that voice was actually saying.  It was sort of embarrassing when he said stuff like that, but in a way you had grown to find quite enjoyable.  Once he’d figured out your sensitivity to praise— especially that kind of praise— he’d taken every opportunity to exploit it.  “Bet you taste even better,” he finished as he dove in between your legs, licking a long, slow stripe through your folds.

You could feel his beard against your pussy and you thought you might die.

“Ari,” you moaned, “fuck.”  You let your head fall back against the floor, which he corrected instantly with a light slap on your thigh.

“Nuh uh, baby, wanna see those pretty eyes while I taste your cunt, okay?  Don't look away."

You were pretty sure it wasn't about him seeing your eyes, though; it was about you seeing him do this to you.  Those blue eyes of his pierced right through you as he latched his lips onto your swollen clit, your back arching instantly of its own accord.

You could feel him smile a little as he kept working you, tongue laving over every sensitive spot he could find— which, it turns out, is a lot.  Even more came into play as he pressed two thick fingers inside you.

"Ari, baby," you whimpered, pushing back against his hand.  Just his fingers were enough to get so deep inside you; it was a wonder you were able to take his cock at all.  "Right there," you sighed.

"Think I don't know that?  You're about to come already," he laughed as he licked your clit again.  Your fingers laced into his hair, tightening and tugging at the roots without really meaning to.  The long ends were swinging against the insides of your thighs as you rocked back onto his hand and face, and it made your whole body erupt into goosebumps.  "Come on my tongue, pretty baby," he encouraged darkly, "wantcha to soak this beard you like so much with your come."

"Fuck, 'm gonna," you hissed, "so close, please please don't stop."

The hand holding your thigh gripped you a little tighter, just as the fingers inside you curled a little harder.  Pressure seized up in your gut as you felt your walls clenching on him; warmth spread from between your legs, specks of color danced behind your eyes.  You heard his name before you even realized that it was you who said it.  

When his fingers slipped out of you and his face emerged from between your thighs, he was grinning so wide that it was impossible not to smile with him.  “That was…” you searched for the right word, still catching your breath, “unexpected.”

You giggled when he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, his beard nearly dripping with your arousal even as he tried to clean it off a bit.  “I bet I’ll be able to smell your cunt for days ‘cause of this.”

“Don’t be mad cause I gave you what you asked for,” you shrugged.

He leaned in to hover above you, ghosting his lips over your ear and pressing his hips between your legs so you could feel how hard his cock had become.  “Oh, I’m not mad,” he assured darkly, sending a shiver up your spine just with his voice, “but I’m not anywhere near done with you yet.”

[votederpycausemufins]

Surprisingly Familiar Ch 1

The first chapter of the sequel to Summoning Family. I'm going to be working on my scattered au fic more, but you might still see some chapters of this scattered around

@petrichormeraki made the hermit!Tommy au, and @helleborusangel did amazing rambles for the chapters of Summoning Family.

Now, Let's see how things have gone since the ending of Summoning Family.

It had been eleven days since Grum’s birthday and now it was Jrum’s. He was excited by the party, playing games and trying to scam people of their diamonds. Cake was nice, his mask getting a special cake of his own with diamonds since Grum had gotten the same. And then it came to presents.

Jrum was especially happy at any toys he got and glad if he was just getting diamonds. Kokatori had also managed to get another ribbon around its neck and try to be a present again. Jrum wasn’t the most pleased about that since he was still coping with everything that happened with the egg, but he still took the present before handing them off to Grum.

Just as the presents were just about all gone, two more were placed on the table, each one with a different label. Jrum went to grab the last present when he saw the new ones being placed, so he looked up at who was putting them down, surprised to see an unfamiliar face. “Um, who are you?”

The question made everyone look over, most people looking confused, but three people had different reactions. Phil looked surprised, recognizing the man. Grian was also surprised, but also awestruck. Lastly, in Grum’s arms, Kokatori hissed.

“What the heck are you doing here? Who even let you in?” Phil asked, walking over to the man.

“I let myself in. I mean, I sort of already had permission to be here, just never used it. Building big was never really my thing.”

“Who are you then?” It was Scar who spoke up. The person looked at a few of the hermits who seemed to also look as confused as Scar sounded.

“I think the beard is messing with them.” Phil said, elbowing the man, who then ran a hand through his beard.

“Right, spend a month on an abandoned island and then get captured by pirates and you can’t really do much for that. Anyone got a raz...or…” he trailed off as Jrum pulled out some special shears. He was stunned by the bot having such a thing, but took them with a thank you and stepped out of the room.

After a few minutes, he stepped back in, and immediately some of the hermits were no longer confused. “Oh my god, it’s been so long!” Bdubs was the first to say, going over to the man. “What have you been up to!”

“Eh, mainly family. You’ve been working with someone named Scar?” Bdubs nodded and gestured to the mayor. “Got it. Nice to meet you.” He moved over to Doc. “And how about you? How’s the family life?”

“Eh, some days are always better than others, I haven’t been around here as often because of it. What about you?”

“Well, the kids are all grown up at this point, I’ve got more time on my hands so I’ve gone back to filming.”

Doc nodded. “Sounds good to me. I’ve got to tell you more about what we did last season.”

“I’m sure you do.” The man chuckled, moving over to Keralis. “Hey, can’t wait to see your city. The pictures seemed crazy enough. I can’t believe you built all that.”

“Why spank you, but I have had help with designs.”

“Yeah. And you said you own it with someone named Cleo now?”

“Yes, in fact, she’s got a relative that is in Bub’s troop last I checked.”

Cleo spoke up at this point. “Yep! Got an order in for popcorn just the other day.”

“Nice to hear. By the way, Etho’s behind me, isn’t he?” The hermits unfamiliar with the man were surprised by that comment, as Etho was indeed behind him. Pretty much no one could tell when Etho was sneaking around, so this new person doing it was very shocking. “I’ll be asking everyone about your shops so I can stay awake from them.”

“Oh come on, some of them would be fun for a survivor like you. In fact we could get Tango to open up decked out for a session for you.”

“Right, sure Etho. Now is Beef around?”

“No actually. He had something really important come up.” Etho answered, another hermit nodding to agree with the statement.

“Ah, that’s too bad. Well, I guess the only person left to greet is ol’ rap battle over here.”

Wels suddenly looked embarrassed. “Oh that’s why you look familiar. You’re the OBP leader.”

“Yeah.” The man nodded. “You know green wasn’t really your c-”

“Please don’t bring that up again.”

The man laughed. “Alright, I won’t.” He then looked at the rest of the hermits. “Well, I think I know a few of you from the letters I’ve gotten from these guys.” And he gestured to the hermits he had been talking to. “Like I know Scar and Cleo now, then TFC and Xisuma I’m familiar with, also Zedaph.”

“Yeah, so who are you exactly?” Mumbo spoke up. “While I’m glad you’ve come to celebrate Jrum’s birthday, I’m not familiar with you.”

“Right, forgot to give my name I guess.” The man started to say. “I’m-”

Grian cut him off. “You’re the Soarvivor Paul! I remember watching your shows when I was in highschool! I had some friends at my school in England who went to an event of yours!”

“Wait, this is Paul?” Scar spoke up. “I’ve heard a lot of stories about him from Doc and Bdubs.”

Paul smiled at that. “Yep, that would be me.”

Grian took over the conversation again. “So wait, you said you were recording again, are you making MvM again?”

Instead of answering happily like Paul had to everyone else, he just gave Grian a bit of a nod before giving him the cold shoulder.

“Wait, are you that uncle Phil’s always talking about?” Tommy asked. He had stayed out of the conversation when he had no clue what was going on, but now that he recognized the name, he had some things to say. “The one he always complains always uses letters instead of a phone call or texting.”

Paul nodded. “Yeah, that would be me. Letters are the most reliable when you’ve got a job like mine.”

“Then stick to a comm then Paul.” Doc said, resting his arm on Paul's shoulder. “I’ve offered to make you a special one who knows how many times. I’m sure your kids wouldn’t mind it either.”

“Why do I feel like I’m still missing something?” Tommy spoke up again, Doc explaining for him.

“A number of us hung out with Paul in the past. Most of us he knows from the old Minecrack worlds, but he met Keralis on some other worlds.”

“Yeah, and met Wels when we were dealing with an apocalypse world. Beef was there too.” Paul sighed. “So Phil, what’s your family been getting up to other than the obvious?”

“Well, Tommy’s actually living in hermitcraft now.” Phil answered. “Wilbur’s getting through some things, and Techno’s trying to keep up his hardened warrior mask, but Grian’s kid is making that hard.”

“Well, this group seems to have that effect on people.” Paul nodded. “And how’ve they been doing with Xelqua?” Paul jabbed a finger on Grian’s direction.

“Right, shit, forgot to say that part. Grian is Xelqua.” Phil quickly explained, Paul’s mouth turning to a small ‘o’.

“Ah, I guess that explains that war and the hippies I heard about in letters. At least It’s a little tamer in a world like this.” Most of the people in the room were confused, and at first Grian was one of them, but then he made a connection and his legs were suddenly struggling to keep him up. “He has told you about Tokyo, right?”

Before anyone could answer, Kokatori was hissing in Grum’s arms again, drawing Paul’s attention. He pulled out a stone sword and immediately the hermits that knew Paul were holding him back. “No! Hey! Paul, that is a kid’s pet!” Bdubs said. “I know you don’t like them but that’s like the one chicken you’re not allowed to kill!”

“Just get him a pet other than a chicken! You can’t trust a chicken! They’re spies, killers and thieves.”

“Killer chickens?” Wels, who wasn’t holding Paul back, asked.

“Oh no, he’s telling the truth about that.” Doc answered. “I saw it for myself.”

“How do you get killed by a fucking chicken?” Tommy asked.

“You forget to kill it first.” Paul answered, finally putting his sword away. “Well, you said that kid’s one of Xel’s.”

“One of Grian’s.” Phil corrected. “And yes. That’s Grumbot, or Grum, the older of the two. His birthday was a week and a half ago.”

“Well, figures they’d just try causing more problems.”

Phil rolled his eyes and then grabbed Paul’s arm. “Alright, you and I. Talk. Now.”

When Phil and Paul had left the room, Grian finally allowed himself to go to the floor. The hermits that knew Paul were immediately apologizing for him, not sure why he was acting that way. But Grian knew. And Mumbo helped Grian up, pretty sure he knew too. “I’m going to help Grian lie down. Grum, maybe I should take Kokatori with me so they don’t cause more problems.”

Grum nodded and handed the chicken over, it being very upset about being moved and pecking at Mumbo’s arms. But he was too worried about Grian to let that stop him. So soon they had left the room too.

For a while, everything was silent. But then Jrum spoke up. “Well, for my birthday, I want to eavesdrop! And no one can stop me!” And he ran off to listen into Phil and Paul’s conversation, leaving the rest of the party members confused on what to do.

[veronicasanders]

I would also like an American girl doll diagnosis please lol <3! 1. No I would say i have strong feelings for or against horses but i love all animals and I think they should all be respected, loved and cared for :03. 2. Very! I love plants and animals. I love going to the zoo and learning about animals and watching programs on them :0D. 3. Yes I am very much a person who follows rules lol (and i hate when people don’t lol). 4. It depends on how stupid, the more stupid it is the more likely it is I will not follow it lol. 5. I would say maybe a soild 6 or 7? I honestly don’t know 💀. 6. Physically? Yeah. Socially? Ehhhh (its hard, lol). 7. I’m a single child (Can you tell 🥴) 8. The 40’s but that literally from a tv show (‘Agent Carter’) so 💀, maybe the 20’s? Idk fine the ‘mob’ era interesting. Plus i like the flashy lights and shit 💀. 9. Lo mien, Dumplings and Crab Rangoon :03. 10. Uhhh Fun, Creative, Frustrating.

Okay!!! Thank you for your answers. I would say, mostly Julie, the 70s hippie flower child. She lives in San Fransisco and she loves sports and girl power and saving the whales. And she has a bunny named Nutmeg. Her furniture and accessories are awesome. Plus! Her best friend's grandpa owns a Chinese restaurant (and said best friend has a very fucking cool and very gay romper, seen below, which I may have purchased back when it was available).

And a little bit of Nanea, who is also quite one with nature (aloha!):

[jincherie]

potion 609 | pjm & ksj

- COMMISSION -

✩ — pairing: seokjinx reader x jimin ✩ — genre: poly, magic au, roadtrip au, mutual pining, borderline crack, fluff, slight angst ✩ — words: 10.8k ✩ — rating: sfw ✩ — warnings: *sobbing* they’re so stupid man, they’re so stupid ✩ — notes: this took a bit longer than expected, if only because like everyone else in the world rn I’ve had a few unprecedented issues in my life pop up to deal with. I hope u all are well and if you’re not, that you get better soon. please enjoy this mess! <3

A four day roadtrip into the depths of the mountains with the two best friends you’ve recently realised you have feelings for is probably the last thing you need. It becomes a reality, though, when Seokjin and Jimin bring home a cursed doll that reacts with the potion you were making and lands you all cursed yourselves; both forced to say whatever comes to mind and bound to each other. Now stuck in close quarters with your two idiot best friends who for the life of them can not shut up for the foreseeable future while you venture to fix this, you’re beginning to doubt whether you or your heart can survive this trip in one piece.

masterlist | — posted; 24.03.2020

“Oh my god… y/n. What have you done?”

You glare, hard, at the male standing dead in the middle of the room, currently in the midst of being accosted by two idiots you happen to call your best friends. If you hadn’t thought quick and chugged a silencing potion before frantically texting Namjoon, you have no doubt you’d be stuck in the same situation as them right now.

“Please, please, please help us!” Jimin is clutching your professor by the arms, shaking him like a madman. Some of the goo coating his soiled silken grey shirt flings onto your professor’s, and you watch him physically recoil. “I can’t live like this! Jin might be hot but he’s so incredibly stupid and if I have to listen to his unfiltered thoughts all day every day I’m going to lose my [quack]ing mind!”

As much as it pains you, you’re so stressed and exasperated right now that you can’t even laugh at the fact that your professor has spent all of two minutes in the room and already has cast one of his stupid censoring spells on the two of them.

“Excuse me?” Seokjin sounds, smacking Jimin on the arm. “You think I’m hot? Why don’t you tell me more often!! You know I like hearing it! You’re so stingy, honestly. No wonder y/n likes me more.”

At Seokjin’s unwitting confirmation of Jimin’s words, the shorter male turns a look of absolute plea to your professor, grip tightening. The man in his hold then turns to you, looking an odd cross between bewildered and annoyed. Before he says anything more, the two idiots continuing to bicker beyond him, a voice sounds from behind you.

“She can’t talk,” Namjoon supplies smoothly, stepping to your side and slinging his arm around your shoulder with a dimpled grin. “The potion seems to have had the opposite effect on her, oddly enough.”

You resist the urge to spin and pin the male with an impressed look at how smoothly he just pulled that out of his ass, especially after performing a strong silencing spell on you barely a minute ago.

“Well, these two can definitely talk,” your professor says, and the deadpan tone and expression coming from him, someone who is usually so mild mannered and sweet, almost makes you choke on your own spit. Even if you wanted to laugh, Namjoon’s silencing spells are no joke and you can’t let out even the slightest of chuckles.  “It seems that not only has the potion bound all those covered in its contents—the three of them—but these two in particular… It seems as though their filters are completely gone, and they’re just saying everything that comes to the top of their head. And I mean— everything.”

Namjoon makes a pitying sound, giving your professor an empathetic look. Meanwhile you are standing and contemplating whether it would be a better option to throw yourself off the nearest bridge rather than stay and deal with this mess. It’s tempting, you admit, but one thing stands in the way…

You look down, catching sight of the translucent, glowing cord of runes and sigils that winds around your wrist, trailing off in the direction of the bickering duo a few metres away. A wave of something like exasperation floods through you, tinged with hints of self-pity.

Of course one of the side effects of this stupid cursed mishap is that you physically cannot stray more than 3 metres from dumb and dumber over there. Like, at all. You’ve tried. It was a massive effort just to get them close enough to the doorway that you could go into the other room with Namjoon so he could give you a hit of magical shut-up juice.

“Please help us!” Jimin whines, louder than before. He is successful in capturing the attention of the entire room, and he stomps his foot. “Professor Lim, please! Have I not been the best student you could ever ask for? Helping in your shop and bringing you cursed items from across the globe?”

Once he starts, he doesn’t stop—which isn’t all that different from usual except this time it’s like you’ve twisted a tap on and the handle has then broken, leaving the pipe jetting out water with no way of cutting it off. You think you’re really going to go insane if you’re stuck with these two any longer.

“I can’t help you!” your professor bursts, tearing himself away from your friends’ pleading grips. “Look, I have no idea what on earth y/n was attempting to cook up in there that made it react with the cursed doll like that—”

I was EXPERIMENTING, you defend silently, thankfully unable to voice your thoughts.

“—but it’s out of my jurisdiction, boys. Judging from the runes on those bindings this is some high level magic, and kind of, uh… niche. I only know barely a handful of people that might be able to help.”

“Who?” Jimin and Seokjin demand at the same time, eyes wide with hope—for all of Seokjin’s rebuttals to Jimin’s earlier whining, he doesn’t seem too overjoyed at the prospect of being stuck with him for longer than necessary either.

At the question, your professor gives a somewhat sheepish laugh. “Uh, well… the closest is a witch I knew back in my university student days. She’s not that far geographically, but she lives at the top of one of the mountains in Dusk Dew Valley and the magic of the forest means you can’t zap in or out so… you’re gonna have to drive.”

“That’s not so bad,” Seokjin comments, at the same time that Jimin squints, suspicious.

“How long?”

Your professor clears his throat, averting his gaze—personally, you’re on the edge of your metaphorical seat. “Uh,” he begins awkwardly, like he wishes he didn’t have to say what he is going to next. “Probably about… four? …five days?”

Aside from the background sound of cursed goo sliding down the walls and plopping onto the floor in fat, glutinous globs, the room is silent. Your gaze goes from your wrist, to the ugly doll on the floor a few feet away (where it landed in the midst of the blast—they hadn’t gotten very far into the room before things went south) and then to Jimin and Seokjin, who have been your closest friends for the better part of your adult life and with whom normally you wouldn’t mind spending such an amount of time with.

