#i would fall asleep in class or drawn or write just to get some sort of stimulation

[spellscarred]

I need to actually put it in a reblog here as a reply, because it's important to understand why "water is wet" studies are so important. Even though it's something we know, "water is wet" studies are so important (not just on this topic but on various others like the one time there was one about validating a trans person's gender identity helps their mental health) because it gives a credible source to our lived experience.

It's not even a, "maybe neurotypicals didn't know this" case. Perhaps they do, perhaps they don't, that's ultimately irrelevant. The part to focus on here is that these studies validate our lived experience in a manner that's very hard for them to undermine or invalidate, you know?

These studies may seem "ridiculously obvious" in their conclusion or "superfluous" in that, you could just talk to ADHDers the world over and understand that we've been saying this for decades. But it gives us the tools to fight against the ableist monster that is society instead of just beating our heads against the walls, hurting ourselves more than said walls.

I don't want to say that's the point of this study, because I don't know the people involved nor their motivations. But that's the point of why "water is wet" studies are so, so important. It gives our voice and experiences legitimacy, credibility, that cannot be discounted, because it's right there, with sourced material, with the scientific method in effect, with the conclusion echoing what we all know and have been saying.

So please don't discount studies like this, ever, nor discourage "water is wet" studies from being conducted, because they're important weapons in our fight against ableism and for the rights and accommodations we need to move through our societies.

Scientists once thought that ADHD symptoms were always present. But previous research from Rapport, who has been studying ADHD for more than 36 years, has shown the fidgeting was most often present when children were using their brains' executive functions, particularly "working memory." That's the system we use for temporarily storing and managing information required to carry out complex cognitive tasks such as learning, reasoning and comprehension.

Here’s full study: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/478386

If you enjoyed this post, please give it a ❤️ and check out @scienceisdope for more science and daily facts.

[voidthewanderer]

Private: 5 Arsenic x Crow. Hier sind Kekse (lol).

@bleumanouche || Location Based Smut Prompts

Private #5: bent over a table while something bakes in the oven. 

Sorry this took so long! Gaming brain worms took over!

So, fun fact, this was almost a scenario that these two were nearly in before the war. Crow is the baker of the couple and Arsenic was just... very horny about this exact scenario happening for some reason? Like, it's been a scenario that's played out in his head way more than he'd ever admit. Some plot stuff for their story too. I just don't want to keep putting it off because it's taking me forever to write A Different Life.

MDNI🔞: 18 + CONTENT UNDER CUT Word Count: 1,857

All was quiet when Crow was able to sneak down the stairs of the house. It’d been a long time coming, them finally getting a house of their own within The Slog. Yeah, it wasn’t large by any means, a little two story; two bedroom, one bath. But, it was still something. It’d been the first home Crow ever actually owned and they wanted to do something special to sort of christen the home. The first thing that came to their mind? Bake a cake.

It wasn’t going to be anything big; they’d taken on of the seven inch pans from the main kitchen to make a little cake just for them and Arsenic. Hell, it probably wasn’t even going to be anything fancy. Knowing their partner? He’d try to turn it into some sort of sexual tease. The thought made them snicker to themself; that had been a big part of the start of their relationship. Crow had taken an avid interest in baking while still in school, though never went further than advanced optional classes. They just didn’t have the money to go to college for anything like that. The overall humor too of a chef and a baker ultimately winding up together; two very clashing styles having to share a single kitchen.

Arsenic never really bothered them too much when they’d bake in the apartment; just little teases here and there. His favorite extremely overused joke? Why not pass the time and get something else baking? It only made it funnier to their vehement desires to keep that child-free status, but it was still the same joke almost every single time.

“You’d make a good dad with those god awful jokes.” Crow’d always return with. It was worth it to get to see him flustered and stumble over his words, almost always muttering something along the lines of “Didn’t mean it like that…” The redness that crept across his face as he tried to hide his almost embarrassment for falling for that trap every single time.

He hadn’t made jokes quite like that in a long time, especially since they’d finally taken that plunge into that stage of their relationship. Granted, at the time, there was only the communal kitchen, but regardless… Crow did miss that joke in particular a bit. Perhaps it had just been the tone in his voice, the humor of the irony of it…

They didn’t want to dwell on the thought too long, knowing it would ultimately wind up upsetting them. Thankfully, it was still fairly early in the morning, Arsenic was still asleep. Nobody, outside of the guards, were awake (or rather should have been). Crow made sure the curtains were still drawn before getting to work, dry ingredients in one bowl, wet in other. The careful combining… making sure it wasn’t overworked, but that any clumps were broken up… Getting the oven preheated during the whole process.

It had been nice to be able to get the cake batter actually made up and prepped without having Arsenic hanging off of them. They knew he really did want to better his own baking skills, but they just wanted to bake out of the joy of the art, not to teach. They hadn’t even realized that they were being watched from across the room as they bent over to put the cake into the oven; nearly jumping out of their scarred skin when their spectator gave a whistle.

“Arsen! God damn it, I’m not exact-”

“Dressed? Yeah, I can see that,” he chuckled, “What, nude bakin’ a new thing ya tryin’? ‘Cause I’m gonna want front row seats from now on.”

“I just didn’t feel like getting dressed, I’m not messy when I bake and I’m careful around the oven when someone isn’t scaring the crap outta me.” And the curtains were still drawn, so it wasn’t like there were any prying eyes.

They set a timer, finally looking over to Arsenic. He’d cleared the room quickly, pulling them into a brief twirl before trapping them between the counter and his own bare frame. They were only able to make a soft noise as he quickly connected his lips to theirs, his hands releasing the counter and going to wander their frame. They pressed their hands up against his collarbone, lightly pushing upward. He took this silent request easily, his hands hooking their thighs as he lifted them to be seated onto the counter, breaking the kiss for a moment, “First mornin’ in th’ house an’ we’re bein’ a couple a horny fucks, ain’t we?”

“No,” Crow tapped the tip of their finger to the ridge of Arsenic’s remaining nose, “You’re being a horny fuck. I’m baking a cake.”

They watched the smirk form on his lips, them already starting to laugh, knowing exactly what was coming next.

“Wanna get somethin’ else bakin’ in th’ meantime?”

“I mean, you can try as hard as you want, don’t think anything’s gonna be baking in there anymore.”

Crow noticed the falter in his smile, their own fading, “Oh… oh honey…”

“I mean… We didn’t want ‘em… Just… kinda hits different when it ain’t possible anymore.”

“And thoughts can change, you know that,” Crow locked their legs around his waist, pulling him close so they could kiss his good cheek, “I’m not gonna lie and say I never thought about it. You made the same joke every single time I’d bake in the apartment. Eventually the brain worms were gonna happen. My sister didn’t help either.”

Arsenic pressed his lips to the side of their neck, a small, content sigh sounding from the smaller ghoul. They let out a whimper as they felt his teeth lightly rake along their skin. He shifted enough to be able to look at them, his smile returning as he watched their face slowly shifting from their content pleasure back to a more neutral expression. Crow cupped his face in their hands, lightly brushing their thumbs along his jawline, “Never said you couldn’t try though. Just because it can’t happen, doesn’t make the thought or actions any less enticing.”

He chuckled, one hand shifting to rub against them; him watching them tense slightly before biting their lip. There was caution in his movement, first only just rubbing his rough fingers against them. They tucked their chin towards their neck, shutting their eyes for a moment before letting out a quiet, “Please…”

They’d barely finished the word when they felt two fingers press inside of them; slowly pumping them inside as best as he could given their positions. Crow took a sharp breath at the feeling; this wasn’t something they frequently did. Arsenic was definitely more of an oral sex person for non-traditional sex, but this was also good. He never had to finger them long, something about the action rising a quick, small climax. He savored feeling their pussy clenching around his fingers as they let out a whimper with pleasure.

“Arsen…”

“Easy…”

He pulled them from the counter, glancing to the timer for a moment. He’d been surprised that only five minutes had passed… twenty five minutes was more than enough time for what he wanted to do. Crow went easily with Arsenic’s movements, following him easily to the kitchen table. He chuffed softly lightly pressing their belly against the table, “Haven’t done it like this in a long time…”

“Don’t think we’ve ever been like this,” Crow hummed, bracing one arm against the wood as they felt Arsenic’s hand cup against their hip. He chuckled, “No… don’t mean I haven’t before.”

“Arsen.”

He was quick to bury his cock inside of them, a shaky whimper escaping their lips. He kept his thrusts steady, a careful eye on Crow, making sure he didn’t get carried away. He watched as they took a soft breath, pressing back against his hip every so often. He arched over Crow slightly, free hand gripping a breast as he pressed his lips to the back of their neck, “Fuck… you’re so beautiful.”

“Keep going…”

“Pace yourself.”

A small squeeze and his hand slowly slid down their belly, resting on their midriff. He pressed himself completely inside, finger lightly tracing the small mound that pressed outward, “Fuck, I love this. Wonder if ya did it before ya went ghoul.”

“Oh fuck…” A small moan followed Crow’s words, bowing their head down, other hand bracing against the table. Arsenic chuckled softly, giving a particularly rough thrust. They let out another moan, arching themself up against Arsenic’s chest. His hand shifted once more, arm bracing against their shoulder.

The new position made him ease slightly, though, he was much more preoccupied with Crow themself. A hand lightly touched his, fingers curling around his own, guiding the limb towards their throat. He gave some resistance, trying to redirect their energy with a rough thrust. They bit their lip, “Please.”

“Not. Yet.”

“I want to try.”

“I said no.”

He pulled his hand down, gripping their chest once more, lips pressed against their neck. His teeth grazed their leathered skin once more. He felt their breath quicken, pulse racing. Lips still pressed against their neck as he spoke, “I just want you right now…”

“Which you have…”

“No kinks… no perversions… just… you.”

A thrust in and he felt their legs shake slightly with pleasure. Another thrust was met with a whimper, Crow pressing back against Arsenic. His voice was a low croon in their ear, “There we go…”

“Oh, Arsen…”

A tongue lightly brushed along their ear, lips pressing just behind the cup of it. Emotions flooded the smaller, rolling their head back into Arsenic’s shoulder as they let out a rather loud moan. Arsenic tried his hardest to keep himself steady in his final moments, savoring the moment when he finally released. This moment wasn’t something he’d wanted to end… The emotions that rushed through both of them… it felt so much more than anything he’d ever felt before.

He pressed his forehead against the back of Crow’s neck, taking a breath before moving slightly to kiss it. They made a soft noise as his lips brushed against their skin, going to rest against the table. Arsenic carefully pulled himself away from his partner, lightly running a finger down their spine, watching their muscles twitch as his finger hit each ridge, “Fuck, I wish I could get some more meat on you…”

“You like it,” they gave a soft laugh, taking a breath before slowly going to stand upright. He hummed, “I know… but still. Know what happened an’ all… Sucks that I can’t.”

The timer went off for the oven and Crow couldn’t help but laugh, “Certainly didn’t feel like it was that long.”

“’M not sure I should take that as a compliment or an insult,” Arsenic laughed as well. It had been just about thirty minutes. Crow popped up onto their tip-toes to kiss him, “Compliment. If that’s what it takes for thirty minutes to pass, I’ll take it any day.”

A hand splayed across their belly before snaking around their waist, “An’ I’ll be glad t’ give it t’ ya.”

[goorehound]

okay! i have not been in the mood to write so I snatched some work I handed in to my prof instead, and tweaked it back to being a Mary fic. Originally, I took an old Mary fic (lost that) and turned it into something presentable for class work. Now I’ve reworked it to be presentable for my little Mary fanatics. enjoy!

WARNING: mildly graphic depictions of being buried alive

Buried Alive

A quick breath gave way to a musty and rotten smell, one that offered only the vaguest of memories attached. He must have found himself in a truly foul place this time, but turning his head to confirm this was a fruitless effort. Nothing would budge.


There was something tight pressing in against his limbs that stopped him from freeing his head from its unknown confines - only then did he notice that his lungs could hardly expand with this all encompassing pressure, he was now hardly even sure his eyes were open with the darkness in every direction.


Things began to click into place when his fingers sunk into the substance that held his body firmly in place, that pungent smell finally surfacing some memories. Dirt.



His body was encased in dirt.



There was a renewed sort of panic, limbs writhing for purchase in a desperate scramble to find air as every ragged breath drawn in only welcomed the earth up his nostrils and between his lips. This could not be happening. This couldn’t be real. Mary’s brain whirled as it searched for any sort of recollection of how he ended up here, could he be in a coffin?

 

 

Would a coffin be filled with soil?


He was most definitely in the ground. How deep? Could he dig himself out? Would he choke on the dirt before he could make it that far? Moreso, Mary would choke before he could finish this train of thought if hr didn’t even out his panicked breathing soon. It seemed to be asking too much to try and calm his body. He was trying to thrash without giving his body the permission to do so and everything had become an instinctive battle to survive.

 

 

Things were starting to get hazy, no longer sure if there was little air left to breathe or if the hyperventilating was starting to take its toll. The young man was starting to feel exhausted and sluggish despite the thrumming adrenaline in his veins, and he could only pray he’d made some sort of dent in the immovable wall above me.

He could no longer feel his hands. Was that normal?


A foolish question, and the punk was hit with the sudden and delirious urge to laugh. As if something about this situation could be described as anything close to normal.


Another breath wheezed in, dirt beginning to pool in his mouth as Mary made a feeble attempt to turn away from it. He wouldn’t very much mind this being over, or so a distant part of his brain told him.


Another breath, less air pulled in this time around.



He felt tired.



Another breath. He didn’t think he was moving anymore.

 

 

He can’t remember another inhale. He remembers feeling soil tumble further down his jaw, the earthy taste enveloping his senses as his throat was clogged up. He does remember falling asleep, oddly enough. He recalls agreeing with himself that a short nap ought to help him regain my strength.

 

 

Just a quick nap, he thought to nobody in particular. He supposed it was only him around to be stuck with the internal monologue.

 

 

Ridiculous, wasn’t it? Nothing logical pointed to him waking up again once he allowed sleep to overtake him. What a silly, anticlimactic last thought to have.

[i-am-trying-my-best-okay]

Roughly How I Would Write Twilight As A TV Show

SEASON 1 (AKA Book 1, Twilight)

It would start out with the typical Renee sending off Bella at the airport, but I think she should give her the camera now instead of later in the series, sort of like a send off present and it gives Bella an actual hobby. From the first scene it shows that Renee likes her daughter, but she doesn’t really cares and loves her, and that’s more on Bella’s side than hers, as Bella will hug her before going into the airport and Renee will let go before Bella and Bella will just keep hanging on to her, showing that she doesn’t really want to be separated from her mom. Also, throughout the first season she will be constantly checking her flip phone (I still want this to have the same time setting) to see if her mom messages her, but she never does, which will sink Bella into a deeper and deeper depression each time she checks.

When she and Charlie meet it’s really awkward, but both sides are trying and both sides feel bad about making things awkward. Also throughout the first season whenever they start getting closer Bella will sort of put distance between them and then hate herself for it. Perhaps she pushes him away because she is unused to this type of parental love and it makes her nervous. When she gets to school she meets Jessica whose very nosy but because she’s a self proclaimed reporter and likes to know everything about everyone; and she does. Except for the Cullen's, and that’s why she’s so obsessed with them, because she doesn’t know enough about them or she senses their is more. When Edward first sees Bella, whose eating with Jessica and only Jessica because she has a bad rep around the town so she has no real friends, he can’t read her mind and that really freaks him out. We’ve now shifted perspective towards the Cullen’s, and Edward is having a crisis because he’s grown so used to knowing every person’s thought it sort have turned him into a bit of a control freak and now he’s not sure how to handle this, and his siblings are trying to calm him down. Also later, probably that night, he’s freaking out and he wants to go see her and maybe test if he can read her thoughts when she’s asleep, which his family’s all like ‘bruh stop’ but he doesn’t bruh stop and tests it out, only to find out he can’t and he doesn’t try again. 

When Bella and Edward meet Bella doesn’t really care much about him and his weird behavior, but then he stopped a car with his hand and then she cared a whole lot more. Maybe after the hospital she tests it out, seeing if she was actually crazy or not. Like she steals one of her dad’s handcuffs and before class handcuffs Edward’s seat to the leg of the table then during class suddenly goes really close and Edward scoots away really fast, breaking the handcuffs, or just something similar to that where she tests if what she saw was actually real. She gets into a few more conversations with Edward stretched out, at some point maybe Bella will throw the golden onion at Edward in anger, who knows. Throughout this entire season we will be constantly switching perspectives from Edward and Bella, which will give us some more time with the Cullen siblings and their dynamic.

Anyway, Bella will ditch the dance to go to the city and then the beach Charlie requests for her to take a at least three friends, and so she recruit's Jessica, Mike and Jacob, and this is where we first meet Jacob Black, but not the first time we meet Mike. With Mike, I kinda completely changed him, and he’s now a kid with serious anger issues and a tendency for small amounts of arson and fights, which makes him an outsider like Jessica, but they never hung out as fellow rejects or anything. Charlie was probably a bit late picking up Bella from the airport because he was busy driving Mike home from yet another case of arson. He never really gets charged with anything, since Charlie has sorta took it upon himself to look after him. Anyway, Bella probably had taken a picture of him when she first got here and that made him really mad but she had ran away. Now, as she approaches him to ask him to go to the city with her, he tries to fight her, but as they fight she still asks him to go to the city and than the beach with her, which kinda throws Mike off but he actually agrees because he’s worried his mom is worried about him not having friends, so they make a deal about pretending to be friends but of course they turn into real friends. Now with Jacob, Bella goes to his house to ask him, and find him fixing some weird broken thing with the music blasting and him singing along. When he see’s her he immediately knows it’s her and is thrilled. Charlie also came along to see Billy and we see cute friendship moments between them, also Charlie confessing his worries about Bella and Billy giving him advice. 

So these four head on out to the city, and it’s the first time these people have come together and they slowly form a tight friend group. They roam the city and start chaos everywhere they go. Mike teaches them all how to shoplift although finds out Jessica is practically a pro, Jacob wants to roam through the dumpsters for parts he can use and the rest of them help him with Mike setting the occasional fire in these dumpsters, Jessica shows them how to stalk people and they tail a guy all the way home but they forgot about the not going inside his house part and the guy notices them so they need to make a run for it, and Bella is trying to take all these picture and nearly dies due to her clumsiness and determination to take the perfect pictures which lead to the rest of the gang saving her from falling off a building or onto the subway tracks or something. All and all, they’re each surprised about how much they like each other, except for Jacob, he liked them all from the start.

So they decide to all go out to eat before heading to the beach and Bella says she wants to go to the book store really quick and to not wait up for her. She had actually seen this book about anomalies and such through the window earlier that day, and she decided to go back for it. She had decided to go to the city originally because the drama with Edward was getting to be too much and she just needed some time away from Forks, but that book had captured her attention. Anyway we go to Edward and his family, who were at the city because they figured it would prove a nice distraction from Bella. Alice couldn’t say that Bella would be in the city because Jacob is with her and they don’t really outright say that he’s a werewolf yet. At some point the Vam Fam had smelled Bella and Edward went to go see her, much to his Vam Fam’s disappointment. 

So Bella almost gets attacked by that group of guys and Edward steps in and they get to talking in the car he had stolen; well, technically Alice was trying to steal it but when he sensed Bella he took it from her and drove off. They go to the restaurant where her friends are and confirm that she has a ride with Edward to the beach, although at first he just says he’ll take her home afterwards since he can’t go to the beach, but Jacob’s all like ‘nah bro I’ll give you a pass’, since Jacob couldn’t care less about whatever feud is going on. So they eat and have an argument and they go back to the car all angry, and Edward is still bitching about how he doesn’t understand what Bella thinks or feels, since what with reading minds for roughly a century he doesn’t really remember how to properly understand a person, and this frustrates him. Before they go into the car, Bella checks her phone to see if her mom and texted her back. You see, before going on this day trip Bella decided to take initiative and text her mom first, since she didn’t do that before cause she was worried about bothering her. She did this early in the morning, and it was already night, and her mom still hadn’t texted her back. This caused sort of an emotional breakdown from Bella right there in the parking lot. She’s basically all like ‘fine, you wanna know what I’m thinking? well here you go’ and she just tells him everything, about her current situation with her parents, why she decided to move here even though she didn’t want to, how she just always wanted her mom to show that she loved her so she would always do everything to get that love, how guilty she feels for not being able to give Charlie the daughter-father relationship he probably wanted, feeling guilty wanting to be loved by her mom, basically screaming all her trauma at him. At the end she silently gets in the car and looks out the window as they drive away.

Edward feels kinda bad, so they have a nice bonding conversation, and Bella is still freaked out about his speeding. Anyway, it’s during this conversation that they both sort of develop//realize feelings they have for the other person. At first, Edward was just drawn to Bella because he was unused to not understanding people and he became obsessed with knowing her, and as he had gotten to know her he developed feelings. As for Bella, throughout this she had been interested in his inhuman nature and was equally as obsessed to understand and then also ended up falling for him. Basically they fell in love because of a desire to get to know the other person and desperate to make the person not know them. But when Bella tore down her walls in that parking lot Edward also told her some personal stuff, and I think it’s here in this car that Edward drops the bomb about being a vampire, and with now more fully understanding each other and no longer having that draw of being close to each other because of wanting to understand, there still a desire in both of them to keep seeing each other and that’s when they both realize their love.

Anyway, Edward drops Bella off and leaves immediately, but we still see people that live there scold Jacob for telling him it was okay to come drop of Bella. The squad have fun at the beach and Bella gets some great pictures, although she’s still digesting the whole Edward’s a vampire and she might be in love with him thing, so she tells her knew found friends about the whole being in love part and glosses over the vampire bit. Back with Edward, he tells his Vam Fam about being in love and telling Bella, where there are definitely mixed reactions. Now this is where they start interacting with Bella directly, rather when before they just tried to get Edward to chill about her. Alice is of course thrilled about this and has publicly declared Bella as her new best friend; it was an actual public declare, she had a microphone and announced it several times in the middle of town. Rosalie is super not thrilled about this, and definitely treats Bella coldly, although she’s thrown off at Bella’s apathy. Emmett, like Alice, is 100% down with this. Jasper is cautious, but otherwise just wants to watch it all unfold. Carlisle and Esme weren’t happy about exposing them to some teenager, but they support his endeavors none the less.

Anyway, after many shenanigans Bella is invited to dinner at the Cullen's, and she brings along Jessica, Mike, and Jacob. The family’s a bit wary of this guest list, as it was the girl who had tried several times to break into their house and expose their secrets, a well known arsonist, and a soon to be werewolf. But, they actually all had a grand time, and they all kinda start acting like one big family. Particularly Jacob with Jasper and Alice, and Jessica with Rosalie and Emmett, to set up my plans down the line. Now, I’m not saying that there NEEDS to be a polymerous relationship with these two sets of three, but I’d like for it to happen. Jacob would probably notice Jasper’s not really enjoying himself at this socializing stuff, especially with the smell of human blood and all, and Jacob comes over and they get to talking and Jasper will get into that, and it’s helpful that since Jacob is in the future going to be a werewolf he doesn’t have the urge to eat him. So Alice will come over, thrilled that Jasper is having a good time, and then her and Jacob will probably get into something wholesomely chaotic and Jasper will just sit back and watch, enjoying the drama that will come from this. And with Jessica, she’s asking a million questions and exploring the house as much as she could, and Rosalie has taken it upon herself to try and placate her, but Jessica ends up roping Emmett into something and Rosalie now needs to look after him too, but somehow they all have a good time. Meanwhile, I feel like Mike would really vibe with Carlisle and Esme, not in a polymerous way like the others. They’re so exasperated by his behavior but never rude to him, which he finds jarring and it encourages him to be nice to them, and they sort of become like parents to him.

Anyway more stuff happens, probably romantic stuff between Edward and Bella and Jacob kinda slowly realizing he has feelings for Bella more near the end of the season but not letting it show, and then there comes the baseball scene. While they’re doing baseball Jessica actually put a sort of spy camera thing on Bella, but Edward wasn’t around when this was happening, and Jacob was with Jessica when she did this so Alice couldn’t see it. Anyway, Jessica, Jacob and Mike go about spying and they find out that about the whole vampire thing, Then the other vampires show up and they actually drive down to help, driving out onto the field, nearly running over the other vampires, which by the way, besides Victoria, James, Laurent, there’s actually going to be two more vampires with them. I say this, because after getting out of the car, Mike throws a match at this other vampire which sets them ablaze. James, who afterwards comments how he always hated this vampire, takes this opportunity to tear them to pieces as they burn so they die, while Victoria and Laurent are in the back like ‘this bitch really just did that; this is why we can never add new members to our group’. I dunno, I feel like this group of three should be a lot closer and maybe not spilt up or something, like their actually friends.

So now James has two objectives; make Mike into a vampire, and eat Bella, in no particular order. He just takes a really big interest in Mike. Anyway, Laurent is just so done with this drama, and tells James that the Volturi was probably going to be really upset about four non vampires being in on the secret, so they probably don’t want to get involved when shit hits the fan, and Victoria, who is always down for a little murdering, convinces him that they need a more careful plan then just going after them. So James reluctantly agrees, but when they leave he tells the other vampire that’s there to go after Bella and Mike and bring her to him without telling the other two.

So drama ensues, they gotta keep Mike and Bella from dying, they gotta deal with more people knowing their vampires, etc. I think that the vampire that now’s gotta track down Bella and Mike, who I’m gonna call Eric because this is Eric now, isn’t super down with this but is going with it cause he doesn’t want James to kill him. So he feels bad about all this and becomes pretty sympathetic, and the Vam Fam at some point will try and convince him to just join them and that they’ll protect him, but Eric didn’t do it so they had to kill him in the end and it’s very sad.

Anyway, we’ll probably go back to the vampire trio and they figured out that James sent Eric away and now Eric was dead, and they’re just talking. Also, I’m making Victoria and James not mates, because I don’t want that. And there’s the dance that of course needs to happen, and at the end of the season it shows how far Bella’s and Charlie’s relationship has progressed, and with Bella injured she needs Charlie to do some things for her, and she’s forced to accept parental care and learns that it’s actually not that bad. She also stopped constantly checking to see if Renee had texted her. So back to the dance, the Vam Fam siblings and Bella with her friends all go and of course cause chaos that gets them kicked out of the dance. So they decide to go running around town instead, and Bella and Edward have a quiet moment together and it’s nice.

SEASON 2 (AKA Book 2, New Moon)

So the Vam Fam doesn’t leave town, because I don’t want them to. There was going to be a birthday party at the Vam Fam’s house, and along with Bella’s friends Charlie’s invited and he tries to invite Billy too but then Billy turns him down saying he can’t go there, which makes Charlie sad so now Billy’s sad and he grits his teeth and asks the Vam Fam to hold the birthday party somewhere on neutral ground, so they do and they end up going to like the woods or something, maybe that special meadow Bella and Edward had gone to. So the party’s going fine although it’s a little tense with Billy there, which kinda makes the rest of the people there confused. Jacob doesn’t really get why his dad hates the Vam Fam, or why most everyone he knows does, and he tires to get them to get along, but it fails. 

When Billy sees Jacob all friendly with the Vam Fam, particularly Jasper and Alice, Billy tries to put a stop to that, telling Jacob not to get to close. Jacob’s trying to make light of the situation, being all like, ‘nah dad, you crazy’ and Emmett joins in trying to make a joke of it; I feel like Emmett and Jacob would have such a Fred and George Weasley vibe to them as friends. However, as Billy gets more and more persistent with Jacob cutting himself off from the Vam Fam, Jasper gets noticeably hostile, not liking that idea at all, and ready to throw down with Billy. Alice, also visibly upset but not hostile, tries to calm him down while the rest of the family tries to reason with Billy, as they are also not thrilled with the idea of not seeing Jacob again and they don’t want Jasper to fight Billy and break the treaty. Bella’s trying to get everyone to calm down by reminding Billy that this is her birthday party and uses her birthday privilege's to ask him to leave it for now. Meanwhile Mike is yelling at Billy and Jessica is writing everything down, Charlie’s asking Billy to not ruin his daughter’s birthday party, it’s a mess all around. 