Except, thing’s aren’t really as they are normally, and lately you’ve started noticing some feelings rising within you that are getting harder and harder to squash. You don’t think you can make it out of this in once piece, and a look to the side reveals Namjoon’s doubtful expression that tells you he thinks the same.

 [ DAY ONE ]

The trip, for the few hours you’ve been on it so far, has proved to be taxing in more ways than one. Case in point:

“Namjoon! Stop playing that hippy garbage and show us your mixtape! What are you, a coward?”

Next to you, you can sense Namjoon’s hands tighten on the wheel—you might have fought tooth and nail to get shotgun but he’d been coerced somewhat unwillingly into the driving seat. He has a provisional licence and still has some supervised driving hours to complete, so it was with a pout that he climbed in next to you earlier today and has been behind the wheel ever since.

The reason for the twitch that’s developed under his eye and the white tint of his knuckles as they grip the wheel lies in the seats behind you—Seokjin and Jimin have been running their mouths for the better part of the last few hours and don’t seem like they’re going to be shutting up anytime soon. To be fair, at the start they were just talking about normal things, but then one of them said something somewhat antagonistic about an hour and a half in and they haven’t stopped bickering since.

In the seat behind them, Jungkook and Taehyung – two friends who had somehow been roped into this abridged roadtrip— sit with looks of pure, unadulterated regret on their faces.

“This is my mixtape,” Namjoon says through gritted teeth, Seokjin shrinking back into his seat in response with a chastised look. It takes all of a split second for Jimin to snicker, no chance for sweet, sweet silence to bloom before they’re back to bickering once more. You almost give in to the urge to slam your head against the dash again. Almost.

“Why couldn’t they both have turned out like y/n?” you hear Jungkook question in something that must be his attempt at a whisper (yet that still reaches you at the front of the car). Taehyung sighs, like the weight of the world has suddenly rested itself on his shoulders and he now finds himself with the task of carrying it for the rest of eternity.

“They’re too stupid,” Taehyung answers, somewhat cryptically. By some show of mercy from up above, neither of the two idiots in question hear him insulting them.

You squint at Taehyung through the rear-view mirror, wondering if he’s onto you. He doesn’t seem like it, what with him now playing ‘I Spy’ with Jungkook and cheating with his magic, but then again you know Taehyung to be awfully perceptive when he needs to be. You’ll have to ask Namjoon to make sure he doesn’t blab to dumb and dumber behind you or you’ll never hear the end of it.

“You know what? This wouldn’t have happened if y/n didn’t pick you up like a stray dog in her second year!”

Ears alert at the sound of your name, you turn your head to nail the two with a suspicious look while Namjoon keeps his eyes pointedly to the front and on the road carving a path between thick rainforest greenery. Seokjin is sputtering at what Jimin just announced, eyes whipping between you and Jimin incredulously. He has the exact look on his face that a child does right before they tattle on their older sibling to their mother for being mean to them.

It really is like raising two kids though, honestly, you lament. You should see if you can get family benefits from the government.

“Excuse me? If anything, I picked you two up like strays. You should have seen her that first day she came up to me, all pleading with these puppy dog eyes, asking if I would be her mentor. She was so pitiful I couldn’t bear to say no.”

WHAT?! That’s not how that went! You glare at Seokjin for spewing mistruths, reaching for something to throw at him in the front cup holder. He has a look of regret on his face, like what he said was never meant to enter the air, but it’s out now and you’re gonna pelt something at him for it. It’s their fault they’re cursed to say whatever the hell comes to mind, anyway. It’s just unfortunate that 80% of the things that come to Seokjin’s mind happen to be things that shouldn’t be said out loud. You’d say the same for Jimin but his percentage is a little lower, more like 50-60%, so you’ll let him live for now.

“Oh my gods that is ENOUGH! Both of you shut up! Please! Or so help me Hecate I will turn this car around and dump you two on the side of the road to walk!”

Surprisingly, Namjoon’s reprimand works and the two males snap their mouths shut, eyes wide. You haven’t forgiven Seokjin for his sleight, so you make sure he sees you glaring before you turn back around. You can hear him gulp.

Before you met Seokjin in one of your classes at the academy, it had always been you and Jimin. The two of you grew up in the same gated community in the same cul-de-sac—you with your aunt, and him with his incredibly rich and highly esteemed parents. You always saw his parents before you ever saw him, and (somewhat unfairly) you judged from their stony expressions and default looks of disdain that he’d be just like them—cold, stuck up and probably someone who would bully you for not living in a home with actual parents. It was a bit of a sore spot for you back then.

To your complete and utter surprise, everything you assumed of him was turned on its head when he found you at the park one day, angry-crying in embarrassment due to the nasty fall you’d just had. Some other kids had dared you to do a trick on the swings that required some air magic, but you’re not very strong in that area. Yet, like the stupid, proud child you were, you attempted it anyway and ended up scraping your knees raw at the edge of the playground. Not wanting to get in trouble and terrified at the sight of blood, they’d fled and left you there gritting your teeth and trying not to wail in pain. You were in the middle of plotting your revenge on each and every one of them while pressing a hand to your knees when a voice had sounded from beside you and scared the living daylights out of you.

“Hey… are you okay?”

Honestly, he had been so sweet and kind that you didn’t even realise straight away that he was the same child that lived in the house across from yours. From the beginning you couldn’t stay strong against his big, puppy eyes, and you ended up letting him help when he offered. You always were a bit better with plants and herbs, trees flowering when you tickled them and dandelions dancing around you in glee as you passed through meadows on the way to school. That didn’t help much in the area of healing, though.

Jimin, you were surprised to learn, actually was quite adept at healing magic, despite his affinity being for water—or maybe that’s part of the reason why. He’d wiped the tears on your cheeks and pressed them to your knees with small, careful hands—they’d glowed before your eyes and a tingle and a tickle later, they were completely scuff free—smoother than they had been when you were a baby, you remember marvelling in awe.

That moment then, you’ve concluded many times, was the moment you first started to like Park Jimin.

All through high school, you liked him. Sometimes painfully so. Eventually, even without the nurturing and watering that comes with requited feelings, that bloomed into something a little too alike love. Right as you entered your undergraduate at the academy, you decided to do yourself a favour and attempted to squash that flower down, to rip it out of your heart. But alas, it was rooted too deep. You were helpless but to continue dealing with those feelings.

That is, until Seokjin came along.

You could say that he was your next infatuation, but it was a little more complicated than that at the time. The way that you came to like him… is a little different.

You might have developed your crush on Jimin instantly as a child, but with Seokjin the feelings built slowly within you for weeks as you sat with him in classes and began to hang out with him outside them. It was the kind of thing that you don’t realise until it smacks you suddenly in the face one day at the most inconvenient time—for you, you realised the feelings that had blossomed within you one afternoon at an ice cream parlour after watching Seokjin shove the entire dessert into his mouth on a dare, ending up looking like a chipmunk with crushed waffle cone threatening to escape the seal of his lips every time he laughed. It was gross as hell and you’d never been more stupidly attracted to him in your life.

Seokjin eventually was absorbed into your little friend circle, and that’s how it has been for the past two years. The two of them bicker often, but it’s usually playful and it’s just the type of dynamic they happened to fall into. You’re growing a little concerned now though, because it feels like these arguments are slowly getting more and more serious now that they don’t have the ability to exercise their filter.

Frowning to yourself in thought, you turn your gaze out the window and try not to think about it too hard. This roadtrip will be over before you know it! Surely!

— X—

 “JIMIN! YOU ALMOST SET MY PANTS ON FIRE! STOP, Y—OH my god you ACTUALLY DID! JIMIN!”

Chaos.

That’s what has overtaken your small little roadside camp. As it grew dark and Namjoon grew tired after driving all day, all of you had made the unanimous decision to stop for the night and set up camp. It was part of the reason Taehyung and Jungkook had agreed to come—they’re always down for an adventure and they’d never been into these mountains.

Yoongi and Hoseok, two other friends that ended up joining your troupe as an extension of Seokjin, had only agreed to come along because they are, in fact, huge plant nerds—and this forest is full of magical flora that Hoseok went absolutely starry-eyed at the mention of. They brought their own car and hence didn’t have to deal with the vexing nature of the journey in the company of Seokjin and Jimin, but they were quickly enlightened once you all stopped to set up camp.

Hoseok is the one that screamed, and considering the flames currently licking the dark material of his slacks, you think he’s well within his rights. A part of you is worried you’re about to be set alight as well, but the rest of you is catching up with what you just saw.

Jimin’s magical affinity, as you’ve known ever since you were kids, is for water. Seokjin’s, as you found out quickly after meeting him in college because he likes to show off, is for heat, and combustion. Put plainly, his affinity is fire.

And yet, when Jimin went to magically pull the water out of Hoseok’s pants after Jungkook spilled the ramen pot on him, it hadn’t exactly gone as anyone expected. For one, Jimin’s hands had glowed pink instead of blue, and instead of seeing water seep out of Hoseok’s pant leg, the entire camp watched as a spark formed from Jimin’s fingertips and went flying towards it.

Long story short; Hoseok’s pants are now on fire and Jimin is freaking out.

The campers that aren’t currently affected (read: everyone but Hoseok and Jimin) are instead almost wetting themselves in laughter at the situation.

“If this is a joke it isn’t funny!” Jimin exclaims, waving his hand in the air. You don’t know whether to focus on him or on Hoseok leaping out of his pants behind him and throwing them on the ground to stomp the flames out. Both are funny, especially when Jimin’s frantic waving doesn’t conjure water as he desired but instead more sparks.

“JIMIN NO!”

The rest of the camp pauses their laughter and scrambles in alarm to dodge the sparks falling, diving out of chairs and rolling out of the way in their desperation—well, everyone but Seokjin, who is currently laughing so hard his eyes are squeezed shut and he’s rolling on the ground in a different way. You make a face of disdain—you could have chosen anyone in the world to befriend and subsequently fall in love with, and you chose these two? You’re a little disappointed in yourself.

“I can’t believe it!” Seokjin is howling, cradling his stomach as he curls on the ground. You wince at the leaves currently tangling in his hair. “Are you telling me you didn’t—didn’t know our powers swapped? Oh my gods, Jimin—”

Your gaze whips to the shorter male, who looks like the visual definition of both unimpressed and murderous. “Are you saying you knew? And you didn’t tell me! You ass—”

A sense of resignation settles within you as you anticipate another fight on the horizon. Their bickering has only worsened through the day, and at this point you’re not above physically gagging them. You brought spare socks, babey.

“Of course I knew! I sneezed in the bathroom earlier and had my ass suddenly embraced in cold water. Are you telling me you didn’t notice when we were drinking juice boxes before and the straws kept melting in your hands?”

Well, everything you’re hearing is news to you—you had no idea before this incident that their powers had been mixed up as well as everything else. They are masters of their own affinity, but have no experience whatsoever with the other’s, so you’re anticipating (regretfully) a lot more incidents like this.

At first Jimin’s face is contorted in something like sympathy and disgust, but that quickly shifts into embarrassment—the tips of his ears join his cheeks in flushing pink.

“No, I thought I was just sitting too close to the fire!” he retorts, pointing a finger at the older male. “I never use fire for anything, how was I supposed to know?!”

Seokjin opens his big mouth to fire something back, but is thankfully stopped in his tracks by Yoongi cramming a pizza slice in there. Seokjin immediately starts chewing like the action triggered some evolutionary reflex, like when you put a finger in a baby’s hand and they grip on instinct.

“Can you both shut up?” he grouches, only bold enough to send Jimin a glare since Seokjin is older than him; it doesn’t stop him from running his mouth at him, though. “I can and I will mix something up to knock you out. Hell, I’ll even get y/n to help—I hear her potion is part of what landed you in this mess.”

You were not expecting to be dragged through the dirt at the end of that. You send the male a glare, flipping him the bird before stomping off to go get some of the desserts from the car. He’s lucky you already silenced yourself or you’d be ripping him a new one by now.

Stupid! Stupid boys! All men do is talk, eat hot pizza and LIE!

Thankfully, you have time to cool off before dinner is over, the atmosphere mollifying now that Jimin and Seokjin’s lives have been threatened and their fear of god (or rather, fear of one Min Yoongi) has rendered them silent once more. You almost forget they were even bickering earlier until it comes time to retire for the night and tents have to be allocated.

Of course, after the day and dinner you’d all just had, it was decided unanimously by all those not currently afflicted by a curse that you, Seokjin and Jimin should share a tent. The others happily retreated to the two other tents set up by the cars, and before you could even smack someone in protest they were gone.

Ten minutes and your entire nightly routine later finds you laying on a king-sized blow-up mattress, squished between your two best friends with the blanket up to your chin. Surprisingly, despite the bickering that occurred when choosing tents, they’re silent now—but not asleep. The occasional sigh gives them away. It’s dark, but the moonlight filtering in through the material of the tent allows you to see the planes of their faces a little more clearly. Both are frowning slightly, Jimin staring at the ceiling and Seokjin looking at the runes over his wrist.

You want to sleep, but the air is heavy with the weight of something yet to be said.

“We’re… sorry, y/n.”

You turn to Seokjin in surprise, eyes taking a moment to adjust to his profile. He’s avoiding your gaze; you feel Jimin’s head turning to face the older male as well. Seokjin sighs, closing his eyes and carding a hand through his charcoal-coloured hair. 

“This is our fault,” he continues, resting his hands atop the blanket, over his stomach.

“Hyung,” Jimin voices, tone cautioning. It piques your interest and you file it away for later.

Seokjin turns his head, looking at Jimin for a long moment before turning it further and looking at you. You can’t help but wonder what he just said to the other with his gaze, but for now you’re taken with the soft glisten of his eyes as they meet your own.

“Sorry,” he repeats, clamping his mouth shut after. You squint at him for a long few seconds before releasing him from your gaze and shrugging.

You’re forgiven, I guess. Especially since this is technically also my fault, even though I didn’t know that stupid charmed perfumes could react with cursed dolls… where on earth did they even get that thing?

At your shrug, Seokjin grins brightly. “Great, now that you’ve forgiven us, I have a favour to ask.”

You’re not left wondering what he means for long, because in the next second he rolls over, turning his back to you.

“Can you spoon me? I wanna be the little spoon tonight. Makes me feel safe.”

Letting out the biggest sigh you think you ever have in your life, you roll your eyes but oblige his request and shuffle over to slip your arms around his waist and hug him from behind. He can’t see your smile, so you don’t have to worry about saving face.

“Seriously? Right in front of my salad…”

You reach behind to smack Jimin, and he laughs, quickly scooting over to follow your suit and slip his arms around your waist, curving his body around yours. It makes your heart race, and for the sake of your sanity you pretend that you don’t have one and so don’t have to deal with its traitorous reactions. Heart, what heart? It’s Donut Tuesdays that keeps your blood pumping, babey!

Now that the air is clear and warmth seeps between the three of you, runes around your wrists glowing brighter than before, it doesn’t take long at all before the three of you pass out, slipping eagerly into the tender embrace of sleep.

 [DAY THREE]

Needless to say, the tranquillity of that night did not last very long at all.

You’re on the third day of the trip, with at least one more expected to go, and for the duration of today’s drive, the entire car has been in a foul mood. Last you saw Yoongi and Hoseok, they were grumpy too, but you don’t doubt now that they’re away from the bickering duo causing you all such stress that they’re in much better spirits. Sadly, the same can’t be said for you, or anyone else stuck in the same car as you.

Today’s driver is Taehyung, and you swear you’ve seen the thought to drive the car into a ditch flick through his gaze more than twice in the past few minutes alone. It alarmed you at first, but now you’d welcome it, to be honest. Anything to escape your current reality.

You already knew that Seokjin and Jimin enjoyed talking and hearing their own voices, but never before have you been faced with such a long, extended situation where they just do not shut up. It’s wearing you down, you have to admit. As Namjoon’s silencing spell wore off last night, you almost blew your cover and tore into them for it. They just can’t help themselves! They’re lucky that your priority is making sure that your thoughts aren’t revealed to the air, so much that you forwent killing them in favour of topping up the silencing spell.

There are some things that have been lurking on the tip of your tongue in the past few months that you just cannot risk saying aloud. You’d rather lose said tongue.

Everyone has long since given up attempting to shut your two idiot friends up, and so your suffering continues, unabated.

“You wanna bring up all the times someone has ditched for selfish reasons? Alright, how about we talk about all the times you skipped movie night because you ‘had a pop quiz to study for’, when really you were out sleeping with half the students in your Aquatic Magics class!”

While you might have been expecting something petty to come out of Seokjin’s mouth, you most definitely weren’t expecting that. Your head whips around at lightning speed, wide eyes locking onto Jimin who looks like he’s just been electrocuted. He sputters, eyes flicking from you to Seokjin rapidly.

Lately, in the past few months, Jimin has been calling in rainchecks for your weekly movie nights. Usually the three of you relish in the opportunity to sit back and relax, and none of you were inclined to skip, but Jimin had told the both of you that the professor he’d gotten this semester is particularly fond of giving weighted pop quizzes. Now that you’re thinking about it, he’d actually skipped more times than he’d attended this this year so far...

You hadn’t even suspected anything before now, but meeting his gaze reveals all you need to know that he’s guilty of what Seokjin said. Immediately, you’re incensed.

You selfish—

He’s lucky you’re magically silenced right now, but Seokjin can still talk, and that seems to be a problem for him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he denies, scowling at Seokjin.

“I saw you on my cousin’s tinder and she told me all about what you’ve been up to the past few months! Said you’ve made your way through almost all of her friends at this point, and always on a Friday—our movie day!” Your mouth drops open as Seokjin flings Jimin’s dirty laundry into the air for all to see. Jungkook lets out a hiss through his teeth, wincing.

“My god, hyung, you’re a whore—”

“I would have said fuckboy,” Namjoon interrupts the youngest to supply helpfully, keen to exact some form of revenge on Jimin for the suffering he’s had to endure in the past three days.

“I am NOT a fuckboy!” Jimin squawks and his face goes so red you’re sure he’s going to combust. “I’m not just some—I have feelings! I’m capable of having feelings for someone!”

“Yeah, you’re really proving it with all your escapades you ditcher,” Seokjin folds his arms, scowling at the younger. Nice! You applaud him in your head. “Good to know your friends mean so much to you that you’ll drop them at a moment’s notice for a quick fuck!”