At some point Billy says something that goes to far and Jasper lunges for him and the Vam Fam need to stop him and such. After the party Jacob takes Billy home, and both of them think that the other doesn’t know about the vampires so they’re just kinda tensely all like ‘well that was weird, probably nothing to really look to deeply into though, haha’. After the party to lighten the mood Edward starts bitching about how he couldn’t give Bella a present, and so Bella takes a picture of him and says ‘there, now you gave me a present, happy?’ and it’s very cute. Jacob gets a bit upset at Jasper, telling him that he shouldn’t attack his father and stuff, and Jasper doesn’t feel bad about it and is just sad that Jacob is now upset and Alice is trying to get them to make up, which they do eventually. And Charlie questions Billy about his odd hatred and Billy kinda dodges the questions.

So in this season it’s basically about how Edward and Bella are dating and Jacob is secretly in love with Bella but it’s not a secret to the Vam Fam thanks to their powers and then Jacob deals with the werewolf thing and how he’s suddenly supposed to hate them. It’s a very Jacob centered season. And there is of course the motorcycles, which are there because Jacob gave them to Bella as a birthday gift, saying he had found them at the dump a few days ago and still need to fix them up, so now they start hanging out alone more to fix the bikes, although sometimes Mike and Jessica tag along. This is also where Bella learns that she actually really likes the rush of adrenaline, much to Edward’s nagging. There’s also going to be some tenseness between Edward and Jacob in this season, but it’s more quiet since Jacob never outright says he likes Bella, although after he learns about the whole mind reading thing he doesn’t know what to do about that. And of course there’s the jealousy from Jasper and Alice’s side, who are slowly coming to terms with their feelings for Jacob, and are heavily conflicted because he’s going to be a werewolf and they can’t be together after he turns but they still want to make the most of the time they spend together, and it makes Alice anxious when she can’t see Jacob’s future which makes him unpredictable to her and she worries if something bad will happen to him when he’s out of her sight which in turn makes Jasper sense her worry and makes him worried so they try to be around him as much as possible, which he enjoys but is a bit thrown off by.

This is where Jacob introduces his other friends Emery and Quil. I want to make them a bit more distinct from each other, so I want Emery to be the quieter yet very rebellious one that does crazy shit, and Quil to be the more extroverted one but can get very moody and cynical, which Leah can definitely vibe with and they often have deep conversations. Speaking of Leah, we also meet Leah and Seth this season. The Vam Fam is less than friendly towards them, similar to how they treated Jacob at first, the only difference being that they didn’t end up warming up to them, except for Leah and Rosalie, who became surprising friends.

Jacob gets stressed about the situation with Emery suddenly joining Sam’s little cult, and while the Vam Fam sympathizes with him, they don’t tell him the secret. He’s not super surprised that Emery suddenly got into the group, since Emery’s always doing crazy shit and so does Sam’s pack, but he does find it weird that he’s suddenly not talking to him and Quil anymore. So Jessica is now super ready to expose all of Sam’s secrets on this weird group and how he sucked Emery into it, so she, Jacob, Bella, Quil, Leah, Seth and Mike keep trying to find out about Sam’s crew, and Jasper and Alice try to put a stop to it, worried that finding out will trigger Jacob’s transformation, and Rosalie and Emmett sometimes give assistance because Jessica asked, but they don’t get to involved because of the treaty, and Edward is really worried about Bella while she does this so he’s torn between helping and stopping it, shifting from helping Jasper and Alice and Rosalie and Emmett.. And this sort of mystery solving thing carries on for a while, and at this point Sam and his crew are pretty fed up with it.

So then comes the time when Jacob becomes a werewolf, and happens after him, Bella, Mike, and Jessica take a break from spying and cause chaos at the movies; the employees saw them enter and they already knew it was going to be a rough day. Bella was recording the movie illegally, Mike set a small fire to the popcorn, Jessica broke them into where they were making the movies play and that’s where they watched it, and Jacob, in his sickened state, accidently broke the thing playing the movie and they had to bolt. Bella, Mike, and Jessica all get worried about him, and they try to go visit him at home but Billy keeps pushing them away, and the Vam Fam wouldn’t give any details, so Jessica does what she does best and breaks in, where Jacob nearly attacks her in his wolfy state, but he manages to calm down and he and Jessica talk about how he’s turning into a werewolf. 

So after Jacob can go out and about, the pack tells him he can’t hang out with the Cullen’s anymore since they’re vampires, and Jacob’s all like, ‘okay, but they don’t hunt people, they hung animals right? so what’s the problem lmao’ he’s genuinely confused why they need to be all hostile towards them. And here while they’re trying to convince him to not hang out with vampires it can show the dynamic of the pack. Sam can come across as too harsh and a very dominate person, while his second in command, Jared, is much more chill and tires to broaden Sam’s narrow view. But Jared is the only one who can do this, since they’re very close and possibly lovers that have imprinted on each other. Emily is actually a werewolf now, and she got her scars because she and Sam actually became werewolves at the same time and when they first met as werewolves their hormones were all over the place so they attacked each other and that’s how Emily got her face injuries. Anyway, she’s got a level head too but she mostly thinks about what’s best for the pack rather than everyone like Jared does. Then there’s Paul, the guy whose always of the mindset to throw punches first and ask questions never. I’m going to make Brady and Collin here now too, and with Brady, he’s honestly apathetic to the idea of now being a wolf, and would much rather go read a book or something then be here with all this wolf drama. As for Brady, she’s pretty social awkward, but just as vicious as Paul if she gets into the mood. Basically, she’ll be all like, ‘uh, hi, yeah, um, maybe we should, uh, if you don’t mind that is, just go in and kill them all? please?’ and I changed Brady to a girl just to help with the ratio of boys to girls in the wolf tribe. As for Emery, he’s the one who will put himself in the most danger, but also he’s at odds with Sam what with them being half brothers and not having the best relationship before all this wolf stuff went down. Also, Jessica is there too when Jacob goes to meet them, which the pack isn’t happy about, telling her she can’t report this.

Anyway, the Vam Fam are depressed about the whole situation with Jacob cause they really liked him, so imagine their surprise while Bella and Mike were also hanging out at their house when Jacob and Jessica burst in. Jacob explains what’s been going on, basically asking if he can break the treaty and still hang out. Rosalie’s all like ‘bitch no’, nervous about the safety of her family, and Edward sides with her, much to Bella’s glaring. Esme and Carlisle, are hesitant, but do give in. And Alice, Jasper, Emmett are of course ecstatic of this news that he didn’t suddenly hate them. I think this is actually an opportunity for Jacob to get closer to Jasper and Alice, since Jasper can help with Jacob’s new found anger. I think werewolves when they first become werewolves they have an explosive temper, kind of like puberty, but then after a few months or however long they calm down. Anyway, Jasper can help with managing his anger, and this may result in some codependency's now that I think about it, but these books are built on codependent relationships, so the more the merrier. 

But then the vampire trio tell the Volturi about the situation down at Forks, and the Vam Fam need to go down to the Voltari to go talk to them. But Jessica, who had actually started to gain a lot of odd information on the vampire world as any good reporter would, hears the news of the potential planned killing of the Vam Fam set up by the vampire trio, so now Bella, Mike, Jessica and Jacob need to go to the Volturi to put an end to that. Before the Vam Fam could even get to the Volturi, James gets all impatient and starts attacking them right then and there, in front of all those people. A fight scene happens, and then Jane shows up like ‘surprise bitch’, but then the real surprise comes when Bella and her friends show up, causing a scene and it accidentally lets James and his crew to get away.

I think it would be a cool scene if Jacob, Edward and Bella enter first ahead of the rest of them and the moment they’re in front of the Volturi, with Aro looking at them, he’ll smile and say something like ‘a vampire, a werewolf, and a human; what an oddity you all are’ and since these three had kinda been a bit at odds this season what with Jacob’s crush on Bella, now they are a united front. So they make an arrangement for them all to become vampires within a certain time frame or else they will be killed. Aro also says that they’ll occasionally go check up on them.

Now Edward’s being all emo and avoiding Bella, which makes her sad so Jacob goes and tracks down Edward and he bolts, so now Jacob is chasing after Edward, being all like ‘bitch you better go see her’, and he actually ends up catching him. Edward’s all like ‘but don’t you love her’ and Jacob just kinda shrugs and says something like how mutual love is much better than a one sided one. They have this heartfelt talk about stuff and Edward goes to see Bella, and Jacob, who at this point had just been comically chasing Edward around, allowed himself to cry once Edward left. Then he’ll go talk to Alice and Jasper, and throughout this entire season it seemed obvious that they were both trying so hard to keep hold on the ties they had, regardless of the obstacles, and now it’s kind of come full circle when they can just relax and be together and stuff, also there will be a small hint of Jacob’s returning feelings towards them. So Edward and Bella share a moment, maybe back at that meadow or something.

But the last scene of the season will be Leah and Seth at home with their dad Harry, and the whole Leah transforming which gives Harry a heart attack and then Seth transforms too, and it’s just going to be a very jarring scene to end on.

SEASON 3 (AKA Book 3, Eclipse)

So the first scene will be with how James, Laurent and Victoria are making their army and this is where Bree comes in. Victoria is honestly thriving with this whole army thing, and James is just super impatient and wants to just go kill em, and Laurent is low key stressed about pissing off the Volturi. 

But with the wolf pack, there’s a new dynamic that Leah and Seth brings and there’s the whole grief with their father, so maybe the just refuse to transform for a while, sort of defying the pack and it’s alpha and choosing not to be a part of it. So that’ll cause drama for a while, as if there wasn’t enough with Jacob still running around with vampires and by the looks of things getting way to close to Jasper and Alice. Jacob is trying to get over his love of Bella, and is doing pretty good, much to the delight of Jasper and Alice, but they don’t want to rush things. Also, I don’t think werewolves should be able to share thoughts so they know exactly what’s happening with each other at all times, but instead when they shape into werewolves they can communicate with their minds. That way Jacob can keep it a secret about the whole turning three humans into vampires thing.

Also, with the idea that they now how to eventually turn three humans into vampires or else they’ll die is kinda unsettling to the Vam Fam. They’re trying to decide when to do it, and they all have different opinions. Jessica and Mike are honestly ready right now, but Bella wants to wait till after high school since she worries about Charlie, Rosalie and Edward wants to do it never and would honestly rather try and bring down the Volturi, Emmett will be down for honestly anything whether it be doing it now later or fighting the Voltari, Esme, Carlisle, and Alice actually agree with Bella and think waiting till they move town again would be the smartest plus Alice looks into the future and thinks that it’ll be the best possible outcome, Jacob is just upset that they’ll all be leaving him although he is reassured that he is welcome to come with although he’s not sure how that’ll pan out with the pack, and Jasper just says he’ll take care of things when they turn since he knows newborns best and just watches everyone fight over the timing since he lives for the drama. And this will also be the season of Vam Fam backstories, so throughout we will get flashbacks of what each of the Vam Fam went through. Their backstories will basically be the same, except I’m gonna tweak Jasper’s and make him a slave that was forced into fighting for the confederate side. 

Also, per their promise, the Volturi will occasionally pop in just to check up on them, which will cause the wolves to mad about that. ALSO, listen, what if Aro and Marcus became low key friends with Charlie? LISTEN they keep coming around to Forks, and eventually Charlie will approach them because he hears that they’ve been talking to his daughter and he asks what’s up. Aro and Marcus will bring him to a bar or something and lie about it, but as they get to talking they somehow start bonding, and Aro and Marcus are like ‘what’s happening? what spell is this human casting upon us?’ but it’s just Charlie being the best as usual and them starting to like him. So now they’re friends that often have conversations as the season goes on, and when Billy catches wind of this he is super unhappy, wondering how Charlie can be so chill yet so prone to getting into dangerous situations, kind of like his daughter.

And since last season the polyamorous relationship that got more time was Jasper, Alice, and Jacob, so now we’ll shift more towards Rosalie, Emmett, and Jessica. Rosalie is obviously super unhappy about having to turn Jessica into a vampire, since although she loves Jessica she didn’t want her to end up like her and was content with having to leave her in order for Jessica to leave a normal life. So now throughout the season Emmett and Jessica take it upon themselves and the single brain cell they share among the two of them to reassure Rosalie in the best way they can; also, it really establishes how Rosalie is the brains of this trio, with Emmett being the himbo and Jessica being the stubborn dumbass.

So then news about the vampire trio building an army and such travels to Forks and Jessica is actually the first to hear of it. Also, the objective of this vampire army is more world domination than just tracking down Bella and Mike, although that’s definitely part of it. Since the Volturi is already after them, why not strive for world domination? We’ll also keep having scenes of the vampire army shenanigans, particularly with the vampire trio and Bree. Also, Alec and Jane were in charge of the tracking down the vampire trio thing, and they discovered the army, and they were gonna put a stop to it, but then they met Bree. They probably met while Alec and Jane were debating how to take down the army and the vampire trio and such, when some random drunk guy showed up and was being a creep towards them, so they were gonna finna destroy him when Bree popped up and threw a rock at him, took the two and ran. They get to talking and shenanigans' and they actually grow attached to her, but Bree is a very weak vampire, which is odd for a newborn, so they know the Volturi won’t accept her and that would mean they would have to kill her. So they keep delaying the killing of the vampire trio and the army to hang out with Bree some more, tortured by the idea that they’ll have to kill her eventually. Also, I’m gonna make Bree their age, or make them Bree’s age, whichever works.

So anyway, with the threat of the vampire army, the vampires and the wolves are forced to work together. Aro and Marcus know that Jane and Alec are supposed to take care of it, but they’re kinda amused so they’ll see how it all pans out. And of course chaos ensues and nobody can get along, which bugs Bella the most because she has this thing about making everyone around her happy at the cost of herself, so she comes up with idea of doing a group bonding exercise, like they all go to an amusement park or something, which she in fact hates but does for the sake of bonding.

So back to the Leah situation, she needs to go through a whole arc, and Seth does too. Leah probably low key thinks Seth blames her for the death of their father, but the thought never crossed his mind. And since she’s avoiding Seth because of this, Seth thinks that Leah doesn’t want him around. So they need to clear up that understanding, probably with the help of Emily. While Jared makes sure Sam doesn’t slaughter all the vampires and potentially Jacob, Emily tries and mends things within the pack. 

At some point, Leah and Mike get kidnapped by the a few members of the vampire army. What had happened was Leah and Mike were hanging out, as everyone was taking shifts trying to get Leah and Seth to transform again, and Seth had run off at this point, and Mike was surprisingly making some serious progress, when a few members of the vampire army, including Bree, saw them and was like ‘oh wait, isn’t that Mike? from the pictures James showed us? and that girl has black hair, is that Bella bro?’ so they kidnap them.

So Leah is super not Bella and the vampire trio get angry and punish them, well, Laurent kinda just watches. So Bree will meet up with Alec and Jane kinda messed up from the punishment, also, Bree still has no idea who Alec and Jane are or even what the Volturi is. But anyway, when Alec and Jane find out about this they are very unhappy, and hatch a plan with Leah to go get the Vam Fam and the werewolves and come fight the army now, now that they have a location of them. Jane and Alec are doing this rather than taking them down themselves because if the rag tag team of vampires and werewolves were the ones fighting and not them then it would seem more reasonable if one of them were to escape the battle and disappear, that being Bree. 

Mike isn’t there when this plan is hatched because he’s taking with James, who wants to turn Mike into a vampire now, but his other two friends keep telling him that Mike will just turn on them and they need to convince him to join their side while he’s still a human. So him and James hang out and although Mike is cussing them all out, him and James actually have fun causing destruction, and he also causes the biggest case of arson he has done yet, which gives him a rush. Also, Leah is trying to turn into a werewolf now, given the dire circumstances, but she can’t and she doesn’t know why.

So Jane and Alec tell the crew about the kidnapping and the location, so they all head out. Jessica and Bella try to convince the Vam Fam to just turn them into vampires now so they can help out, but they say that they’ll just be unconscious for a few days so it wouldn’t help, but Jessica and Bella say that they can be like a back up plan if they fail, so when they wake up they can avenge them or something. And this is the first time the werewolves aside from Jacob heard about the plans to turn three humans into vampires, so discord ensues but they don’t have enough time so they just go to the vampire army with Bella and Jessica tagging along, thanks to Alice who said they would in fact be useful.

So they get to the army and the battle ensues. Seth is now in werewolf form, wanting to protect his sister, and when Leah sees Seth in a tight spot, she manages to turn into a werewolf again and protect him. Mike is actually very attracted to the idea of destroying the world, but when he sees his friends, he doesn’t want them destroyed so he doesn’t go to the side of the vampire trio. After a lot of epic fighting and some unexpected teamwork, the vampire army is destroyed, and within that chaos Alec and Jane took Bree and high tailed it out of there, explaining the whole situation to Bree. She’s kinda upset that they were planning to kill her, but then Aro and Marcus appear before the situation with that could get too out of hand. Marcus senses the strong relationship the three have, and tells Aro that they will indeed lose Alec and Jane if they kill Bree, and they kinda need them so Aro plays if off like ‘why didn’t you tell me you guys wanted a new friend? sure she can join the Volturi’  and although they are confused they’re just happy Bree’s gonna live, and now they can be together.

So the vampire trio retreat, still alive somehow, and the vampire army is gone, and they got Leah and Mike back, plus Leah and Seth transform now, so all’s well that ends well. Also maybe Brady and Leah get together, which would have been set up throughout the season. Why? I dunno, because I want Leah to be happy, and also with the personality I gave Brady it would be a fun dynamic I think. Brady is all shy while Leah has a much more forceful personality, but Brady is always ready to cut a bitch while Leah isn’t all that down with hurting people most of the time. They’d probably imprint on each other.

So back with the whole Emmett and Jessica trying to convince Rosalie not to worry too much about Jessica turning into a vampire, Rosalie had known what they were doing since the beginning, and to her surprise it actually slightly worked? Not really but Rosalie chooses not to focus on the fact that Jessica will be turned into a vampire, but instead that they’ll always be together, and it’s sweet moment for the three of them. And so the Vam Fam decide to do the vampire turning thing after high school, and Edward asks if they can do it after his and Bella’s honeymoon, since he and Bella had an arrangement. Now, the audience knew about this since Bella throughout the season had been asking if Edward wanted to sleep together since she wanted to do that as a human, but he’s very adamant about the whole wait until marriage thing, so he proposed at probably the worst time, and she accepted.

But the Vam Fam didn’t know about this, so now their all dealing with that, and agree let Bella wait until after and Jessica and Mike will turn first. So some days go by and they’re planning the wedding, and then what a surprise; Renee shows up, having heard about the wedding from Charlie.

SEASON 4 (AKA Book 4, Breaking Dawn)

Wedding time, yay. Also, Renee is creating a super uncomfortable atmosphere, what with the whole Bella feeling neglected from her, and also she brought along Phil, her new husband. Everyone’s acting pretty protective over Bella, eyeing Renee up. Particularly Edward; whenever he sees Renee he just glares at her full on while holding onto Bella, and whenever Renee tries to talk to him he throws so much poetic shade Renee doesn’t even know what this man is talking about.

Bella’s kinda tense about Renee being here, and tries to get along with her, but after getting all that parental love from Charlie, she forgets that’s not how Renee operates, leading to some tense moments between her and Renee. But the wedding planning continues and Alice is stressed because these chaotic idiots are ruining her perfect planning skills. But the wedding goes on and it actually goes off without a hitch. Well, except for Mike causing a teeny tiny fire to only ONE of the bouquets, and Bella did end up tripping going down the aisle while bringing Charlie down with her so Edward went over to her and they both had to go to their places together, and Emmett and Jacob did do that drinking contest but Emmett left out the part where he couldn’t get drunk and Jacob got absolutely wasted so Jasper was in charge of taking care of him, Jessica was trying to get info on the other vampire guests which was annoying them while Rosalie stood menacingly behind her to make sure they didn’t try and anything, and one of those other vampire guests did end up sort of trying to attack Billy, but other than that it went great.

But before the wedding came to a close Bella realized that she’ll probably never see Renee or Charlie again, so she pays a lot of attention to Charlie, but near the end she asks Renee and Charlie to take a picture with her, one that she could keep for after. She and Renee got on better terms, and Renee admits that she could have been a better mother. So Bella and Edward go on their honeymoon where they have tons of sex and we get lots of scenes of that, but back in Forks, disaster ensues.

So Mike and Jessica are getting ready for the whole going to be a vampire thing, and the Vam Fam makes arrangements to move. Mike and Jessica leaving won’t look weird, since they just graduated high school and it’s not like they have anyone particularly close here, well, except with Mike’s mom. So he goes to say his goodbyes to her, and it’s very sad because Mike knows they’ll never see each other again but his mom doesn’t. And then there’s the whole situation with Jacob going with them, which his pack and dad aren’t happy about. So he’s trying to convince them, when suddenly him imprints on Alice and Jasper. Now it’s official; he needs to go with them, and it’s actually a kind of sad goodbye to his dad and the werewolves that were actually his friends. So now the Vam Fam has included Jacob in it, now it was Jessica and Mike’s turn.

So the Vam Fam and Jessica and Mike go to the new house and they turn Jessica and Mike into vampires, with Rosalie being the one to do it for Jessica and Carlisle doing it for Mike. Then, the vampire trio show up to ruin things, and there’s a big fight, and James and Mike have their own separate fight going on. Throughout this entire series, it would be shown the parallels between Mike and James, how naturally violent they both are, how it seems to be a match made in hell for these two. But now it seems like their violent ways had caught up so them, as they fight with everything they got and enjoying the hell out of it, and so Mike and James die together, having killed the other one. Mike’s final words will probably be something like ‘damn, I just got these cool ass powers; I was gonna do so much’ and James laughs and is like ‘hell yeah, you missed out’ and after they say that they die, hand in hand.

The vampire trio, now the vampire duo, is devastated at this news, James was like family to them. So they run off but swear revenge, even Laurent pissed off now. They all mourn the death of Mike, and Alice was taking it especially hard because she had relaxed on the future seeing and didn’t see this coming. Then she saw the thing with Bella being pregnant and went to go call her to tell her that she was pregnant and Mike was dead.

Bella had already suspected the pregnant party, but the Mike being dead took her so off guard she actually fainted, although Edward caught her. They go to the house where the wolf pack was already there at the request of Jacob, to help fight when the vampire duo attack. Although, they are not happy with the pregnancy. It’s very emotional for a while, what with Mike dying, Jessica dealing with being a newborn, and Bella on the verge of dying with this baby she refuses to give up.

So she gives birth and dies but comes back a vampire, and now Renesmee is out in the world, which the Volturi doesn’t like. We go back to the Volturi and get some scenes with them, also with Aro and Marcus consoling Charlie about his ‘dead daughter’ who they actually feel genuinely bad for. Also we get scenes with Bree, Alec and Jane, who are just having a grand time, although some of the other vampires pick on Bree for being so weak, Alec and Jane roll up and they’re on their knees in front of Bree begging for forgiveness, which she gives much to Alec and Jane’s pouting. In any case, the Volturi know about Renesmee, and they need to go kill her.

So Bella’s discovering her mind blocking powers, and Edward is losing his mind about how he finally knows why he can’t read her mind, and Jessica learns she doesn’t really have any powers other than an average vampire. Life goes on and such, and Bella and Edward are getting really attached to Renesmee, loving the hell out of her and doing their best to figure out how to be parents, and this is when the coupling of Jacob with Alice and Jasper and Jessica with Emmett and Rosalie is now official, so they get couple moments. But then the Volturi rolls in. Alice does her thing and shows what will happen if this battle happens so they roll back out, but then Victoria swoops in and straight up kills Renesmee, then Bella kills her. Laurent is there, but after Victoria dies he realizes that all his friends, his family, are dead, and so he just closes his eyes and allows himself to be killed.

So after Renesmee is dead, Edward and Bella are really going through it, and then Bella just reminds Edward of his days of killing murders and pedos and such, and she kinda hints that she’d be totally down for some of that. And so now it’s murder road trip time of killing murders and pedos, and the Vam Fam isn’t upset about the killing really, their just worried that this might not be the healthiest way to handle the loss of their child. But they do and we get to see a bunch of their killing fun times, and there’s actually going to be a time jump of maybe like 30 years or so, when the Vam Fam is in a different town doing stuff, and then Edward and Bella show up and they’re all reunited. Edward and Bella settle down from the killing joy ride, although they hint that they wouldn’t be adverse to doing it again if they get into the mood. So now that’s their cute couple thing; killing murderers and pedos.

EXTRA DETAILS

Couple pet names would consist of; 

Edward to Bella: Love, My Lion  (Edward had that dumbass line about him being the lion and her being the lamb, but I’m gonna change it so he was like ‘at first I thought you were the lamb and I was the lion, but I realize it’s the opposite’ or something stupidly emo like that and Bella’s all like ‘Edward pls’ but the nickname stuck)

Bella to Edward: My Lamb (same explanation as above)

Rosalie to Jessica: My Little Storm

Rosalie to Emmett: My Monkey Man

Emmett to Rosalie: Babe (when referring to both Rosalie and Jessica he says Babes), Angel

Emmett to Jessica: Babe (same explanation as above)

Jessica to Rosalie: Kitty

Jessica to Emmett: Big Boy

Jasper to Alice: Ma’am, Frightening Little Monster, Darlin’

Jasper to Jacob: Sunshine, Darlin’

Alice to Jasper: My Darling

Alice to Jacob: My Dearest

Jacob to Jasper: Cat (It started as a joke and then it wasn’t)

Jacob to Alice: Raven (again, started as a joke)

Jared to Sam: Sap

Sam to Jared: My Life, Precious Thing

Leah to Brady: Baby

Brady to Leah: Mine

Regular nicknames used by anyone;

Isabella: Bella, Bells

Michael: Mike, Mikey

Jessica: Jess, Jessie

Charlie: Chuck (only if you want to annoy the hell out of him)

Rosalie: Rose, Rosie

Jasper: Jazz, Whitlock

Alice: Mary, Shorty

Emmett: Em, McCarty

Edward: Anthony, Eddy

Esme: Platt

Carlisle: Lyle

Jacob: Jake, Jay

William: Billy

Sam: Sammy

Jared: Jay-Jay

Emily: Lily

Paul: The Paul-ster (If you want him to try and kill you)

Brady: Phyco

Leah: Lee Lee

Seth: Sethy

Collin: Lin

Victoria: Vickie

James: Jamie

Laurent: Laur’

Aro: No (insert heart emoji)

Marcus: Mark

Jane: Plain

Alec: Al

Bree: Baby Bree (mostly just Baby)

Also, I find it hard to believe that the Cullens stuck to America while moving around so much, so this is where I think all of them are from:

Esme: Caribbean

Carlisle: Britain

Jasper: America

Emmett: Canada

Edward: Italy

Alice: Wales

Rosalie: France

ALSO throughout the entirety of the series it’s probably going to have more Edward and Bella moments then what was written, since this is a story about their romance, I just thought I’d put in other stuff and mention it since the romance scenes would be pretty obvious.

[rsgguk]

true love, almost always — jjk

↳ aka — 'cause baby you're perfect for me

summary: y/n didn't know much about her soulmate. She knows that he's artistic from the little doodles that appears on her arm. She knows he's athletic from the scrapes that appears on her knees. She also knows that he has pain in the ass friends from the random dick drawings that appears on her forehead

genre: romance, angst, comedy, fluff

word count: 5.8 k

pairings:

Jungkook + reader | soulmates

warnings: so let me tell you, this is probably gonna be a bit inconsistent, I had written most of this during the middle of the night when I had a severe case of the feels. Now this isn't my usual style of writing, most things are in passive form because I'm trying to focus more on how they feel. I’m not sure if I’ll ever go back to this writing style but I had fun generally not worrying on the dialogue.

Y/n didn't know much about her soulmate. In a system where everything marked on your soulmates skin crosses on yours, she knows from the seemingly many doodles that appears on the plan of her hand that he is an artistic person. She knows from the way her knees would appear scraped at times meant that he was either athletic or desperately clumsy. She knows that by the scar that daunted on her cheek that he got in a ’fight’ with his brother. She also knows from the random dick drawings that appear on her forehead that he has the most chaotic of friends.

Jungkook would like to say he knew a lot about his soulmate. He knows by the way tiny little hearts would appear near his doodles that she wasn't the most artsy person in the world, but she could draw a damn to near perfect heart. He knows by the way that small little freckles would gloss over his skin that she was an outgoing person. He knows by the way that shallow cuts would appear on his arms and fingers that she had an asshole cat. He also knows that by the way tiny reminders would appear on his palm that she had a knack for forgetting things (he also knows that her handwriting might be the cutest thing he'd ever seen, but he may be a little biased).

They're sober to the fact that the other exist by the time they're 11. Jungkook was bored in class and started drawing little clouds, trees, the sun with shades on, the whole package on his arm. And then on the expanse of his palm would appear in large curvy letters, 'can you draw a cat?'.

He thinks back to the day and guesses that he didn't really understand the extremity of the situation back then. Everyone had a soulmate, but it was the first time he'd actually 'talked' to his.

He didn't gasp or scream or shed a tear, only complying with her request and drawing a cute little cat next the tree trunk. He'd think he was hallucinating about the request until he watched as a ribbon was drawn and coloured in the middle of the cat's head.

The next week, he would have a fight with his brother that had ended in him getting a cut on his cheek. He doesn’t worry about it, only locking himself in his room and sulking in his sheets. It’s when a few words appeared on his palm that he finally sat up with a smile on his lips. She would write down if he was okay because a cut had appeared on her cheek.

‘I’m sorry’ he’d write.

‘it’s okay my daddy said I look cool’ she would reply, and his cheeks would flush because his mom had always said that a woman’s face was her pride. Jungkook had never understood it back then, because if he could be covered in dirt after a fun game of soccer, and still be called adorable, why should it matter what a girl’s face looked like?

She’d ask what happened and Jungkook would bite down an embarrassed whine. ’My brother said I played with the computer too much so I threw a pen at him’.

‘did you win?’ She’d ask a second later.

’No it hit the floor and bounced to my face’.

‘and then he laughed at me’

‘your brother sounds stupid’

‘he is stupid’

They didn't talk more than that, they were still young and the whole soulmates thing hadn't made sense yet. Jungkook still drew his doodles on his arm and she'd add little details (mostly hearts) around them, a tiny reminder that she was there.

It was barely considered a means of communication but it had morphed into a sense of comfort for Jungkook. He draws the little doodles, sometimes it was of a cat (He would never admit it but he'd learn how to draw a cat because he knew she liked cats). And each time without fail, she'd draw a tiny ribbon on its head.

And then Jungkook entered high-school and he met his friends. His stupid, chaotic, love them to death friends and his soul mate was still there, drawing little heart across his skin. The boys say its cheesy (as cheesy as it is to the fact that she's literally his soul mate) but he really hadn't given a shit.

He'd considered himself a romantic throughout the years, although he's gotten not a single bit of experience, he cries at the ending of titanic every single time and his ideal way of proposal is during the sunset walking across the shoreline of the beach, nightlights littered in the scenery and him on one knee, asking to marry his one and only soulmate.

He tries his best to keep up a mature kind of facade for his soul mate. Afterall, that was what they were into right? Older and more mature men. Sure, they'd like bad boys too, but honestly Jungkook bruises like a peach. His act of maturity consists of drawing thing with 'deeper meaning'. And yes, maybe a cat surfing on the beach tides has a deeper meaning, you never know.

His act is ruined when one day, he falls asleep during lunch after a long night of overwatch (in which he dominated by the way) and wakes up to Taehyung snickering beside him, looking at him with the largest shit eating grin he’d ever seen. Jungkook would shake his head and roll his eyes, dismissing whatever it was that he did.

Later during class, everyone kept giving him weird looks, and his teacher even laughed at the sight of him. It wasn’t until multiple frowney faces appeared on his arm that he really realized that something was wrong. His heart skipped a beat when he answered back with question marks written along her doodles.

‘there’s a dick drawing on my forehead :(’ she’d rely with the same curvy letters he’d gotten used to. And then there was a sound that had left his mouth. A mix between an angry scream and a surprised gasp with a little bit of an embarrassed groan. He’d then realize he was still in the middle of class and that every one of his classmates were staring at him.

His teacher would give him some sort of look between annoyed and amused, and finally asks ’so you finally realized huh?’. Jungkook would splutter on his words and immediately turn towards Jimin and Taehyung. It was barely a second before Jimin had shook his head and pointed at Taehyung. He would finally lift his hand off his mouth and bursts out laughing for a minute or two before outright choking, tears in his eyes.

That day, Jungkook along with Taehyung and (for some reason) Jimin would be sent to the discipline teacher. Jungkook wouldn’t give a shit about being sent to devil’s incarnate, only silently punching Taehyung’s shoulder and cussing it out at him for making him look like a fool to his soulmate.

When he’s home (after a lecture from his mom, a pat on the back from his dad and a high five from his brother), he locks himself in his bedroom and takes a pen from his bag, writing apologies all over his arm. She’d reply a minute later, saying it was okay.

His fingers would then drum along his arm, his leg jumping up and down, trying to figure out what else to say to her. He’d get up the courage and ask her what was her name. She’d respond with y/n and he’d have a smile riding up his lips, saying her name again and again, realizing that he loved how it felt to say her name.

Then the two of them would keep talking to each other, Jungkook constantly rolling up his sleeve to make some room for more words. They would spend the whole night getting to know each other and filling up a whole decade of silence. When they had run out of room to write, she would go on and ask for his number so they could text instead, and Jungkook would get up to his feet, jumping up and down on his heels. He wouldn’t waste a second to write down his number on the little space he had left.

The next day, he had woken up with an especially good mood. An extra jump on each of his step, a large grin on his face as if he hadn’t gotten into trouble for having a dick drawn on his forehead just the day before. Taehyung would expect a more than pissed of Jungkook, maybe a little bit of pettiness in the mix, but Jungkook shows nothing but adoration for him, even going as far as to buy him the apple juice he knows he loves from the convenience store nearby.

Texting her falls so easily in his routine. One second, he’s hesitant to text her, afraid to show her just how much of a dumbass he could be, another second, he’s called her the fifth time in a day because he swears a baby just gave him a nasty look. They connect quickly. She finds out the reason she suddenly gets eye bags after a full night’s sleep with because her idiot soulmate had spent the whole night screaming at wario for cheating at Mario kart.

Taehyung says it’s sickening to see just how lovey dovey Jungkook was (Jimin says it’s nice to see him so in love, but they both knew he secretly hated it too). The way his eyes light up at the sight of her name appearing on his screen.

He gets in trouble more nowadays though, teachers having caught him talking to his soulmate on his arm, and the most embarrassing time they read out his not-so-failed attempts of flirting off his arm to the whole class. Let’s just say he’d gotten teased for the life of him when it reached his brother’s ears (though he supposes his brother isn’t any better when he would literally be a make shift carpet if his soulmate asked for it). The Jeon boys treat their women like proper queens and won’t settle for anything less.

The first time they video call, Jungkook has fixed his hair for the hundredths time, a comfortable (and new that he bought just for this occasion) sweatshirt hung loosely on his shoulders. She’d asked if it was okay if they could do a video call the day before and Jungkook being as whipped as he was, of course agreed with her, only regretting not to be the one who asked first.

He’s so tense that when his phone starts ringing, he nearly chucks it off to the wall. He forces himself to calm down before setting it up on the table and pressing the green button after taking a deep breath. He looks at the screen and watches as her face appears. His heart almost bursts, because he’s thought of this moment a million times. He’d expect her to be something like a glowing figure, that she’d resemble a star and that her voice would sound like a serenading angel.

She’s nothing like he’d expect. She’s not glowing like an angel. Her camera has bad lighting and he could see a few strands of her hair sticking out. When she says hello, it isn’t like an angel, her voice isn’t smooth, a little raspy. But she still manages to surpass all his expectations, and he realizes she’s so much better than he’d ever imagined. His heart beats faster and faster because she’s only said one word, and Jungkook is already falling for her. She’s not perfect, but she’s perfect for him.

It’s going well, very well. There’s a way that she makes him feel, a way that just brightens up his day, and when they have their video calls and she laughs at one of those lame jokes that he’d gotten from one of his friends, her voice just soothes him, lets him relax into his seat and just watch as her eyes crinkle in joy.

 It starts to become a routine, the video calls are weekly but the texting is daily. Whenever he’s nervous about an upcoming exam, he calls her and just listens to her talk about her day, lets her voice fill his ear and calm his nerves. And then she would get off track and asks why is it that he had called her and he’d brush it off, he called to hear her voice, but he won’t say that because it’s too cheesy and he has a reputation to keep.

It’s during one of his classes that he feels it, a gut wrenching feeling deep in his stomach that has him groaning. It’s a different type of pain, nothing like nausea or a muscle cramp, because he’d always considered himself as a person with a great pain tolerance, but at that moment, he had just felt like curling in a ball and crying. Jimin and Taehyung would take him to the clinic immediately, and he’d just have tears rolling down his cheeks, and he’s sniffling and making these weird choking sounds when he tries to smother down his sobs.

He stays there for a while, the curtains draped closed with Jimin and Taehyung just rubbing his back soothingly. He tries to calm down, but every so and then, a sob bubbles up to his chest and a new wave of tear roll down his cheeks. It stays like that for an hour and the pain in his stomach travels up to his chest. His right arm starts to ache and dizziness starts to seep in his head. He falls asleep in the clinic bed, his whimpers slowing down and his eyes drooping heavily.

When he’s back at home, he doesn’t try to talk to his parents. They’d come visit now and then, giving a few hugs and pats on the back. His brother would come by when Jungkook had calmed down a bit, ruffling his hair and saying ‘it’s going to be okay’. But that’s the thing, there isn’t an ‘it’ to be okay. For all he knew, ‘it’ was all okay, everything was going okay in class, but then there was this rush of emotion that came over him and he’d just double over in pain. There was this burning sensation in his gut, something that hadn’t been building but more of an eruption. And then it would slowly cascade to his chest, and then he’d start crying and crying, choking on his sobs.

He’s in his sheets, listening to the sounds of pans clanging from the downstairs kitchen. His mom was cooking dinner, but he doubted that he’d go down to have some himself. The sound of the washing machine clashing against itself. That old thing was always just waiting to give out. The sound of the TV running from the living room. There was always some sort of game his dad would be watching, cheering on for teams he’d never even heard of. These are all sounds he’d never realized he’d taken comfort into. Such meaningless things that were just always there, a consistency that had always reassured him in some way.

He’d just lays there, listening to his own heartbeat. For the first time in hours, he feels relaxed and his breath relax into a steady pace. His eyes almost drift to sleep, because It's been a long day and Jungkook feels exhausted, but then there’s this loud blaring noise that breaks the silence. He knows what it is, someone had gone up and called him again. It would be the sixth call he’d get from his friends.

Only it turns out that it wasn’t his friends, it wasn’t Jimin, nor Taehyung or even Yoongi. It was her, and it terrified him because he’d always smile at the sight of her name, but there was this raw and intense feeling that had him wanting to decline the call. It terrified him because she’s his soulmate and supposedly the ’love of his life’ but he had wanted nothing more than to hang up the call. And it just stays like that, him wallowing in the fact as his phone had stopped ringing, and then a few seconds pass and her name appears again. His arm would suddenly feel heavy at the weight of the phone in his hand. Slowly, he would finally tap on the green button.

Her voice hits him like a wave. Jungkook doesn’t even have the chance to say anything when her voice starts filling his ears. Her voice is raspy and broken, there’s sniffling and whimpering as she rushes through her words. ’I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry’ she whispers in uneven breathes, and he would have stopped her, to comfort her and ask her why she was crying and that ’it’ was going to be okay. But then there is this sudden realization that hits him that ’it’ wasn’t going to be okay, and he probably wasn’t going to be okay. So, he just sits there as new tears roll down his cheeks.

When she finally speaks, everything just dawns on him. He felt like he was dying because his soulmate had kissed someone, he felt like dying because his soulmate had kissed someone that wasn’t him, he felt like dying because his soulmate’s first kiss wasn’t him, and will never be him. And then all of her other words just go straight through his other ear. He doesn’t hear it when she says that she didn’t want it, or when she says that she didn’t know it was going to happen until it happened, or when she says that she also felt the pain, the suffocating and unrelenting pain, that she also felt like she was dying.

He hears it when she says she loves him.

Jungkook has always one for cheesy romances and tear-jerking speeches. He imagines their first exchanges of ‘I love you’ to be at night, with a sea of stars sunken in the night sky because that was where they would have their first kiss. She would have his jacket that was a little too big for her on her shoulders because the night was breezy and his mom raised him to be a gentle man. Her hands would be in his because she always has cold hands and he always has warm hands.

He would talk about the ‘old times’ like when he had drawn those little cats for her or when he’d waken up to many frowney faces along his arm because his friends yet again drew dicks on his forehead (he should really get some proper sleep). And then he’d try to coax a few tears out of her and end it off with ’I love you’, and because this was Jungkook’s imagination of how things would go, she would also say I love you, and they’d kiss in the night sky.

Jungkook then realizes that nothing he’d imagined will ever go as planned, that they will never have a first kiss, because she’d already had hers with some random asshole, and that they’d never have their first ‘I love you’, because she had already said it through the phone while they were both out of breath and sobbing every drop of tear from their bodies.

He doesn’t realize it, but when he’d finally gotten out of his phase, the call had already ended and his cheeks had become tear stained and his sobs had calmed down to weak whimpers. He realizes that he’d just hung up on her after she’d said she loved him, and he just panics, because she’s going to think he doesn't love her and he should immediately call her and tell her that he loves her, because he does, he loves her like he’d never loved anyone before.

He’d started talking to her in his sophomore years and he was now a senior, and she'd been there in every step of the way. But he just doesn't, he doesn’t tell her he loves her, he doesn’t call her, because he doesn’t trust himself if he does. And she doesn’t call back either.

There are a few times when Jungkook forgets that y/n is his soulmate. He doesn’t know what he’d expect when he doesn’t talk to her in a week. It starts off small. He catches himself dozing off, looking into the distance and zoning out. His friends would ask him if he was okay and he’d reply with ’I’m fine’, even though he knew he wasn't, and that he knew they wouldn’t believe him anyway, because who the hell would be fine yet walk into the classroom with puffy and bloodshot eyes.

And then when class goes on like normal, he’s moving his leg up and down, fingers drumming along the desk, because he swears class had never been this long before. He realizes later that class had always gone on so fast because y/n was always there for him to talk to. He looks back at it as if it had happened years ago, as if he hadn’t talked to her in decades.

The truth is that they haven’t talked in no less than three days, yet he’s been missing her as if he’d gone days without a limb. A piece of him feels missing, torn apart from him and left out to dry. It’s a weird feeling, a suffocating feeling that has him yearning for her, that has him filling his mind with nothing but her. He supposes that was the thing with soulmates, when they were together, it had felt like he was he was over the moon, as if nothing could ever go wrong in his life, but when they were apart, it felt like he was missing a part of himself.

She would nag at him whenever he was bombarding her with doodles on his arm, waiting for her attention so she could drag him from his boredom of class. She’d say ‘you have class’ and he’d say ’I also have a soulmate, and I’d rather pay attention to her’. His friends would tease for it, for flirting and dancing around with her as if it was a game of push and pull, as if she wasn’t his soulmate.

That’s the thing that terrifies him, because as far as he had ever known, having a soulmate was the best feeling in the world. It’s all rainbows and roses, because it had meant that there will always be that one person that just gets you, that just loves you unconditionally for all your flaws and perfections, all your quirks and mishaps. That one person that will always be there for every step of the way. He yearns that, the comfort of knowing there was someone the universe had picked just for him, the missing piece to his puzzle.

And then he meets her, and he realizes just how perfect she is for him.

And then the whole fiasco happens and he realizes just how much it would hurt if he didn’t get his happy ending, because he knows it wasn’t uncommon for soulmates not to work out, usually from the intensity of their emotions for each other.

Having a soulmate had also meant other things. It meant that when you were together, you’d feel the happiest you’d ever be, but if you weren’t, you’d dread every second of your life. You’d feel pain, you’d feel nauseous, you’d feel your body start to crumble. Having a soulmate was almost like a drug, something so addicting that your body starts to dysfunction when you go a day without.

Jungkook still feels it sometimes, when he’s managed to get her out of his mind. There was this sudden jolt of pain that shoot up his chest, causing him to lose focus. And then all he can think about is her, her, her. He wonders if she feels it too, if she misses him too, if she thinks of him too. He realizes how stupid he is, because his phone is right there in front him, and he could end all of this with just one button.

Truth is he’d stopped mulling over the whole kiss thing a while ago, and that he should’ve called her a long time ago, but he was scared, scared of his own emotions, scared of how much he loved her, scared that this whole thing is going to destroy to him.

He wants to talk about this with someone, to anyone, but then it dawns on him that the only person he really wants to talk to about this was his soulmate, and that she was the only person he should be talking to about this. So, he picks up his phone and presses on the name he’d been missing for what felt like decades now.

She answers after no less than a few seconds. She speaks after a second’s hesitation, and her voice is filled with the sort of hope, as if she has done something wrong. Jungkook cuts her off when she starts on her little ramble (a habit he’d learn she had over the years) and apologizes, two words that hits her as hard as a brick. ‘I’m sorry’ he’d say again, and again and again. He says it until he can hear her start crying on the other end of the call. He knows she’s crying in a way that she’s trying to hide it from him, but he’d still hear her weak sniffles and whimpers.

It breaks his heart because he knows he never should’ve hung up on her that day, that he should’ve said that it was never her fault that ‘it’ happened, that he never thought of ‘it’ as her fault, that he was sorry ‘it’ had to happened in the first place

There’s a lot of things he realizes that he should have told her, so he doesn’t give her the time to say anything before he gets everything off his chest. He tells her everything. He tells her that he had never been upset with her, that he was upset with what happened to her. He tells her that he’s scared, no— terrified of how strong his feeling are for her, that the pain he felt that day was never what he’d ever experienced before. He tells her how much he had missed her during his period of stupidity when he decided not to talk to her, that he’d thought of her every second of the day.

And she just swallows in everything he tells her, listening to every word he says without a single interruption. And then they talk, talk, and talk until they shed more tears, because they’d never realized it, but they had always needed this. It’s a bit like clearing the air, speaking up about every and any hesitations they’d have.

They talk until their voices go dry and their eyes droop heavily. It isn’t until then that Jungkook realizes he hadn’t had a good night’s rest in days. Sleeping had always come easy to him, but during the past few days, he would lay down in his bed and just had this queasy and tense feeling.

When they’re nearing the end of the conversation, he knows there’s this one thing he hadn’t said yet, and he knows she’d been waiting for it too, those three simple words that had meant everything to them. He wants to say it, but there’s this one nerve in his stomach that causes his throat to close up when he tries to.

She finally ends the call after hours and hours of talking about their feeling and what they’d miss. Jungkook would again take out his pen, and write the words he’d meant to say in the palm of his hand. I love you.

Jimin shares a look with Taehyung when Jungkook comes to class the next day (he’s always late and it’s definitely not because of his poor excuse of a sleeping schedule), and the next thing he knows, they’re just screaming and hollering before running towards him. Jungkook swears he’s never felt more scared than he was at that moment, with the sight of his two best friends sprinting as if they were about to run them over like the untimely death of Mufasa.

And then they just hug him, stuff him with pats on the back and intense noogies. Jungkook just stands there, accepting it with the most confused expression ever. They go on about how glad they are that he got over whatever it was that had set him in such a sour and glum mood the past week and it puzzles him because he doesn’t remember being that much of a debbie downer.

They prove him otherwise by listing all the reasons he was such a pain to hang out with, because he’d somehow turned into a dictionary of depressing jokes and emo quotes. They end up finishing each other’s sentences, locking eyes when they say the same words and giving each other a bunch of high fives (Jungkook sometimes feels sorry for whoever their soulmates are, because the two of them are so in sync that they were already each other’s soulmate).

They’re interrupted when the teacher finally enters the class and tells everyone (specifically the two of them) to take a seat. They turn to Jungkook one final time and give him a pat in the back because they’re genuinely happy that the kid had no longer seemed so miserable.

Jungkook hadn’t thought hearing ‘I love you’ would change much for him. He’d heard it a dozen times from his parents (never from his brother, but let’s be honest, that’s to be expected) an amount more than you’d expect from Jimin and Taehyung (although Taehyung would say it more to annoy him and it works every single time), three times from Namjoon (which makes him grin more than it should) and once from Yoongi (now that one he wears like a golden medal).

Hearing it from his soulmate hits him in a totally different way. The conversation they had led them to get more comfortable in their relationships, this time acknowledging each other in a more romantic way. The way she says ‘I love you’ during insignificant moments like during a goodnight text or his after his daily ramble on how his friends are a pain in the ass sends him in a sort of high. It makes him giggle and flush and swoon all in the same time. It makes him feel things in a way he never knew he could.

Jungkook would learn that he shouldn’t plan things out as much as he used to, lets himself enjoy the moment for a while. Takes one step at a time, and this time he’s not as terrified to his wits anymore. It turns out when he's not worrying about all of his 'plans', time happens to move so fast.

When he finally sees her, she's got her back turned towards him, she hasn't noticed yet.

Jungkook takes a moment to take it all in. Sparks don’t fly, his hands don’t sweat and his breathing doesn’t pace. There is no nausea or nervousness that bubbles up in his stomach. When he sees her, his heart starts beating faster, but it beats in a way that you see something familiar after a long time, there is this sort of comfortable feeling. There’s a moment of complete peacefulness and serenity when he sees her. He’d never felt more at home.

When she sees him, her knees almost buckle, because he’s there. The boy, the dumbass, her soulmate that she’d been talking to for years now is finally there, and he’s waiting for her, looking for her. Her eyes almost well up in tears and she hates it because she swore to herself, she’d done cried enough times in their relationship, she doesn’t need to add another one to it.

She cries anyways, and she guesses she doesn’t hate it that much after all. Jungkook had managed to overturn all her expectations of their relationship that she’s not surprised that he pulls this either. She’s always known that her forgetfulness would bite her in the ass one day and she guesses she can’t be mad when this happens.

‘4:30 java time café pick up’ and right below on her palm is his handwriting, the handwriting she’s grown to adore and look forward to all these years, is written ’I found you’.

[fezcosbitch]

JJ Maybank imagine:

Passion and wild regret

Summary: The pogues think you’re a bad influence on JJ.

I’ve been away for a couple of days so I hope this is ok! 💙

All feedbacks welcome as long as it’s not rude or mean ❤️

Warnings: angst, drug use (kind of, they aren’t taken I also do NOT condone drug use, unless it’s for medical reasons).

And yeah, let’s get into to it...

——————————————————————————

You were a bit of a party girl, a wildcard, some would say. ‘Some’ being everyone except for you, who thought you were completely casual.

You were on the beach, at another summer kegger, where, to be fair, you may have a had a bit too much to drink, which of course, normally leads to JJ watching over you like a hawk. You had just downed your 15th (?) beer of the night, and decided to join in on truth or dare with the tourons, with a few pogues and kooks scattered about in the circle. “Y/n, truth or dare?” A random touron asked you. “Easy, dare” you responded, a grin on your face. The touron smirked, clearly having his dare planned out. “I dare you to take this” he said while holding up a clear baggie which looked to have a couple pills in it. “What is it?” You questioned, if you were going to take something you wanted to know what it was. “Only Molly” he said with a sly smirk on his face, looking you in the eye, testing you. The circle went silent, watching for your reaction, and looking at the touron to see if he was serious. “Ok, give it over” you replied, not ever being one to back down from a challenge, maintaining eye contact with him the whole time.

By now, JJ had heard of what you had been dared to do, as well as the rest of the pogues, and they were running to you right now, to stop you from making one of the biggest mistakes of your life. JJ caught you just in time, and slapped the pill out of your hand. “Jesus Christ you really are pissed, come on” J said, grabbing your arm and pulling you up, away from the rest of the group and into the chateau. Laying you down on his bed and waiting for you to fall asleep before going back to the beach to meet back with the pogues at the kegger.

JJs POV:

“What she do over there then JJ” Kie questioned me because they didn’t hear the whole story before we rushed over. “Just y/n being y/n I guess” I chuckled. The rest of the pogues frowned at me, leaving me confused “what” I asked, looking around until one of them spoke up. All three pogues looked at eachother, before John B started speaking “we just- we don’t think she’s a good influence on you man, I mean look at this, look at earlier, she shouldn’t be your responsibility bro, you’re not her parent why should you have to be stressed all evening just waiting for her to do something that you need to rescue her from, why do you have to look after her because she’s so stupid that she can’t control herself, I mean, fuck! Bro she almost took a class A drug today, the only reason she didn’t is because you stopped her. What happens when you’re not there bro? Or what if she somehow convinced you to do it? To join her? I don’t want that for you, none of us do, ok J. She ain’t good for you, it’s about time you realise.” John B ranted. “Shut up, John B, you don’t know what your talking about” I argued back, biting my tongue, not being in the mood for John Bs interference. “I- I don’t know what I’m talking about? Huh J, l-” JB started before Interrupted “NO! Ok you don’t know what your talking about! You’re mackin’ a kook, who’s had everything handed to her her whole life, she’s got everything she’d ever want at her finger tips. She wants a holiday? She gets a holiday. She wants a burger? She gets a burger. She’s not had to deal with the same struggle I have, or y/n has ok, so don’t you dare, stand there and compare you, and your fucking life with your perfect girlfriend and her perfect money, to me, and my girlfriend, who have to take any happiness they can get, so if she wants to get drunk, she’ll get drunk. Of course there’s a limit, I’m not gonna allow her to take that mdma shit, alright, but who can blame her? With the shit that’s happened to her who blames her?” I finally let out, absolutely fuming at John B, how dare he say that shit about her. “SHES A BURDEN JJ, Y/Ns A BURDEN! SHE ACTS LIKE A CHILD! You don’t have to look after her, you deserve more then that” Kiara then burst out, getting involved aswell. I looked between the two of them outraged at how they were acting. “I KNOW OK! I know I look after her, but did you ever once think that maybe I enjoy it? That I like the idea of looking after her? Maybe that’s what I want to do, do you guys EVER consider other peoples emotions? Jesus Christ, fuck you guys” I turned around and stormed off towards the chateau, completely mad at them for what they said. How dare they.

Y/ns POV:

I woke up 5 minutes ago, and immediately started walking to where I knew the pogues would be. As my feet touched the beach I could hear them shouting, so I stopped and listened in, curious, and not wanting to interrupt their seemingly important conversation. “She’s a burden JJ” Who? You were drawn in, who on earth where they talking about like that? “Y/ns a burden” kiara continued.... oh shit. That was great, you guess. Your own friends consider you a burden to your boyfriend, how... joyous. “I know ok” you heard jj shout back. Oh fuck, even better, your own boyfriend agrees. You turned around and ran back to the chateau and into JJs room immediately, not wanting to hear the other harsh words they supposedly say when you’re not around. Taking off the necklace he gave you on the day he asked you out (which you haven’t taken off since) and started writing a note. When you were done, you left them both on his bed side table, side by side so he wouldn’t miss them, and sprinted back home.

How dare he, you thought. How dare he act as if he enjoyed going out with you, and wanted to be with you, when apparently, all this time he, and all his friends thought you were a burden, what even is this? Who says that about the ones they love? Yeah, you might not have had the best upbringing and yeah, you may be a bit (quite a lot) rough around the edges, but so’s JJ, and you don’t judge him or love him any less for that. You don’t see him as a burden. What is is about you? That just, makes people want to leave you behind, I mean should it even be surprising anymore? Your mom took off a while ago and your dad.... well, he stayed but let’s not get into that but, why did she leave you? Along with your brother, and nan and grandad, they all seemed to disappear, forgetting you ever existed. What was it about you. You got home and raced upstairs, trying your hardest not to wake your dad up, and went to bed, tears flowing down your face and thoughts running wild in your mind. Goddamn JJ, why couldn’t he just tell you he didn’t want to be with you anymore? Why’s it always your heart getting broken? But oh well, right? He’s probably happier now he doesn’t have to deal with you and your problems.

JJs POV:

I slammed the door to my room open and just, screamed. Why do they think they can say that to me? Who do they think they are?

I look over to my left, wanting to just crawl into bed with y/n and forget the whole thing, but there’s one problem...I can’t. She’s not there. FUCK. Where did she go? There’s no way she could’ve heard. I look down and see a very familiar necklace, and a note next to it. I pick up the necklace, running my fingers over it, eyebrows furrowing, why’d she take it off? She never takes it off? My heart starts to race as I imagine every possibility, has she been kidnapped? Taken away? Has DCS finally got her? What happened. I then decided to open the note, eyes focusing on her neat handwriting, almost mocking me in a way, the pretty, pristine handwriting and the beautiful words almost making me forget the main message, that were done.