“How can you say that when you know that just like you, I like—” As quick and heated as he starts off, Jimin suddenly cuts off, snapping his mouth shut with wide eyes.

The car is silent, even Taehyung’s ears perked in their direction. Confusion takes up most of your brain space—had he just been about to reveal that he likes someone? At once, your heart skips a beat and squeezes painfully. Do you want to know who it is, when you also know it can’t be you?

Because why would Jimin blow off nights he is meant to spend with you to play around with other girls, if you were the one he liked?

Trying to keep your face schooled, you turn back to the front, sinking into your seat slightly and missing the way Taehyung’s gaze flicks to you as you do so. You wish that things had stayed as they were, when you’d moved on from Jimin and you only had Seokjin on the brain. It wasn’t that long ago, but unfortunately for you, it’s no longer the case. Your brain and heart have never been so overloaded.

Evidently feelings for Jimin aren’t like the chicken pox, and you can catch them again.

Even stewing in your own thoughts as you are, the prolonged silence confuses you when you notice it a few moments later. Unable to help yourself, your eyes flick up to the rear-view mirror, catching sight of the way Seokjin is sitting, scowl from earlier replaced by a look of deep thought, his brows furrowed and arms still crossed. For a minute you puzzle over why exactly he is being quiet when Jimin was the one under fire, replaying the events of the conversation over in your head once more. You freeze when it strikes you, your own face scrunching in thought.

"How can you say that when you know that just like you, I like..."

For a second you sit in shock, a slight cut of betrayal skirting around your heart. Are they serious-- both your best friends have feelings for someone and have told each other, but not you? Disregarding your own refusal to admit your crush/es to them (mainly because they are the crush/es in question), you don't think you've ever felt so betrayed in your life. If your crush wasn't incriminating to admit out loud, they would be the first to know! You focus on the feelings resulting from their treachery that are drifting over you so that the sting of knowing that they like someone else is a little less noticeable.

This trip is a disaster and as soon as you can speak again you're filing for friend divorce.

x--x--x

Oddly enough, the rest of the day is spent in almost silence. Apparently that last little argument finally taught the two of them a lesson, because they haven't uttered a word since. You caught them glaring at each other once or twice, but apart from that there was a distinct lack of JinMin bickering. Taehyung's mood was quick to turn around after that, and he made sure to turn the music up so that if they started talking again he wouldn't hear it. Jungkook and Namjoon seemed relieved that they could finally have their own conversation, and you... well, you spent the rest of the day's trip staring out the window and blasting your own music, like a moody teenager.

Needless to say, you're in a bit of a funk. One might even say you're upset.

You can't believe them! How much else do they withhold from you and only tell each other? You feel like you don't even know them right now, and do your best to make sure they know it by glaring at them every time they meet your eyes. Because of this, setting up tonight's camp teeters on being a slightly uncomfortable affair.

You're so annoyed (and hurt, but you're not acknowledging that emotion yet) that when dessert is brought out, you even go so far as to take the last piece of their favourite one. The looks on their faces as you cram the entire strawberry crepe cake slice into your mouth in one go is almost funny enough to redeem them, but by this point you've had all afternoon to stew and you're not going to be having a change of heart any time soon.

By the time it's late enough for everyone to be retiring, you've pointedly ignored the two males enough that when you look up and don't see them anywhere, you have no idea where they've gone. Apparently your confusion is in plain view for the rest of the group to see, because Namjoon snorts. When you look over, he speaks.

"They went to grab their toiletries from the car," he informs you, rocking dangerously on the camping chair he's currently seated in. "I heard one of them call the other a tart on the way over though, so they're probably fighting again by now."

You huff, wondering if they've even noticed you're upset with them. Well, it's not like they'd said anything to you-- then again, that is precisely the problem. But still, they're stupid and you don't know if they've connected the dots yet. It's not that hard though!

...Are you overreacting?

It's possible. Learning that they like someone, and intuitively knowing it isn't you, well... it's done a bit of a number on your ego and your heart, and maybe you're overcompensating. Not for the first time, you wonder if there is a potion that can numb your heart and cancel out feelings. That would be great!

"You're wondering if they've noticed you're mad at them?" Taehyung's low register surprises you when it sounds next to you-- you didn't realise that he'd moved seats. Given your attention, he continues, "They most definitely have. Although, they're kind of stupid, so they can't agree on why you are."

"To their credit, they both realise it's something they've said." Namjoon drags a hand down his face with a sigh, "Except the thing is, they've both said so damn much."

You frown, tilting your head in thought; your eyes end up staring unfocused at Jungkook where he sits across the fire, poking his finger in the dirt and making flowers sprout. Your best friends? Having some degree of self-awareness? It seems almost too good to be true.

Yoongi and Hoseok have plodded off in the midst of your zoning out, apparently going to look for a certain mushroom that has unique magical properties and happens to grow near here. Gradually, the other three sitting with you disperse and you use a minor spell to reduce the flames of the campfire to a smolder. You figure it's been long enough that Seokjin and Jimin are probably back at your tent by now (you were really zoned out just then, so you have no idea if they went past or not), so you head to the car to grab your own toiletries and go about your nightly routine. Just because you're on the road doesn't mean you can afford to neglect your skin.

Considering you expected silence and an empty space when you rounded Yoongi's car and turned towards the van, you're more than a little surprised to both see and hear people. Immediately, you halt, expecting them to turn and notice you, but they’re so wrapped up in their own conversation that they have no idea you’re there. It only takes you a moment longer to realise it’s Jimin and Seokjin, who apparently haven’t succeeded in actually getting their toiletries and have instead been talking this whole time. 

Well, you don’t know if you can call it just talking.

They’re arguing again, you can tell that clearly, but for once you have no idea what is being said. What you can catch of their voices is hushed and somewhat vexed, emphasised by the occasional arm movement and finger jab. You’re tempted to step closer just so you can hear what they’re discussing so angrily, but don’t even get a chance to properly consider it before Seokjin is snapping loudly and answering your unspoken question.

“You know what we read! We both read it! So the fact you almost said in the car—”

“But I didn’t say anything,” Jimin snaps back, sounding crankier than you’ve ever heard him. His eyes are dark and he leans forward as he speaks, tense. “But you know what, if it bothers you so much, and you want it to be you, then why don’t you say something? Why haven’t you said anything before now? Nothing is stopping you!”

Seokjin’s response is lower than you can catch, heated if the tension in his shoulders is anything to go by. What Jimin says next is also spoken lower than you can hear, but Seokjin does you a favour in the next second when his voice raises in outrage.

“--you wanna know why? Huh? Maybe it’s because I realised lately that it’s not just that—  I like you!”

You freeze, an ellipsis materialising in your brain in the stead of any coherent thought. The world around you and the conversation in front of you doesn’t wait for you to catch up.

 Jimin blinks, mouth open in preparation to throw back a retort. He shuts it, something passing through his gaze that you can’t quite discern. He speaks a moment later, but you can only catch bits and pieces of it. “Both…? Seokjin… stupid idiot…”

The next bit comes clear as day to your ears, though.

“I like you too…”

All at once, the situation comes crashing back up to speed in your brain and everything catches up with you. Your head doesn’t really know how to process it but your heart is already ahead and shrinking in your chest.

Are you fucking kidding me.

You don’t know what comes over you, but from what you can discern it seems to be a cocktail of incredulousness, anger, and heartbreak. Ruining your cover, you stomp over to the van and march right between them to the boot, yanking it open more aggressively than you need to. The two of them exclaim in surprise to see you, but are left reeling as you simply grab your toiletries bag and turn on your heel before stomping away, ignoring them completely.

You cannot believe the cruel twist that fate has just slapped you across the face with, like a massive silicone dildo giving you a black eye. Earlier today you learned that your two best friends — who you’ve recently realised you have feelings for— actually have feelings for someone. And alright, that shit hurted, but you could have seen yourself getting over it some time in the future.

But to find out that that person they like is each other and you’ve essentially been third wheeling for the entirety of your friendship? Call you a drama queen but you have such a mix of emotions in you that you almost feel nauseous. For the sake of simplicity, you decide to label that concoction anger and wash your hands of it.

Storming back through the camp to your tent, you ignore a bewildered Yoongi and Hoseok emerging from the treeline and instead try not to rip your toiletries bag with the harsh grip your fingers have on it. Throwing it into the tent that you’d left open after setting up, you follow it inside and then turn to rip the zip down. You’re tempted to simply leave it at that before you decide that’s not enough and you hold out your hand, charming it  so that it wont open for anyone but you. 

Satisfied with your last spiteful act of the night, you rush through your routine and head to bed, blood boiling all through the night until you wake up the next day.

x — x — x

“Did you kick Seokjin and Jimin out of your tent last night?”

Not lucid enough to have noticed him standing next to you by the van as you munch on your cereal with half-closed eyes, you jump in fright when Namjoon’s voice crosses your ears. 

And what if I did? You have the impulse to voice that thought, but the slight itch in your throat reminds you that, for the time being, you’re still silenced. At your own behest, sure, but not being able to quip sassy retorts back at people has been steadily getting at you these past four days. 

Instead, you simply shrug, and Namjoon rolls his eyes. “Trick question! We know you did because they came to our tents last night pleading for us to let them in because they couldn’t get into theirs.”

Well, you suppose that considering the three of you are bound and can’t be more than a few metres apart, it’s lucky that their tents were so close to your own. You frown at what he says though, squinting at Namjoon. Your point?

As though he’s perfectly in tune with your thoughts, he readily elaborates. “So what did they do to warrant that? I didn’t realise you were that upset with them.”

His words make you remember what you’ve been trying not to think about: last night. 

Your mother always told you that sleeping on it would fix almost everything, but you’d woken up in just as bad of a mood as you’d gone to bed with. It’s petty of you to be angry at them for liking each other, just because it’s not you, but there is also the fact that they’re your best friends and hadn’t told you a single thing. The betrayal of it all is one of the things that stings most, as dramatic as that is. Whatever, you’re allowed to be upset and you’re going to exercise that right. 

Namjoon doesn’t get an answer because you scull the remainder of your milk and cereal in one go (leaving him in something akin to a state of shock) and promptly walk off to get dressed. 

When everyone piles back into their respective cars today, it’s with a lighter air than the days previous. This is because, as Jungkook had announced excitedly before you all departed, you should be arriving at the witch’s home in a little over a few hours. Honestly, you’re ecstatic, because you don’t think you can handle being around Seokjin and Jimin for a while after this. 

In your bid to think about literally anything but the two males boring holes into the back of your head with their eyes, you instead allow yourself to daydream about how things are going to be in the next few hours. The witch is probably old and nice, wise and knowledgeable. She’ll get it, and she’ll probably support you if you call the boys names. Sisterhood of witches!

x — x 

Hours later and you’re standing outside of an industrial concrete home, not too dissimilar to the Cullens’ house from Twilight, except it’s overrun by plants and vines that curl and flower across the mass of grey in gorgeous patterns. The door has just slammed in front of you after Namjoon explained who you were and why you were here, and you’re now listening to the sound of many chains and bolts sliding on the other side of the wood.

The witch is nothing like you thought and you feel like your fate has fallen into some questionable hands. 

When the door opens once more, now unrestricted by chains, you’re met with the sight of the woman you’d driven four days to see and plead with. Needless to say, she isn’t what you expected at all— somehow despite the fact that your professor had literally explained what to expect before you left on this little roadtrip.

She stands, somewhat short but still graceful with long inky hair that curls down her back untamed, slipping over her shoulders at the front. Her skin is the kind of bronzed that tells of time spent in the sun and out in the wilds, and the loose clothing hanging from her form is light and breezy looking. Her eyes are dark and sleekly lined for a cat-like effect, lips stained dramatic red in contrast to the rest of her chill get-up.

She’s really out here living her best life, you think in wonder.

“Lim said you’d be coming… I’m Sunmi,” she voices, staring shrewdly at all eight of you one at a time until her gaze passes over you, Jimin, Seokjin and the runes binding your wrists. Her nails tap against the doorframe that she’s braced against as she hums in thought. “...Come in.”

When she turns and moves further into her home, the rest of you hover awkwardly before kicking into gear. Yoongi and Hoseok dismiss themselves, having spotted some ‘exciting’ plants back by the treeline, and so it is just you, Jungkook, Taehyung, Namjoon and those other two you don’t want to think about that are left to follow the witch into the house. 

You follow her as she walks around the whole floor, gathering certain things as she goes. At her request, Namjoon fills her in on exactly what the issue is— he’s apparently a bit intimidated by her keen gaze and grumpy disposition, because he stutters a few times while recounting your situation to her. Taehyung and Jungkook, considering that they’re just along for the ride, spend the walk looking around in awe. Sunmi has a lot of artefacts on display in her home, some with runes you’ve never seen before in your life, not even in textbooks— kind of like the ones on your wrist.

“Alright, you three wait here,” Sunmi stops all of you in what seems to be a sitting room of sorts decorated with soft greens and white, pointing at Namjoon, Taehyung and Jungkook, and then the lounge. “If I’m going to fix this… curse...I will need only the three of them. It shouldn’t take too long.”

Her words are polite, skirting along the edge of being curt. Obediently, like puppies, they follow her instructions and take a seat with wide eyes. Satisfied, the witch turns to you and the idiots behind you. 

“Come, in here. Be quick about it.”

Hastily, you follow her finger and enter the room situated off to the side, hearing Seokjin and Jimin scramble behind you. What greets you is dark blue walls with stars smattered across them in metallic gold, the carpet plush, dark grey. There is a desk pushed against the wall, and a large table in the middle of the room that is framed by a few plushly upholstered chairs. You get the sudden urge to cough, throat itching slightly, but hold down the urge as best as you can and ignore it for now.

Sunmi closes the door behind her, taking a moment before moving to the table and placing the items in her arms down. She then leans forward, eyes pinning all three of you in place; you hear Seokjin let out something like an ‘eep’ from just behind you, and have to remind yourself that you’re angry at him so you can’t find it cute. 

“Look, I moved all the way out here so I didn’t have to deal with people,” she begins, straightening and crossing her arms. You avoid her gaze, instead focusing on the large window behind her, and then the vase of white and violet blooms in the middle of the table; you wonder if they’re responsible for the sweet, syrupy yet musky scent that accentuates the room. “Let me cut to the chase so that you leave and I can get back to what I was doing sooner.”

Somewhat taken aback by her words, you’re left blinking in surprise while she simply continues, pointing her finger at your wrists and then in the general direction of the boys.

“These runes are specific to a certain deity, one that isn’t often invoked because of how temperamental he is, but one that usually deals with things in the area of love. Specifically, unrequited.”

As she spoke, she started to move around the table, now approaching your little huddle. On instinct you take a few steps back, shifting slightly behind your two friends. You catch a glimpse of their faces as you move, and you’re surprised at how pale and stiff the two of them have suddenly become. Jimin’s silver hair begins to steam slightly, the tips of his ears flushing red.

“Now, usually what people return with after visiting him, is blessings. These, however,” she points to the runes, “Are what happens when one insults him.”

Jimin gulps, and Seokjin swallows before speaking hurriedly, “We didn’t mean to take the doll! We didn’t know it was his…”

Sunmi rolls her eyes, holding her hand out. “Give me the doll.”

You hadn’t even realised it was in Jimin’s hands until he jerked and hastily placed it in her hold. It’s as ugly as ever and you can’t help but glare at it. 

“This isn’t about the doll,” Sunmi says, cocking her hip and appearing the epitome of unimpressed. “The runes reveal that the insult lies within a request for a blessing. You did something wrong, and the doll became a conduit for his retaliation. You must have been desperate to go to him of all love deities, so how on earth did you manage to mess up the simple process of requesting a blessing?”

While you're standing with a blank face, struggling to keep up with all the information being unloaded on you, the two men beside you bow their heads in something like shame. When your brain catches up, you realise with chagrin that she’s saying they went to a temple or shrine of a love deity to ask for a blessing— and bitterly, you connect that it was likely for each other.

“Wh— but we did everything right!” Jimin is the one protesting now, eyes wide and fingers fiddling. “Isn’t this because of y/n’s potion?”

Bastard! You can’t believe he’d try to pin the blame on you! 

You’re beginning to simmer, throat tingling as you swallow angrily, and like he can sense it, Seokjin sends you a nervous look.

“What? This has nothing to do with a potion,” Sunmi scoffs, sending you a somewhat pitying look. You pretend it’s because she’s sympathising with you for being stuck with these two. “All the potion would have done is cover you in goo. This is—” she grabs your wrist suddenly, turning it to observe the runes on the underside before making a noise of realisation. “— this is because you went to a deity that specialises in unrequited love and asked for blessings in love that wasn’t unrequited.”

Sunmi releases your hand and you’re left reeling, quickly realising that they must have asked for blessings in love with each other— which, as you’d overheard last night and are now painfully aware of, is anything but unrequited. Oddly enough, the two boys next to you appear confused.

“No, that can’t be right—” Jimin starts, but Sunmi doesn’t let him finish.

“The runes don’t lie,” she says plainly, moving back to assemble some things before taking something that looks incriminatingly like a bong into her grasp; you don’t even remember her grabbing it on the way here. “They’re like a signature, almost. I know what I’m talking about, baby boy.”

Jimin goes bright red, hair steaming even more, although you can’t tell whether its from anger or embarrassment. Knowing him, probably both.

“Jimin,” Seokjin warns, shooting the younger a look when he opens his mouth to retort; apparently having Seokjin’s magic has made him that much more hotheaded. Seokjin shakes his head and Jimin clenches his jaw with the effort it takes him not to talk.

“Right, well, it seems like the three of you have some things to unpack— it bound you in particular for a reason. I’ll break the curse for you, but I need to drown this doll in some blessed water before I can get started.” Sunmi is already turning on her heel and walking towards the door before she even finishes. “Stay in here and don’t cause trouble.”

And then she leaves, and for some reason the resounding thud of the door swinging closed behind her is like a metaphor sealing your fate.

For the first few seconds after her departure, the room is silent. The two men beside you are frozen, but it doesn’t take long for them to pick up on the waves of anger beginning to emanate from you. They turn, sharing a similar expression of nervousness and slight fear. They look like they’d like more than anything to disappear right now, but of course that isn’t an option, especially when the curse currently afflicting you all means that whatever comes to their brain is immediately blurted into the air.