𝒥𝒿,

𝐼 𝓀𝓃𝑜𝓌 𝓎𝑜𝓊’𝓋𝑒 𝓇𝑒𝒶𝓁𝒾𝓈𝑒𝒹 𝓉𝒽𝒶𝓉 𝐼 𝒶𝓂 𝓃𝑜𝓉 𝓌𝒽𝑒𝓇𝑒 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝓁𝑒𝒻𝓉 𝓂𝑒 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓉𝒽𝒶𝓉 𝒾𝓈 𝒷𝑒𝒸𝒶𝓊𝓈𝑒, 𝓎𝑜��� 𝓈𝑒𝑒, 𝒶𝓅𝓅𝒶𝓇𝑒𝓃𝓉𝓁𝓎 𝓎𝑜𝓊𝓇 𝓉𝒽𝑜𝓊𝑔𝒽𝓉𝓈 𝑜𝓃 𝑜𝓊𝓇 𝓇𝑒𝓁𝒶𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃𝓈𝒽𝒾𝓅 𝒶𝓇𝑒𝓃’𝓉 𝓌𝒽𝑒𝓇𝑒 𝐼 𝓉𝒽𝑜𝓊𝑔𝒽𝓉 𝓌𝑒 𝓁𝑒𝒻𝓉 𝓉𝒽𝑒𝓂 𝑒𝒾𝓉𝒽𝑒𝓇, 𝒾 𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓇 𝒽𝑒𝒶𝓇𝒹 𝒥𝒿, 𝒶𝒷𝑜𝓊𝓉 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝒷𝓊𝓇𝒹𝑒𝓃 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒽𝑜𝓌 𝒾𝓇𝓇𝑒𝓈𝓅𝑜𝓃𝓈𝒾𝒷𝓁𝑒 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓃𝓀 𝐼 𝒶𝓂, 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓎𝑜𝓊’𝓇𝑒 𝓇𝒾𝑔𝒽𝓉, 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝒹𝑜𝓃’𝓉 𝒽𝒶𝓋𝑒 𝓉𝑜 𝓅𝓊𝓉 𝓊𝓅 𝓌𝒾𝓉𝒽 𝒾𝓉, 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝐼, 𝒾𝓃 𝒶 𝓌𝒶𝓎 𝐼 𝑔𝓊𝑒𝓈𝓈, 𝒶𝓂 𝓂𝒶𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝒾𝓉 𝑒𝒶𝓈𝒾𝑒𝓇 𝒻𝑜𝓇 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝒥, 𝓂𝓎 𝓁𝑜𝓋𝑒. 𝒜𝓁𝓁 𝐼 𝒸𝒶𝓇𝑒 𝒶𝒷𝑜𝓊𝓉—𝒽𝑜𝓃𝑒𝓈𝓉 𝓉𝑜 𝒢𝑜𝒹—𝒾𝓈 𝓉𝒽𝒶𝓉 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝒶𝓇𝑒 𝒽𝒶𝓅𝓅𝓎 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝐼 𝒹𝑜𝓃’𝓉 𝓂𝓊𝒸𝒽 𝒸𝒶𝓇𝑒 𝓌𝒽𝑜 𝓎𝑜𝓊’𝓁𝓁 𝒻𝒾𝓃𝒹 𝒽𝒶𝓅𝓅𝒾𝓃𝑒𝓈𝓈 𝓌𝒾𝓉𝒽. 𝐼 𝓂𝑒𝒶𝓃 𝒶𝓈 𝓁𝑜𝓃𝑔 𝒶𝓈 𝓈𝒽𝑒’𝓈 𝒶 𝒻𝓇𝒾𝑒𝓃𝒹𝓁𝓎 𝑔𝒾𝓇𝓁 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓉𝓇𝑒𝒶𝓉𝓈 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝓃𝒾𝒸𝑒 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓀𝒾𝓃𝒹. 𝐼𝒻 𝓈𝒽𝑒 𝒹𝑜𝑒𝓈𝓃’𝓉 𝐼’𝓁𝓁 𝒸𝑜𝓂𝑒 𝒶𝓉 𝒽𝑒𝓇 𝓌𝒾𝓉𝒽 𝒶 𝒽𝒶𝓂𝓂𝑒𝓇. 𝒴𝑜𝓊𝓇 𝑒𝓎𝑒 𝓂𝒶𝓎 𝒷𝑒 𝑜𝓃 𝓈𝑜𝓂𝑒𝑜𝓃𝑒 𝑒𝓁𝓈𝑒, 𝑜𝓇 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝑒 𝓁𝒾𝒻𝑒𝓈𝓉𝓎𝓁𝑒, 𝒷𝓊𝓉 𝓂𝓎 𝑒𝓎𝑒 𝓌𝒾𝓁𝓁 𝒶𝓁𝓌𝒶𝓎𝓈 𝒷𝑒 𝑜𝓃 𝓎𝑜𝓊, 𝒥. 𝐼’𝓁𝓁 𝒩𝑒𝓋𝑒𝓇 𝒻𝑜𝓇𝑔𝑒𝓉 𝓎𝑜𝓊𝓇 𝓈𝓉𝓇𝒶𝓃𝑔𝑒 𝓋𝒾𝓇𝓉𝓊𝑒𝓈. 𝒩𝑒𝓋𝑒𝓇 𝒻𝑜𝓇𝑔𝑒𝓉 𝓉𝒽𝒶𝓉 𝓊𝓃𝒹𝑒𝓇𝓃𝑒𝒶𝓉𝒽 𝓉𝒽𝒶𝓉 𝒸𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓇𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝑜𝒻 𝓇𝒶𝓊𝒸𝑜𝓊𝓈 𝓁𝒶𝓃𝑔𝓊𝒶𝑔𝑒 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝑜𝓊𝓉𝓁𝒶𝓃𝒹𝒾𝓈𝒽 𝒷𝑒𝒽𝒶𝓋𝒾𝑜𝓊𝓇 𝒾𝓈 𝒶 𝓇𝑒𝓂𝒶𝓇𝓀𝒶𝒷𝓁𝑒 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓅𝓊𝓇𝒾𝓉𝒶𝓃𝒾𝒸𝒶𝓁 𝓂𝒶𝓃. 𝐼 𝒶𝓂 𝒶 𝒾𝓃𝒸𝓇𝑒𝒹𝒾𝒷𝓁𝑒 𝒷𝓊𝓇𝒹𝑒𝓃, 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒶 𝓁𝑜𝓉 𝓉𝑜 𝓉𝒶𝓀𝑒 𝒽𝑜𝓁𝒹 𝑜𝒻, 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓌𝒽𝓎 𝓎𝑜𝓊’𝓋𝑒 𝓈𝓉𝓊𝒸𝓀 𝒷𝓎 𝓂𝑒 𝓈𝑜 𝓁𝑜𝓃𝑔 𝒾𝓈 𝒶𝓃 𝒾𝓃𝒹𝒾𝒸𝒶𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃 𝑜𝒻 𝓎𝑜𝓊𝓇 𝓁𝑜𝓎𝒶𝓁𝓉𝓎. 𝐼 𝓈𝒽𝒶𝓁𝓁 𝓂𝒾𝓈𝓈 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝓌𝒾𝓉𝒽 𝓅𝒶𝓈𝓈𝒾𝑜𝓃 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓌𝒾𝓁𝒹 𝓇𝑒𝑔𝓇𝑒𝓉. 𝒜𝓁𝓁 𝓂𝓎 𝓁𝑜𝓋𝑒, 𝒶𝓁𝓌𝒶𝓎𝓈, 𝓎/n

Tears where streaming down my face, she left me, all because she over heard kie and the pogues sprouting absolute bullshit about our relationship. She actually left, oh fuck, why does it hurt so much. I’ll go after her tomorrow, we can sort it out, we’ll talk it through tomorrow when she’s not drunk and the pogues will have no influence. I walked out to the hammock and layed down, looking out to the stars, hoping that she’d listen to my explanation and praying that hopefully, she’ll take me back. And that the pogues didn’t ruin everything for us. I’ll wait until I can have her in my arms again, whether she takes me back or not, I’ll wait for her, in life, and until death.

——————————————————————————

How was it? I feel like it was really bad but idk?

All feed backs welcome as long as it’s not rude or mean❤️

Part 2 idk is that needed? If you want one, ask! 💙

But uh yeah, that was that oops.

Also that letter wasn’t mine, it was the letter from Richard burton to Elizabeth Taylor, I just made some adaptions! X

But yeah, cya

Part 2^

[cherrehx]

okay so its 2am right now and I just thought of something really cute hhhh, so basically, how would kaminari, kirishima, todoroki and bakugou react to finding ship art or something of them and their crush?? I love your writing btw, it's so awesome 💕💕

super long wait, i know. half of this was written when bnha was still my hyperfixation, hence why it's one shots. the headcanons were written now, because i felt bad leaving out denki and eijirou. -cherry

katsuki bakugō:

it was just after nine in the afternoon. katsuki had already gone to sleep as per usual, though tonight he was rudely interrupted by loud knocking on his room's door.

"the hell do you want, loser?!", he shouted, still unsure of who was even at his door. everyone knew by now not to disturb him, so who dared to do so anyways?

getting out of bed and proceeding to open the door, the ash blond was slightly less angered when he saw eijirou standing there. said red head looked frantic because of something. bakugou honestly didn't even want to know what had got him so distraught, but he knew he wouldn't get his well deserved sleep otherwise,

"spit it out, shitty hair."

"we were looking at pictures from the sports festival online and we found something that you should maybe see for yourself!", eijirou started, realizing that he wasn't getting his friend's attention, so he added, "it's about you and (y/n)!"

kirishima was the only one that knew about bakugou's secret crush on you. that's why he wasn't laughing like everyone else in the common room; because what they found may cause complications.

after kirishima had mentioned your name, bakugou was swiftly jogging towards where almost all of his class was sitting gathered around a laptop, which seemed to be mina's, judging by all the leopardy and pink stickers on it.

"out of the way extras!", katsuki stomped over to see what all the fuss was about. from the corner of his eye he saw how you were cowering next to one of the couches, face covered by your hands. at first he couldn't understand why, but when he saw a particular piece of artwork displayed on the laptop screen, he figured you were just majorly embarrassed.

the art that his class found on google was from somebody's blog that was all about the 'heroes of the future!'. needless to say, the blog didn't only deal with the heroes, but also the relationships of them. ever since an encounter at the sports festival that a lot of people saw and shared around, you and bakugou had become a popular so called ship. (the girls explained that 'ship' didn't mean anything related to boats when they teased you about mentioned moment in front of him.)

katsuki couldn't help but feel embarrassed himself, but he also had to keep his cool to not seem suspicious. looking at the drawing of you and him one more time, the ash blond walked over to you, ignoring anything his class was saying.

"(y/n), you ok?", he crouched down to your level, poking your head once. his only response was a quiet hum, followed by a hiccup. worried, katsuki grabbed your hand tightly and pulled you outside the dorm.

the air was nice, not too hot, nor too cold. a light wind was blowing as the moon shone brightly.

bakugou gave you a little space and some time to calm down. when you did, he was quick to ask,

"what's the matter? did you get THAT embarrassed by it?"

you shook your head no. it was something more, but was this the right time to tell him?

"i was really embarrassed at first.", you started, "but then i thought about something and cried."

"about what?", the usually loud boy asked softly. silence was all he got for a good minute until you finally responded,

"you know how they say 'life imitates art'? i really wish it w-was like that..."

now you were the one getting silence as a response. did you really just say that?

"idiot, being all cryptic and shit.", katsuki tried to stay calm, even if he was freaking out on the inside, "if you want a kiss you can have it."

shōto todoroki:

mr. aizawa's classes had a pretty strict schedule most of the time: first the class would get an assignment, that they'd do until said teacher falls asleep. after that, everyone would quietly - in order to not wake up aizawa - do anything they want, really.

for shouto this was more or less just plainly boring, as he was one of the few students that actually did what they had to. he'd finish his work and then wait, because he had nothing else to do. he was most likely to bother midoriya, but today he was very into whatever he was writing down in his little book. so shouto settled for observing the classmates behaviour. well, rather your behaviour.

the half and half boy knew it was weird, but he liked watching you. he liked seeing you, especially when you were happy and smiling. todoroki knew what these 'symptoms' were, but he wanted everything to stay as it was for now.

why he had caught those feelings, he didn't know. he figured it was the way you stood out. you didn't get lost in between the others and he liked that.

while todoroki was deep in thought, ashido had walked over to your desk, where you were doing the assignment in peace and quiet,

"(y/n), look! the other's and i thought about how todoroki always stares at you so intensely, so we created these shipnames! which one do you like better?"

you looked at the paper or rather the newly created words and little pictures drawn by some of your classmates and immediately turned red. flailing your hands around a little, you lied,

"none of these, i don't...like todoroki in that way."

mina looked a tad upset at that, but she understood, nodded and walked back to her table. you sort of felt bad, having killed her excitement, but you didn't need anyone knowing about your secret crush on the stoic one.

speaking of the stoic one, he couldn't hear anything you and mina had talked about. he only saw her walking over, showing you something and you freaking out and sending her away. needless to say, he was curious what had caught you off guard so much. when shouto saw mina throwing away that suspicious piece of paper, he decided to look at it when class ended. even if he thought sticking his hand in the trash was a little gross.

the end of class came sooner than expected. shouto was packing his bag slower than usual, waiting until everyone had left. after they did, he skipped over to the trash can, pulling out the latest addition: a piece of paper that embarrassed (y/n)!

he stuffed it in his bag and carried on walking to his dorm room, where he finally felt safe looking at it, " 'ship names'? why would they want to name a boat after (y/n) and i?", he asked himself, before a certain doodle on the page explained your reaction and the girls' name-mixing. even shouto couldn't help but react in some way, thinking about said doodle happening in real life. that's when he got startled by a knock on his door.

"hey, todoroki. i know you always do your work in class, so i thought i'd come and ask you about...", you drifted off, seeing the light blush on his cheeks and his fire side burning, "...umm, am i interrupting something?"

he was hiding a piece of paper behind his back. you could see just the corner of it, but that was enough for you to identify what paper it was.

"didn't take you for the nosey type.", you akwardly laughed in order to drown out your embarrassment.

"sorry, i got curious.", he looked unusually upset, averting his heterochromatic eyes and letting his arms drop on his sides. you confirmed the paper was indeed the one that mina showed you earlier.

"did you dislike it a lot?", shouto asked without thinking.

now it was your turn to blush.

denki kaminari:

-ok hear me out

-his love language has to be physical touch

-so naturally, when you guys and the rest of the bakusquad had a sleepover, you cuddled

-platonically of course (even though both of you had feelings for one another, but shh)

-oh, but mina couldn't let this one slip

-she HAD to take a picture

-in the morning, when you were still only half awake, mina ecstatically showed her phone into your face

-"LOOK, (Y/N), YOU GUYS ARE THE CUTEST!"

-queue embarrassed (y/n) and denki

eijirō kirishima:

-i feel like with him, you had been like childhood friends

-and back in the day, you guys were all like

-"i'm gonna marry you when i'm older!"

-so you engraved a little "eijirō & (y/n)" into a tree

-years and years later you guys go back to that spot

-just because you wanted to reminisce the good old days

-you guys find the carvings

-"you know, (y/n), i still haven't changed my mind."

-"what do you mean, eijirou?"

-"i'd still marry you."

[eyeofthedrgn]

A Heavy Battle Symphony - Chapter 4

New chapter! This chapter is slightly fluffy, still angsty, but much less than previous chapters.

Catch up here: Chapter 1 // Chapter 2 // Chapter 3

TW: language, mental abuse, verbal abuse, physical abuse, violence, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, self harm, self-esteem issues, sexual abuse (only alluded to briefly in future chapters), just a lot of trauma, angst, smut - lots of lovely gay smut

Word count: 1685

Chapter 4 - Forgotten

A little piece of paper with a picture drawn

Floats on down the street 'til the wind is gone

And the memory now is like the picture was then

When the paper's crumpled up it can't be perfect again

It was Monday, and he was healed enough that Maeve let him go to school. After a normal morning routine, Lorcan made sure he wore a hoodie that would do a decent job covering his neck. Hood up, hands in his hoodie pocket, head down, he headed to school.

He missed a lot of schoolwork. It was going to be a late night. Luckily, most of the teachers gave him until the end of the week to turn it in.

When P.E. came around, he went straight to the gym rather than the locker room. He found his teacher and handed him his doctor's note. Mr. Brullo sent Lorcan to the library to study. Lorcan was happy about that. He was able to catch up on some of his homework.

Lorcan's handwriting, luckily, wasn't hindered by his cast. Perrington at least broke his right arm, his non-dominant arm. That he was thankful for, if he could be thankful for anything that happened to him.

He was getting a headache from his pre-calc homework. Lorcan rubbed his face with his hand and sighed.

"Lorcan?"

Lorcan grunted and slowly turned to see Elide, who looked relieved to see him. That was interesting. "Oh, uh, hi."

"Aren't you supposed to be in gym?" Lorcan lifted his casted arm. Elide's eyes widened and her lips parted. "Oh." She swallowed. Fuck, here comes the pity. "How-" she closed her mouth. "How'd that happen? We thought you were sick." Why were they concerned?

He told the same story Maeve told the doctor. Something about getting in a fight and falling down stairs, and "you should see the other guy". She didn't seem to believe him, neither did the doctor.

"Can I sit with you?" Lorcan shrugged. She sat down and then proceeded to talk to him about what he missed in creative writing. He didn't realize her voice was so soothing.

"Has anyone signed your cast yet?" She was eyeing the black cast. "I have a silver Sharpie!" She pulled it out of her bag and held it up with a smile.

Lorcan huffed a small laugh. Not being able to say no to that smile, knowing he was going to get in trouble, well, what could really do to him anyway? So, Lorcan carefully pushed up his hoodie sleeve. She smiled brightly at him. He propped his head up on his hand, eyes closed and listened to her hum as she put ink to the black cast.

++++

It was hard to keep from asking Lorcan questions. Elide saw the handprint bruise on his neck, the exhaustion lining his body, and of course, the full arm cast. She thought about how his injuries were formed. Obviously, someone put their hands on him, but who?

She didn't know who he lived with besides his aunt. It was doubtful that a woman had done this sort of damage, but one never knows for sure.

As she put pen to plaster, she kept looking up at his face between strokes of ink. He had drifted off to sleep. His face was slack, a slight snore every time he breathed out. Lorcan looked so innocent like that and dare she say, gorgeous.

Having finished her artwork, she just watched him until the bell rang. She gently brushed a lock of hair off his forehead, delicately tucking it behind his ear. He didn't stir.

Elide wished there was something she could do to get him away from his more than shitty situation. Calling the police was probably out of the question, but that was really the only thing she could think of.

The bell rang.

---

He didn't realize he had fallen asleep until he felt his textbook being pulled from under his elbow. "Oh, shit. Sorry," Lorcan furrowed his brow as he started cleaning up his stuff.

"You looked tired, I didn't want to wake you, but it is lunch time." Elide smiled, "and you have to look at your cast!" She seemed so excited about it.

Expecting some nonsense, he was pleasantly surprised to find a nice line drawing from his elbow to his wrist. It was a row of detailed trees with her name under it. Lorcan looked at it with awe. He looked back at Elide, "You did that?" Obviously, she did that. Don't be stupid, Lorcan, he thought to himself.

She giggled. He thought her laugh was adorable. "Obviously." Lorcan's cheeks flushed while he finished packing up before they walked together to lunch in a comfortable silence.

---

He followed Elide through the lunch line, the lunch lady gave him an extra serving. He was probably looking a little gaunt these days having barely eaten for the past week. Lorcan started towards the empty table in the corner.

Apparently, Elide wasn't having any of that as she pulled him to the group table before he could go be alone. Everyone seemed excited to see him. His name was shouted amongst several other greetings. Lorcan felt a tug in his chest as he looked around at the friendly faces. Why were they always trying to be nice to him? And then his eyes fell on the silver haired boy, he instantly forgot what he was thinking. He stared at the green eyed beauty a fraction longer than he should have as he sat down.

Elide introduced everyone. Aelin, Lysandra, Manon, Dorian, Chaol, Fenrys, Connall, Rowan - the silver haired boy - and then Vaughn, who was the last one to join the table.

He was sitting between Elide and Fenrys. Lorcan kept his head down while he ate, feeling very out of place. Everyone was chatting around him, over him, leaning around him. It was a lot. He wished he was alone at the table in the corner.

Rowan spoke up, "Can I sign your cast?" Lorcan jerked his head up. The sleeve of Lorcan's hoodie was still pushed up, he had forgotten to pull it back down which was unusual, but under the current circumstances, it made sense.

Lorcan's heart sped and he suddenly felt warmth spread up his neck. It drove him crazy how much his body reacted of its own accord around Rowan. He wished it would stop.

There was no reason to deny him when the punishment was coming now anyway since Elide's Sharpie touched the cast in the library, so he just shrugged and moved his arm towards the center of the table, towards Rowan.

"Elide, can I borrow your Sharpie?" She handed it over with a nod and went back to animatedly talking to the other girls about something.

Lorcan was careful not to press into the edge of the table, as he adjusted his arm. "I don't think mine will be as pretty as Elide's. Sorry in advance." Lorcan just shrugged a shoulder. He watched Rowan do his little doodle.

Then Rowan grabbed Lorcan's hand to carefully twist his arm to get to a different part of the cast easier causing electricity to shoot through his skin. His breath hitched. The soft fingers lingering on his skin, he never wanted the other boy's hand to move. Lorcan's eyes darted to Rowan's face to see if he noticed anything weird. All he saw was intense concentration, the way his tongue stuck out just a tad and his brows stitched together. Suddenly he was too warm, chest tight, heart pounding. Hellas below.

"There!" Rowan smiled at his silly nonsensical line doodle signed with his name. "All done." That smile did weird things to his stomach and the absence of those warm fingers made all the heat he had just been feeling disappear. A shiver ran down his spine.

Rowan capped the Sharpie and went to hand it back to Elide when Fenrys grabbed it.

"Can I?"

"Yeah." He was screwed anyway.

By the end of lunch, his cast was covered in names and doodles by his... Friends? They couldn't be friends, could they?

As he walked to his next class, he started panicking. His chest tightening for a whole other reason than being in close proximity to a certain boy. A tightness that was only reminiscent of growing anxiety. He shouldn't have let anyone sign it. What was he thinking?

Fuck.

++++

"Lorcan," Rowan breathed as he saw the dark haired boy basically being dragged by Elide to their table. Everyone perked up at that and welcomed him back.

Rowan saw his pained expression. Then, he saw the cast and the light purples, greens, and yellows on his neck that Lorcan was obviously trying to hide with the hood of his hoodie. It looked like a handprint. A fucking handprint. His gut roiled at the thought.

But then Lorcan looked at him, and oh boy, those eyes were going to be the end of him. They were an amazing onyx, almost like pools of night. His cheeks heated and he hoped no one noticed.

He finally got the courage to ask to sign his cast. And when Lorcan leaned over to get his arm closer to Rowan, he noted the stiffness and slight discomfort that flitted over his face. There was so much damage to Lorcan's body that they couldn't see. It made him unbearably sad thinking about it.

For the rest of lunch, while everyone signed Lorcan's cast, Rowan just sat there silently, observing the beautiful dark haired boy. He'd catch his eye every now and then give him a small smile, which was never returned. His eyes just quickly flitted away. Lorcan, he learned was very hard to read.

Rowan wished they could hang out, just the two of them. He wanted to get to know him and help him. And know what those lips felt like, tasted like. How it would feel to thread his fingers through his long dark hair that was usually in a messy bun. Or just to hold his hand. Fuck, he had it bad.

____

Thank you for reading! Let me know if you would like to be tagged.

@thenerdandfandoms @starlightorstarfire

[cupidcreates]

Love You Equally

Chapter Twenty-Six: Splintered

Part 2: The Sleepover

THIS CHAPTER CONTAINS NS//FW MATERIAL, VIEWER DESCRESION IS ADVISED

Also this is my first time writing sm//ut so please be nice 😖

Tamaki took another twenty minutes before finally emerging from the bathroom, puffy-eyed and still sniffling his lanky frame drawn as far into itself as he could manage. He pressed his palms into his eyes as he approached you, screwing up his face in an attempt to suppress the tears undoubtedly still on the threshold of escaping. You immediately rose from your spot on the bed and pulled him into a tight embrace, allowing him to lay his head on your shoulder and rub his cheek into you, still trembling with the effort of quelling his emotions.

It killed you inside to see him like this; the devastated look on his face when you both realized your other four boyfriends had gone off for a date without you, without even thinking to invite either of you, or even tell you they had made plans together. It felt like a deliberate exclusion, a purposeful rejection of your company and it was very hard to not take it personally.

You tried to rationalize the situation; you really shouldn’t be upset, should you? After all, you and Tamaki had spent Saturday together without informing your other four partners of this plan, why would it be different that they’d done the same? However, you just couldn’t shake the feeling that this was different somehow; like it was more deliberate and planned than your spontaneous trip home with one of your partners. It was less like your random adventures you frequently drug one of them along on and more like retribution for something you and Tamaki might have done. It felt personal, you couldn’t deny that.

However, what you could deny was your responsibility in handling it for the night. It was already very late, you and Tamaki were both exhausted and it was indisputable that it was better for you both - for your relationship as a whole - that you both get to bed and worry about it in the morning. Everything could be sorted out after a good night's sleep.

You took Tamaki by both hands and led him to bed, laying him down on his side and tucking yourself in next to him, pulling his head to your chest and stroking his hair. Tamaki shuddered and sniffled for a while after this before eventually falling silent, breaths evening out and body slackening with sleep. You gazed over his head and out your window for a while after he drifted off, the frost had settled back over the grounds, making the grass and barren trees shimmer in the moonlight with an ethereal luminescence only present in the winter months.

You weren’t sure when you fell asleep but you must have, because when you opened your eyes again you were in a different position than before. At some point in the night Tamaki had pulled you down so your face was level with his. He shifted and sighed in his sleep, hot breath ghosting across your face bringing with it the pepper-minty smell of your toothpaste. He’d pulled your bodies flush against one another, so that every bit of you save for your face was in contact with a part of him. He was hot against you, on the cusp of feverish and if it had been any other season but winter it would have been too much. However, even the excellent central heating of UA could only do so much against the blistering winter winds and bone-chilling cold that seeped through even the most miniscule of cracks.

Shifting slowly so as not to wake the sleeping man next to you, you lifted your head to check the clock on your nightstand. The time read 2:34am, you’d only managed to be asleep for a little over an hour and a half. You doubted very much that you’d be in the right headspace for class at 9am and doubted even more that Tamaki would either. You sighed and resigned yourself to a Monday in bed, laying your head back down and gazing into the peaceful face of your lover. Tamaki was extraordinarily pretty, unfathomably soft and gentle; his sweetness was only compounded in sleep. You pushed your face into his neck and inhaled his scent, the light smell of fresh linen relaxing you and bringing a soft smile to your face. You couldn’t help but pepper his neck with small kisses and gentle nips, reveling in the feel of his skin on your lips and between your teeth.

This, however, effectively disturbed Tamaki’s slumber and he quickly awoke with a soft groan and a sigh. He opened his eyes slowly and moved back just enough to peer down at you through dewy dark eyelashes; you gave him a comforting smile and a small bunny kiss. He blushed as you rubbed your nose against his, making you giggle. His blush deepened as he turned his head to bury half of his face in his pillow, gazing doefully up at you and smiling. You placed a kiss on his exposed cheek and pushed your fingers up through his hair, earning you another soft sigh.

“Hey you,” you said, massaging his scalp, “Are you feeling any better after having slept a bit?”

“A-a b-bit,” he replied, voice hoarse with sleep, “a-a-are you d-doing okay?”

“I’m fine, I’ve been fine honestly,” you said “I was more worried about you, I hate seeing you so sad like that Tama, it breaks my heart.”

Tamaki sighed and began shifting himself, re-adjusting your already close position into one a bit more comfortable “I-I think,” he stammered, “I t-t-think I m-might have o-overreacted a b-bit. I m-maybe assumed the w-worst and r-reacted d-dramatically.”

You nodded understandingly and allowed yourself to be moved into whatever arrangement Tamaki saw fit. “Your feelings are valid though Tama, you should never feel bad for having them. It’s better to acknowledge and express them than it is to bottle them up and repress them.”

“I-I know,” he said, still shifting you both around, “But I-I still think I c-could have-”

Suddenly Tamaki’s body went rigid, his eyes snapped open as he let out a startled gasp followed by a deep, guttural groan. You lay puzzled for a moment wondering what could have brought about this reaction, until you felt a hardness push directly against your crotch.

This wasn’t the first time this week Tamaki had gotten hard while in bed with you, in fact it was more common for him to wake up with an erection than not. You weren’t unfamiliar with the term morning wood, so you had expected it to happen at some point. You didn’t blame him for it, you knew it was completely normal for genitals to be ready to go for no reason at all; in fact  you knew that from your own experience of drenching yourself without any external stimuli that this was just a thing that happened sometimes.

This time, however, felt different. This time Tamaki didn’t stammer out a hasty and sheepish apology before rushing off to the bathroom to hide his embarrassment from you. No, this time Tamaki simply froze, crotch still pressed directly into yours mid-grind. Not finishing the motion, but not necessarily pulling away from you either. His face was completely blank, his blush still present but expression completely unreadable.

It was then, fuck, it was then that you felt him throb against you.

Your mouth suddenly felt very dry as a soft whimper escaped your boyfriend, he covered his mouth and ducked his head to avoid making eye contact with you. You immediately moved to pull his hand away, only for him to suddenly grab your ass and grind his heard length directly against your clit.

Sparks of pleasure danced up your spine and something between you two broke. Before you even knew what was happening your lips were crashing onto his in a searing kiss, your tongue immediately finding his and winding it way around it. You gripped his hips and matched his movement, pushing and grinding against him and swallowing the groans he emitted into your mouth.

You quickly found yourself pushed down into the mattress, Tamaki overtop you pushing his hips into yours with the perfect amount of pressure. You made a mental note to ask him how much time he’d been spending with Dabi because his hip movements seemed to mimic Dabi’s to near perfection. His grinding was slow and filthy, completely controlled and unhurried; he seemed to want to revel in every push against your core, circling his hips in a way that hit your clit with every motion and made you see stars. 

You cupped his face to control the kiss, only for him to pin both of your hands above your head and tongue-fuck your mouth. You were quickly getting dizzy from the overwhelming heat between your bodies and you felt the wetness of your cunt cling to your underwear, spreading across the fabric with every thrust of Tamaki’s hips.

He pulled back, a thin line of spit connecting your lips for a fraction of a second before breaking. He was panting and quivering above you, a concerned look on his flushed face.

“Is this, is this okay with you right now?” He asked. You couldn’t help but notice the lack of stutter as he spoke. Seemingly his ability to speak without stammering was only present when he was pushed into a lust-fueled haze.

You swallowed, mouth still too dry and replied, “I’m okay with this if you are, I’ve done this before so it’s up to you how far we go tonight.” You were already wishing for the warmth of his kiss back, the cold air feeling like a slap to the face after the extreme heat you were under assault from a moment ago.

Tamaki’s face went lax and his eyes glazed over, as if he could read your mind he immediately resumed the kiss, tongue thrusting back into your mouth and wrapping itself around your own, making you groan.

“I want to,” he spoke between kisses, “I want you. I want to do everything with you. I - fuck - want to do everything to you. I want to fuck you.”

That simple declaration sent a series of electric shocks up up your spine and had heat pooling in your groin instantaneously. You wrapped a leg around him and ground yourself up into him, earning you a guttural moan and two hands underneath you groping your ass. He lifted you up and pushed you into him, controlling the motion and fucking himself against you, head bumping your clit with every movement and making you shudder.

You broke the kiss and pressed a hand to his chest, he let down your hips and you flipped him over, straddling him and immediately resuming the kiss. He groaned as you stuck a hand down his pants and grabbed his cock, gasping as you pumped the head several times. You pushed your other hand into your own pants and sunk two fingers into your wet heat, pumping them in time with your fist around Tamaki’s cock.

Just when you thought he was close you pulled back, swinging yourself off of him and making your way over to your nightstand drawer. You hadn’t started the year off with condoms, but you’d decided to stock up after your first kiss with Dabi. You’d figured it was only a matter of time before things got physical with one (or maybe more) of your soulmates. Though you hadn’t expected it to be Tamaki who made the first move, you couldn’t say you were upset by this development. Next to you Tamaki pulled his underwear down and off one leg, moving the blanket to cover his now exposed and throbbing cock from the chill of the room.

You returned and shucked your own pajama bottoms off along with your underwear, you didn’t bother with the shirt but instead bent down to capture his lips in another kiss as you rolled the condom onto his cock. Tamaki wasn’t the longest you’d ever seen, probably no more than six or seven inches at best, but he was definitely among the thickest you’ve seen. 

In any case you placed a hand on his chest and positioned the head of his cock outside your drenched entrance. You lowered yourself slowly onto him, reveling in the stretch and burn of his cock sinking into you. Below you Tamaki gasped and twitched as you sunk onto him, excruciatingly slow. He squirmed as you seated yourself onto him, whimpering at the feeling of being fully enveloped in your heat.

You allowed yourself a moment to adjust to the feeling, Tamaki was thicker than you had previously realized and he stretched your walls nearly to their limits. Tamaki gripped your hips hard enough that you knew you’d have bruises come tomorrow. You didn’t mind and instead focused on making small circles with your hips to relax your body and allow yourself to accommodate his thickness.

Once you felt comfortable enough to move you braced yourself against his chest with both hands and lifted about halfway off of him before slamming back down, making you both cry out. Tamaki groaned and thrust up against you as you repeatedly impaled yourself on his cock, pleasure building in the pit of your stomach as he brushed the sweet spot inside of you with every other movement.

Tamaki, you quickly found, was very vocal, whimpering and crying out underneath you, every thrust accompanied by a desperate noise or a whispered beg. You shifted and laid yourself flat against him, swallowing his words mid-sentence with a kiss. You pushed your tongue into his mouth as you rolled your hips against him, the head of his cock now putting a constant pressure against your g-spot. Tamaki adjusted his thrusts to sink into at this angle, grabbing your ass with both hands and fucking himself into you, pace forgotten as he used your body to chase his pleasure.

You managed to get a hand in between your bodies to push and circle your clit, the added pressure and constant massaging of your g-spot sending you racing towards your impending orgasm. You could feel Tamaki was getting close as well, if the stuttering of his hips and increased volume of his cries were anything to go by. You were so close, you could feel it, you were right there. You just needed a few more thrusts, a few more moments before you were pushed over the edge.

It was then that Tamaki gave a particularly hard thrust and your dam broke, your orgasm crashed against you like a wave against the rocky coast. You cried out as you came, clenching around the cock buried inside you and pushing Tamaki over the edge into his own orgasm. He gave one final cry and released inside of you, twitching and shuddering as he came down from his high.

You fell atop him, completely stated, body leadened and lethargic as you panted against his skin. He rubbed your back as he caught his breath and pressed small kisses to your forehead. It was several minutes before you were able to right yourself and pull Tamaki’s softening cock out of you and roll off of him; curling up underneath his arm and laying a hand on his chest. Tamaki tossed the condom into the trash beside your bed and wrapped himself around you. You both fell into a comfortable silence, allowing yourselves to catch your breath as the post-orgasm tingles abated. It wasn’t long until you both drifted off to sleep, still curled up in each other's arms.

Masterlist

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[obeymefictionwriting]

I've seen so many requests for the brothers reacting to a really pretty or drop dead gorgeous MC, but can I request HC for the brothers + Simeon reacting to an MC that could be described as looking similar to ugly Betty? Like first impressions and what changes after they get to know them? MC isn't insecure about their looks or themselves, they're indifferent to how they look and don't see why others would care so much about what they look like when they don't care about it themselves

The ugly Betty is literally my style and I love it soooo much, I tried so hard for the longest time to find my own style and when I did I was so happy. When I was in high school I was talking to some friends and I described my style to them as "Ugly Betty meets dark academia" (since HS I have refined to look so it's actually pretty solid now) and in like a year later when a friend turned into a bully she got some of her new friends and her boyfriends' friends to harass me by calling me ugly Betty, its not something that bothered me or that I took too much to heart but it was annoying 🙄 anyway... I digress

I've loved reading what you've written, I have literally spent my afternoon reading over your writing and I'm like 🥺💕

Hi! I absolutely love your idea and I think it will be really encouraging for many people out there. Thank you for leaving the request and here we go!

P.S. Turned out to be a long-read - sorry! :D

Lucifer

“Well, I wouldn’t expect much of a human anyway”.

Can’t help but looks at you with disdain (”Why are humans so pathetic?”)

Despite that, really takes control over his feelings. You are a guest, after all, and Diavolo wants you to be taken care of.

Snaps at his brothers if they try to act in an inappropriate way.

Just hopes you will survive this year.

Admires your confidence though.

Turning point: sees you not running away when facing some creepy demon at school (he step in, of course, but still!)

Starts paying more attention to you. Realizes there is more to you than your looks.

Apparently, you turn out to be quite smart. And witty.

“Maybe humans are not that bad”.

Finds himself enjoying your company and actually relaxing in your presence.

Mammon

“OH NOOOOOOO”

Whines about his duty of looking after you FOR AGES.

Can’t understand why Lucifer chose you. Like, are all humans these mediocre?

Oh and apparently, you are completely dumb too because you aint’t afraid of him.

Secretly evaluates what he can steal from you in order to sell it.

Turning point: you help him with his homework and do not tell Lucifer about him skipping a class.

Hey, you aint so bad!

You are even pretty. Well, no, that’s not what he meant. It’s just... Ugh whatever!

Secretly observes you. Turns out you are thoughtful, helpful and kind.

And you don’t call him moron like his brothers do.

In fact, you might need some protection. There are all sorts of creeps at school. And who but the Great Mammon can protect ya!

Leviathan

Another normie in his house.

Really wishes you were a cute anime girl. Is disappointed and always annoyed in your presence.

Doesn’t consider it worthy to talk to you. What can you possibly offer him? You don’t even know about TLS.

Tries to avoid being in the same room with you. He already saw you starting a convo with his brothers and he doesn’t want to be next.

Turning point: sees you reading some manga series in the library.

There is hope for you.

Maybe you will be interested in TLS...

Has no idea how to approach you.

Is a bit scared by your confidence so shuts in even more.

Is annoyed at how cheerful you are with his brothers. Secretly wishes to be among them.

Satan

Just accepts your presence. If he can’t change it, why worry?

Considers you a funny pet.

Secretly agrees with Lucifer about humans being pathetic.

Sometimes he secretly observes you and tries to understand why you won’t change the way you look. Aren’t humans supposed to want to look gorgeous?

Compares you to the witches he knows.

Turning point: observes you while you read in the dining room. Is fascinated by how interested and involved you are.

Starts paying more attention to you and starts the conversations first.

Finds out you have similar taste in books. How very interesting.

Starts looking at you differently. In fact, you are quite cute.

Is entertained and intrigued by your confidence. Wants to test it.

Asmodeus

Well... maybe you are a good person?

Never had high expectations because humans are well, not demons! Though he knew some truly outstanding humans but you are definitely not one of them.

Is supportive and empathetic though: understands it must be tough for you to live in a different world. Plus you are so...un-pretty.

Really wants to suggest a make over but doesn’t want to force it.

Turning point: sees you laughing and is fascinated by how beautiful you look at the moment.

Oh wow there is more to this human than he thought!

Now he is INTERESTED

Boldly approaches you and suggests help with your makeup and hair and skin. Winks and offers massage too.

Finds your rejection entertaining. He wants you now!

Beelzebub

Is disappointed because Lucifer does not allow to eat you.

You smell really good. And you don’t look so good. Why can’t he just eat you?

Tries avoiding you in order to avoid the temptation.

Is a bit surprised you are not scared of him or of other demons.

Kind of watches you in school. Lucifer ordered to protect you and he does his best but from the distance.

Turning point: you shared your food and suggested you cook something for him.

Are you really so kind?!

Oh and you can cook. Wow.

And you are not annoyed by his appetite.

Goes into full protective mode. You may not be the best-looking human but you are his human now.

Belphegor

Doesn’t care so much it hurts.

Doesn’t even bother to talk to you. Why would he?

Secretly hoped you’d be beautiful but you are so average there is nothing to look at. Boring.

Pulls little dirty tricks on you just to annoy you (and Lucifer!).

Turning point: sees you in the observatory gazing at stars. There is something in your eyes he is drawn to.

Studies you when you don’t see it. Memorizes your habits and preferences.

Stops being mean to you.

Falls asleep on your lap on purpose.

Finds you comfortable to be used as a sleeping pillow but does not admit it.

Solomon

Another human? Interesting.

Oh. Not so interesting anymore.

Wonders why would Lucifer choose you? You are just so average compared to him.

Was a popular boy so is used to ignoring people like you.

Feels superior and does not hide it.

Turning point: sees you interacting with brothers and how they enjoy your company.

There might be something else to this human.

Starts observing you. Realizes you are way more complex than he thought.

Hates to admit it but you are quite charming.

Has a strange feeling when sees you surrounded by the brothers. Would never admit it.

#obeyme #obey me! shall we date? 

[saturatedboy]

Lord Heisenberg X Male!OC

New and first story series! This involves a male OC, however be free to use your own name instead. This book won’t exactly follow the plot of RE8, however ideas will be taken from it.

Male!Oc- Leonardo is a 27 year old male that works within a distance village called ‘Village of Ram’. Reason for it’s name is that its hidden away behind many mountains. His job includes being a literacy teacher within a new still-in-construction school. On the side lines he is a journalist, using his findings to post through the Duke to spread around the other villages. However not all his stories can have a happy ending, and I fear the story he’s within won’t go to plan. Would his story be complete with a happy ending, or will he loose- may the pages of his story be turned.

Warnings: Mentions the use of alcohol

Words: 3K

The Slaughter of the Ram

Chapter 1

They all stared at him with a lost look in each and every one of their eyes. Some had heads down, others blinked away any boredom that snuck in through the words that came from his mouth and the rest were whispering amongst themselves with a few giggles escaping. They really didn’t want to be here but they were forced by the leaders of their home to. It wasn’t like they could get education anywhere else.  

The sudden chime of a bell ringing had woken most of the young. Them all being swift in gathering their things together. The older male stood with chalk in hand, watching the young pack away equipment such as pencils, paper and books. Smiling at their eagerness to leave his class, with a clear throat he spoke over the loudness that they were causing with their chairs and voices. “Read pages 12 to 16 of ‘Mid-Summer Night Dream’ please in your break!” A chorus of groans left most of their mouths leaving the male at the front to chuckle. “I know you all are enjoying it all!”

“Sir, must we read? It’s Summer break-”

“Since when do we have Summer break here? You know it’s always Winter here Robert.” The girl with a high bun, neatly wrapped with a silk ribbon had spoken up as she gently flicked the boy named Robert on his forehead.

“So, Charity, it’s still Summer-” He shot back, grabbing her wrist before she could give him another flick. She struggled out of his grip, moving her arm about as she smiled at the others playfulness. The oldest male cleared his throat having heads turn towards him. With a silent chuckle, he banged his fist against his chest a couple of times to clear his throat fully before speaking.

“And here I thought you all wanted to go home.” Just as quick as the words left his throat, his future generation had scrambled out of the door and filed into the very small hallways to escape through the front. He stood there for a minute or two, waiting for all the students to leave fully before turning to face his desk and gathering his own equipment and papers to mark. Being in thought about his next meal of the night, he was drawn back out by a knock against wood.

“Knock knock, it’s your favourite.” A feminine voice that had the tone of a mother had spoken from behind him. Placing the last paper into his messenger bag, he stood and turned to face the old visitor with a bright smile. Leaning against his open door was a woman with blonde hair that was slightly mangled from her usual bonnet that she would wear that was now resting on her shoulders. Her green dress with an apron over the top had reached her ankles which feet was accompanied by black doll-shoes.

“Catherine, great to see you. How were the lessons? Heard you have some new sprouts.” The sudden expression change that came from her explained the whole day to him instantly. With a heavy sigh, she placed her bonnet back onto her head and spoke.

“They were terrible. I’m not even joking. They don’t understand how to make soup. Soup I tell you!” she continued to ramble on about her day, expressing her hatred towards the new students and old ones that she herself had to teach for cookery class. “-And then I told her to put her utensils back and-Hey! Are you even listening to me?” A pout fronted her lips, brows furrowed as she stared at the male with arms crossed over her chest as she watched him stare into space. With a harsh nudged of her, he blinked his eyes and turned t face her, hair swaying with his movement. With a smile and neck scratch, he spoke.

“I’m sorry Catherine. All this talk about food is making me thirsty. Say, would you like to join me at the Inn? I’m pretty sure some whiskey would move all your problems away.” He suggested, adjusting his messenger bag over his shoulder and rolling his beige sleeves up to his elbows. With a soft sigh, the woman placed her bonnet on and brushed her dress down, getting rid of any wrinkles easily.

“Only if you’re paying, and I’ll take my usual of scotch thank you.” Together they walked, arms linked out of the room and school that was still being built. The snow wisped around them, being gentler as it lightly touched their exposed skin. With the walk being silent, they could hear the joyful cries of smaller children playing with sticks and others having the usual game of a snow ball fight. The sight made Catherine cringe. “Children, they are so much to handle.” she expressed her hatred through bending down gathering snow and then throwing a snowball at a child that was in her classroom that day. “And that’s for running with a knife!” She exclaimed as the child that got hit only laughed with a thumbs up, using their other hand to wipe the snow off her arm.

“You mustn't hurt the children; they are the reason this village will be up and running still in times yet to come.” The older male spoke, placing his arm back out for Catherine to grab, which she did almost immediately. Catherine sighed and rolled her eyes, tutting at his words.

“Now Leo, you know very much that if these children aren’t taught manners, then how could they ever survive. Haven’t you heard the news from the Village of Shadows?” She asked, however the older male, Leonardo, stayed quiet. She continued as the Inn was slowly getting closer in their reach. “Apparently mutant sorts of dogs have been wandering about, snatching children left and right. A young girl, age 14 I think, was attacked but luckily survived as her father with his buddies shot at the beast. Wicked I tell you, scarily wicked.”

They reached the Inn at the end of her words, a now unsettling aura around them both. Leo pondered to himself, being caught up in his thoughts as usual. ‘If the centre village is being attacked, then why haven’t they cancelled the festival for two days' time?’ Being dragged into the Inn, Leo huffed and coughed slightly at the sudden smell of cigars blocking his nose. The stench was something he had yet to still get comfortable with however he would deal with it for now. Letting Catherine lead him, Leo looked around the now bustling room of other men and woman, some children falling asleep in the wooden booths to small babies nestle in their mothers' grasps. Waving to familiar faces as he passed them, he quickly settles down at the bar as Catherine sat beside him. “Would you look at her,” She sighed dreamily. Watching her line of vision, Leo followed it to have his vision set on a beautiful woman. Long brown hair reaching her hips, a brow dress reaching the floor with a daisy took behind her ear. She was enjoying a glass of water with some other people that Leo hadn’t set a name with the faces.

“I swear we only come here for you to gush over women.” Leo snarked, rolling his eyes at his friends' actions of whistling loudly grabbing the attention of the girl who blushed deeply in return. Leaning back against the bar top, Catherine giggled and she raised her hand up to call for the bar tenders' attention.  

“What can I say, women are really pretty and you can't say much, what about you and Aaron? What happened there?” Her question aa caught in the air as she held a finger up to keep Leo silent, telling the bar tender their orders of whiskey and scotch. It was only after the tender had written down their orders that she signalled Leo to carry on as she turned on her buffet to instead sit straight and look at the lines of bottles behind the bar.

With a groan, Leo dropped his head onto the wooden top as he turned his face to look at her. “He let for another village, asked if I wanted to come. I declined and so he left without any trace of a ‘goodbye’ to me.” Catherine pursed her lips together, only for her lips to stretch into a smirk.  

“So, writing boy is free to date hmm~?”

“No, I am not. I enjoy being single and I don’t need no man in my life.” Beside him, Catherine held her laugh. Her faced flushed in red as she tried to keep her composure. With a hard slap on his back, Leo jerked up and sat with an angry look on his face. “Hey, what was that for?!”

“I just felt like it. All this talk about love is making me thirsty- EY BAR TENDER, PASS OUR DRINKS WILL YA!” With a nod from the said other, the bar tender came over to them dropping their drinks on the counter and nodding to them. With muttered ‘thanks’ of the best friends, he walked away to tend to other customers.

Both sat in minable silence, the odd talk about classes to talk about summer ideas passed through their conversations. As the night became young, the pace began to get more crowded and louder. Someone had started to play the harmonica, Catherine had wobbled away from Leo in search of the girl she called beautiful, the place began bustling with smokers and soon, Leonardo had turned on his buffet to watch everything go down. Smiling, he watched as happy couples were on the make-shift dance floor as a small band played, children were running in and out of the doorway and the odd student came up to Leo to ask about the pages they must read. “Just those would do, now go enjoy your night and holiday.” With a loose hand shake, the student ran off again into the crowd of people. Leo scrunched his nose as he downed his 4th glass of the night. The fiery taste burned his throat yet he was still perfectly fine. Looking around the room, he spotted multiple photos hanging of ‘Mother Miranda’. She was Somone that his community and others worshipped. She was their god in their eyes. Although Leo didn't quite understand her, he had his own hopes he wished to grant to her however dreaming is one thing to reality.

Just above the doorway was a sketch of his entire village. ‘Village of the Ram’ was quoted at the bottom of the sketch. There were multiple villages in the area, however his village had mostly resided away from Castle Dimitrescu as he remembered. Words between villages was sent through post by the duke. A large man who acted as a father to all. He was sweet, something Leo did find attractive however The Duke was far from his type. If he didn’t travel every day, Leo was sure to find himself maybe even falling in love with him however he treasures the fact both were close friends- but that never stopped him from never getting a discount of the other.

Placing his empty glass back onto the bar top, the noise from the bell of the door along with gasps and the sudden stop of music had caught his full attention. Turning towards where everyone was looking, the door was wide open with a fairly tall man standing in the way. With long strides, the man had walked in, banging the door close behind him. Murmured talk between everyone erupted at the visitor. The free and enjoyable air that was in the atmosphere had let as it was placed with an uncomfortable sense of feeling. “Ignore me will ya.” The deep, husky voice spoke as everyone went back to what they were doing. Music had started to play again as the new visitor had stride his way up.

Leo stared at the man, taking in his features as he walked practically up to him. Not wanting to attract attention to himself, he spun back around on his buffet and asked the bar tender that was nearby to order him another glass of whiskey. The tender placed the glass he was drying down and went to do as commanded. Leo had stated to take notes in his mind. ‘Big guy, sunglasses blocking his vision, fair long stipple of beard growing, really nice grey hair to compliment his face- overall the fucking Lord Heisenberg.’ Thanking again to the bar tender, Leo kept his eyes on his refilled glass that was stirring with his chosen liquid. He tried his best to keep his breathing down as the Lord of the Village of Shadows had taken the seat next to him. With a shaky hand, Leo sipped his drink this time only to have his eyes wander to look at the man beside him. To his shock, he could see behind the sunglasses to have a pair of greenish yellow eyes staring back at him. Pretending he wasn’t looking; Leo slowly turned his eyesight back onto his drink as he placed the half empty shot glass down. “I’ll have what he’s having.” The same deep voice spoke.

Distracting himself from the talk about him, Leonardo ran a hand through his fairly long hazel hair and pulled it back into a ponytail, using a bobble he had solen of Catherine to tie his hair back. Two loose stands fell in front of his face framing his jawline. “Do I get the pleasure of knowing the young man's name?” The lord asked, turning his larger frame to face Leo.

Biting his lip, Leo turned his head to face him, being greeted again with the same eyes that felt captivating. Without a second thought, he spilt his name. “Leonardo- or Leo would do.”  

The Lord smiled in satisfaction, a smirk stretching his lips. “So, you are more than staring!” He exclaimed, catching the attention of a few nearby people who were also sat at the bar, however as soon as they noticed it was the Lord speaking, they turned their heads quickly to carry on with their conversation. Biting back his frustration, Leo spoke up in a much harsher tone forgetting who he was dealing with.

“I’ll have you know it was you staring at me first you-”

A hand pulled on his shirt collar, making him look at the culprit. Catherine was there with the woman from before clinging onto her arm. “My apologise Lord Heisenberg, my friend appears to be drunk.”

“I’d have you know I am no light drinker; he was staring at me-” Catherine slapped her hand over his mouth and began to pull on Leo’s shirt.

“Looks like the alcohol is getting to him. C’mon it's time to go Leonardo.” Heisenberg waved the bar tender away as he placed down his drink of the same liquid as Leo.

“It’s quite alright miss, I find your friends attitude towards me quite...intoxicating.” Heisenberg leaned to grab his shot glass, only to down the whole drink in a mere second. Slamming the glass back not the top, he swung an arm over Leo’s shoulder and pulled him away from Catherine’s grasp. “It’s not every day I see new villages with such Firey attitude. I think I may stay around a little longer, what do you say Leonardo?”  

Leo groaned; he could start to feel the effect of the alcohol seeping into his blood stream. Oh, to just pass out in Catherine’s arms would be amazing. “You may be a Lord but that doesn’t mean you weren’t staring at me first.”

“Leo, drop it already.” Catherine hissed, bringing the woman on her arm behind her as she glared at Leonardo. Leo shook his head, letting the alcohol take over his movements as he slowly began to get tipsy.  

“He looked at me though,” He whined, pouting as he shot a glare of his own at the Lord who smiled in return. Oh, how he was loving this. The way Leo swayed slightly, to his slightly muscled arms being free and on show for him. To say a man was having such an effect on him that he couldn’t understand, he was enjoying every moment of this.

“How could I not look; you are like the Ram of the village aren’t you.” Heisenberg let Leo’s body fall against his, his arms wrapping almost immediately around his front. Catherine shook in her boots; her friend was at the mercy of the lord’s grasp. “Strong arms with an attitude to prove strength by. So fascinating.” Heisenberg hands got tighter as he pulled Leo closer to him, his scent of chalk and a whiff of whiskey became an instant comfortable smell.

Catherine watched her friend in worry, he was getting less sober by the second whilst she was gaining her composure to be sober. “Not to be rude but I think it's time I take my friend home Lord Heisenberg.” Catherine spoke, twiddling her fingers as the Lor stared at her with an unamused look.

“He’ll be fine. This is a 24-hour Inn, right? I’ll stay with him until he wakes up. Don’t worry, I won’t do anything to a Ram like him.” Catherine balled her fist. Here her friend was half awake and half asleep and she knew she couldn’t do much against a Lord. She sighed and nodded, trusting him with his words as she turned on her heel and walked away, the smaller lady following her.

Heisenberg turned his attention back onto the male named Leonardo. ‘Such a pretty little thing, too bad you're a little annoying- or maybe it's because of the alcohol.’ Heisenberg thought as he placed Leo’s head onto the counter carefully, letting his whole slightly taller than average frame fall against the counter. Heisenberg watched as he slept, this was sure an interesting interaction.

He only came to here explore the other villages, for Mother Miranda to have some new bodies for the experiments. He never suspected to already be caught up in weird feelings with some random boy. He only knew his name anyway. “Leonardo,” He smirked to himself, pulling out a cigar from his pocket and lighting it. “Leo-...nardo.” He repeated but more slowly this time. The syllabus that rolled of his tongue felt good. The name was perfect. Looking at the sleeping male one more time, Heisenberg took a drag from his lit cigar.   “Leonardo, Strongest Ram in the mountains.”

[terra-sprout-imagines]

take a break - e. kirishima x gn!reader

Fandom: My Hero Academia / Boku no Hero Academia

Pairing: Eijirou Kirishima x Gender Neutral! Reader

Written by: Ryelle

Word Count: 1,326

Warnings: none

Request: For ryelle, would you be willing to write a kirishima x reader where the reader has been staying out late and getting up early and he finds out that they've been overworking themselves with school/job/training and he helps her relax for a bit? - anonymous

Author’s Note: Sorry this took a little while, anon! I’ve never written for Kirishima before so I wanted to take the time to make sure I got his character right! :) I hope you enjoy!