“Look, y/n, uh… we can explain.” Jimin takes a step forward, holding his hands out as though to placate you. For some reason even just that is quick to irritate you further, and you glare at him. How is he going to explain, you wonder? The witch has pretty much already spelled out everything you need to know about exactly why you’re in this situation. 

They went to the shrine of some obscure love deity to receive blessings on their ‘unrequited’ love — which happened to be requited because the person they were asking for blessings for was each other — and then proceeded to insult the deity and take a doll from the shrine, which the deity then used as a conduit to curse the three of you. You get all that, loud and clear. What you really want to know is why the hell you got roped into this punishment and forced to experience all this shame and humiliation.

“Look, about the shrine— we didn’t only go for personal reasons! We knew there was a doll there that the professor would be interested in,” Seokjin hurried to elaborate, before throwing a dirty look to the side and proceeding to incriminate his friend. “Actually, the only reason we even went at all was because Jimin suggested it.”

You don’t know why they’re so eager to shift the blame; you’re happy to include both of them on your shit list. 

Jimin seems to grow so incensed at Seokjin’s comment that his mouth grows that much looser and he’s speaking before the thought can even materialise in his brain. “What the fuck, dude— we both agreed to go because we both read that page of her diary that we found the cat playing with! Stop trying to pin this on me, it was a group effort you jerk!”

For a second your brain is filled with white noise as what he said sinks in.

Then you’re pissed.

So pissed, in fact, that you don’t even feel the familiar tingle in your throat when it occurs and you’re exploding before you even realise that the silencing spell has worn off.

“Are you kidding me— YOU READ MY DIARY?!” both boys flinch, eyes shooting wide as they take a physical step back. You’re so angry you’re almost shaking. This is ridiculous! Faintly, you realise that you should shut up but now that you’ve started you can’t make yourself stop.

“This is unbelievable! Not only did your stupidity and your stupid heart-ons for each other end up dragging me into being cursed, but then you went and made this the worst four days of my life!” You jab your finger at them, voice so loud it’s ringing in your own ears. “I can’t believe I like you two! I’m so fucking angry at you— when we get home I’m performing a cutting spell so I don’t have to love you anymore, so fuck BOTH of you and go kiss behind a tree or something!”

You’re slightly out of breath by the time you finish, still fuming but feeling like a weight has been lifted off your chest. About a second later you realise that the spell has worn off and you just tore their heads off, but your brain is a little preoccupied with everything so you decide to deal with the mental repercussions of it later. 

Both boys are silent, looking at you with wide eyes. You’re just beginning to wonder why when Jimin starts to speak, eyes shifting. “y/n did you just… did you just say—”

At his words, you reflect on exactly just came out of your mouth and instantly horror washes over you, your heart dropping through your chest. 

Yeah, you like reading about accidentally confessing in fiction but now you’re suddenly feeling a lot of regret and you’re not so sure you’re a fan of it anymore.

You’re saved from having to muster a response in the current black hole that has become your brain by the door opening, Sunmi returning with three squishy, heavy-looking items in her hand that you quickly recognise as water balloons. The realisation comes a little too late, though, because you don’t even have time to move before she’s pegging them at all three of you and next thing you know, you’re standing there soaked, sputtering and shocked.

“What the hell—?!” Seokjin spits out the water that got in his mouth, gagging. 

“Specially blessed water, procured by yours truly,” Sunmi says simply, moving into the room just to place the doll back on the table, along with a bowl. She reaches into it and throws something like ground stardust on you, sending you all into a coughing fit once more. “Alright, the curse is dissolved. Your speech issues should be solved, but the runes that bind you… they might take a little longer, a day or so, to wear off.”

She smacks her hands together, dusting them off as she delivers the three of you with a sly look. “I’d tell you good luck, but while I was soaking the doll I realised why the three of you in particular were bound. It’s the same as I said before— your feelings aren’t unrequited, for either of the people that you requested blessings for.”

“Either of the people?” you echo, regrettably inclined to talk now that you’re able to again. Sunmi sends you an amused if somewhat exasperated look.

“I’m sure they’ll tell you,” she says cryptically, before angling her body to the others. “Now my work is done, get out. I miss my solitude. Also, I’m keeping the doll as my fee. It’s ugly as hell and is gonna look fantastic on the wall by the dining table.”

Still processing what she said before all of that, your group is hassled out of the house in a blur and before you know it, all six of you are standing in front of her door and witnessing it slam in your faces for the second time today.  

Namjoon is the first to recover and is ridiculously cheerful as he speaks; you’re confused as to why until he sends you a knowing look and you realise that he, along with the other two youngest, probably heard your loud, shameful confession to both boys. He’d never said anything about knowing of your feelings, but you knew he knew. You could feel it in your bones. Also, his expressions aren’t as impassive as he’d like to think they are.

“Right, well! Back to the car everyone! Someone go get Hope and Yoongi. The sooner we head back, the sooner I can forget the weird things I saw in that living room!” He then grabs Taehyung and Jungkook around the shoulders, turning with them and steering them away in the direction of the car. “The sooner I can also get those fish bread things at the market near my house. Gods, I miss them.”

“You have an addiction, hyung.” You hear Jungkook say, his voice growing fainter the further away he grows. You stop attempting to listen after that, turning back to the other two males who you’re surprised to see haven’t budged and are looking straight at you.

“We went to the shrine for you,” Seokjin says suddenly, before you can ask them what they want. You blink, shock smacking you in the face. “We read a page of your diary— which we didn’t realise was a page of your diary until it was too late — and saw that you liked someone, but it didn’t say who.”

“We both wanted it to be us,” Jimin intercedes, rubbing the back of his neck and averting his eyes. His cheeks, along with Seokjin’s, are flushing pink. “Because as you no doubt heard last night, although we like each other… we liked you first. So I think you were drawn into this mess because we both like you… and each other.”

“And, um, like the witch said,” Seokjin gulps, now somewhat tentative. “Our feelings aren’t unrequited… which means that you like us too…?”

“Well, yeah,” Jimin mutters, smacking the other male on the arm. “That’s literally what she said while yelling at us, idiot.”

What they’re saying… is this a love triangle with all sides filled in? It’s a lot to process at once, and they give you a second as they watch the gears turn in your head.

“You…” you pause, struggling to put words together. Finally, you give up trying to be eloquent and slap a hand to your face, closing your eyes. “You both are so stupid— so stupid. I can’t handle this right now.”

When you open your eyes, you’re met with looks of fear. You squash that emotion by jabbing your finger at them, runes still faintly on your wrist. “When we get home, I’m gonna beat you. Then, I’m gonna give you a kiss, and then I’m gonna beat you again, and then we’re going to talk about this. Got it?”

They’re fighting grins at your words, Jimin snorting as they both nod hastily. 

“It’s a date,” Seokjin says cheekily, cackling when you raise your hand at him.

“Can we have a hug, y/n?” Jimin hazards a plea, stepping forward with puppy eyes directed full force at you. “It’s rough when you’re angry at us.”

“You deserved it for all the shit you two said,” you say, rolling your eyes but opening your arms nonetheless. They exclaim in happiness and dive forward, almost making the three of you fall over in their zealousness. You feel your heart ease as you hold them both in your arms and they hold you. 

Maybe this trip and whole ‘getting cursed by a cranky love deity’ thing isn’t a complete disaster after all. 

Then again… you still have the trip back.

a/n: to the commissioner, I hope u like it!!! thank u for reading and if u enjoyed it please lmk with a like and/or rb!! thank u !! love u !!!

[morwensteelsheen]

Do you have any advice for someone who wants to write Éowyn x Faramir fanfic in a way that remains authentic to who they are/how Tolkien envisioned them? Of all the fics I’ve read on this pairing, yours just stands out to me as being most in character, whether you’re writing them in Middle Earth or a modern!au. I agree with you about Faramir being gentle but NOT a crybaby and Éowyn not a loose cannon and actually somewhat frosty! Any advice you have would be appreciated. Cheers!

bro... 🥺❤️ that is so kind of you, thank you so much!!!! Like holy moly I am going to be riding high on that compliment all week hahaha, i’m giddy thinking about it. 

i’ve been fretting about how to answer this question because i think i still struggle quite a bit with their characterisations. also i’m terrible at framing advice, so i’m going to try and answer this by giving my interpretations of certain things and how that effects how i write about them, and hopefully that will be helpful? also i’m so sorry, this is literally 6,000 words, this totally got away from me. 

To start quite generally, i think it’s super helpful to realise that almost all of the characters in LOTR are devoid of any significant internal life because the book is structured as a retelling of historical events to frodo, which are later written down and then “translated” by tolkien. unless a character is explicitly telling frodo/someone else what they’re thinking, we don’t really know what’s going on in there (except éowyn and i’ll come back to this later). But the other reason we don’t really get a sense of most characters’ internal lives is because they function as, essentially, heroic/fantastical archetypes and responses to other elements of literature. People tend to shy away from this because of this weird postmodern backlash against tropes, but it’s, i feel, extremely important to remember that these characters aren’t in the books because they’re fully-fleshed out human beings, they’re there because tolkien needed characters to fulfil certain narrative roles. this is not a value judgement, but acknowledging that’s what’s going on here is helpful for us as we try to figure out what these characters would be doing when canon doesn’t explicitly tell us what they’d be doing (or what they’d be doing in an au/a rewrite/whatever). 

All this to say: all of these characters are born out of a specific literary and historical context, and i think in the first instance its suuuuuuuupa helpful to go back and figure out what that context is, because it helps you to build out a character profile in your head that feels true to character even when you’re operating in the great canon unknown. 

Okay so for some general thoughts on each of the kiddos:

Éowyn

I’ll start with éowyn because i think i’ve spent the most time thinking about her lately and i feel like i’m finally starting to get in her head a little better. I’m not super confident in my take yet, but it’s getting there, i feel. 

éowyn’s metatextual character history is really fascinating and really important for understanding who she is. éowyn is, essentially, a direct response to the character of lady macbeth and what tolkien saw as a massive disservice to her character at the end of the play. I had a much better pull quote from tolkien talking specifically about that, but i can’t seem to find it right now so you’ll have to use this really brief overview instead — sorry! I will update this if i come across the quote again. 

understanding that foundation in lady macbeth, we can start to ask certain questions about éowyn vis a vis lady macbeth. What are the things that we know — in text — make lady macbeth and éowyn similar? Quite a lot, actually. They��re both ‘fully realised’ women (and i’ll come back to this in a sec), they’re both not naive about the mechanics of power — lady macbeth is a conniver, éowyn is left in control of a whole ass kingdom while the menfolk are away etc —, they’re both hindered by their gender (this is obvious for éowyn, but i HELLA recommend reading lady macbeth’s come you spirits/unsex me here speech and thinking about the relationship between womanhood and violence, especially in light of éowyn’s experience of battlefield violence and later decision to give it up to go be a hippie in ithilien), and they both have to deal with men being frustrating. I love and will defend théoden quite explicitly, but it’s important to realise that he did, in essence, fuck éowyn over entirely and abdiate on his familial responsibilities to her, before you even get to his abdication of duty to the crown etc. 

The other big — very big, i feel — similarity between éowyn and lady macbeth is that they are both tremendously emotionally distant and restrained. But éowyn, unlike lady macbeth, is capable of camouflaging her emotional distance when necessary. Here, from ROTK, is a passage of crucial important to understanding éowyn: 

‘Alas! For she was pitted against a foe beyond the strength of her mind or body. And those who will take a weapon to such an enemy must be sterner than steel, if the very shock shall not destroy them. It was an evil doom that set her in his path. For she is a fair maiden, fairest lady of a house of queens. And yet I know not how I should speak of her. When I first looked on her and perceived her unhappiness, it seemed to me that I saw a white flower standing straight and proud, shapely as a lily, and yet knew that it was hard, as if wrought by elf-wrights out of steel. Or was it, maybe, a frost that had turned its sap to ice, and so it stood, bitter-sweet, still fair to see, but stricken, soon to fall and die? Her malady begins far back before this day, does it not, Éomer?’

‘I marvel that you should ask me, lord,’ he answered. ‘For I hold you blameless in this matter, as in all else; yet I knew not that Éowyn, my sister, was touched by any frost, until she first looked on you. Care and dread she had, and shared with me, in the days of Wormtongue and the king’s bewitchment; and she tended the king in growing fear. But that did not bring her to this pass!’

‘My friend,’ said Gandalf, ‘you had horses, and deeds of arms, and the free fields; but she, born in the body of a maid, had a spirit and courage at least the match of yours. Yet she was doomed to wait upon an old man, whom she loved as a father, and watch him falling into a mean dishonoured dotage; and her part seemed to her more ignoble than that of the staff he leaned on.

‘Think you that Wormtongue had poison only for Théoden’s ears? Dotard! What is the house of Eorl but a thatched barn where brigands drink in the reek, and their brats roll on the floor among their dogs? Have you not heard those words before? Saruman spoke them, the teacher of Wormtongue. Though I do not doubt that Wormtongue at home wrapped their meaning in terms more cunning. My lord, if your sister’s love for you, and her will still bent to her duty, had not restrained her lips; you might have heard even such things as these escape them. But who knows what she spoke to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all her life seemed shrinking, and the walls of her bower closing in about her, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in?’

Emphasis my own.

there’s a whole hell of a lot going on here, but i’m going to try and boil it down to a couple main things:

1. gandalf and aragorn immediately see misery in éowyn, but they are both very good at reading people. faramir (later, in the steward and the king) also senses the misery, but he is explicitly talented at reading people, and even he takes a while to fully understand what’s going on in her head

2. Éomer, who éowyn feels obligation and duty to (both as her brother, but also her superior in rank) has no idea that éowyn is suicidal. he knows she’s not happy, but he thinks it’s not until aragorn shows up that she finally becomes despondent and is amazed to hear that that’s not the case, to which gandalf responds, essentially: you weren’t meant to know, she was working with a will of steel to hide her emotions from you because she wanted to protect you from it. So éowyn is well versed at controlling her emotions when she needs to, and is not prone to showing them where she doesn’t want to.

3. Gandalf describes éowyn first as wrought from steel (which, short of an incredibly hot fire, is not easy to break), and then amends it to say that she is made of ice. Ice, compared to steel, is far easier to melt. Maybe inadvertently on tolkien’s behalf, i think this speaks to the nature of éowyn and faramir’s relationship — first she is melted by fire (battle, the witch-king, etc) and the she is warmed by the sun (faramir! Minas anor! The winter has passed, etc). 

4. Earlier i said the characters in lotr don’t really have a huge internal life, except for éowyn. This is where that comes in: éowyn, we are supposed to understand, has a really intense internal life, because her mind is really all she has. We are meant to understand that she’s got a lot going on internally, but there is a very specific reason we’re not privy to it. That’s important to think about.

what this does is widen the gulf between what éowyn’s thinking and feeling, and what she’s actually saying and doing. If you’re writing (as i tend to prefer) in a way that deals with her inner life quite intensely, building that gap up is much easier to do. She’s going to have a lot of thoughts, and almost all of them are going to be hindered by either other people’s expectations of her, or her own expectations of herself. And that’s going to cause problems for her — maybe not always throwing-herself-at-death level problems, but certainly problems.  

so there’s that. Then i think there’s a lot to be said for widening the net on éowyn inspirations. I’ve looked to joan of arc (which i kind of hinted at here) quite a bit. I feel like the joan of arc comparison is easy to understand so i wont waste too much time on it, though i will say i’d actually recommend reading catholic interpretations of joan of arc, not later protestant Girlboss interpretations because i think those miss the point of joan of arc entirely. 

I was going to try to comment more on the gender element but i feel like i’m not on great footing with that yet so i will leave that to the side for now.

Faramir

tbh i was kind of dreading getting to this because i still find it exceptionally hard to get into his head, so wish me luck lol 

I’m going to be a total bore and recommend you check out this article. Bear in mind that that was written by a dude at the citadel so it’s going to stray into the realm of Military Brain at points, but i think it’s a worthwhile read anyways. 

ah christ, faramir. okay. cowabunga.

faramir, more so than aragorn, is the platonic ideal of a romantic hero. Both in the genre sense (as in, romance novels) and in the sense of the artistic movement of romanticism, i know i’ve said exactly this before but it’s worth reiterating. I’ll start with the romantic influence and then go onto the romance.

So the romantic movement is a really important intellectual, cultural and political movement, and you will have to forgive me because i am only loosely a modernist and more a contemporary historian, and not at all an expert in literature or art history, so this is going to be, like, a 101 level understanding of what was going on. 

The romantic movement is kicked off as a reaction to both the emphasis on rationality and quantifiability promoted during the enlightenment, and the bourgeois economic revolutions (this is the french revolution, mostly, but the later revolutions across the european continent in 1848 and the kickstarting of the industrial revolution in england). Romanticism was, essentially, a return to intense emotionality, reverence for nature, and appreciation of that which is, ultimately indefinable. Not necessary for writing a fanfic, but reading about the idea of the sublime is kind of a fun rabbit hole to go down if you’ve got time to spare. 

A lot of present day writers will talk about the romantic movement as a break with the past, which is, i guess, kind of true, but is also not really true. The romantic movement — as much as the enlightenment — took its inspiration and logical from classic art and thought. But it interpreted the classics differently to the enlightenment. Whereas the enlightenment era thinkers were fascinated by the rationality and mathematical precision of the greeks and romans, the romantics were more interested in their emotional liberty, and the epic (in the truest sense of the word) shows of emotion and experiences of human life. 

but what does this mean for faramir? A lot! 

The first time we’re introduced to faramir (if not in name) is in fotr, when boromir talks about the destruction of the bridge at osgiliath, when he describes an epic story of war and heroism, wherein only four total people survive swimming from the bridge: two unnamed others, boromir, and faramir. right from the off we know that, if nothing else, he’s not a limp-wristed little lordling, he has the fortitude to survive what few others can. 

Then, barely half a breath later, we get a description of faramir’s premonition, the fact that it came to him repeatedly, and that he immediately volunteered to go blues clues his way through it. We get the sense that he’s a guy who doesn’t back down from a challenge. And then faramir goes away for a while, until two towers, when we meet him again in the brilliance that is ithilien. And here i’m going to go back to our friend from the citadel for some interesting character insight:

the rangers under the command of Faramir are armed with long bows, giving them the capability to wage war over distances greater than most of their foes. This is the same type of warfare deemed cowardly and dishonorable by the chivalric knights, but is far more effective and less perilous than the face-to-face [...] This tactic also reveals Faramir to be a conscientious leader, minimizing the risk to his subordinates while maximizing their effectiveness in battle. Faramir was considerate of the risk he put his men to and sacrificed the idea of glorious face-to-face combat in favor of a weapon system that would be less desirable in the eyes of men such as Boromir, but also much more efficient. [...] Using camouflage and stealth, the warriors un d er Faramir's command set themselves apart from all other military units besides the elves in The Lord of the Rings and ultimately align themselves more closely with the soldiers of modern warfare than with the ancient heroes prevalent in the work of Tolkien. 

Okay enough of the military history because it’s soul-crushingly boring, but the gist is that faramir is, (whatever else he is) a very unique figure. Taking this as a value neutral statement, we get the sense, before we even hear him own to it himself, that he’s a man apart from the rest. I think it’s important also to think about the extent to which he is situated as a part of nature when we first meet him, even if we later know that he is from this big, awful stone city, we are meant to immediately associate him with nature. And not nature in a primitive sense, i’d argue, but nature in the romantic sense, where it speaks to the beauty of creation etc etc etc 

Then there’s the bright sword speech, which im not going to say anything on because cleverer people than me have dealt with it much more efficiently, but i would say that the takeaway from that, besides that he loves peace yada yada yada, is that he likes talking about peace. He has opinions on the war, perhaps even a controversial opinion, and by god, he wants people to know it. So thinking about what that level of immediate and almost impolitic honesty says about him is worth thinking about as you try to write him. 

Later, we get to see faramir in the white city, and what we see is that he’s kind of a drama queen! I say this lovingly, but it does correspond to him going off on one immediately about how the war sucks ass and how he’s above it and how all the other people of middle earth are shit, including his own, and how much better life was In Númenor (which is, essentially, the crux of a lot of romantic poetry. And my headcanon of faramir’s connection to romantic poetry is here). 

The other thing we learn in the white city is that faramir is very aware of himself as a person, and is actively altering whatever his base inclinations are to fit his desired personality. Here’s what i said in a comment on swaddledog’s excellent hearts and minds: 

When Denethor hits him with the "ever your desire is to appear lordly and generous as a king of old, gracious, gentle," he's not saying it because he thinks that sort of behaviour comes naturally to Faramir but because he knows he has to work really, really hard at it. I think inherent in that desire is also the failure — he tries, but sometimes he comes up short (often, even — that kiss on the wall wasn't exactly gracious and gentle!), and it's because he sometimes comes up short that Denethor knows it doesn't come naturally to him. And you get that perfectly, just so, so perfectly.

That gap between what faramir thinks he is and whats to be versus what he actually is is very important for understanding him. Though, as i say, i really struggle with writing faramir, so it’s definitely not an easy thing to work into a fanfic. 

I realise i’m probably not articulating this as well as i should, but that’s because dealing with faramir is a tremendous arseache for me, lol. I think basically my advice here is to familiarise yourself with a lot of these romantic figures and try to bear them in mind as you write. pierre bezukhov from war & peace actually fits quite closely to what i imagine young (as in, pre-ring war) faramir is like, with some necessary alterations for canon, and the fact that faramir seems like he’d be slightly more responsible than pierre. And certainly far, far, FAR more confident. 

So that’s the romantic, and then there’s the romance. I saw a post a few months ago that identified faramir as, essentially, a love letter to women. And he totally is: he’s this fucking baller guerrilla warrior who quotes poetry and reads widely and falls in love deeply and sweeps a woman off her feet because he finds her beautiful and incredible and worthwhile even when she’s at her absolute worst. emotional intimacy is real, hallelujah! And so i think any time you’re writing faramir you’re going to have to keep that in mind, because he is this sort of breathless romantic. He’s a character that exists (inadvertently because tolkien couldn’t predict the future) to act, outwardly, as an antidote to the All Men Are Shit mindset. How much you actually keep him on that pedestal is up to you. I like to nuance his character with a bit more chaos, let him be a bit of a shameless flirt in his younger years, let him be so high and mighty in his romantic behaviour that he doesn’t realise that sometime éowyn just wants to fucking chill, that sort of thing. 

There are lots of other character moments that stick out to me that i dont want to say a huge amount about, but will instead link to this incredible meta about faramir’s númenóreaness, with the disclaimer that dealing with that sort of capability in any serious way scares the shit out of me, so i have mostly just Pretended I Can’t Read every time i think about it, except for a super brief reference at the end of this fic. 

Okay onto the meat of this (oh my god, i’m so sorry for how long this is)

Faramir + Éowyn = true love

Before i start, i just want to point out that in terms of seeing their relationship, we only really get it in the steward and the king, which is significant for a lot of reasons. For one because tolkien got a huge amount of shit for how quickly they fell in love (people accused it of being war-bride stuff, which typically was not a great arrangement for those involved) — tolkien himself said ‘shut the fuck up dude’ to that, and this is probably because tolkien married his wife, edith, right before he went off to war. I’ll come back to that in a sec because it’s important. 

The other reason it’s important is because the steward and the king features some of the most consistent lofty and high-fantasy prose of the entire series. Tolkien does this magical thing where he weaves high brow purple prose in with deeply casual, familiar (for the early 20th century) vernacular, and to great effect. And he does this for a reason, he wants to create the sense of this deeply developed, fantastical world that extends well outside the bounds of what we are allowed to see in text while also allowing us the rhetorical space to relate to the characters we see. It is, then, significant that there is almost none of the “low-brow” vernacular speech in the steward and the king. It means tolkien’s got all thrusters on full, so to speak, in terms of the romance. He wants to evoke arthurian romances, courtly/chivalric love, the sort of fated-by-the-stars love that nobody would think to deny because of the time constraints because it seems so abundantly obvious that this love is Meant To Be.

But that’s just what he’s doing tonally. In terms of content, he’s weaving a more complex picture. 

We’ll start with the obvious. Emotionally, both éowyn and faramir are at their worst. Sort of. éowyn’s worst might have been when she did her suicide run on the pelennor in terms of self-destructiveness, but i think her real low point is actually when she wakes up in the HoH, basically immobilized, prevented from dying, and now aware she’s going to have to do the One Thing she refused to do, which is watch everybody she loves go off to die, and then sit about and wait for her own death. faramir, meanwhile, went off to a hopeless battle (expecting to die) after mouthing off at his father, then wakes up to find out he’s not only alive, but the only surviving member of his family (for some reason! because don’t forget gandalf is very clear that he shouldn’t find out about denethor’s death until Later), is now the fucking steward of gondor, and also this mythical king is Back. also he too has to sit around and wait for death. So emotionally neither of them are doing too great. 

Their first impressions of one another are very important. 

faramir, of éowyn: “and he turned and saw the Lady Éowyn of Rohan; and he was moved with pity, for he saw that she was hurt, and his clear sight perceived her sorrow and unrest.”; “He looked at her, and being a man whom pity deeply stirred, it seemed to him that her loveliness amid her grief would pierce his heart.”

So he knows who she is, and he can see that she’s physically hurt, but also can see she’s feeling all kinds of fucked up. And the first emotion he feels is pity. He’s assessing her in terms of pain and sorrow, and all of these sorts of emotions éowyn seems desperate to divorce herself from. And he offers her pity. That’s significant. 

éowyn, of faramir: “she looked at him and saw the grave tenderness in his eyes, and yet knew, for she was bred among men of war, that here was one whom no Rider of the Mark would outmatch in battle.” 

She doesn’t know who he is, not really, but she does immediately think he could kick ass. And that’s her first and only real assessment of him. That’s also significant. 

And éowyn is miserable, and she’s so miserable she’s actually willing to openly talk about if (if only to a limited extent) and faramir does what is, I think, one of the most incredible things in the entire book. He functionally disarms her, lets her down gently, and places them on equal footing with a single joke:

‘What would you have me do, lady?’ said Faramir. ‘I also am a prisoner of the healers.’

There’s merit in interpreting this straight, but I actually think it's quite funny to relate the safety and security of a hospital in wartime to a prison, to a cage. And I think tolkien’s aware of this, and not really intending us to read it straight. What this does is soften éowyn up enough that she asks for what she wants, but also seems to make her more interested in dealing with him, even if she reacts badly to his compliment of her. 

And then they fall in love, and whatever. The chapter’s there, there’s a million fanfics out there about it, whatever. 

But faramir’s proposal is Big, and deserves thought for what it says about their relationship. People like to bitch about it because they take it to mean that éowyn has had to change all this stuff about herself, give up her desire to be a firebrand or whatever to go off and be a lovely prince’s wife in this noble hippie commune over those hills yonder. I think that’s totally wrong.

I think what’s going on in faramir’s proposal and éowyn’s response is a really fascinating illumination of the accord they’ve reached with one another through their (admittedly brief) courtship. Here’s why:

First, faramir tries to approach the conversation with a bit of subterfuge. Not in the weird negative way, just in that he’s not hitting it head on at the start. He obviously still doesn’t understand what’s going on inside her head fully, so tries to ask around the question (‘why aren’t you at the cormallen?’) instead of asking the question he’s obviously interested in. éowyn has no time for this, and tells him to nut up or shut up. And he does! 

But then there’s this line: 

But I do not offer you my pity. For you are a lady high and valiant and have yourself won renown that shall not be forgotten.

Two things going on here: one, faramir’s rescinding his initial emotional reaction. He felt pity for her, but has now come to know her well enough that he realises she doesn’t need pity, and isn’t dumb enough to try and force it on her. But the second thing, almost more important, is that he assesses her in the terms that she prefers, which is that she has won herself renown and has shown her valour. These are not the things Faramir values, we know this, that’s the whole point of the bright sword speech. But they are the things éowyn values, and he loves her, and is willing to acknowledge what her desired self image is. That’s a huge concession she’s won off him, that’s big. 

And then éowyn responds:

I will be a shieldmaiden no longer, nor vie with the great Riders, nor take joy only in the songs of slaying. I will be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren.

here’s my potentially controversial take. I don’t think she’s giving up on her desire to be a fighter of some sort, but she’s giving up on some specific traditions, which is that of the mythical (but, let’s be clear, functionally nonexistent, save for éowyn) shieldmaidens, and of the riders of the Mark, who, as we have been told throughout the books, are given to valorising warfare and martial acts above all. This is supported by her saying “nor take joy only in the songs of slaying.” she’s not saying she won't take any joy in it, or that she won’t still praise it when it earns her admiration, but that’s not going to be her only raison d’etre anymore. Her life is going to move beyond the realm of death and killing and battlefield survival to growth and life and the future. That’s also a concession on her behalf. 

And then there’s this hella romantic kiss on the walls, which is fucking brazen behaviour, but is also i think representative more of the unique situation than setting a trend for them. It is, i think, the positive equivalent of éowyn’s slaying of the witch king in terms of its uniqueness. In the same way that she’s not going to keep going around throwing herself headlong into fights she’s not meant to win, she’s also not going to be publicly playing tonsil hockey. This is the big moment, and then it’s back to the reserve from there. 

Really, their entire relationship is, to me, about a series of negotiations. One culture and another, wives and husbands, old and new, war and peace, life and death, etc. they are similar in a lot of ways — both are intensely headstrong — but they’re similar primarily in character, not necessarily in belief, and so much of what they’re going to have to do as a pair is work to find their harmonious accord, if that makes sense. Sometimes they’ll do it peaceably, sometimes they’ll have blow up fights, but their entire relationship is going to be predicated on negotiating the space between, if that makes sense? 

Okay i said i’d say some stuff on the relationship of tolkien and his wife edith to faramir and éowyn. Tolkien was adamant that they were beren and lúthien (that’s on their tombstones), and i’m full willing to grant him that. But i think it’s complicated by the fact that faramir is, in some senses, tolkien’s self-insert. Obviously authors can have stand-ins for their opinions without the character having to be them exactly (and i think there’s more merit certainly to saying that tolkien’s 100% self-insert is tom bombadil) but i think there’s something worth exploring to the connections between beren and lúthien and faramir and éowyn. I know the morality issue makes B+L more closely comparable to arwen and aragorn, but, as I argue for here, the mortality issue (or lifespan issue) isn’t totally alien to faramir and éowyn.  

As i write them, there are some core themes i’m pretty consistently thinking about, so i’ll just list em here in case that’s any help to you.

Family 

This would be: life after orphanhood, life as the last of a family, what your obligation to your family is, how you go on and have your own family after having had a less than ideal childhood, etc.

Duty

Here’s what I said about their differing approaches to duty in a now-abandoned draft chapter from willow cabin:

Faramir has said, not in as many words, that she should not begrudge him for following orders. This, she knows, is a crucial difference between them. They each hold duty above all other charges, but their interpretation of what exactly that means is different. It comes from the differences in power they wield: he has ever been empowered to change the course of decisions before they are made, while she is forced to react to them after. To him, then, it would be unreasonable to disobey direct orders, given that a failure to change them in advance is a reflection upon his skills, not the legitimacy of the command. She, however, has rarely had control over how and when orders are given, and so sees no inherent legitimacy to them, and thus no reason not to disobey orders that are unjustly given.

Time

As I alluded to above, éowyn is going to live a significantly shorter life than Faramir, and she is no doubt very aware of this. But this also means that they’re going to experience time differently, and that will have an impact on their behaviour. What might seem like foot-dragging to éowyn seems like impatience to faramir, etc

Healing

We never actually see faramir’s reaction to finding out denethor tried to burn him alive. That’s a lot. We have no idea if he knows when he proposes to éowyn. When does he find out? What does that do to his mood? Etc. but also, éowyn says she’ll become a healer — what does that really mean? Is she going to be nurse/doctor éowyn from now on? Will she broaden the definition of healing (for my part, i say yes, which is what i’ve been trying to do in willow cabin, though a little less successfully than i’d hoped)

Gender

This is a slightly less popular theme in the bookverse fics, but i think as part of éowyn and faramir’s relationship of negotiation, they’re going to have to deal with éowyn not feeling one hundo thrilled about being a woman. And i think that raises some interesting questions about what faramir’s response to that will be. men/manhood is often treated as the historical default — so what happens when someone like, say, éowyn, starts challenging the notion of gender and gender roles around faramir? How does he react? What does that do to his own self-image? Etc. 

Okay. yes. That’s all i can think of right now. I am so, so sorry this is so long, i just totally brain dumped there. If you have any questions at all though please please do hit me up and i’m super happy to read whatever you’re writing (literally gagging for farawyn content rn lmao), if you’re comfortable sharing etc.

[boogiewrites]

No.9: The Body

Chapter Five

Characters: Diego Hargreeves & OFC Eve Corpuz

Summary: Diego breaks down Eve unexpectedly, and Luther attempts to break down Diego.

Warnings/Tags: Light descriptions of fighting. Little bit of Luther. Talk of past trauma/abuse/death. 

Click on my icon then go to my Mobile Masterlist in my bio for my other works and chapters. Please like, comment and reblog if you enjoyed it! It helps out us writers A LOT! If you’d like added to the tags, just let me know. This is a multi-chapter fic.

Eve walked into the gym after work as she did most nights now. It greeted her half-lit but still bright enough to see the training area. She’d continually thanked Luther for being so accommodating, and he didn’t seem to mind in the least. She felt almost bad keeping him in the dark about her powers. She was dying to tell them all, to have people understand, to be around people like her as she tried to newly navigate this alternate reality she’d found herself having to accept. But Diego said to trust him, it was best to keep it as low key as possible until she felt a bit more certain. She did trust him, so she did as he suggested even if she felt like a kid being denied a gift.

She had acetaminophen in her system, her usual jug of water, and another large container of Gatorade in tow. She was as ready as she’d ever been. She was actually glad she decided to go late instead of early for her sessions. She was at least awake and warmed up and accustomed to the hungover feeling at this point.

“You showed up.” Diego smirks as he wraps his hands to ready for training.

“Of course I did.” she sasses back and throws her bag against the wall. She also liked not having anyone looking at her or bothering her while she worked out. No one around to steal her things, she could toss them instead of throwing them into a locker and be able to totally focus.

“You were getting a little faded when I left last night, didn't know if you’d be up to this.”

“I’ve already put in a shift today, dude. Don’t come at me with that shit.” she laughs and begins taking off her outer layers. Still staying in an oversized t-shirt and leggings as was her usual, she shook and jumped to warm up everything after it’s exposed to the still cold late winter air of the city that drafted through the old brick walls of the industrial-looking building.

“How was work?” he asked, always down to hear the gross-out stories she had to tell.

“Not great.”

“You good?” he asks, brows high and making an effort to meet her eyes.

“I’ll be fine. Just y’know, dealing with kids is hard.”

“They call you a butt head and it hurt your feelings?”

“No, they died from a drunk driver.” she stares into his eyes and she sees his instant regret.

“Oh shit. I-I'm sorry.” his posture slinks.

“It's what I signed up for, Diego. I’ll be fine.” she motions her hand to halt his sympathetic approach to her. “Just wear me out so I have to go home and collapse into a dreamless sleep.”

“Oh I’ve never let a girl down that’s asked me that.” he falls back into his playful self, trying to deflect the embarrassment he felt.

“Let’s not start now. C’mon.” she begins stretching and heads over to the heavy bags.

------

“Eve. You aren’t hitting like you MEAN it!” he says for the fifth time, trying her patience.

“I’m TRYING! I don’t know what you mean? I’m putting my whole body into it.”

“No, this isn’t about your body, you’ve got to FEEL it.” he shakes the bag as he holds it so she can hit it. She’d been shown how to wrap her hands, and get used to the feeling of hitting something and it jarring her back. But she kept hitting the bag, focused and form correct and he kept asking for more. She was starting to get frustrated.

“Is my form wrong?” she asks with dropped shoulders, panting.

“No, it’s perfect. That’s the problem. I want to see you get messy. In a real fight, you won’t have your head on perfectly straight. I want to see you give everything you’ve got and HIT. Like you HATE this bag.”

“I’ll hit it like it’s you if you don’t stop with this hippy sounding nonsense.”

“THAT is what you need!” he says exasperated too, trying to get her to give in and break, put her heart, not just her mind into it. He knew a fighter was inside her but her years of polish to appear as perfect as possible was a hard varnish to breakthrough. “Imagine it’s someone you hate.”

“I don’t HATE anyone…” she lies.