   Sweat dripped down your cheeks as you twirled through the small training room, gracefully hitting every target with sharp precision. The sword in your hand glimmered in the artificial light, casting a holographic glow against yourself. Your breath came out in harsh pants as your knees hit the ground, exhausted from both the rigorous training and the late hour. The sword flickered before completely disappearing, and you allowed yourself a short reprieve.

    It was no secret that you were falling behind the others in Class 1-A. At the beginning of the year, you were one of the top students in your class, in terms of grades and control of your quirk. But between the villain attacks and the pressure you put on yourself to be better, you soon found yourself having to work harder than ever in order to maintain your spot. 

    Training for provisional licenses had just begun, and with your classmates improving their abilities on such a large scale, you felt quite inferior. Your quirk was called “Spectral Sword”, as you could manifest a blade out of seemingly nothing. And while you always found your quirk interesting, it wasn’t long before you had hit a wall. You never saw yourself as a very creative person, and it was showing. While your classmates were coming up with innovative ways to use their powers, you couldn’t think of any new uses. 

    Which would explain why you had been staying up so late each night, coming to the small training facility within the dorms to practice by yourself. You would make up excuses to your teacher and classmates quite easily; you simply didn’t have the time to hang out in the common room anymore. Not when you could be training and catching up to them. You knew they were starting to notice the distance you had put between yourself and them- you had caught the concerned glances and the whispers behind your back. As you lay on your back, racking your brain for some sort of epiphany regarding your quirk, you wondered how long it would be until Mr. Aizawa took you aside to give you a chat.

    “You know, you’ve been in here for longer than five hours. Maybe it’s time to take a break.” The familiar voice popping out of nowhere shocked you to your core, causing you to jump up and activate your quirk. The sword stopped just below the red head’s chin, and your eyes widened. In front of you stood Kirishima, which you were quite grateful for. If it was anyone else you most likely would’ve drawn blood. Luckily for you, he had activated his own quirk in time. You lowered your sword with a soft sigh, letting it disintegrate into the air. 

    As you began to walk back towards a random training dummy, ignoring your friend’s advice, you felt yourself being pulled back. “What the hell, Kirishima? Let me go and get back to training!” Your eyes narrowed as you turned to face him. 

    Softened eyes met your own, and you felt your resolve begin to break. It was clear just from a glance that he was extremely worried for your well-being. “You need to take a break. You’ve been in here for who knows how long every single night for weeks! I know you’re just trying to get better, but trust me- it isn’t very manly to go this far.”

    “I can’t stop now, Kirishima.” You stood your ground, planting your feet firmly as he tried to pull you out of the room. You needed to get stronger, or at least that’s what you kept telling yourself. Surely he understood that? “I’m falling behind, I need to start improving or I’m going to lose my place.”

    Kirishima had always been light-hearted and cheerful around you unless shaken from hero work or certain events. So, when his eyes narrowed and his frown deepened, you knew you had said or done something wrong. “Listen, I understand the need to improve more than most. But that doesn’t mean you should be risking your health to do so.” Your mouth had opened in preparation for a rebuttal, but he quickly cut you off. “And don’t say that you aren’t! You’re exhausted. You haven’t been eating properly, you haven’t been getting nearly the amount of sleep you need. What you need to do is take a few nights off and just relax.”

    The redhead sighed as he took in your flabbergasted expression, and he realized that maybe he (or anybody, really) should’ve said something earlier. Kirishima loosened his grip on your wrist, moving his hand down to hold your own. “Listen… I’m just worried about you. And if you don’t stop then I’ll have to take it to Aizawa.” 

    “I-” You faltered as you looked at your joined hands, suddenly aware of the exhaustion seeping through your body. “I don’t think I can go to sleep right now…” Yes, you knew you were tired... You were always tired nowadays, especially after a grueling training session like tonight. But you had also conditioned yourself to fall asleep at a much, much later time. 

    His eyes met your own, and he pulled you closer, beginning to lead you out of the room. “That’s okay. Everyone was watching some cheesy rom-com out in the common room. If it’s still going we can always join them.” He felt you tense up, and he began to backtrack. “Or, I can just take you back to your dorm if you want to be alone?”

    “I don’t want to be alone, but…” You paused, tightening your grip on his hand. “I don’t know if I can face them right now… I know I’ve really worried them but I’m just… I’m exhausted and I can’t handle the overbearing concern right now.”

    “That’s okay. We can hang out in your dorm for a bit. I’m not really tired yet, either.” He led you away from the common room, choosing to take the stairs instead of the elevator. The trek back to your dorm wasn’t long nor uncomfortable, but rather nice. At least, your sleep-deprived brain convinced you so. You couldn’t deny that lately things had been changing between the two of you, at least before your obsession with training took over. You only hoped that things would continue to change between you two.

    Before you knew it, the two of you had made it back to your dorm. Kirishima flicked the light on while you flopped on your bed, picking up the remote to turn on your small flatscreen. You debated with each other for a short while on what to watch, but in the end you just turned on an old sitcom you both had seen a thousand times over. Episodes rolled by quickly, with the two of you hardly paying attention. He was sitting beside you on your bed, a fact that made him slightly uncomfortable due to the intimacy of it all. It didn’t help that you were leaning your head on his shoulder, close to passing out. 

    Kirishima sighed, running a hand through his hair as the screen faded to black, asking if you were still watching. “You know, maybe tomorrow we could go grab some lunch together? Getting out of the dorms may help.” He waited for a response, thinking maybe you were mulling it over. However, when he looked down towards you, the redhead could only chuckle at your sleeping face. “Eh, I’ll ask ya again tomorrow.” 

    Moving as smooth as he possibly could, he maneuvered you to what he assumed would be a comfortable sleeping position for you. After throwing your comforter on top of you, he went to leave, sparing a few glances at your sleeping form with a grin. Maybe he had finally gotten through to you. Sometimes, in order to grow, you need to take a break and rest. And he was most definitely going to make sure that’s exactly what you were doing.

[wonderlustlucas]

i hemoglobin you - byun baekhyun

⇢ prompt “Yeah, but Baekhyun doesn’t really talk romantics with me.” ⇢ pairing baekhyun x gender neutral reader ⇢ word count 4.8k ⇢ genre fluff ⇢ warnings swearing. kinda descriptive when it comes to the actual needle idk i’m bad at warnings if needles make u uncomfy don’t read. ⇢ summary You’d think, after some time, your crush on the annoying little shit named Byun Baekhyun would fade away. Fortunately for him (and you), falling out of love with someone brighter than a star is near impossible. Plus, needles are scary and even med kids need their hand held sometimes. Alternatively: Junmyeon found dead in a ditch.—friends to lovers!au ; college blood drive!au ⇢ a/n ok yes i realize this is an odd setting for fanfiction but like,,, my school had a blood drive & what happens in this is exactly what i experienced, minus the whole crush revealing they like me with a kiss thing. so i decided to WRITE IT OKAY?! also, i really tried to make this gender, color, absolutely everything reader neutral but then when i was editing i saw the nurse call y/n ‘miss’ so if i missed anything pls lmk so i can edit it!!! thank u & i hope u enjoy ♥︎

If it weren’t for that time you tried anal with your ex-boyfriend back in high school, you’d consider Byun Baekhyun to be the biggest pain in your ass. If asked, you definitely could come up with a hefty list of all the things about him that annoy the living daylights out of you, things from the unnecessary high volume of his voice to the time he introduced himself as “Bacon” on the first day of your internship at the hospital.

Truthfully, however, it all comes down to one certain realization: seeing Baekhyun’s stupidly cute smile has become the sole thing you look forward to everyday. For the first two years at university, you did not know Byun Baekhyun. You knew of him. As fate would have it, you were bound to meet at some point with an undergraduate enrollment of around four thousand, and your sanity began its downward tumble the third week of junior year.

At the time, you couldn’t quite put your finger on why he left such a sour taste in your mouth. From a distance, he was a star; this great, big bundle of sunshine and joy, full of life and spirit and in the eyes of someone as mild-mannered as yourself, he was magnificent and everything you wished you were. But, once the barrier between you fell and your relationship swiftly jumped from strangers to friends, you realized just how polar opposite you were. Always going out of his way to meet new people and a little too chaotic for you personally, Baekhyun draws attention to himself without even trying. And you can’t blame him— it’s hard to go unnoticed when you prance around with a thousand-watt smile and the energy of a three-month-old golden retriever.

Sometimes, you wished he had chosen one of the arts as his major rather than health sciences.

Nevertheless, it is hard to ignore such an innocently beautiful soul such as Baekhyun. No matter how many times you told yourself to find a new lab partner, no matter how many countless nights you found yourself rolling out of bed, bundled up in your blankets and into the cold hallway of your residence hall to knock on Park Chanyeol’s door and tell him to open the window for his frost-bitten roommate hiding in the bushes, no matter how many this or how many that’s, you couldn’t help but fall in love with the friendship and chaos that came with Byun Baekhyun.

If it weren’t for that time you tried anal with your ex-boyfriend back in high school, you’d consider Byun Baekhyun to be the love of your life.

“Absolutely not,” you interrupt, looking up from your clipboard in order to search the crowd for the younger boy. Baekhyun groans, wrapping his arms around your waist and dropping his head on your shoulder. “C’mon, ___. He’s fine, you know Sehun.” He whines, adding a drawn-out ‘please’ against your ear. It makes your stomach sink for reasons you’d rather not disclose.

“Baek,” you scoff, wiggling out of his grip despite his best efforts of keeping you against him, “are you serious? Sehun quite possibly may be the smallest person in this room. He needs to rest.”

“He’s twenty pounds heavier than me!”

“Taller, too.”

“___,” he groans, crossing his arms over his chest and mustering his best straight face. It makes you laugh.

“I’m not arguing with you. He did Power Red; he’s not going anywhere. If he didn’t want to miss chem, then he should have made his appointment later. It’s one class. He’ll be fine.”

“Why must you be so stubborn?” Baekhyun sighs in defeat, combing muted silver hair away from his forehead. Your eyes follow the movement, distracted for hardly a second, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “I learned it from you,” you smile, nudging his arm with your elbow. The signature tilted smirk returns. “Tell Sehun I’m sorry, but I—well, we—can’t risk letting him leave. He could have a delayed effect and end up passed out in the staircase. Twenty more minutes and he can go.”

“I get it,” he hums, snatching the tentative schedule out of your hands before you can even protest. For as rash as he may be, Baekhyun is not dumb. And even if he was, he knows that when you are as unrelenting as you are now, there’s no point in arguing. “I think I’m gonna try and donate.”

“What?” You exclaim, maybe a little too loud if all the Red Cross employees shooting annoyed glares your way is anything to go by. Baekhyun truly is started to rub off on you. “I thought you were scared of needles?”

“Heights, ___,” he scoffs, “needles aren’t my favorite, but if I’m going to eventually put them in other people, I better get used to them for myself.” As he explains, he rolls up the sleeves of his hoodie and presses at the soft skin on the inside of his arm before stretching it out for your examination. “I mean,” you hum, holding him still and feeling around for a thick enough vein, “you definitely have the veins. Do you want me to hold your hand?” You sing the last part cutely, lips puckered out at him.

“Will you? Since Sehun has to stay over there, I have no one else,” Baekhyun retorts, using your previous resolve to his advantage. You can’t tell if he’s oblivious or simply choosing to ignore your mockery. Rolling your eyes, you drop his arm and reach for your clipboard, tearing it out of his grasp. “Don’t you have anything else better to do than annoy me? Aren’t you supposed to be watching the donors?”

“Well, yes, but—”

Baekhyun starts, trailing behind you before the shout of his name promptly cuts him off. “Baekhyun! Can you help Jongdae carry in more water?” See, precisely as you were saying.

“But I like annoying you,” he pouts, hugging onto your arm and holding on tight. “Sorry, Baek,” you offer, feelings in shambles because 1) he is so cute you could cry but 2) he’s really distracting and now you finally will be able to focus, at least while he’s gone. Frowning, he releases your arm at last, combing his hair back and once again, you feel like throwing up.

“Go see if you can donate when you’re done,” you remind him, nodding toward the rather quiet donor room. “Yeah, I will. Wish me luck,” Baekhyun grins, blowing you a kiss. Without a second thought, you blow one back.

You have begun walking on an incredibly unstable rope, you realize, the thin line distinguishing the way you look at Baekhyun diminishing each and every day. On one side, he is simply your friend, your lab partner, a coworker of sorts. Comrades working toward the same goal, and once it’s reached, you go your separate ways. But on the other hand, he is much more than that. Now that you no longer live on campus, days spent bullshitting in the dining hall or dorms over, you most certainly do not spend as much time together.

And yet, nothing has changed. Except for your feelings, of course. This time last year, you were minding your own damn business when Chanyeol had to go and mention how much time Baekhyun spends with you instead of him. “Sorry?” You had offered, unsure of what the crease in his brow meant.

“No… don’t be sorry,” he hummed, deep in thought and stabbing at his salad in disinterest, “not to be blunt, but he usually bounces from person to person each week. He’s been sticking to you for, what, six months? Something is up.”

“Don’t you live with him?” You asked, confused. What was he getting at here?

“Yeah, but Baekhyun doesn’t really talk romantics with me.”

“Romantics?” You exclaimed, spit flying from your lips. Luckily, he didn’t seem to notice.

“He definitely likes you. God, it all makes sense now! Okay, I need to do some interrogating,” suddenly rushing, Chanyeol was up and swinging his bag over his shoulder before you could blink an eye. “See ya, ___!”

“Wait!” You yelled out for him, but the obnoxiously tall boy just kept running, dodging students meandering around the dining hall. Slumping in your chair, you eventually turned to look out the window, watching as he continued his flight across campus. “Good talk.”

Nothing ever came up afterward. No answers, no clarifications, nada. Chanyeol never brought it up again, despite the expectant raise of your brows the next lunch you had alone with him. You were content shrugging it off— it was out of your hands. If Baekhyun liked you, so be it.

Or so you thought. Turns out, having such unanswered questions dangling over your head every time Baekhyun left his friends for you at parties, fell asleep with his head on your shoulder during chem, or arrived at your front door with your favorite boba in hand just because he ‘was driving by’ left your mind racing almost as fast as your heart. You thought, for some time, that you could dodge such budding emotions by countering it with all the things you didn’t like about Baekhyun. (Spoiler: it didn’t work.)

Even now, as you watch him catch up with Jongdae, the left side of your brain has already begun arguing with the right. You miss his annoying ass already, one side points out. But he was a distraction, now you have double the students to check in, the other reasons. With a heavy sigh, you shake your head to rid such enraging thoughts and turn to said students, counting each one before making your way to the first in line.

He can’t donate. You realize this before he has even left his seat.

From across the gymnasium, you have continued glancing his way as he went through the mini physical. Just before the finger prick, he shot you a thumbs up and a beaming smile bright enough to challenge the Sun before jerking in his seat at the sudden pinch. Laughing, the grin you returned has not even left your face before his shoulders are sagging, a cloud of disappointment replacing the anxious excitement that was there hardly ten seconds ago. Your smile is gone just as quickly as his.

Standing, Baekhyun nods one last time to the nurse before making his way over, rolling his shoulders and cracking his neck from side to side. “Low iron?” You guess, opening your arms for him to nestle into your side like the little munchkin he is. “Yeah,” he mumbles, miserable, and you cringe knowing he’s going to be like this all day now. “I wish I could donate, but…” You drone emptily, trying to change the subject despite the deceitfulness of your ‘wish.’ Over your dead body would you lie on one of those tables and have a harpoon in your arm.

“You should, now that I can’t,” he hums, breath warm on your skin. Convincing as snuggly Baekhyun is, it’s not happening. “Yeah, I’ll pass,” you snort, offering a faux smile to a group of sophomore girls making their way in, shooting confused and envious glances your way. “Make sure to grab a water before starting your Rapid Pass, ladies. If you have not eaten much today, there are snacks by Katie,” you spew, pointing to said girl across the room, “if you have any questions, let me know.” With one last feeble smile, you turn your back to them because, well, it’s awkward facing multiple females whose eyes are trained solely on the boy clinging to you.

“You’re hot when your all doctor,” Baekhyun whispers, lips brushing ever so softly against your collarbone. Suddenly, you regret taking your sweatshirt off during lunch. Swallowing past the panic rising in your throat, you scoff. “Doctor? What doctor are you seeing that directs their patients toward donuts, muffins, danishes—”

“Hot ones, I guess,” he interrupts, smirking against your skin. “Ooooh ‘kay,” you wheeze, heart racing and eyes wide as you wiggle away from him, “y’know, maybe I will donate. Just so you stop bugging me.” Gasping, Baekhyun fakes a bullet to the heart. “Ah, but here’s the thing,” he counters, following close behind as you make your way to the front table, “my job is to distract donors from the needle, hold their hand, tell them ‘good job!’ So, it looks like you’re stuck with me.”

Groaning, you choose to ignore the inexhaustible boy and smile to Lauren once you have reached her. “Do you know if anyone can cover for me for a little? I’m going to try and donate.”

Gasping, she ruffles through the papers spread about her for the volunteer log. Then, “You should be fine. After those girls, the next appointment isn’t until two. I thought you hated this whole concept?”

Snorting, you pull one of the laptops towards you and begin filling out the information needed for a walk-in. “Yeah, well,” tilting your head in Baekhyun’s direction, you sigh, “he couldn’t donate, so now I feel obligated to. Plus, I need a break.”

“Ah,” Lauren hums, writing your name and ‘Walk-In’ on a sticker before passing it to you, “are you guys…?”

Immediately catching what she is hinting at, you jump up from your knelt position and quickly return to your station. “Nope! Negative! Okay, bye Lauren! Thanks!” Laughing, she chooses to ignore your antics, watching after you with a knowing smile when Baekhyun realizes you have left and scrambles to catch up.

You’re hoping you won’t be eligible since you left the country for vacation with your family nine months ago.

Never mind. It’s fine.

Perhaps your heart rate will be too high. You’re pretty anxious, after all.

84. Shit.

You flinch when the quiet-mannered nurse pricks your ring finger. Praying that your iron will be too low, you lean forward in your seat just enough to see the machine’s reading. 13.4. Fuck.

“Alright, I’m just gonna need you to read this first paragraph and sign here,” she directs you, using a pen to point at each spot. When she stands to wave for the next potential donor, you glance up to search for Baekhyun. You could use one of his smiles right about now.

And what you ask for, you receive. Finding your gaze instantaneously, he shoots you bright, encouraging grin and a thumbs up. It’s enough to calm your nerves. A little.

Offering an uncomfortable smile back, you return to your paperwork and hurriedly finish up, your leg bouncing ceaselessly. “All done?” The nurse returns, smiling softly at you and taking the papers when you nod. “You can head over to the third table in the middle.” “Okie,” you squeak, nice, “thank you!”

Good god, what happened to never allowing one of these needles to go in your arm? Sure, you have had blood tests done before, Hell, you have even given someone else one! But this… this is different. This is no ordinary needle, and you certainly do not have Byun Baekhyun veins.

“How are you doing today?” The Red Cross worker greets you once you have reached the table, smile warm and comforting. Seoyeon, her nametag reads. “I’m, ah… I’ve been better, honestly,” your voice comes out shaky and weak. You cringe. Going to med school and you’re whining over a needle. A big, fat, wide needle that will stay in your arm for more than five minutes. “Aw, no! Why’s that?” Seoyeon pouts, shuffling through your papers and slapping a big sticker onto the bag your blood, eventually, will fill.

“I have pretty tiny veins, so I’m really nervous this isn’t going to go well for me,” you admit, artfully rolling the sleeves of your tee even higher. Humming as she finishes carrying over the rest of the equipment, Seoyeon helps you onto the cushioned table before standing beside you, reaching for your arms. “Well,” she starts, brushing over each one for a few seconds before tying a tourniquet around your right bicep, “lucky for you, we do in fact check to make sure your veins are big enough. Hansol, can you double-check that this is alright?”

Your nerves seemingly do not know how to feel at the given moment. On one hand, these are professionals. They know what they’re doing. Plus, Seoyeon is lovely and has certainly eased your anxiety. Nevertheless, you realize that if your veins are okay, that needle is going to be in you in minutes.

This Hansol skirts around the table to feel the two veins Seoyeon has gone back and forth prodding. “Hm,” he grunts, pressing harder on the vein set deeper beneath your skin, “this one is good.” Oh, Christ. “Okay! Thanks,” Seoyeon smiles, then, once he has left her side, “you can lie back this way, sweetie.”

“Okay,” you sigh, settling back and resting your head on the pillow. Unsure of how to situate yourself, you awkwardly cross your legs and nestle your left arm into the pockets of your joggers, right arm dangling over the edge of the table. Then, just as you have closed your eyes, “___!”

Oh, good. This should be interesting. “Hey, Baek,” you smile at the boy as he jogs over, stopping on your left side. “You made it! No backing out now, right?”

“No, no. I’m praying for the best,” you hum, turning away from him to look straight up at the ceiling as Seoyeon begins sanitizing your arm. “You’re gonna be fine,” Baekhyun sings, tugging your hand out of your pocket to intertwine his fingers with yours, “if Sehun could do it, so can you.”

“I’m just marking where your vein is, no need to tense up,” Seoyeon interrupts, chuckling at how easily your posture has gone rigid at the sensation. Funny, how you only tensed up because of Baekhyun’s tender gesture. “I know I’ll be okay, I just,” anxiously licking the desert-dryness of your lips, you once again turn to Baekhyun, “I’m not looking forward to feeling this thing in my arm for ten minutes.”

“Nah,” he giggles, thumb swiping back and forth against your skin, “I’ll distract you!” Yeah, well you do that every day anyway, you snort to yourself, shamelessly taking advantage of the moment and scanning over his features, zoning in on the pinkness of his lips and the tiny moles sprinkled about his face. From this angle, even the shitty LED lighting of the gym somehow makes him look immaculate. “Alright, I’m going to count down from three,” Seoyeon interrupts your gawking, though you haven’t really processed her words until she’s on two. “One…” She utters, and you are instantly squeezing your eyes closed just as hard as your squeezing Baekhyun’s hand as the needle first breaks skin.

“Oh, shit,” you heave once it’s completely sheathed, rolling the plastic grip anxiously in your increasingly sweaty hand, “that actually wasn’t so bad.” Now that Baekhyun has moved to stand directly behind your head, you stare straight up at him and muster your best smile. Really— it was not as bad as you imagined, felt just like regular blood work. As long as you don’t focus too much on it remaining in your arm, you’ll be fine.

“See! I knew you could do it,” he cheers, letting go of your free hand in favor of combing his fingers through your hair. “Ooh,” you quite literally purr, leaning your head back to give him further access, “so, Mr. This-Is-My-Job, is this how you distract donors?” Chuckling, Baekhyun continues to comb through the knots that have accumulated throughout the day. “No,” he admits, “I usually just talk to them about what they did over the weekend. You’re an exception, though.”

Christ, you hope he can’t feel the way your face heats up at his words. “Ah, well, this is great. Thanks, Baek,” humming, you cannot help but let your eyelids fall closed. Peak comfort when you're donating blood? Not what you would have expected.

“So, what did you do this weekend?”

“Well, I went to Target, which was kind of disappointing.”

“Oh, yeah! Didn’t I see on your story that you only got one pair of pants or something?”

“Yeah! Crazy, honestly. I needed to pick up some things and they were completely out. Even their clothes were kind of slacking.” Before he can reply, Seoyeon returns to check up on you. Gasping in surprise, she gives your shoulder a congratulatory nudge. “___! Look at you! You’ve already filled up a fourth of the bag.”

“Oh shit, really?” Laughing, you try to lean up in order to see, but there’s no use. “Have you been drinking a lot of water today?” She asks. Well, now that you think about it… “Huh. I guess I have. Nice.” Chuckling, she fiddles with the tape holding the needle in place before turning away once more.

“So,” Baekhyun starts conversation up once more, “did you do anything else?”

“I hung out with Junmyeon on Sunday again.” Suddenly, you wish you didn’t tell him that.

“Oh,” Baekhyun coughs, accidentally yanking too hard on the tiny braid he’s attempted by your temple, “how was that?”

“It was fun. He’s a great guy…” Clearly, you are hesitant and he easily catches it. “But…?”

“I don’t know,” he’s not you, “I feel really immature and lame compared to him. He’s like, super chill and polite and somehow, it makes me nervous and then I act like I’m on crack. He needs someone older than him, not younger. A lawyer, or something.”

“___, you’re getting a degree in Neuroscience. What the fuck is lame about that?” Baekhyun scoffs, undoing the braid and starting over on the other side. “I don’t know! I guess I just don’t have romantic feelings for him. Everyone keeps pushing me to go for it and he really is amazing, but… it’s just not what I want.”

“No one’s forcing you to date him, ___.”

Well, yeah, but he doesn’t know the bit where your friends are doing it so you can get over a certain someone else. “I know. I think he’ll be fine when I tell him I just want to be friends.”

When a heavy silence falls over you, you rush to change the topic. “So! What did you do this weekend?”

“I played New Horizons,” Baekhyun chuckles, giving up on the braid and going back to simply combing through your hair. When you laugh, you feel the vibration in your arm and realize with another wave of surprise that you still have a needle in you. Damn, looks like you’re a pro at this. Who knew!

“All weekend?” You snort. He definitely went out for drinks with Chanyeol or something.

“Yes, sadly,” oh, never mind, “I couldn’t help it. It’s so relaxing. I can’t wait to go home and play.” He sounds ashamed. “Hey,” you shrug, “sometimes we need a mental health day. Or weekend.”

“Or week.”

“Month?”

“Year, I’m thinking.”

In the midst of your giggle fit, Seoyeon returns, evidently shutting the two of you up. “You’re all done! I just have to take a few tubes and then I’ll tell you when I’m going to take the needle out.”

“Wow, was it just me or did that seem really quick?” Baekhyun asks, frantically moving to hold your hand when he notices you wince at the uncomfortable feel of the needle moving slightly as Seoyeon fills each tube. “No, you’re right,” she hums, “six minutes! Wasn’t so bad, right?”

“Not at all,” you agree, blinking up at the ceiling. Still, you can’t wait to be done. “You sure? Your hand is shaking really bad,” Baekhyun murmurs,  hovering directly above your face. He looks funny, messy hair cascading around him and cheeks looking extra squishy. It makes you smile. “Yeah, just nervous for it to come out, actually. Feel like it’s gonna hurt,” you admit, accidentally squeezing his hand when all Seoyeon does is remove the tape on your wrist keeping the line in place.

“Alright, you ready? It’s just going to a be a little pinch,” Seoyeon interrupts, giving your fingertips a reassuring squeeze. “Yeah,” you hum, instinctively sucking in a deep breath and squeezing your eyes shut.

The sensation that first registers in your brain is not that of Seoyeon slowly withdrawing the needle from beneath your skin. Actually, it’s unnoticeable behind the gentle pressure lingering upon your lips, soft to touch and minty in taste. Blistex, you recognize, eyes flying open just in time to see Baekhyun leaning back up. “Did you just—”

“Alright, keep pressure on this for me and keep your arm straight up,” Seoyeon interjects, oblivious to what just transpired as she presses a hefty square of gauze to your skin. You oblige, brain cells going haywire still trying to piece together the fact that Byun Baekhyun just kissed you.

“Do you do that to everyone?” Is the first thing you blurt to the grinning boy, who, surprisingly so, wears cheeks just as rosy as yours. “No,” he laughs, moving to the side and continuing to stroke you hand, “just donors named ___.”

“Oh,” wrinkling your nose, you slowly lean upright once Seoyeon instructs you to do so, “can I ask why or am I just special?” When she busies herself for few moments cleaning up all of the equipment, Baekhyun releases your hand in order to cup your face with both hands. “Well, of course you’re special,” he murmurs, thumbs swiping against your jaw, “but I figured this was a good opportunity to show you how much I like you.”

It takes a fat second for you to realize what he’s just said. Like you?

“I’m gonna kill him,” you groan, definitely not the response he was expecting if the way he retracts is anything to go by. “Kill who?”