He cocks a brow at her. “Bullshit. Think of something that made you cry, made you lash out, made you want to beat someone's head in. HEY imagine it’s whoever stabbed you? What would you have done now that you KNOW how to fight huh? Imagine it’s them and that you’re going to give them what's coming to them.”

She takes a deep breath and presses her lips together. He didn’t really know what he was asking of her. Her therapist would be slapping him for requesting her to do such a thing. But she trusted his philosophy. And she imagined the bag was her mother. “I’ll… try okay. Just...stop talking and let me... focus.” she rasps out and stretches her neck.

He motions zipping his mouth and throwing away the key, and braces himself for her hit.

A one-two. A flash of her mother screaming at her. A few more hits. The feeling of true fear as she saw the wild in her mother's eyes. She begins a pattern, a few hits, and a deep breath. Eventually, it becomes a continuous downpour of hits, making sounds as she hits each time. It sounded like pain and Diego knew she’d found what she needed to fuel herself.

“There it is. You got it. Keep goin’.” he says softly, watching her eyes.

Her naturally dark hair is falling out of its tight ponytail, now flopping with every hit. She could hear her mother's voice, feel that fear for her life, and the deluge of insults that would be her inner monologue for so many years after. The hits came harder, with more grunts and whimpers after each one, each a time she’d been afraid. Her breathing buckles, the hits harder and harder, her knuckles aching until she throws in knees and kicks. It doesn’t stop, the feelings were broken open and he’d gotten what he wanted, but at what cost to her.

Diego was proud for a few shining moments until he saw the tears start to fall. Her lips went from tight to gasping, sobs breaking through her angry sounds of impact until her hits lost strength and her head hit against the bag. Her shoulders shook and his eyes went wide, quickly reaching around to her support her as the sobs hit and her knees gave out.

With an unsure hand on her back, her on all fours and trying to gasp through the sobs, the day and her past became too heavy at that moment and it all hit her, breaking her down into a tired, sweaty mess on the gym floor.

He sits next to her, silently, a now supportive rub to her back. “I”m sorry Eve I didn’t-”

She reaches her arms back and hits him lightly. “It’s-you didn’t-” stuttering inhale that she couldn't control.

“Sh… just breathe. Sit up here.” he pulls her up, sitting on her knees, pressing between her shoulder blades to give her lungs room to breathe. “Count in five, out seven.” He counts out loud for her, as her hands begin to still against her thighs and the sounds of pain cease. “I didn’t know you had panic attacks.”

“I dont,” she says wiping her eyes. “I just... it’s been a hard day.” she begins more weakly crying and lets a small laugh out to hide her pain.

“Uh…’ he takes his hands off of her as she begins to let herself stretch and retie her hair. “I think this is where I ask if you wanna talk about it?” he offers and his delivery makes her laugh.

“Better question.” she moves to wipe her face with the hem of her shirt. “Do you wanna hear it?”

With a pause he answers, “Of course I do.” and she turns to face him with still watery eyes.

“Really?” the disbelief almost hurt his feelings.

“Yeah. If we’re gonna be in this together, I wanna know what’s gonna set you off like this. I don’t wanna...make things worse than I already do.” he shrugs.

She nods, turning and plopping down to sit on her butt and cross her legs. “That’s... that’s really nice…” she wells up again and then laughs and rubs her face. “Must be time for me to start my period or somethin’,” she mumbles and it makes him chuckle.

“Or you’ve had a shitty upbringing that still follows you around no matter where you run. Not that I would know anything about that though, right?”

She considered hugging him. For the goofiness he showed, he also had a depth that you had to access through empathy. They both had finally let that facade of having their shit together break down and now they sat like two children in a play circle, sharing secrets.

“Did your dad ever stab you?” she asks with a weak smile as she let herself slump over with a deep sigh.

“He did actually. Tried to kill me.” he nods with an annoyed look on his face.

“Well fuck.” she snorts and rubs her face. “Maybe you do get it.”

“I do.” he leans in and puts his hand on her shoulder. “So tell me.” he asks softly.

“It was the night I ran away for good.” she begins, eyes wandering and looking at nothing as she recalled it. “There was this kid, this guy at school that used to bully me. He’d had me cornered and was... “ she sighs, “he was trying to hurt me. And he ended up having a seizure and dying.” her eyes stare out blankly. “Whispers started fast. Saying I killed him. Although how would I?” she says defensively still. “My mom...knowing about my...abilities she did blame me. She became convinced I’d kill her too. So she tried to beat me to it.” her face wrinkles, pulling her knees to her chest.

“Shit.” he quietly exhales. “That's fucked up, Eve.”

She lets out a genuine louder laugh that confuses him. “Yeah, it is.” She shakes her head and rests her chin on her knees. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed but we’re both pretty fucked up, Diego.” she offers with a smile and tears still wet on her lashes. It makes him give the smile back, a soft laugh shared between them. Sometimes you had to laugh not to cry.

After pulling her to her feet, he tells her there’s no way he’s making her train more tonight and sends her home. A comforting hug between them before she parts, it felt right to do so. She’d entered the gym with a secret that no one else knew, and left with the weight of it shared. It was no small step, and even though it hurt like hell, in the aftermath it felt worth it.

Diego has a contemplative look on his face as he begins to tidy and shut everything down. Luther appears from the men’s locker room, an apologetic look on his face.

“Didn’t know you were still here big guy.” Diego looks him up and down, trying to read him.

“Yeah…” he drags on, eyes not meeting his brothers.

“What?” Diego demands with a jutted out chin.

“I...uh...kind of heard….all of that…” he pushes back his chin and presses his lips. “Were you gonna tell us you found another person like us or… just keep that to yourself?”

“I didn’t want her to get freaked out by you all and leave.”

“Well she’s already met me and I’m the freakiest there is.” he chuckles softly.

He shrugs in non-insulting agreement. “I just… she’s the first person since..”

“Yeah.” Luther interrupts.

“Y’know who's GOT me. Like, she gets how messed up everything is, man. I don’t want her to…” he sighs and drops the tension in his shoulders. “I don’t want her to leave.”

Luther put a large hand to Deigo’s shoulder. “Ever think she might want to be a part of this?”

“No, Jesus why would she?”

“She’s been alone since she was what? Sixteen she said? She didn’t have support like we did growing up.”

“You’re gonna call what dad did to us support?”

“Look, the point is.. She doesn’t have a family. And even if you hate your family, like you claim to, you still keep coming back right?”

“I can stop.” he sarcastically suggests.

“Well, maybe that’s what she needs. A family. Or at least y’know...friends that understand her. She didn’t know what was going on when she was younger. Can you imagine that? I can’t.” he muses with raised brows, feeling bad for the kind doctor lady.

“I hate to admit this...but you’ve got a point.”

“I know. I do that sometimes. If anyone would listen.” he mumbles defensively. “And I mean.. she’s very nice. She seems...cool. I wouldn’t mind being able to help her out too.” He offers, and Diego knows he only means it in the nicest way possible.

“She is cool.” he nods and looks down, voice soft. “Just let me… I’ll do...somethin’. Just give me some time okay?”

“Secrets safe with me.” Luther says proudly.

“Oh shit, Luther you can’t keep a secret.” Diego groans.

“Yes I can!”

“This is going to end so badly…” Diego complains childishly and loudly. “She’s gonna get introduced to Five and he’s gonna be a DICK and she’s gonna leave and hate me and-!”

“Ah. I get it.” Luther grins.

“What? What’s there to get? We’re a bunch of crazy people, and she’s a nice girl and you’re all gonna freak her out!”

“You like her.” Luther keeps the same cheesy grin on his face.

“PSH!” Diego says dramatically. “I don’t- pfft. I don’t like her. She’s cool and all but-”

“Diego…” Luther comes in and gives his brother a forced hug. “Can’t believe I didn’t realize it sooner.”

“I don't.” he murmurs into his brother chest, being held against his will.

“It’s been like what? A year? Over a year now? Since… Voldemort happened

“Voldemort?” he pushes away.

“She who must not be named.”

“You can say her name.” he grumbles.

“Since Lila. You were a wreck. It’s about time you started to move on.”

Diego pouts and holds a low brow, looking up with disdain for his brother. Who was right. “Doesn’t mean you have to say it.” he mumbles back but Luther hears and laughs.

“I can’t wait to meet your girlfriend, Diego!” he cheers out as his brother sulks away.

“SHE’S NOT MY GIRLFRIEND!” he protests but the flush on his cheeks from embarrassment says otherwise.

@s-h-e-w-r-i-t-e-s​ @jaegeeeeer​ @diegos-butt​ @anglovesthis

[mattzerella-sticks]

A Healing Touch/New Experiences

15x17 coda, Post-Finale, Dean/Cas, Adam, Serafina, Sam, Jack, 2/2 chapters, 4.7k

Chapter 1: A Healing Touch (ao3 link)

Maybe if Cas hadn't abandoned him, he wouldn't have agreed to Adam's offer. But with free will finally theirs, Cas made his choice, and Dean his. Now he has to live with the consequences - even if they are awkward. He won't die from it, certainly.

It's only a massage.

But what Dean doesn't know, is that it's more than a massage. It's healing.

           Dean’s grip tensed on the towel, pulling its fabric closer against his waist. Terrycloth rubbing his crotch like sandpaper, making him even more aware of his current state of undress than he already was.

           Damn Adam, for talking him into this. The placid cadence of the First Man wreaked havoc with Dean’s judgement. Lulled him into a false sense of security. Now that his armor’s been cast off, Dean realizes how terrible an idea this really is. Briefly, Dean considers turning tail and jumping back into his outfit. Pretend this never happened. Play dumb. But then Adam emerges, parting the beaded curtains and motioning him towards a table set up in the middle of the room. Dean trudges along, window of opportunity slammed on his fingers.

           “Relax Dean,” Adam croons, lighting one of the many candles that surrounds the room. Interspersed with crystals, totems, and an incense stick that suspiciously smells like a VW van at a concert. “This is going to be a transcendent experience.”

           “If you say so…” He sits, kicking his feet. Hunched over, spine protesting from the angle. Ignores twinging pain with practiced ease.

           Doesn’t matter how well he masks it in the other man’s presence; Adam arches a brow at Dean and orders him to lay down. “You’ll feel better that way.”

           He stills, clutching at the towel with both hands. Frozen with an unnamed emotion Dean swears isn’t fear. Staring with wide eyes at Adam while the other man waits. Finally, he breaks the silence, “Can’t you just… do my shoulders?”

           “I will,” Adam promises, drifting closer, “Along with your sides… your back… anywhere I believe you might need.” He brushes featherlight fingers across his chin, a scant distance from actually touching it. Lips stretched in a lazy smile. “If it’ll make you more comfortable, though, I’ll look away while you get settled.”

           Dean clears his throat, gaze darting away. “You will?”

           “While I don’t agree with your shame,” he says, pulling back, “I understand it. How it works. So, when you’re ready to start, let me know.” Adam spins on his heel, grabbing for tinctures and potions on a nearby counter. Mixes them. Feigns busyness while Dean readies himself.

           He slides off the table, glancing from Adam to the exit. Wonders if he can sprint fast enough, snatch his clothes, and jump into his Baby. Put Santa Fe in his rearview, even if it meant leaving Cas. Finding a new path home would serve him right, abandoning Dean immediately for Serafina. Former and current angel leaving for lunch, catching up after millennia apart. Dean stuck with Adam. Biding time, making awkward small talk; listening as he rambled on about differing memories patchworked together while he played hopscotch through his timeline. So bored and confused he didn’t realize what Adam offered until he locked the bathroom door behind Dean, instructions rattling around in his head. Towel in his arms instead of around his waist.

           “Dean,” Adam chimes in, laughing, “I’m almost done.”

           Thinking, not acting, wasted too much time. No other options left Dean unfastened his towel. Held it while he climbed onto the table, carefully lying down. Adjusting his junk so his weight wouldn’t crush it. Then, face pressed into the appropriate hole, Dean fixed the towel. End hanging off the edges, censored his freckled ass from view. “Okay,” he says, croaking the next few words out. “I’m all set.”

           “Perfect.”

           Dean nearly asks when Adam will start. As soon as the question forms in his throat, he swallows it. Adam’s wet, warm touch sliding over his back. Spreads a slick substance that makes his skin goosepimple when the air meets it. Elicits a sudden, breathy response from Dean. “Sorry,” Adam apologizes, continuing his ministrations, “probably should’ve warned you?”

           “Would’ve been nice…”

           “Well, we can’t go back, now can we?” He kneads Dean’s shoulders, loosening a tight muscle with his thumb. “Let me do all the work…” Adam speaks aloud, calling on a nearby smart device. Tells it to play a certain playlist, whining strums pouring from his speakers. Dean rolls his eyes. The added hippie music only pours salt in the wound. “You’ve got a lot of knots, Dean.”

           “I’m not surprised,” Dean says, “the stuff I do? My body’s been through the wringer.”

           “You should take better care of your body, Dean. We only get the one.”

           “Yeah, we do…” Dean sighs, shifting. Too aware of Adam’s touch. Counting the differences between his expectations and the reality. They’re softer than what he expected a man’s hands should feel like. And gentler. These motions were more tender than Dean was used to, especially from a stranger. Part of him wants this over with, while a stronger, quieter part begs for more. He shifts, squirming. “Hey, what’s this you’re rubbing me with?”

           “Oh, the oil?” Adam laughs, pinching his sides, “I had it specially delivered from some small town I last visited years ago, in Morocco. When it was all the rage, kids fleeing for the East in search of enlightenment. This herbalist was teaching in the streets…”

           Dean tunes Adam out like he did the music, drowning his voice in the waves of his mind. Lets it sink deep below while Dean splashes around shallower waters. Like how this trip was planned.

           After Chuck, after the Empty – after their last cosmic showdown, the Winchesters faced a new challenge. An ordinary day. It’s been years since Dean could wake without worrying he forgot something. Walk and not look over his shoulder, at where he imagined someone with vengeance in their eyes and death in his future. Greet his family and not doubt that he will see them later.

           It’s everything Dean wanted. Except he couldn’t handle it.

           Sitting at the breakfast table, his family discussing pointless, trivial affairs, Dean broke. Maybe because of Sam’s bright smile while talking about a road trip he planned with Eileen, or Jack’s list of shows he wanted to watch. Maybe it was when he caught Cas’s gaze, his foot nudging at Dean’s, with a well of emotions Dean hadn’t deserved. Similar to that horrid night, although less sadness darkening his expression. Less blood staining his hands. Dean flashed between those two images and stood, hitting his knee on the table. Left with a meager and suspicious excuse.

           Somehow, an endless cycle of near-death experiences made things simpler. Being trapped in a never-ending story meant exactly that. They would live forever. Exist in the unknown, remain unchanged.

           Now that freedom is truly his, what will he do? How will he end? Will he become someone he doesn’t like? Will people he thought would stay forever slip out of his grasp? Does he go first and leave so many people behind?

           He couldn’t sleep those next few nights. Cas caught on after his third bout with insomnia, bags heavy under his eyes. Looked across the canyon from his side of the bed, arms curled tight around himself. Chained there. “What’s wrong, Dean?” His fingers twitched in aborted need. Another easy piece that proved more difficult to fit into place. “Isn’t this what you wanted?”

           Dean stared at Cas. Saw the streaks of grey that tickled his hairline, and little crusts around his eyes from sleep. Reminders of how fast things can change, and what little they have left in the tank. If Cas were an angel, he thought, they’d have more time. Can stay alive through his grace, healing even the littlest signs of age. Like Serafina did with Adam.

           It slipped out like a leak, and then poured free. Inch given; mile taken. Frantically repeating how he met the First Man who loved an angel, and they lived normal lives in Santa Fe, and they seemed weird but in love, and –

           “Okay,” Cas said, “we’ll go visit them.”

           “Dean,” Adam whispers. Dean creaks an eye open from below the surface. “Where were you just now?”

           His heart lurches. “Can’t really go anywhere, now can I?”

           “Only in the physical sense,” he tells Dean, “your body can be here, but you can also be a million miles away.” Adam kneads harder on his back, forcing a grunt through Dean’s clenched teeth as he poked a sore muscle. “What’s more important that you’ve allowed your mind to wander far from the present?” He stops massaging, bending. Meets Dean’s squinted gaze. “Would you rather not be here?”

           “What did I ever do to give that impression?”

           Adam doesn’t flinch from Dean’s bite, smirking at him. Followed by an airy laugh that sounds nicer than it should. “Y’know, my hands can only do so much,” he continues, standing. Clawing at Dean with blunt nails, repetitively raking patterns like he were a rock garden. “Massages are a give and take. I can only leech away what you’re willing to part with. And there’s a mountain of stress buried here you’re still holding onto.”

           “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dean growls. Closing his eyes hard enough white, hot stars burst from behind his lids. “Maybe you’re a shitty masseuse?”

           “Nah, I’ve been doing this since Alexander the Great was in toga diapers. Can’t be that.”

           “Just because you’re old doesn’t mean you’re any good.”

           “That’s true.” Adam pinches Dean’s lower back, at the dip right where his ass curves from beneath the towel. Electricity jolts along his nerves, up his spine, and makes Dean bite his lip. “Then let’s say my intuition is sounding the alarm you’re blocked.”

           Dean snorts, “Then give me some Pepto and we’ll call it a day.” Another pinch. This time his knee jerks, foot jumping into the air. “Can you quit it?”

           “When you start taking this seriously.”

           “Sorry,” he says, each syllable drenched in sarcasm. “I didn’t think your types took anything seriously.”

           Adam places his hand on Dean’s neck. Touch shocks him enough he lifts his head, finding the other’s stern expression. “If not for me,” he says, “then Castiel.”

           He still feels Adam on his neck, and the second hand hangs at his side, shiny. Yet there must be a third. Because how else can Dean explain the pain in his side as anything other than a stab wound. Knife stuck there, cruelly twisted, cutting his insides further. Dean subtly nods, going slack. Adam guides his head back to its resting spot. Resumes petting him with much more severity. Each stroke like a match scraping against a striking surface, sparking but never lighting.

           “Do you feel my hands, Dean?”

           “Am I supposed to feel anything else?” Dean grouses, “Because if this is you coming onto me…”

           Adam squeezes Dean’s ass over the towel, Dean yelping. “Why I’ll admit you’re a beauty, my heart is spoken for. As is yours.”

           Dean waits as the coiled heat in his stomach unravels, breathing raggedly all the while. “Yeah,” he says, “I can feel your hands.”