“Chanyeol! Like, a year ago he went all detective mode on me trying to figure out if you liked me, but then he never said anything again, so for the past year I’ve been going nuts trying not to fall for you because I figured if he had nothing to say, you probably didn’t like me like that, yet here we are a year later and—”

In the midst of your mindless babbling, Seoyeon coughs, promptly shutting you up and you turn to her with a wince. “I just need to wrap you up, then you can head over to Recovery,” her attempt to hide her smile is futile but you don’t comment on it, instead allowing her to wrap elastic tape around your elbow. “Leave this on for about an hour, or you can take it off after twenty minutes. Other than that, you’re good to go!”

“Thanks so much, Seoyeon,” smiling appreciatively at her, you slowly turn to slide off the table with the help of her grip on your other arm. Before you are even fully upright, Baekhyun has rounded the table to help, slipping his arm between yours. Honestly, you feel perfectly fine, but you’re not about to go arguing right now. Once he starts leading the two of you toward Recovery, he breaks the silence once more. “So, were you finished back there, or can I talk?”

Cringing, you shake your head, avoiding looking him in the eyes. “No, I’m done.”

“Good,” at this, you pinch his arm, “Chanyeol didn’t say anything because I told him not to.” Baekhyun shushes you when your mouth opens to argue. “I thought I would make a move a lot sooner. But every time I went to, I just started panicking thinking you didn’t feel the same, because, y’know, you don’t show much emotion. And then you started hanging out with Junmyeon… but that doesn’t seem to be working out, so I decided to wing it.”

Your jaw certainly must be on the floor. Stopping by the snacks, Baekhyun releases your arm so you can fill your hands with a donut, apple juice, and a bag of Cheez-Its. “Glad to see we’re both airheads,” you grumble with a mouthful of donut, “I say we blame Chanyeol.” Making sure you safely seat yourself onto the mats spread around the room, Baekhyun then joins and sits crisscross across from you. “I agree. It’s his fault.”

Then, once you have stopped laughing, Baekhyun leans in close, face centimeters from yours and evidently stealing all the air from your lungs. God, he sure is beautiful. “This means you’ll go out with me, right?” He whispers, wiping away a sprinkle that has managed to stick itself to the corner of your lips.

“I thought you were going to play New Horizons when you got home?” You tease, raising one arm to sling across his shoulders. Groaning, he finally cups your face in his hands, strawberry pink lips ever so slightly brushing yours as his smirk deepens. “I am, but you can come watch.”

[vintagerry]

Help?

Authors note: I know it’s been a really long time since I released anything but here we are! The hyped up virgin!harry fic! A huge thank you to @sweetcreatureinthedark for all the help in editing and making this fic what it is now! I love you 💕💕

featuring: smut, blowjob, cursing obviously, I think that’s it??

Harry wasn’t exactly popular in high school. He was the quiet one who would simply get his work done and go home so he could play music or write poems. His social life wasn’t all that intense until a bubbly girl with a bright smile bounced into his chemistry class.

Ever since that day the beautiful girl loaned him a pencil, Harry was whipped.

Barely a month after their first meeting, Harry and Y/N became attached at the hip, spending every lunch period, spare and after school time together. After the first month of being best friends, Y/N got tired of waiting for the sweet curly-haired boy to ask her out, so she had to make a move on her own. During study hall one day, Harry had been waiting for Y/N in the back of the library, only to see her bounce inside with bright red lipstick and excitement in her words. “Harold!” she sang as she sat beside him, leaning over and smiling wider than before. “I have something for you, close your eyes, m’kay?” Harry raised an eyebrow suspiciously but simply let her do what she needed to do.

His eyes closed softly and without a delay, her lips were on his. The feeling was very new, Harry hadn’t kissed anyone before. Her lips were so soft, he had no idea how to react.

Harry tried to move against her but it was kind of awkward and messy. Y/N giggled shyly and moved away. “Sorry! I had to," she paused, feeling his reaction before continuing to ramble. "I felt like we were there, but we’re not, I guess." Y/N rocked on her heels anxiously, "I’m sorry! Don't let me make this weird.”

Harry listened to her babble, trying to calm her down, reaching for her arm with a soothing yet nervous tone. “It’s not that. No, um, I actually," Harry paused, trying to figure out how to word this confession, "I quite enjoyed that. I just didn’t, I’ve never -"

“You’ve never been kissed?” Y/N cut him off with a louder exclamation than she meant to.

“Little louder, petal, don’t think the history wing heard you,” Harry blushed, gently tugging her hand to move him closer to her, his cheeks flushed as he looked away from her and around the room.

Throughout the afternoon of studying, Harry’s fingers kept travelling up to his lips, tracing where they had met hers. As the days passed, Harry found himself daydreaming about the way her lips felt against his, how he would kill to feel that all the time. Meanwhile, Y/N found herself remembering fondly how adorable Harry looked with her red lipstick smudged across his lips and a deep blush in his cheeks, how cute he would look with a collection of her lipsticks smeared upon his lips and chin.

The relationship between Harry and Y/N wasn’t much different after the incident in the library, though the two were increasingly affectionate in public settings, which was new. Instead of walking alongside each other with arms almost touching, Y/N would sneak their hands together, her fingers laced through his, prompting a blush to take over Harry’s cheeks and nose. 'Movie Night Fridays' was the first promise Harry and Y/N had made to each other that alluded to something more than friends. Casually sitting around her bedroom after the first time he had gone to her house to work on a chemistry project, he mentioned that his weekends were always too boring. Taking his hint, Y/N proposed that they'd watch an awful 'chick flick' (although Harry found that term quite demeaning) and then fall asleep eating cheap pizza and an arrangement of their favorite snacks. That first week after the kiss, 'Movie Night Friday' was seemingly better than any other. On occasion, YN would cuddle herself into Harry's side, claiming that she was a bit too cold and he was warm.

Now, a week and a kiss later, YN was tucked right into Harry's side, and his heart was beating unusually fast. Her lips were so inviting to him, he just wanted to taste them again. Harry wasn’t paying much attention to the horrid movie playing ahead, instead, he spent his time just looking at how Y/N’s eyelashes fluttered when she blinked, at how her nose crinkled at corny jokes from the main characters on screen. Harry had abandoned his attention to the movie, opting instead to admire the beautiful girl attached to his hip. There was something about the way she appeared when she was interested in a movie, eyebrows drawn together in a focused manner, her expertly painted nude lips pulled between her teeth as an exciting scene unfolded in front of her.

YN also used the dark room to her advantage, especially on the occasion that Harry turned away. Her eyes danced across his soft features, the lips that she had felt against hers in the library, the nose that she often tapped with her finger to tease him, the eyelashes that she openly envied. All of the beautiful things about him seemed to stand out even more in the state she was in. YN was trying, she really was, but every time she saw Harry’s tongue dart out to wet his flushed lips, her heart skipped a beat.

She couldn’t take it anymore, she decided. Making some sort of move felt like her best option to have her lips on his. “Ba-," she quips, a pet name almost slipped out as she spoke to get his attention. "Harry?” Upon hearing his name, Harry turned his head to face YN, smiling at the delicate expression she had on her face.

“Yeah?” he replied softly, not expecting what would come next.

As if in slow motion, Y/N brought her hands up to cup his soft jaw and pressed her lips to his. The kiss was different than the one they shared in the library. The two simply absorbed one another’s breaths. Harry reluctantly broke the kiss and looked at YN below him, her lips slick and swollen, her eyes glossed over.

“What was that for?” he asked sheepishly, she simply giggled and pressed a soft peck to his lips once more.

“May I?” she asked softly, gesturing to straddle his lap. He nodded nervously, pulling her up onto his thighs.

“You’re pretty," Harry let out a whispered compliment, using the hand that wasn’t resting extremely softly on her waist to hesitantly coax her into another kiss.

“You’re pretty, too, Harry,” YN whispered against his lips, slowly disconnecting and eyeing over his face. Much to his displeasure, she could feel him begin stirring in his sweats, the grey material contrasting against her skin. He could be felt against her inner thigh, causing a smile to break onto her attempt at a sultry expression. Her confidence shocked him and his inexperience, unsure of how to speak to her in such a sensual way. “I liked the kiss, too," YN whispered before nibbling on his ear. "Maybe just as much as you."

Harry could barely hold himself together, his boner aching against the soft material of his pants while his heart almost exploded out of his sweaty chest. "You did?"

"Could help you with it, if you want."

“Help? You wanna," Harry gulps, trying to maintain his composure, "help me? As in...” His words came out in whimpers, almost involuntary in their sound. This was the closest anyone had ever been to him and he wasn’t exactly sure how to handle it.

“Have a few things we could do, if you’re okay with it. I want to,” Y/N spoke, her confidence increasing quicker as Harry’s shaft nudged against her thigh.

“Do you mean?" Harry tilts his head suggestively, his hands were clammy against her skin. "I’ve never done that or much of anything. You were my first kiss and, um, I -," Harry babbled typically, only to be cut off by her thumb against his lips.

“I can just," YN sighs, unsure of how to word what she is implying, "help you out? Doesn't have to be sex, right now.” Her lips pressed to his neck and the skin behind his ear, coaxing a whimper from his swollen lips. “I was thinking if you’re up for it, I could go down on you." Her mouth immediately stopped moving on his skin and her eyes met his, trying to gauge his reaction. "I don’t have to if you’re uncomfortable though.” Y/N was trying so hard to be careful and attentive, but she really just wanted his cock in her mouth. She hadn’t seen him naked before, feeling him against her was making her mind travel to the dirtiest of places, and she was impressed.

Harry nearly choked on air hearing those words. She wanted to put him in her mouth? She wanted to suck him off? This couldn’t be happening. “Oh no, if you want to I’d love," Harry stops himself, already probably sounding too eager. "I mean, you can if you want to. I can just leave, actually, and um, we can forget about this. You shouldn’t feel pressured just because I’m -." Harry cut himself off with a high pitched moan he didn’t know he could make as he felt Y/N’s hand press against his clothed hard-on. “Or, or you can! I mean,” he breathed, his babbles masked by how much heavier he was breathing, more than he thought was possible.

Y/N slowly moved down his body, sinking to her knees in front of him. “Did you want me to take off my shirt? That’s something I’ve heard of and I don’t know,” Harry questioned, fumbling with the hem of his soft tee.

“You do whatever feels right, I can take off mine if you’d like. It's, y'know, something to look at?” Y/N offered, taking one of his clammy hands in hers.

Harry shook his head. “You don’t have to. Don’t take that as me not wanting to see your boobs, because, God, I’m sure they’re fantastic, I just," he mutters, trying to hold his voice deeper than a high-pitched whimper. "We’ve only kissed, and you’re about to blow me. I'm so, fuck.”

Harry finished his anxious sentence with a moan as Y/N nudged his hips up and pulled his sweats and boxers down, releasing his cock from the cotton confines.

Y/N’s mouth watered at the sight of him. He was even bigger than she had thought, than she had felt, and it was pretty. His head was a shimmering deep red colour just begging to be touched, leaking from the stimulation of her hand on him. “Okay, baby, I’m gonna go slow for you," she whispered reassuringly before kissing his inner thigh softly.

Being cautious so she didn’t scare him away, y/n pressed a feather-light kiss onto his tip before leaving the same down the underside of his shaft. “Just breathe baby, I’m gonna make you feel good.” Harry shuddered at the feeling mixed with the sultry tone of his best friend’s voice. A collection of high pitched whimpers and deep groans escaped Harry’s lips as he felt the warmth of y/n’s mouth on him.

As soon as she wrapped her lips around the leaky head and hollowed her cheeks slightly, Harry was about to burst. “Fuck! I’m gonna- I’m sorry but I’m definitely not gonna last!” There was a whine behind his words as he gripped the couch beside him, close to letting go. “It’s okay baby, I know.” Y/n reassured him between sucks. She began bobbing her head slowly and Harry was a goner.

“Fuck! I’m- I’m cumming!“ He moaned out as his seed spilled into Y/n’s mouth. She moaned softly around him as he came, swallowing all of him. “Was that good for you?” Y/n asked him, a small hint of sarcasm behind her words. “Yes. Yes! Fuck yes it was.” Harry answered eagerly, still catching his breath.

After he calmed down, Harry pulled his pants back up slowly, wincing at the feeling of fabric against his still sensitive shaft. “Uhm...best friends don’t do that kind of stuff...right?” He questioned, hoping he could get some kind of answer. He really liked y/n, always had, and she obviously liked him a little bit, right? She was just on her knees for him, she HAS to like him. “I’m still your best friend, Harry. But, we can be more if you want?” Y/n responded to him, stroking her thumb over his cheek. “More? Like...you and I could be-?” He cut himself off, not sure what word y/n would classify them as. “Dating, Harold. I can be your girlfriend.” She giggled at his nerves, kissing him softly once more.

“Holy shit! I have a girlfriend!” Harry chuckled in disbelief and kissed his girlfriend again.

[radiofreeyurick]

Thus The Man Continues to Fall

By Nick Yurick

20 years after the tragedy that shaped a generation now haunted by final days of the War that was spurred by it, and newly bereft of so many previously held sentiments, causes, or beliefs that felt so vital and true on that day, for many, all that remains is The Falling Man

Any adolescent on the verge of social awareness has to feel it coming. Though some may only be students of history out of obligation at that age, rather than genuine interest or concern, the patterns and shifts begin to take on palpable rhythms of causes and effects, ebbs and flows, and calms preceding storms. The moment when the News becomes a Documentary, replete with imagined underscoring, slow motion, and a dramatic voiceover. The moment when Life becomes History.

At 14 years of age I was already an aspiring multihyphenate. actor, artist, musician, perhaps educator, and on that day, and at this moment it seems, a journalist. Thus it remains a fitting coincidence that for me, Life became History when I was in second period school newspaper class. Much as my grandparents and parents had told me over the years of their “where were you” moments in experiencing the Bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, mine took place as I struggled to upload photos of the first day of school from an already outdated late ‘90s digital camera. It is perhaps for this reason that, though my life and work since have spanned multiple fields and environments, from stage to screen to the classroom, it is still through the mind of a journalist that I revisit this day every year. Be it with my continued work as a student journalist in the years immediately following or later as one of millions of social media pundits in the years to come, I have felt compelled to revisit the facts of why and how every year. But as the History we’ve lived the past 20 years continues to make those answers more and more evasive, my fascination, and that of many others, has shifted to the actions of a different, and more functional, camera a thousand miles away. The camera held by a Pulitzer Prize winning Associated Press photographer named Richard Drew as he captured The Falling Man.

It is here that I must humble myself a bit, being well aware that the undying fascination with the image of this lone inverted figure has only increased in recent years. In a sardonic act of self-awareness I could just as well title this essay, “This 9/11, if You Read One Unqualified Take on ‘The Falling Man,’ Make it THIS one.” Day to day I am but one of millions who fight for stage and screen time, clicks, words, and any vague measure of digital real estate before taking a break to get back to my woodworking hobby. Thus I only ask that you read on with the knowledge that the History being lived by a 34 year old armchair philosopher as he chain smokes at his Chromebook is as real as the History being lived by the septuagenarian widower in the Oval Office. As it relates to The Falling Man though, for myself and many like me, today The Falling Man is all that remains of that day.

-Trajectories and Arrival Points

In analyzing any historical event, we are drawn to examine it in terms of the trajectory it puts us on and arrival point it leads us to. These consequences often take the forms of calls to action, causes to be taken up, or revelations about American society of the day. In any case, they tell us why the world we fell asleep in that evening, or that many didn’t live to, was different from the world in which we had awakened that morning. Pearl Harbor placed us on the trajectory of entering World War II, drawing the United States and its Allies into a global conflict of unprecedented scale and accelerating the end of the Great Depression, with the arrival point of the Nation’s emergence as a global leader and the establishment of “The American Dream” in the form of a higher standard of living than was previously accessible to many. The Assassination of John F. Kennedy placed us on the trajectory of increased escalation in Vietnam, leading to a new era of social unrest and mistrust in our institutions. Simultaneously the inspiration to carry forth what was considered the late President’s unfinished work, gave birth to heightened social activism and significant leaps forward in Civil Rights and Women’s Rights. This was largely seen through to the arrival points of our withdrawal from Vietnam, the Resignation of Nixon, and the dawn of “Morning in America” with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Although every single historical event echoes eternally, in American Society we are accustomed to some feeling of victory or at least reprieve, as if the demons that emerged from these national tragedies have been temporarily vanquished in our day to day lives while we lick our collective finger to gingerly turn the page on the next chapter.

-The Curtain

It is, at this very moment, 12:26 PM on September the 7, 2021. It occurs to me that to write with such perceived urgency about another September Tuesday a score of years prior will hopefully become as passe and bland as any of the seemingly newfound conspiracies on Kennedy’s Assassination have now become. Yet I continue to do so, because as of now, the aforementioned page has yet to turn. In the previously mentioned epochs, though there were plenty who still saw through the folly of the “American Dream” and the falsehood of “Morning in America,” even an equitable specter to those has yet to emerge. The Election of Barack Obama seemed a fitting placeholder in 2008, but the quick return to the frustrations of petty political gridlock coupled with the now pyrrhic victory we found in the final defeat of Osama bin Laden, made immediately clear that this generation would be visited by no such specter. This absence may on the surface seem a failure on the part of the current proverbial page turners to do so, but is also a result of our increasingly short attention spans having already written so many of the remaining pages that there is no consensus on Which page we may now turn to, but only the widespread certainty that we can’t. Because one thing we have so much more of than those preceding generations, be it the Boomers post Pearl Harbor or the X-ers post Kennedy, is an inescapable curiosity about what may be written on them and more importantly a will to read it. Or in stronger terms, this generation now carries the burden of knowing that which may be on those pages could prove our only salvation, as none other has made itself apparent. Thus if historical events can be seen in terms of a curtain being pulled back and then drawn again while the stage is reset, now the curtain has gone up in flames.

This so-called Curtain can come in the form of where we as a society now place our faith, or more specifically, what entity we trust to lead us to the aforementioned arrival point. With most national tragedies our instinct is to place our trust in our leaders, imploring them to step up when our faith in our own security has crumbled. Alhough with 9/11 we became quickly aware that we lacked an FDR to guide us through the darkness through Fireside Chats, we still entertained the notion that we were to have some faith in the very idea of Leadership itself, however personally distasteful or incompetent we found that Leader to be. By 2004 however, the leadership of George W. Bush had not only failed to bring us a perceptible victory in our immediate cause in Afghanistan, but had begun an entirely new sideshow in Iraq the previous year. This was the beginning of what has fittingly been referred to as “The Forever War,” where battles are not simply initiated by belligerents and ended by victors, but fought on eternally, perverting the traditional goal of final victory as we previously knew it. And if there is an end, it will likely be celebrated by none, if any, who were present when it began. This Forever War began to be seen as such during the Presidency of Barack Obama. While a controversial election in 2000 had already lead many of my generation to view the failed leadership of his predecessor Bush as a clerical error of sorts, we also blamed the misfortune of Our Generation’s Moment having taken place before we had come of age to elect Our Generation’s President. And yet the Page remained unturned. The aforementioned killing of Osama bin Laden did little to quell the Forever War, and domestically we were afforded mere scraps in the form of slightly more accessible healthcare for the few capable of navigating a bureaucratic system now more inconsistent and Byzantine than ever. Meanwhile societal issues such as racial equity and LGBT+ rights only achieved progress as a result of the larger culture elevating them to the status of the baseline right thing to do, but only when it saw fit. All of that being the case, 2016 arrived with an all too ideal stage set for the rise of Donald Trump, or more fittingly the fall of Leadership and the sheer laughibility that it ever represented a concept worthy of a generation’s trust. Even with Trump’s replacement by Joe Biden after the bitterly contested 2020 election, the ensuing Insurrection of January 6, 2021 cemented the new reality: there is now no such thing as Leadership, but only who You choose to believe.

Thus the Man continues to Fall…

-The Meaning of We

Two months prior to this writing, our nation celebrated the 245th year of its independence with the usual bombast we’ve become accustomed to. However each year for many the “bombs bursting in air” referred to in song seem to ring more and more hollow, as does the song itself. The hollowness of these verses seems a far cry from the days of ubiquitous flag waving and the shared sense of national pride we experienced twenty years ago. An outside force having done our country such grievous harm, we were called upon to show that world that We, the victims, truly represented the way of right and justice, while They, the aggressors, were but barbarous heathens, lashing out against the world’s brightest beacon of Freedom. We sought to show that our National identity embodied the supreme ideal of the civilized and just world we should aspire to, and that our way of life, the American Way, was anathema to the ways of those who employed violence and terror as a means to achieve their interests. This has long been what we’ve been taught to believe of our Nation, especially when such destruction has been brought to our shores, as if to say, “We are not like them, We would never do this. We are America, and to be American is to be on the side of Good.” Alas, as the Curtain’s smoldering remnants now hang in tatters, through the lazily wafting smoke we have seen America’s failings writ large in the ashes. Not only those we would previously chalk up to “a different time,” or “another generation,” but those being carried out as we speak. Thus Patriotism, as a concept defined by a faith in the unfailing virtue of one’s country, has experienced a superficial rebirth in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, only to be followed by a slow death in the years since.

It is here that we must revisit those previously mentioned pages in our History which we failed to turn, those unread or forgotten chapters that may not have fit into the collective identity that we wished to cultivate. For the History we once read was often presented to us as in a sanitized narrative, compiled as a companion piece to the definition of Patriotism we were compelled to accept. The heroic vision we once held of America during World War II, as saviors from unprecedented evils on either side of the globe, has now been graffitied over in these pages with stories of her persecution and internment of Japanese-Americans, an injustice not even acknowledged for nearly fifty years after. On other pages, the names of millions of European Jews who were turned away from our shores early in the war, many to their deaths, are now scrawled hastily in desperation, as though hoping that someone, in some distant year, may someday bear witness and validate their humanity as our country, and even one of our most venerated Leaders personally, failed to in their lifetimes. Even still, the pages following the war, heralding the establishment of the American Dream, now contain detailed revelations of redlining, “white flight,” and the practices that excluded People of Color from being included in the idyllic America we were thought to have achieved during this period. 

Indeed this alternate chapter continues through the 1960s and to this day, where the America that was thought to have humbly shown remorse and emerged as a global leader in Civil Rights, redressing the atrocities of Slavery and Jim Crow, is seen to have done so with the upmost reluctance. This America instead sought to bolster its image by now phasing out more blatant forms of discrimination in favor of practices more pervasive and insidious. Wage discrimation served to keep People of Color impoverished and desperate, effectively prohibiting them from moving to areas with better access to education and opportunities. With limited access to education, cycles of generational poverty continued this trend. In the face of poverty, those suffering were often forced to turn to the drug trade or other forms of criminal enterprise as a means of achieving even a glimmer of the prosperity that was supposed to define this chapter in American History or even to sustain the very lives of themselves and their families. And when “Morning in America” dawned in the 1980s, also did the rise of the “War on Drugs,” which further criminalized and demonized the only means of income that many already living in poverty had at their disposal. Meanwhile the introduction of crack cocaine to the inner cities provided a more abundant and addictive product to target, leading to harsher prison sentences for those peddling the substance and more debilitated addicts left in its wake. 

But America watched as First Lady Nancy Reagan appeared on television's most popular sitcom of the day, Diff’rent Strokes. In the Very Special episode, Mrs. Reagan’s obliviously grandmotherly voice comforted the precocious and diminutive young protagonist Arnold, an African-American child of the same poverty the American Dream shunned, now in the care of a wealthy white benefactor (and played by Gary Coleman who himself later symbolized an exploitative and predatory entertainment industry), along along with millions of other wayward youths at risk of falling victim to the ongoing drug epidemic, ironically fueled and enabled by the same America that created it. Arnold, and any of those watching could always, “Just Say No.” As though it were a choice. As though any of it were ever a choice. As though choice wouldn’t soon prove to be as illusory as the American Dream was to so many others who experienced naught but cold dark nights during “Morning in America.” As though the concept of choice wouldn’t also be blamed for the plight of LGBTQ+ Americans whose lives were destroyed by the AIDS epidemic that was stigmatized and swept under the rug by this same administration during this period. 

In the past twenty years, these undercurrents that eroded the notion of Patriotism in the fifty years prior now flow freely on the surface. Though these preceding chapters, ones that told of these racial, economic, and cultural struggles, were written on scraps of hotel paper or the backs of envelopes by those who lived them, now these stories grab headlines. Headlines that reveal now more than ever the long held role of the police in maintaining these systems of oppression, as well as the consistent biases ingrained in them against the communities they were sworn to protect. Though the Patriotism that flared so brightly after 9/11 was accompanied by an increased reverence toward law enforcement officers, many having lost their lives in those towers, the ensuing decades revealed their institution’s role in excluding so many from the justice and civility our Patriotic ideal was supposed to stand for, instead embroiling them in lives lived in terror from the violence the country was supposed to stand against. So now the iconic waving flag of stars and stripes turns on its side, as the stars fade and the stripes turn to the vertical walls of the doomed Twin Towers, split by one helpless, inverted figure.

Thus the Man continues to Fall…

-Truth, War, and the War on Truth

Last night as I readied myself for bed, I opened the News app on my iPhone one last time before turning in. Though my at times masochistic addiction to the news cycle had been in a remission of sorts after the emotional burnout of a pandemic filled year, it has experienced a brief relapse of late. I sometimes view it as a quest for positivity, a search for hope, and some indication, any indication, that things are getting better, but more often it’s simply to make sure I haven’t missed the last bad thing to have happened. Indeed such an addiction is far more possible now as the news is more accessible than ever. I’ve often thought that my generation’s predilection for ‘90s nostalgia wasn’t a mere longing for our childhood or for a pre-9/11 America, but a wish to return to a time when escaping the often horrific barrage of news stories was as simple as tossing a newspaper into the recycling bin or switching off the TV. But with more and more of our very existence taking place online, the news has become inextricably intertwined with it to the point that to disconnect would risk severing our ties with our work, our activities and our socialization. Perhaps too this nostalgia is linked to a time when the news by and large represented the truth, or at least the basic facts of the day. Though valid criticisms of media biases have long existed, widespread disdain for factual storytelling is at an all time high and consensus on any voice, even one voice, we can trust is nonexistent. My generation will likely be the last to even remember a reliably comforting presence like Peter Jennings reporting the events of 9/11, or our parents’ memories or Walter Cronkite tearfully informed us of the killing of Kennedy, or the multitude of trusted local radio announcers tasked with delivering the tragic news that broke on December 7, 1941. Much like the idea of Leadership, loss of faith in The Truth is another backdrop against which the Man continues to Fall…

What struck me though about the news story that appeared on the smudged touch screen of my iPhone yesterday evening was its similarity to one that may have appeared next to a coffee stained newspaper on our kitchen table any morning before I departed for 4th grade in 1996. Further, I tell you this was never where and when anyone who had lived through the past twenty-five years would still expect to see the headline: “Taliban Whip Women Protesting Interim Government.” This is what losing a War looks like.

It is for good reason that the Second World War has been referred to as “America’s Last Good War,” and that the War in Vietnam led to an all around loss of faith in war itself as an instrument of foreign policy and a means of progressing our causes. And with America’s participation in War taking on the form of quick and focused operations, isolated police actions, and distantly coordinated air strikes since then, the large scale mobilization against Afghanistan in the Fall of 2001 (rumored at the time to be leading to Congress’s first formal Declaration of War since 1941) cheered by vengeance seeking Patriots, perhaps now to be the Last Patriots, was equally as necessary and noble in beginning what was sure to become known as “America’s First Good War of the 21st Century?” For when, albeit not for ten years, American forces finally decimated Al Qaeda and killed Osama bin Laden, did America not cheer and celebrate throughout her streets, no doubt inspiring many a tear to trickle down the withered cheeks of those who recalled witnessing such on VJ Day in their much younger years, now assured safety in their homeland? For surely a further ten years mired in the unforgiving deserts and treacherous hillsides of the region, as thousands more of our soldiers shed their blood upon the land and return dismembered, traumatized, or not at all, surely that gained our country some unheralded boon to our interests, any strategic advantage, or the meanest notion of progress in the lives of our citizens or more importantly the people whose country we occupied for two decades? Why then, does America’s last plane departing from Kabul Airport nearly a score of years after the first of hers rained bombs not so far from it, instead truly feel like the final Fall of our long dying faith in War itself?