           “Good,” Adam says, “and how do my hands on your body feel?”

           “Um… good? I guess? Like any other massage.”

           “You’ve gotten other massages before?”

           “When I could, I guess.”

           “And your masseuses,” Adam asks, coating more of the oil along his shoulders, “were any of them men.”

           No. “Why does that matter?”

           “I’m just asking,” Adam says, “guessing, actually, if your hesitation during this process has something to do with my gender expression.” He rubs at his biceps, fondling them. “So I’ll ask again – have you ever been massaged by a man.”

           He’s fought with countless men. Punches and kicks and elbows at throats acceptable foreplay. Love bites that stung far too long, bled too much. Shook hands with many hunters while crossing America during his early years where he was figuring himself out. Their intimidating grip thrilling Dean more than they should while near his father. John’s idea of what makes a man still living in his mind, a shadow that won’t disappear no matter how many curtains he draws or lights he turns on. Persistent.

           Sometimes Cas’s hand lingered, back when their relationship was new. Finding its footing despite Chuck’s story. He blamed it on his angel’s inexperience with humanity. But the more he stayed on Earth, the longer they lasted. More significant. A game of chicken, each daring the other to drop first.

           That’s the most intimate he’s ever been with another man.

           It’s been too long since he and Cas touched like that. Circling, never committing. Losing before the game starts.

           “I…” Adam’s touch feels different, headier. Matchhead catching, flame bursting atop it. He sighs, “I’ve never been massaged by a man.”

           Adam hums, “You’ve never had the opportunity?”

           “I’m pretty sure I’ve had lots of opportunities,” Dean tells him, “I just… never took them.” He shrugs as best he can. Sighing when Adam brushes one of his love handles, scratching it. Warm delight making Dean’s toes curl. “It wasn’t something a guy like me was supposed to do.”

           “Supposed to,” Adam parrots, “someone else was making these decisions for you?”

           Bristling, Dean shifts as if to raise his head again. Adam shoves at Dean, keeping him there. Adds an ounce of pressure that should stoke his anger. However, Dean responds with no retaliation. Stills, and when Adam removes his hand, continues talking. “I made these decisions,” Dean tells Adam, “I… there were a lot of expectations, being me. People I couldn’t disappoint. If they knew I went to get… massages, by men… things might not have been the same.”

           “Even if it hurt denying this part of yourself?” he asks, “Suffocating it because other people had opinions on how you should live your life?”

           Dean scowls despite how dedicated Adam works at kneading the skin above his tailbone. “You wouldn’t understand, okay. Being the first person gives you leeway, make your own rules. I was born into a certain role – there was an image I had to fit. If I wanted to survive and I… and it got easy, over time. I wasn’t hurting anyone –“

           “You were hurting yourself.”

           “I’m used to it.”

           Adam reacts violently, nicking Dean’s hip hard enough he expects blood. But his thumb soothes the spot, caresses it far more lovingly than Dean thinks is appropriate. He doesn’t voice his concerns. Busy thinking about the sudden callouses he feels on Adam’s thumb.

           “That’s a dangerous point of view to have, Dean,” Adam warns, drawing him from the off-ramp. “How can you speak so carelessly about yourself like that?”

           “I… I – uh…” Dean had a response. A common one he trotted out whenever a question like this appeared. Now, he finds the stable empty. He has nothing. “I…”

           “You’ve been given a wonderful gift, Dean. The gift called life. Gone are the oppressive forces steering your judgement. Controlling how you grow.” Adam’s voice rises, passion seeping into his skin. Mixing with the oils, providing a euphoric numbness. “Now is when you should slash through those bindings and grow into the person you were always meant to be!”

           “What if I…”

           “Hmm?” Adam stops massaging him. The music ended at some point, leaving only silence. “What if you what?”

           Dean slowly rises from the face hole, Adam not fighting him this time. Leans on his elbows, staring at the floor. At the small droplet that splattered there. “What if I don’t like that person?” he mutters, “What if I look in the mirror one morning and I don’t… don’t recognize that it’s my reflection. What if I become someone so wholly different now that I… now that I can grow, and change, that I lose parts of myself. Lose my family, because they don’t like who I’ve become?”

           Adam’s hand rests on his shoulder, fingers curling over a spot that doesn’t belong to him. When other people touched it, his skin crawled. Itched like fire ants crawled and bit. It’s the opposite feeling, with Adam’s hand. As if Dean’s soul breached through the shadows and filled him with so much light, he could overpower the sun. But only one other person has ever made him feel like that…

           “If your family truly loves you, Dean,” Adam says, stepping into view. Guides Dean’s gaze from his feet towards his face using both hands. Smiling, “Then they love your most core, basic parts of yourself. And those, I know, will stick with you as you journey into a new era of self-exploration. Just as they will. You shouldn’t be afraid of change. It is the most powerful force in existence. Change cannot be stopped, cannot be controlled… how we choose to respond to it, however, is where humanity finds its freedom.” He lets go, drifting backwards into Serafina’s waiting arms.

           There’s still a hand on his shoulder.

           Dean turns. Instead of a thin, linen shirt, there’s a starched white button-down. Blue tie where he expected a scarf and chunky necklace. Dark hair with touches of gray, and blue eyes rimmed red with tears. “Cas…”

           “Dean…” he says, squeezing his shoulder, “I love you. I… I won’t ever leave you.”

           “How can you promise that, Cas?” he asks, “How do you know that? We’ve… what if Chuck was the only thing keeping us together? What do we do now that he’s gone?”

           “We live Dean… day by day.” Cas kneels, pressing a thumb against his chin. “You’re right, I can’t be certain about the future. None of us can, not anymore. But, before Chuck, all I saw was bleakness. Now that he’s gone… after every hardship we’ve been through, the clouds have parted. It finally looks bright. And we could have a thousand more days or one more day, but in this moment Dean I want to experience everything with you.” He kisses him, breathing that promise into his body. Words mingling with his heart and soul. “My first, and most important act of rebellion was loving you. In these few years we’ve known each other I’ve lived more than I ever have. I’ve grown, not because of Chuck or despite of Chuck… but on my own terms. And you’re still here, with me.”

           “Cas I…” Dean knocks their foreheads together, “You’re someone I never expected entering my life… and if you left, I don’t know if I can go back to living without you. Every time you were taken from me I… part of me died. A part that never came back, even though you did. When the Empty took you, I thought that was it. If I lost you one more time… I fought so hard for this – to live by my terms that I… I don’t want to lose it. Lose you.”

           “Then don’t act like you already have,” Cas tells him. “Let me in. Let Sam and Jack… we’re all figuring this out together. Shoulder your burdens with us and we will do the same to you. That way we can enjoy our time together. And when one of us goes, the other will always have the memories of what we’ve won to remind us how the fight – how life was worth it.”

           Dean nods, dropping another kiss against Cas’s lips. Rises with Cas, uncaring that the towel fell. He already felt more exposed from this simple massage. Modesty seemed a… a moot point. Cas slips between Dean’s legs, wrapping him in a hug. Dean returns it.

           Then he looks at their voyeurs, watching from the sidelines. “Was this what you had planned all along?”

           “Before you came here,” Adam says, “I had a vision.”

           “…Right.”

           “And in that vision,” Serafina adds, swaying with Adam. Fingers threaded through his curls, petting him, while his oil-covered hands stained her patchwork skirt. “He saw you two sticking around for a few more days.”

           Dean arches a brow, huffing, “We do?”

           “Oh yes,” she says, “you’ve only just begun to heal, the both of you. It’s a process – like growth – that never really ends.” Serafina’s gaze darts from him to Cas, and back again. “Plus, if you stay, we can introduce you to some new things. Offer some wisdom from our many lifetimes on Earth that may prove… beneficial.”

           Dean and Cas share a silent conversation. He grins from that, knowing he can tilt his head or flutter his lashes and be understood completely. “Okay,” Dean answers, “it’s not like there’s anything else we need to be doing.”

           “Perfect!” She claps, “Oh I’ll – I’ll go put some tea on, and Adam can show you to our meditation room. We can spend the rest of the evening just sharing, maybe even fall asleep under the stars. In all of America, Adam and I’ve found they don’t shine quite like they do here.”

           Dean leans his head on Cas’s shoulder, listening as Serafina rambles about possible plans. Adam interjecting with his own ideas every now and then. Watching them, a strange feeling flutters inside his chest.

           He isn’t sure what to expect from hanging out at their commune or drinking their Kool-Aid. But, for the first time since they’ve closed the book on Chuck’s story… he’s excited.

(chapter 2)

[dammitadolfnomorecake]

1 2

2

Let into the stranger’s apartment, Levi didn’t know whether to be impressed or not by its sheer emptiness. The man really seemed to only give two fucks about having a roof over his head, everything else was goddamn bleak once the apartment lights came on

“Sit on the sofa, I’ll get the first aid kit”

Right. The kid in front of him was too old to hold any youthful charms. There were no “welcome to my humble abodes”, but there was also no “don’t fucking bleed to death on my sofa”, leading him to wonder how many damn strays the man dragged home with no thought of his own safety. His host didn’t even close the door behind them, disappearing off through a door as Levi was left to limp him way into the living area, eyes drawn to massive fucking bong sitting on the table. Great. His “goddamn saviour” was a pot smoking hippy determined to do his good deed for the day.

Everything seemed to hurt as Levi sank onto the sofa. Pulling out his wallet and phone, he chucked them lightly on the table, before freeing himself of his jacket, and kicking back to examine the apartment closer. Other than the bong, the place wasn’t as terrible as it could be. The paint work seemed passable, the furniture served its purpose. Heck, the man had a small bookcase of what seemed to be well read classics, two photo frames sitting on the top shelf, summing up the total everything personal inside the space.

“Scotch, bourbon, or beer?”

Levi jumped, alpha growling lightly at the fact he’d let himself get distracted

“Got any water?”

Clanging from kitchenette connected to the living area, the way the man slammed his cabinet grated on Levi’s nerves. The typical alpha punk snorting, before replying

“You’re gonna want something harder when I’m stitching that hand of yours up”

“Tea?”

“That’s a new one. I’ve got coffee”

If Levi had wanted coffee, he would have asked for coffee. Nothing tonight was going fucking right

“Double shot scotch”

“I suppose you want ice”

Levi shrugged. It all pretty much tasted like warm piss, iced or otherwise

“Oh, man, sure... If you’re offering”

Chuckling at him, the stranger had an alright laugh. For a man he didn’t give two shits about, he wasn’t completely fucking awful

“Careful, there. You’re verging on being polite”

“I’m always polite”

“Says the one calling me a “lanky shit””

Being five-foot-fucking-three was shameful for an alpha. All his damn life people treated him like a fucking runt, not that Levi had an issue with it. He just wasn’t as tall as the strange brown haired man who’s sofa he was now bleeding onto, and apparently needed to care about this right now

“You fucking are”

Bring over the first aid kit and his scotch, the man quirked an eyebrow at him. Levi nearly blinking in shock. Never in his life had he set eyes on a set of eyes so damn green... Scruffy around the edges, the man had shed his leather jacket in favour of a black hoodie, brown hair pull back into a messy bun, not missing a beat as he quirked a smile at him

“And you’re a grumpy old man, aren’t you?”

Yeah. And the man who probably an escaped lunatic that’d murdered his mother and eloped with his sister, knowing Levi’s luck

“Fuck off”

“You know what they say, “6 out of 7 dwarves aren’t happy”. Give me your hand, I’ll take a look”

Holding his hand out Mister Lanky-fuck, as Levi had now decided to call him, sat on the edge of his coffee table. Even with the sofa a few inches taller with the cushion, Lanky-fuck had the never to be taller than him. One look at the man’s grease stained hands had the alpha wrinkling his nose

“Leave the kit, I’ll handle it. I don’t know what I’m likely to catch from those hands of yours”

“Don’t be such a baby. They have these magical things called gloves and sanitizer, my father would murder me if he ever thought I was patching someone up without gloves on. Are you always so damn uncooperative?”

What the fuck? The man in front of him seemed ready to fucking pout. He might have only just seen his face a few moments ago, but now Levi was stuck between the awkwardness of not knowing how young the kid was, or how old the man was... Normally he considered himself quite well versed in the subtle act of people watching. It kind of came in handy sizing up the man who wanted to beat you arse before a fight. Snarkily he shot back

“I don’t know, do you bring home every alpha you meet?”

The stranger shrugged

“I don’t know. Never brought anyone here before so I guess that’s a no. Now, let me fix you up then I can go the fuck to bed with it your death on my hands”

Snorting, and despite the sheer randomness of the situation, Levi wasn’t sure he would mind being murdered by the man in front of him. He seemed easily as cranky as he was, and he’d been looking for something to break the daily grind. Catching his tongue, the alpha blinked in self induced shock, realising he’d very nearly asked if going to bed involved going to bed to fuck. None of this was like him. He never wanted... he was on suppressants. The dumb blonde beta who’d busted his lip must have shaken his brain loose, either that or the late nights were finally catching up with him

“Wash your hands then put the gloves on”

“God. I’ve got you. You’re not the first person I’ve patched up. I would tell you to wash your hand off first but that would hurt like a bitch”

“This dump has an actual shower?”

“With soap and all”

Letting out a low whistle, Levi fooled no one with his tiny bit of actual surprise that somewhere so crappy would have working facilities. If anything the only “foolish” thing would be how much of a fool he was making of himself right now

“I don’t believe it, maybe you’ll have to show me”

Fuck. Fucking. Fuck. Abort. What he meant to say was “If you don’t mind, I’d actually prefer to wash my hands and face”. Not that... Confusion clouded the strangers features, followed by a heavy frown in his direction. Heck. Now the brat looked old enough to be pushing 30. Being “baby faced” had to have its damn limits

“Listen. You can shower if you want. You can eat my food. Hell, you can put your clothes through the washing machine and dryer. I didn’t bring you home for a fuck, and if you think I did, you’ve got it all wrong. I brought you home because you dying on our fucking back step would probably cost me a job I can’t afford to lose”

This was going terribly. Would things go better if he tried to introduce himself? He had no intention of running into this kid again, so what was the point giving him his name?

“Calm your shit. It was a joke. Just fix my hand and I’ll take it from there, Mister Lanky-fuck”

Sighing at him, Mister Lanky-fuck appeared done with him

“That’s a new one. It’s Kruger. My name... Do you really have to keep scowling at me?”

What kind of a name was “Kruger”? Was it a first name? Or a last name? Or a nickname? Nope. He didn’t care. None of this mattered anyway

“I’m not scowling”

He couldn’t help it. Time and time again he’d been told he’d look less murderous should he open his eyes just that little bit wider. He didn’t know what people expect from that shit. His face was pretty much set the same way it’d always been... something referred to as “resting bitch face”, if his idiot friend was to be believed. Having been forced to think about it left a scowl on his face. Kruger snatching up his hand before Levi could grimace at the amount of germs

“Right. Sit there and drink your scotch. I’ll have this done as soon as possible”

*

Neither man had any idea of how fateful this first meeting would be, least of all Eren who wasn’t sure he’d done an actual good dead. He hadn’t learned the strange short alpha’s name, only that he took stitches like he’d had them a hundred times before. Patching the bastard back up, Eren forced himself to remember that politeness did exist, though there did seem to be some kind of polite mutual annoyance at the world between them that he didn’t think he was imagining. Whatever. He’d shown the man around his apartment, told him to use whatever was there... then crashed so hard he really could have been murdered in his sleep.

Come the following afternoon, Eren had woken to find the stranger gone and for some unfathomable reason his washing done, ironed, and neatly left on his coffee table. Hell, he might have just taken him to bed had he known he’d get free housework out of it. Whatever the fuck last night was, that was the last time. The stranger was gone, and with the beating he’d gotten the night before, it was severely unlikely he’d ever see him at the garage again. God. His sister was going to kill him for this... good thing she was never going to find out about him acting on a stupid whim.

[thorinthehottotty]

May 6th - Lyn's Writing Event - Thorin

Prompt - Childhood Neighborhood

A/N: Holy shit these settings are almost over! Nooooo don't let it end! Seriously, this has been a blast! Partially based off of me bringing Cory home the first time...

Summary: Thorin has arrived in our world and accompanies you to your childhood home to meet your parents.

Warnings:

He had seen you nervous before, but you'd always had a handle on it. Packing had been a nightmare. You were pacing and obviously couldn't think straight as you ran between rooms collecting way too much for the weekend trip to your parents. You were muttering to yourself and he was surprised by how insane you looked, running back and forth.

"Should we pack snacks for the ride?" You call from the kitchen. "It's only a couple hours away, but you know, in case?"

Thorin frowns, becoming nervous himself at how chaotic you were. "Grab something for you. I will be fine." He'd easily gotten his things around for the trip. Easily. Quickly. Efficiently... This was a train wreck, as you would call it.

When he'd finally coaxed you into the car you bit your lip, not turning the key in the ignition as you hesitate. "Y/N, we don't have to visit them if you're uncomfortable." He can visibly see the racing of your pulse in your neck.

"Okay," you start firmly and turn in your seat. "I'll give you the run down of my family." You're staring at him, more intensely than he's ever witnessed and its unnerving. "I have never brought anyone home before. Ever. Ever. Okay?" Thorin nods slowly. This was going to be a big deal to you then.

"I can handle that."

"My mom is going to be all over you. She's weird and wants to be liked. Expect her to say weird things and get in your space. My brothers, that should be a breeze. They'll probably try to give you a hard time because you're quite a bit older than I am. They're annoying shitheads with big egos." Thorin cracks a smile, adoring the nervous preparing you were giving him, your words blending from your fast speech. "My dad," you croak as if in pain and he sees your eyes beginning to water, "my dad is the bane of my existance. He has no filter. At all. And he enjoys making people squirm. Expect him to say some... Horrible things at my expense." Thorin was now a little nervous himself, but mostly amused by your reaction.

"I can stay here if you desire."

"No, no. I'm not worried about them not liking you. I'm worried about them behaving themselves around you."

"I will not think ill of you." He grips your hand on your lap and you let out a sigh of relief. While you were still nervous, you weren't mad with it.

He could handle this. The next hiccup didn't come until you had arrived at the great big house with a worn dirt drive. You narrowed your eyes on the garage, something askew to you. "That's weird. There are no cars." The land was flush with gardens and trees and greenery. It was calm and peaceful as you parked. Cicadas, as you called them, were buzzing loudly.

He watches as you pull out your phone, and lift it to your ear. He can vaugely hear a woman pick up. "Hey, ma. Thorin and I are home. Are you guys here?" You ask. There is an answer and your eyes bug in exhasperation. "What do you mean? Coldwater is like two hours away! I though you guys were going to be here!" Thorin smirks at you, amused to see you deflate. "Well when are you going to be back?"

He could see your frustration and felt sympathy for you. He could see where some of your 'planning' side came from. If your family was this whimsy with plans than he could understand why you always felt the need to have a plan.

You turn to find him grinning at you. "Alright, alright. I'll see you guys when you get here. Love you too. Bye." And you hung up the phone before turning to Thorin, nostrils flaring as you give a close mouthed scream of frustration. "My parents left cause my mom wanted to go look at a car in coldwater. Let's just unpack the car and go inside."

Thorin nodded and followed in behind you. Gazing around in amusement at the different themes that liter the house. He was curious to know how you grew up and this was greatly expanding that curiousity. Your childhood home! How nice! You lead him upstairs, calming a barking dog that wiggled excitedly at the both of you before moving into a room.

"This is my old room. Enter at your own risk." He gazes about, surprised to see the bookshelves lined with books and a large lofted bed, a desk and computer underneith. He sets his things down while you toss your bag up on the bed. And he begins to gaze over the titles on the shelf. There are a couple missing titles and he reaches for it.

"No, no! I would recommend not looking at the sketchbooks!" You laugh nervously. "I'm not the greatest artist."

"I was unaware that you drew," he murmurs.

"I used to. Haven't had time lately." He could see the burning of your cheeks. "Nothing that interesting in them, ya know." He arches an eyebrow at you.

"Somehow, I doubt that." He doesn't miss your mischevious smile.

It's quickly gone when the dog begins to howl and you dart to the window. Horror fills your face. "Oh no! My grandpa's here." You fly to the door. "Oh no! Oh no!" Thorin frowns.

"Stay here! Don't touch anything!" You gasp, flying from the room. Thorin pauses, then tugs at a rather worn hardcover sketchbook. And he opens it, shocked by the detailed faces that flutter through each page. He hears you greeting your grandfather down stairs. There is an exchange and then you groan.

"Papa, don't be mad about this. But I should probably introduce you to someone. Hold on." Thorin quickly sets the sketchbook down and moves to meet you in the doorway. "He sat down," you grumble, frowning. He's here to stay. "I was not prepared to have you meet my grandpa... He's a little harsh. And I'm his favorite."

"Oh, are you?" Thorin asks.

"Yes, now come on." And Thorin trots down the stairs behind you to find an elderly man sitting in a recliner comfortably. He sees the shock turn to raunchy amusement.

"What were you two doing in your room?" The man grunts, sipping a thermos.

"Mom and Dad are supposed to be here! We just got here, don't give me that!" You shout.

"It's a pleasure to meet you."

"Grandpa, this is Thorin. Thorin, this is my grandpa who shows up unannouced frequently." You muttered the last part to Thorin and he sees your grandfather narrow his eyes on you.

"What?" He grunts.

"If you wore your damn hearing aid you'd know!" The old man waves a hand and stands up with a great deal of effort.

"I'll leave you both to your canoodling. Just tell your ma that I stopped by." You are left to more frustration. The old man shakes Thorin's hand and they grin at each other, sharing in amusement at this.

"He looks like a hippy," the old man grunts as he leaves, patting you on the shoulder. It makes you roll your eyes as he shuffles out. You shake your head.

"If that's the worst of it... You can relax."

"Oh god... He's gonna tell my whole family we were canoodling alone in my room!" You cry, stomping dramatically up the stairs. Thorin followed, chuckling. Your frazzled nature is amusing him a great deal more than it should.

"Relax, we were not canoodling. Whatever that means."

"Were you looking at my sketches?" You gasp. Before he can answer there is a wild shrieking from outside. A long annoying noise that has you glowering.

"Ah fuck. Well. My brothers are home." He was beginning to like this more and more. He'd never found you so animated.

The hours passed, you grew increasingly nervous as your brothers annoyed you. They both were struck dumb by the dwarf standing in your bedroom. And went quiet at the sight. Then began the nonstop questions of him. Some were forgotten quickly. Others not as much.

Eventually you buzzed, making tea as they made (pleasant) conversation with him. Quickly falling into his kingly charm. And then it happened. The kitchen door opened and in stalked you parents. Cooly greeting everyone.

They were perfectly polite and it left you flabbergaust. How dare they act normal! The one time you were preparing for their theatrics and they act normal! You deflate into your seat as Thorin chuckles.

"Don't."

@tomisbaeholland

[savannahsdrabbles]

Ocean Song - Part Two

rating: PG summary: Marine biology student April O’Neil makes a startling discovery.

notes: An AU originally based off of the 2012 TMNT universe, but can be compatible with most versions of the characters. <3 2.8k words. A03 link can be found here. Also special thanks to @cloakedrabbit and @starfiretheninja for beta-reading!

While he considered himself fairly levelheaded, there were a lot of things that ticked Casey Jones off: The referee calling foul play when an opponent obviously deserved to be body slammed, the cafeteria workers skimping on tater tots (in no universe was four enough), and people being jerks to those who couldn’t defend themselves.

The worst feeling of all, however, was when people intentionally kept secrets from him.

From the moment April O’Neil had walked into homeroom that Monday, he could tell that she had something heavy weighing on her mind. The redhead had avoided his attention-seeking gestures and whispers throughout class, seemingly intent on doodling in her notebook and not paying the slightest amount of attention to the lecture. She rested her chin in her palm, arm forming a barrier that blocked her page from anyone who walked past. Even when Casey flicked a pencil onto her desk, her only response was to absentmindedly return the utensil and continue scribbling.

By the time lunch rolled around, Casey was nearly shaking with curiosity and frustration over the unknown. With one hand firmly gripping his sack lunch, the eighteen-year-old searched the sea of dark hair on the patio and in the cafeteria, and then finally stuck his head into the library – a first for him. Sure enough, April was tucked away at a table in the far corner of the reference section with her nose to a computer monitor and the same expression of deep thought on her face. 

“Alright, Red. Spill.” April jolted when he dragged over a chair with a deafening screech and then flopped into it. Turning his lunch bag over on the table and scattering its contents, Casey shoved an apple towards the hand she was clutching the mouse with and then picked out a peanut butter granola bar to munch on. “I can tell you’re freaking out about something. Is it homework related, or what?”

“It’s nothing,” she muttered, quickly attempting to minimize the tabs she had open on the screen – though not before Casey caught a glance of the website.

“Mysteries of the Deep: Unexplained Open Ocean Phenomena,” Casey snorted, sending a spray of granola crumbs flying, and leaned over to elbow the girl playfully. “What, are you trying to find the loch ness monster or something? Cause I’m pretty sure that’s in Canada.”

To his surprise, April let out a hiss of pain and grabbed her ribs right where Casey had poked her. The smirk on his face instantly vanished, and Casey raised his hands in surrender. “Whoa – I didn’t mean to hit so hard – my bad! Are you okay?”

April’s face tightened for a moment as if she were going to argue, her brows arching into the sassy look that Casey was used to seeing whenever he whined about how useless math was, but then she heaved a sigh and dropped her hand from her side. The girl motioned for Casey to quiet down, and then stood up quickly to peer over the row of computers around them. Once she seemed satisfied that no one was nearby, the redhead relented. “I got attacked when I was diving last night.”

“Wait – what?!” Casey nearly inhaled his granola bar and had to pause for a moment to cough violently. “By what? A fish? Or one of the other divers?”

“Shhh!” the librarian hissed from across the room.

“Don’t freak out – I’m fine.” April waved a hand dismissively, and then launched into a whispered explanation of what had happened. Casey listened with a furrowed brow, constantly interjecting with questions and April constantly hissing at him to quiet down and listen so that they would not be overheard. “He’s at Hamato Labs right now – probably still on constant sedation watch until they decide what to do with him. Dad wanted me to just go back to school today like nothing had happened, but –”

“You keep calling it a ‘him’. Did you get a look at –”

“Ew – no, Casey! Gross!” April let out a muffled shriek of indignation and punched the boy in the shoulder, though her quivering lips betrayed the hint of a smirk that Casey instantly decided was worth the shoulder pain. “I could just TELL that it was a ‘he’. He gave off a ‘guy’ vibe, I don’t know. And maybe the other one, too – though I didn’t get as good of a look at him.”

Casey seemed to calm down at this, as he leaned back in his chair with a grin and kicked his legs up onto the table – which April quickly shoved off with a jerk of her head towards the librarian’s desk. “Alright, so what’s going to happen to ‘him’ now? Or wait – do you get to name him as a new species or something? Like the ‘genus turtle-us, April-us’, or whatever?”

April shrugged, her fingers tapping unconsciously on the notebook that Casey finally realized was in her lap. The spiral bound pages bore dozens of doodles from throughout the day, all bearing features of turtles with cartoonish expressions. Several words had been written and crossed out in the margins, which Casey read aloud.

“Raph-ale? Donatello?”

The girl snapped her notebook shut with a ‘PAP!’ seeming to just notice that he had been looking at it. “Art history homework – another college course. Anyway, I should probably get back to class now. Thanks for letting me ramble – it’s just a really weird situation and I’m actually kind of glad to talk about it with someone that isn’t another scientist.”

“Well, I am definitely not a scientist, so no problem,” Casey flashed a thumbs up as April began to gather her belongings. “So, when do I get to see him?”

April froze, her hands hovering over her backpack. “Excuse me?”

The boy lifted his head to double check that they were alone, and then leaned closer to April. “You tell me all about some bizarre-o turtle man that might end up being on National Geographic or something, and then you won’t let me see it? That’s pretty low, dude.”

“It’s not that I’m against you seeing him – it’s just that I’m more than likely not even supposed to be mentioning the fact of his existence to anyone outside of the research team. Any number of hippie organizations or other laboratories would spring at the chance to claim him. Besides – if we determine that whatever made him like this is the source of an imminent biological or ecological threat, the lab is going to want to keep it out of the public eye until they’ve discovered a solution.”

“C’mon!” Casey slung an arm over April’s shoulder to keep her from standing up and leaving the table. “I won’t tell anyone! I promise – I just want to get a quick peek! It’s not every day that a kaiju saves your girlfriend – ”

“I am in no way, shape or form your girlfriend, and if you ever say that again I will punch you in the throat.”

“- from a squid! Come on – please?” Casey clasped his hands in a praying position and stuck out his bottom lip. “Please please please please please – I won’t stop until you say yes – please?”

April observed him for a moment with an expression of disgust, and then let out a deep sigh, earning a whoop of approval and a loud ‘Shhhhh!’ from the direction of the librarian’s desk. “Fine. I’m heading back to the lab after school anyway. You drive, and I’ll get my dad to sign off on letting you in with me.”

“Alright, all aboard the Jonesmobile, woo woo – ow! Why did you hit me?!”

***

The rest of the day went off without a hitch – though April would be the first to admit that she was less than focused during class. All she could think about was her interaction with the turtle, and the bubbling feeling in her stomach that occurred when she considered the fact that she would get to see him again that afternoon. Casey showed signs of distraction as well – though that was fairly normal for him. April made a mental note to ensure that he was getting his homework done and turned in.

When the last bell finally rang, the two teenagers hurried out to Casey’s old Jeep and gunned it to Hamato Laboratories. A quick knock on Dr. O’Neil’s door with no response told them that he was tied up on the phone, so the two decided to head towards the labs anyway.

“I don’t think they’ll let you into the actual exam room without my dad present, but you’ll probably be able to at least look through the glass,” April explained as the two rode the elevator down to the lower floors. Several marine biologists and lab technicians passed them on their way down, each stopping to ensure that April was doing well after the incident the day before.

“Didn’t you say he’d probably be unconscious or sedated or whatever?” Casey asked. He looked thoroughly out of place in the sleek laboratory building, all skinny jeans and beat up hoodie in contrast to the white lab coats and slacks worn by almost everyone they passed. Even April had grabbed her monogramed coat from the locker area before boarding the elevator and had thrown her hair up into a bun. Despite this, the eighteen-year-old still carried himself with an air of utter ease and confidence that April couldn’t help but respect. “Is that because he hurt you?”

April hesitated before answering. “Not specifically? It’s typically a standard procedure to sedate larger animals – particularly if they’re not reacting well to the lab environment. That way if they lash out, they’re less likely to hurt themselves or anyone else. But I could tell that he wasn’t trying to hurt me yesterday – it was just an accident.” She rubbed a hand on her side and grimaced slightly as her fingertips traced the tender bruises. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t easy explaining that to my dad. He still thinks that I was freaking out and imagined a lot of what I saw and felt.”

“How can you be sure that you didn’t?”

April’s eyes snapped to Casey’s as the elevator let out a ‘ping’ to alert them that they were nearing the correct floor. “Excuse me?”

Casey shrugged. “Nothing against you, but while this thing is cool and big and stuff, isn’t it possible that you kind of hallucinated him being… human-ish? I mean – maybe it didn’t really know that it was helping you?”

“No. He knew that he was helping me.” The words she spoke swelled with utter confidence that dimmed Casey’s doubts. “I just know it. You’ll see.”

Right as the words left her mouth, the elevator doors opened into a stark white hallway offset by the dark cement floor beneath it. Pipes and power lines ran the length of the ceiling in either direction, the whirring that they produced being the only sound in the otherwise quiet hallway. As the duo stepped out of the elevator, the motion activated lights immediately kicked on and flooded the halls with a dim light. A dozen heavy doors lined the walls, each accompanied by a keycard lock and a glass window to allow observation from outside. At the very end of the hallway, a large set of double doors beneath a glowing ‘Exit’ sign signaled the entrance to the garage through which creatures were delivered.

“Welp. I’m pretty sure we are going to get murdered in this hallway.”

April snorted and grabbed for Casey’s wrist, dragging him down the hallway towards Exam Room D. “C’mon, don’t be a baby.”

“I’m not. This… just looks like a hallway that someone in Saw would get murdered in.”

“Wuss.”

***

Despite her words of reassurance, April couldn’t help but feel on edge as well. She had grown up visiting labs with her dad and following him around as he worked. The smells of antiseptic and metallic surfaces were woven through her earliest memories, combined with days spent happily watching fish moving about in their tanks as her father helped to rehabilitate everything from enormous seals to tiny starfish. Such laboratories were what inspired her love of science and biology, and had always served as a safe place in her memories.

But even as she swiped her keycard and pushed open the door to the correct exam room, her recently donned lab coat rustling quietly around her, she could tell that something was very… off.

Casey stuck close behind, the warning of staying by the observation window clearly forgotten – or ignored - as the two walked hesitantly into the dimly lit room. April noticed that the main lights had been turned off – not unusual for when researchers dealt with deep sea or photosensitive creatures – and the only light being offered was from the panels that hung around the examination tables and over the door that led out to the loading dock. Filtered water gurgled in several tanks around the room, adding to the illusion that the room might have been located underwater or someplace hidden away from the rest of the world.

“Dude,” Casey murmured quietly. “I didn’t expect this place to be so creepy.”

“It’s not, usually,” April felt a palm along the white walls until she found the light dimmer and adjusted it just enough that they had a bit more light.

“Holy crap. You weren’t joking about how big he is.”

A large glass cage, usually reserved for seals, stood in one corner of the room. The bottom of the cage had been lined with a layer of sand, which had apparently been kicked up by the creature quietly whining and shifting inside of it.

The turtle within was currently laying on its side with his armored back to the two teenagers and one leg stretched at an uncomfortable angle as it seemed to be attempting to pull itself completely into the far corner of the container. A closer look told them that the turtle had been shackled, a large iron chain around its left leg prohibiting him from crawling into his shell.

“Yeah – he actually seems smaller than I remembered…” The red head hesitantly took a step forward, eyes watching as the turtle took a shuddering breath and twitched. He didn’t seem to have noticed their arrival yet – proving the recent sedative to be quite effective. “When he was moving around in the water I could have sworn he was taller than I was, but now he doesn’t even look five feet tall!”

“Tall or not, he looks kinda dead,” Casey suddenly strode forward to stand beside April and pressed one hand to the glass, tapping lightly with his knuckle. “Wake up, dude!”

“I doubt that will do anything, Casey – he’s really drugged up at the mo-”

As if on cue, the turtle jerked in its sleep and flailed momentarily in the sand, eliciting quiet shrieks of surprise from the two observers. They both leapt backwards as the turtle rolled itself onto all fours, limbs still trembling from sleep and head shaking this way and that as the creature attempted to orient itself. There was a moment of silence as he seemed to suddenly remember his predicament, and then the turtle caught sight of April and Casey.

Eyes shrinking to pinpricks, the turtle let out a squawk of terror and scrabbled backwards on his hands and rear end until the chain grew taut and he couldn’t retreat any further, chest heaving and eyes flicking in every direction as he searched for a way out. With a jolt, April watched as the turtle threw his body sideways against the glass and clawed at the walls. The laboratory room echoed with sounds of distress as the creature began to click and squawk frantically.

“Uh – do we need to go get somebody?” the dark-haired boy pressed both hands to his ears and furrowed his brow. “’Cause he doesn’t seem to be very happy about being in there!”

“We should probably get one of the lab technicians to administer another dose of sedative,” April nodded her head back towards the door, though her eyes remained on the turtle. The creature was still clicking loudly as it balled its hands into fists and beat them against the glass. “The walls should be strong enough to hold him, but he might hurt himself if he keeps freaking out!”

“Sounds good to me!”

The girl motioned for Casey to follow her, backing slowly away from the turtle and reaching out for the door handle. As they backed away, the noise seemed to falter and then suddenly -

“Help!”

April froze, her hand inches from the doorknob, and then turned to meet Casey’s round brown orbs. “Did you-?”

“Help!”

The two stared at each other silently for a heartbeat, and then slowly turned to face the panting terrapin. The creature’s amber eyes had tracked them across the room, and now locked onto April’s own eyes with an intensity she had never seen before.

“Crap,” Casey murmured under his breath. “What did you - ?”

“Tasukete kudasai!” The turtle pressed his trembling palms against the glass, eyes round and searching as they moved to meet Casey’s. “Help! Out!”

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