Because when I read a headline from Afghanistan last night, in high definition through the tired eyes of a young man feeling far older than he had earned any right to, and it remained (even after 20 years of frantically advancing and retreating soldiers, deafening blasts from bombs and improvised explosives, and so much more sanguine blood streaming from wounded flesh of all the colors of the world) so dissimilar from one that would have flashed onto a comparatively fuzzy television screen to meet the cheery eyes of an enthusiastically Patriotic Cub Scout, proud of the Leader his parents would take part in reelecting later that year (though, ironically, this Leader would himself have his own part to play in our collective loss of faith in Leadership), well...I simply could feel no other way. This is what losing a war looks like…

...and thus the Man continues to Fall.

 And while our country losing its faith in War should be welcomed as a sign of progress and our collective evolution toward the civilization that was to serve as a cornerstone of our now-fallen Patriotism, it can only be truly welcomed when it is replaced instead by a renewed and sincere faith in Peace! And perhaps in global affairs, in a nominal and superficial sense, Peace is gaining some believers, though I can’t confidently believe all hold this faith sincerely as much as out of a cynically held tool of self-preservation until the war profiteers who pull their strings find new markets for their wares. But America’s faith in Violence is now stronger than ever. Carried out now by citizens on our streets rather than soldiers across the world, by police in squad cars rather than infantry in tanks, and now, perhaps imperceptibly, by viruses in our lungs spreading freely through uncovered orifi, violence is embraced by America as a whole in ways that make any notion that anyone this violent nation killed halfway across the world made us safer these last twenty years. In that same period, a new record for the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history has been set, first by a disturbed and alienated college student in Virginia, then by a would-be terrorist with a history of hate crimes at an LGBT+ nightclub in Orlando, and finally by his immediate usurper of this horrific distinction who just the following year rained bullets down from a modified assault rifle upon concertgoers in Las Vegas while perched far above them in his hotel room. Expanding our scope to the top five shootings, the other two on the list took place during just this past decade, the first carried out upon children by a mentally ill youth at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, and the other at a church in Texas, by a resentful and misogynistic former spouse of one of the parishioners, a uniquely American demon consumed with wanting. In each instance the tired argument, dating back to the pre-9/11 massacre at Columbine and beyond, was made, that our government’s comparatively lax laws on gun ownership were to blame, but after the killings at Sandy Hook in 2012 changed nothing in that regard, that argument has felt increasingly futile. After all, when a country does fails to restrict such instruments of death after they’re used to murder 27 children, it doesn’t really want to. And to blame the mere presence of guns sidesteps the truth at the root of these shootings: modern America breeds killers, and more effective ones than ever.  

But while Americans react to the violence perpetrated by mass shootings with condemnation and abhorrence, the violence carried out by an increasingly militarized police force breeds division and itself, violent rhetoric as the calls to find more peaceful solutions to making our streets safer are met with calls for more violence and diversions of blame to the victims themselves. This rash of violence was once countered with the statement that, “police brutality in America isn’t getting worse, it’s just getting filmed,” once again ignoring the forgotten chapters in our History in which we have now read that policing in America has played a part in targeting and criminalizing People of Color since its near inception. And as indeed everything is being filmed now, it permeates our culture to the point that it now builds upon itself influencing our every interaction, becoming a key talking point in the hate speech that now passes for political discourse. The result being the undeniable fact that the Fall of our Faith in War has not given way to the Rise of our Faith in Peace. Not in any meaningful way across the globe, and within our own borders it has shifted to a Rise in Faith in War upon Ourselves. And meanwhile…

...the Man continues to Fall…

-Tilling the Earth to Grow Softer Ground

...but where will he land?

In embarking on all of my writings, in contrast to the manner in which our country begins so many of its wars, I never do so without some intention of finding some source of hope or comfort, some path forward to progress, or, when setting out with the most optimistic of outlooks, perhaps a solution to the issues explored. While there was little to be had as I drafted the first few segments, it also became all the more necessary in the face of revisiting so much of the despair, confusion, and upheaval my fellow Americans and I have experienced these last twenty years as well as much of what those who came before did the decades examined prior. Thus it is fitting that while the preceding passages of this article were written in multiple sessions on my porch this week while the searing summer sun begins to give way to the first chilly autumn winds, I conclude this piece sitting on my bed as the first minutes of September the 11th, 2021 tick by. While many of the recent writings about Richard Drew’s iconic photograph have sought to confirm, or at investigate clues as to, the identity of its subject. In writing this piece I was reminded of so much of the American lives currently being lived now takes place in a culture where many are emboldened by the absence of names or faces. Thus to the notion that one would seek to identify this blurry, tragic figure, I retort: in a society where to be nameless and faceless can mean to be validated or even in some way seem enviable, what meaning could this man’s name and face possibly hold were it revealed to the masses? Instead it is perhaps better he continue his descent in anonymity and transubstantiate in our collective consciousness, and perhaps enjoy the comparative bliss felt only when one’s form shifts to that of a generational metaphor.

But as a now belabored metaphor, surely worn and windburned by his descent through my accountings of over a half-century’s worth of America’s broken promises, cheapened values, and hidden hatreds that were really in plain sight, he certainly deserves a softer place to land than the mattress that now serves as my roost, upon which I try to write one up for him. And from it I am reminded as well of the faiths that fell from our very homes, many of which we held our most steadfast trust. Our generation having now experienced the twin economic upheavals of the 2008 financial crisis and the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, faith in our dreams has fallen. And when the fall of this faith was begun by the shortsightedness and bad advice of those who first told us to believe in our dreams, we have to believe our dreams were always meant to decline. Thus many of us have embraced decline, with rates of depression, addiction, and other mental illness climbing in recent years. This is but one factor in the fall of our faith in the preceding generations, but this is in no way a textbook shifting of blame to our parents and grandparents, for they too have never lived in a world like this either. Instead, having spent so many of their younger years in a state of Not Knowing (while we ironically know nothing but this feeling) the brief length of time they spent in a state of Knowing, having been taught so well History’s patterns, shifts, palpable rhythms of causes and effects, ebbs and flows, and calms preceding storms that they weathered in the America they thought they knew, became their addiction as well, their perceived wisdom now the opiate of their uncertainty. For me personally, my late father was the one who taught me the most about the components, currents, and forces that moved History and how they had been maintained. Thus after his passing in early 2016, the loss was made all the more crushing upon the election of Donald Trump later that year, now that he, who for so much of my life could always point back to an equivalent trajectory America had placed upon and determine some possible arrival point, was no longer with us. But even having asked him so many times in my youth, “so what does this mean now, dad?” I recall now how many more times in the final decade of his life, he could answer with little more than, “I don’t know Nick.” 

So perhaps I am also one of many for whom their faith in Wisdom has fallen as well. And since with the passing on of Wisdom our society traditionally passes on its culture, so with it has our Culture fallen as well. By now means in such a way that I would dare complain there has been a decline in the quality of our art, music, and films, but the notion of a shared culture of unassailable timeless classes has fallen. This may be for the best however, as the very subjective nature of art itself implies that any attempt to establish the undeniable supremacy of any work of art in such a way that spans generations, cultures, or life experiences serves to deny the validity of so many diverse tastes, sensibilities, and traditions as well as that of a work’s relevance when its purpose was only to encapsulate the cultural moment it was created in. So perhaps we should embrace the fact that our cultural landmarks are now determined more by individuals for themselves, and consist of niche classics, flavor of the day pop hits, and even tuneful inside jokes distributed across the vastness of the internet by among the varied enclaves of those who appreciate them. And even as part of a generation of young people who feel old, though many who had the luxury of experienced their brief stint in the state of Knowing will argue I haven’t earned that feeling, I remain a dedicated fan of the legendary musician Bruce Springsteen, it is perhaps fitting that his hopeful 2002 album “The Rising” would resonate far less in defining the musical outlook of the post-9/11 era than a 2003 release by his fellow New Jerseyans in the lesser-known punk band Thursday, titled “War All The Time.” Still with cultural moments all the more fleeting and tastes increasingly specific, one might say that each is now as obscure as the other, in contrast to the attention paid upon their initial release. The truth of course may be determined by which generation one comes from.

However this softer landing surface upon which our Man is to Land can only be created through generational cooperation, so let us finally unite in the experience of Not Knowing as we reluctantly celebrate the death of Wisdom, and perhaps even briefly entertain some illusion that the ground may yield when he reaches it, but bear each other through the realization we can instead only soften it by creating new institutions and redefining old ideas. 

For the failing of Leadership need not truly be failure if we instead build our Leaders from the ground up. Rather than following those who present themselves on a bully pulpit as such, follow those who present themselves in the places we already needed them to be and allowed us to find them there. That is to say, on our own streets in the neighborhoods we live in, serving the communities in which they have built their lives while helping others to build theirs. Find them in our own offices and factories, working side by side while gaining an understanding of the labor and dedication that truly builds a nation, a dedication they wouldn’t dare exploit. And task these leaders with creating ideologies of which they themselves will someday no longer be irrelevant symbols, as ideologies must now be based not upon whom among these privileged few we choose to vote into power, but upon which of the many more helpless we choose to heal of their suffering.

Further I implore you not to mourn the death of our faith in Patriotism if our New Patriots can now redefine their love for their country as no longer being a love for the vague and faceless notions of Freedom or exclusionary definitions of “We” that were allowed to make that Freedom a luxury so few were truly afforded. And when harsh economic forces and the predatory and cynical motivations of those who were allowed to write the chapters upon which the Old Patriotism was written seek to restrict that Freedom even further, let us redistribute it to the no longer huddled masses so they may no longer thirst for it. For the New Patriotism will be based in understanding that to love one’s country means to love every human being who resides within it, no matter their origin or status. This Patriotism understands that America need not merely be the name of a long dead sailor, given by white men to stolen land that once bore so many varied, beautiful, and sacred names for the vast and diverse locales that comprise it, but that America by definition is collection of the hopes, dreams, fears, and needs of three-hundred thirty or more million souls upon whose very existence building a fair and equitable society depends.

And if our faith in War is to truly fail and give way to sincere dedication to faith in Peace. Let the only faith in War that remains be faith in the War upon War, and the destruction of our faith in violence of all kinds. And let the War upon War be a war upon ignorance and selfishness, and allow a generation whose defining tragedy’s only arrival point was a larger and more prolonged tragedy breathe easier, with hope that the virus that destroyed their dreams, and took vast numbers of the preceding generations who once comforted them with their experience in the state of Knowing, will no longer dominate their futures. And if this love that defines the New Patriotism can be the motivating factor in facing our challenges with genuine concern and care for the well being and prosperity of all three-hundred thirty or more million souls for whom the freedom to lives of health and safety, joy and fulfillment, will now be by this new definition their birthright.

At last, when this War upon War has ended, not with a dubious arrival point, but on a glorious and eternal new trajectory, let us harken back to the ways the ends of Wars were written of in scripture, for to bend the sword into plowshares now takes on a greater and renewed urgency, as the need to till the Earth is essential in the necessary task of growing softer ground upon which someday, somehow...

...this Man will Land. 

[mexicancat-girl]

Quiet (with you)

Another MarcNath fic written for #MLPrideFest2020 and Pride month in general

AO3: Link, 3600 words

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...

Even after making friends, Marc still likes to write under the stairs.

Maybe it was just an ingrained habit at this point.

Marc didn’t do well with crowds, or loud places. It was all too chaotic. Ironic, considering he loved loud music; but dealing with people in real life was different than listening to his favorite albums.

Either way, Marc started his habit of siting and writing under the stairs since the start of the school year, too anxious to deal with both the cafeteria and his crippling loneliness of not having any friends to sit with. He has friends to sit with now, but his anxiety was a fickle thing. Sometimes he just didn’t want to seem like a bother.

The stairs were a place he enjoyed, though. They were quiet. Out of the way. And no one looked under the stairs, so it provided a nice little hidey hole. He could be isolated, while not being wholly alone.

After all, if he stayed under the stairs in the courtyard, he could hear and see when lunch let out and he had to go back to class. He couldn’t do that if he wrote in, say, the Library. The Library was too quiet, too out of the way. Marc would forget altogether about needing to leave, entranced in his writing, making him accidentally skip classes like some sort of delinquent.

And he wasn’t a delinquent! He just got lost in his head when he wrote…

Marc fiddles with his pen. Someone takes that moment to step close to him on his left.

“Hey,” a familiar voice says in a yawn. Marc snaps up his attention to Nathaniel, who hovers over him for a few seconds, before unceremoniously dropping to the ground to sit next to him.

Or, well. It looks more like he collapsed to the ground.

“Are you okay?!” Marc yelps, nearly chucking his pen and notebook aside in his haste.

Nathaniel just blinks back at him blearily, posture horribly slouched. He has dark circles under his uncovered eye, as if stamped on the pale skin there. His vibrant red hair is mussed, like he’d just been sleeping.

“M’fine,” the redhead sighs out, giving another jaw-cracking yawn right after. “Just tired.”

Marc frowns over at the other boy in concern. “Nathaniel…”

“Mmm?” he hums listlessly in reply.

“Did…did you get any sleep at all, last night?” Marc hedges, staring at the exhausted-looking artist.

“…Maybe.”

“How many hours?” he presses carefully, concern welling up even stronger as he watches Nathaniel duck his head and slump down even further.

“…A few.”

“How many exactly?”

“Like…Four?” is the weak response.

“Nathaniel!” Marc gasps, scandalized and concerned.

Nathaniel just groans, burying his face in his hand. “M’fiiiine.”

“You’re sleep deprived! That’s not fine!” he retorts, setting aside his notebook and pen to turn in place and put his full attention to his friend-slash-crush.

“Well, I’m still alive. So I think—” a yawn disrupts Nathaniel’s drawl “—I’m good.”

“You have to sleep,” Marc decides, quite logically. “You’ll pass out any second if you don’t. And you’ll end up missing class.”

“Bold of you to assume I didn’t already,” the redhead laughs dryly.

“You what?!”

Nathaniel just shrugs, looking vaguely sheepish as he says, “I fell asleep in class again. No big deal.”

“Is this a common occurrence?” Marc asks, brows flying up in shock. “Does this happen all the time?”

“Well, not all the time…” Nathaniel hedges, pink dusting his cheeks and uncovered eye darting away. “Just…Every once in a while.”

Marc sighs, shaking his head. His crush doesn’t seem like he’s jumping to elaborate, and Marc knows how stubborn the boy could be.

One more thing the two have in common to add to the pile: they both had a shit time asking others for help.

“Why did you only get four hours of sleep anyways?” Marc can’t help but ask, curious.

“…I forgot to?” the redhead cringes.

“You forgot to sleep?!” Marc yelps, leaning forwards to gawk in horror. All he gets in reply is a sheepish, tired laugh. “Nathaniel! How can you just forget?”

“Marc, when you have ADHD, it’s easy to forget a lot of things,” Nathaniel deadpans, looking a bit more dead inside as he does so.

“That’s not an excuse, and you know it.” Marc chides, giving a pointed look. “You have a phone. Set an alarm to remind yourself to go to bed.”

“…I do that. It doesn’t work.”

“Set multiple alarms, then?”

“If I do that, I just get pissed that my phone keeps interrupting me. And then I keep drawing anyways.”

Marc sighs, tapping a finger against his cheek. “There has to be a solution…”

“Prob’ly,” Nathaniel shrugs, another jaw-cracking yawn spilling from his mouth. “Look, I just… really wanna take a nap right now.”

“Go ahead. I’ll wake you up when we need to go back to class,” Marc tells him automatically, freezing slightly when he realizes what he’d just offered.

Oh God, was that weird? Who the hell would want to take a nap under the stairs? Not only is it creepy, it’s all solid concrete down here, hardly a comfortable place to sleep for any amount of time—

Nathaniel, however, doesn’t seem bothered by the offer. In fact, he smiles back at Marc, bright and genuine even through his apparent exhaustion.

“Really?” the redhead asks, as Marc awkwardly sputters and nods. “Thanks, Marc, you’re the best…!”

With a concerning amount of cheeriness and enthusiasm, Nathaniel flops right onto his back and throws an arm over his eyes, apparently settling in for a nap then and there.

“Y-Y-You’re welcome…?” Marc tells him weakly.

The redhead hums, but doesn’t do anything else in reply. He just shifts to his side, facing Marc, and…completely zones out.

Marc watches in fascination as the other boy instantly falls asleep. Just like that.

For someone that apparently had trouble going to bed, Nathaniel didn’t waste time actually falling asleep, it seems.

Marc slowly and carefully picks his notebook and pen back up, making sure he’s quiet and doesn’t startle the other boy awake.

And then he writes.

-----

Every once in a while, Marc looks up to check up on Nathaniel.

The redhead keeps on sleeping, dead to the world.

It’s probably creepy to do, but after more and more time passes, Marc’s gaze is drawn to watching Nathaniel’s sleeping form. Like a magnet. And eventually, he just sort of. Watches him sleep.

After all, there’s not exactly many opportunities for him to stare unabashedly at his crush without possibly getting caught by said crush. There’s also the factor in play that sleeping is a private and intimate thing, and Nathaniel had no problems just…hunkering down and taking a nap by Marc’s side.

Either Nathaniel really trusts him and isn’t bothered by the possibility of Marc judging him, or he’s so exhausted he genuinely doesn’t give a fuck about anyone’s opinion.

Both options make Marc’s stupid gay heart flutter, just a bit, in his chest.

Nathaniel looks so… peaceful while he sleeps. His face is slack, lips parted slightly as he breathes slowly and deeply. The exhaustion and stress melts from his features. His lashes are delicate as they fan out across his cheekbones, kissing the small smattering of freckles there. His bangs are mussed and out of his face completely for once, hair feathered out, fire spilling against the concrete. 

The other boy doesn’t snore, either. But he does drool, just a bit.

The sight makes Marc smile. It’s probably achingly lovestruck and fond. He doesn’t fight it.

Marc shifts—slowly, carefully—until he’s sitting level with the sleeping redhead. He pauses, heart in his throat, when Nathaniel mumbles and shifts a bit. And then tenses when the boy butts his head against Marc’s thigh.

Marc watches with bated breath as Nathaniel snuggles against his leg like a cat, apparently drawn to Marc’s body heat. He even curls up a bit and throws his leg over Marc’s extended one, knee hiked up, the weight trapping Marc’s right leg in place.

Marc’s face feels like it’s on fire. He tries very, very hard not to squeal. And also tries to ignore the fact that if Nathaniel migrates further, he’ll end up in Marc’s lap.

Though Marc honestly can’t complain about that, even if the prospect makes him want to go into cardiac arrest from mingled embarrassment and joy.

Fumblingly, Marc brings up his unoccupied leg, balancing his notebook precariously onto his raised knee. He doesn’t even know what he writes—if its cohesive at all, or just the ramblings of a madman desperately in love—but he has to at least occupy himself. If he doesn’t, he’ll die on the spot, or his mind will overthink everything.

If he doodles a few too many hearts on the page than is considered normal, well. No one’s around to see him.

-----

“Damn it, Nath…! Where are you?!” Alix seethes under her breath, stomping across the cafeteria.

She was a woman on a mission.

Somehow, in the five seconds Alix took her eyes off Nathiel in Miss Bustier’s class, he managed to slip past her. He was a slippery one, and too quiet for his own good.

Alix was pissed. Mostly concerned for Nath’s health and continued wellbeing, but pissed all the same.

That dumb tomato-boy was probably off somewhere, passed out in a corner of the school like a homeless person. Vulnerable and ready for any old bully to waltz by him. All because he was avoiding Alix, since she tended to strongarm him to stay awake and eat a proper lunch and wallow in his mistakes of staying up til nearly four in the fucking morning. Again.

Either way, Alix was going to find his stupid ass, and drag him to eat lunch so he could have enough energy to not pass right the fuck out and end up in the nurse’s office.

She’s checked his favorite hidey-holes in the Art Club Room and the Library. With those options eliminated, she has no reason to really stay on the top floors. So she ends up stomping all the way back down to the main floor.

And then realizes that she may have forgotten one last spot.

Quietly, she moves away from the stairs. And when she’s got enough distance, carefully hiding behind a column, she crouches and looks under the stairs.

Marc is there, as she expected. His bright-red hoodie and messy hair are fairly recognizable.

Passed out next to Marc is a very familiar form that Alix instantly recognizes as her dumbass best friend, one Nathaniel Kurtzberg.

Alix would normally stomp on over and wake Nath up. But the actual sight before her makes her pause, and consider.

Marc is sitting down, one knee propped up and seemingly trying to write in his notebook, and looking to be struggling at it. Probably because Nathaniel is half-using him as a pillow, his head all but in Marc’s lap, a leg thrown over Marc’s extended one.

Marc’s sort of trapped under Nathaniel. Though he looks so enraptured and awed at the fact that he’s being used as a pillow, he probably wouldn’t move from his spot in a thousand years.

It’s…an incredibly cute sight.

And it’s also a bit surprising, too.

Not the fact that Marc’s looking down at Nathaniel with a look so gooey and lovestruck, he pretty much has hearts for eyes. Alix’s picked up near-instantly that Marc has a bit of a hopeless crush on her best friend.

No, the more surprising part is Nathaniel taking a nap on Marc.

Nathaniel never feels bothered about taking naps at school, just plonking his head on his desk and diving straight into dreamland. But sleeping around other people is a bit different.

Nath likes to cuddle when he sleeps. But he only does it to people he really, truly trusts. He won’t just sleep on any person.

So far, the phenomena only extends to family. Which includes Alix and Jalil, because Nath all but considers them his siblings. But he doesn’t sleep on any of his other friends.

The fact that he’s sleeping on Marc shows that he trusts him. A lot, at that.

It shows that he even considers Marc family.

“Interesting…” Alix mutters quietly under her breath, her mouth breaking into a shit-eating grin.

Feeling devious, she carefully fishes her phone from her pocket, and clicks it on. A few swipes later, and she’s zooming in on her camera to take a dozen photos of Marc and Nathaniel in their current position.

She’s so going to tease the shit out of Nath later over this.

Hell, she might as well start a new album for them, at the rate that this is going. She hadn’t even realized Nath was crushing back on Marc.

Hell, Nath might not even know he has a crush on Marc.

This is ironically hilarious.

And hey! They’ll all make great photos for the wedding, she’s sure. She should know; she’s going to be Nath’s best man. They pretty much made a blood pact on it when they were younger. She’d be his best man, and he’d be hers, if they ever got married.

With a smirk and a cheery hum under her breath, Alix carefully and quietly backs away, so she won’t be seen and ruin their cute little moment.

She could let it slide. She’ll let Nath sleep, this time.

-----

It feels both like an eternity, and no time at all, before the sounds of students migrating out of the lunchroom get louder and louder.

With a pang of regret and longing, Marc realizes he has to wake Nathaniel back up.

Well. It’d been good while it lasted.

At the very least, Marc can make some corrections about his daydreams of a blissful domestic life with his crush. Including the newly revealed fact that Nathaniel’s a cuddler.

“Nathaniel…Wake up,” Marc says, ducking down and gently shaking his shoulder. “We have to get back to class.”

“Five more minutes,” the redhead half-groans half-whines, raising his head slightly just to plop it straight on Marc’s thigh, burying his face there.

Marc all but jumps out of his skin. He’s so startled, he yanks his leg away, watching in horrified mortification as Nathaniel smacks his face slightly on the concrete.

“I’m up, I’m up!” the redhead yelps, jolting up, blue eyes wide and staring around himself wildly as he shifts himself into a sitting position.

“I-I-I’m so sorry,” Marc gasps, instantly hovering over his friend. “OhmyGodNath—”

“S’fine! S’fine,” Nathaniel says, shaking his head wildly, before bringing a hand up to carefully rub at his face. “My fault for smacking myself anyways.”

“A-Are y-you okay?” Marc worries, hands fluttering to and fro.

“I think so…?” the redhead blinks, cheeks dusted pink. “Ummm…Sorry, c-can you see if I have a bruise, or—”

“Y-Yes, of course.” Marc quickly leans his face in, scrutinizing the other for injuries. Other than the growing blush (no doubt of embarrassment) on Nathaniel’s face, there’s no major change in color that’s a warning sign for an injury. “N-No, you’re fine. Your nose looks a little red, but that’s it.”

“Thanks, man,” Nathaniel sighs, leaning back and rubbing at his nose, eyes averted. “I mean, I’ve had worse on my face after waking up, but still. It’s nice to have someone to check.”

“I’ve fallen asleep on my notebooks before…” Marc offers, wincing sympathetically. This earns him a small smile in return, which is worth the slight embarrassment of his admission.

“Oh, same. I’ve conked out right on my notebooks and sketchbooks before. Woken up with writing from my notes or smeared marker on my face,” the other says, laughing awkwardly, obviously self-conscious even if he jokes about it.

“I-If you need to, you probably have enough time to double-check in the bathroom…But I think your face looks great,” Marc starts, before his too-authentic words catch up to him. “Um! I-I mean, fine. Your face. Is fine. You’re fine.” Marc nearly closes his eyes and drops into a prayer for God to smite him where he sits. “S’fine.”

“Uhhh…Right,” Nathaniel coughs, smiling, blue eye glimmering with mirth. “Anyways. Sorry for making things, like…awkward? But I appreciate you letting me nap with you. Really. I felt like dying.”

“N-No problem! It’s no problem at all!” Marc is quick to wave his hands in front of himself to wave away the other’s concern. “I’m glad I could help.”

“Yeah, Alix doesn’t let me get away with sleeping during lunch anymore,” Nathaniel sighs, smile turning crooked and abashed. “She says I’m scrawny enough that I can’t afford to be skipping meals.”

“I don’t think you’re scrawny,” Marc answers automatically and loyally. Apparently, his brain-to-mouth filter has gone and died on him in the past hour. He would blame Nathaniel for being so cute, but honestly, this is more of a him problem than anything. He’s too big of a gay disaster for his own good.

Nathaniel just smiles and laughs. Not in a mocking way, but in a way like he’s thought Marc made a funny joke.

“Alix would say otherwise, but thanks,” he says warmly, tugging his bangs behind his ear. Marc is hit with both of Nathaniel’s blue eyes crinkled in fondness. It all but punches the breath straight out of him. “Did I bother you at all, by the way?”

“N-Not at all!” Marc is quick to assure, even as he averts his gaze in a way that’s no doubt guilty. “I-I still got a b-bit of writing done…”

“Good. I didn’t want to mess up your flow or anything…Y’know, since this is your spot to write and all,” the redhead says, self-deprecating, averting his gaze. “And…Thanks again for letting me chill here. It’s actually really peaceful.”

“W-well, this isn’t my spot, per se…I-It’s not like I own it?” Marc starts, a bit mystified, but backpedals a bit so he doesn’t seem rude. “B-But you’re welcome! You can come by anytime. It’s not like I’d ever turn you away.”

Wait. Why did he say that?

Marc freezes, trying not to panic. Did he just admit he’d never turn Nathaniel away? What if that blows his cover? What if Nathaniel realizes he means it genuinely, but like, in a very non-platonic and incredibly gay way?

“Ooh, permission to sit here in your secret spot…? I’m honored,” Nathaniel grins back at him toothily, before finally moving to stand. “I’ll come by more often if you come sit with me at lunch more. Deal?”

Nathaniel holds his hand out to Marc, smiling expectantly back at him. Face warm and heart aflutter, Marc reaches out. Nathaniel clasps his hand and heaves him up off the ground, nearly over-balancing in the process.

“Woah! You’re heavier than you look,” the redhead laughs, obviously teasing as he makes a show of wiping his forehead.

Marc huffs, bending down to snag his pen and notebook. “Or maybe I have a solid three inches on you, so I have more body mass.”

“Well gee, thanks for reminding me that I’m short,” Nathaniel drawls back.

The two eye each other with mock annoyance, before they burst into laughter.

Marc feels a potent mix of fondness and joy settle in his chest, nestled with the swarm of butterflies there.

It’s always…freeing…to laugh with Nathaniel. It reminds Marc that they really are friends. That Nathaniel doesn’t just tolerate him. That he maybe even enjoys Marc’s company.

“Get back to class, sleepyhead,” Marc teases, using his unoccupied hand to wave as he starts to step back.

“You get back to class!” Nathaniel retorts, grinning wide, raising a hand in goodbye.

Marc’s already a few meters away, when a thought strikes and a surge of confidence fills him. He has one more thing to say.

He turns around and walks backwards to look at Nathaniel, who’s still standing in the same place as before, yawning and rubbing at his eye. Marc makes an exaggerated and over-the-top pantomime of smoothing his hair down, as he calls, “You should probably fix your hair, while you’re at it!”

Nathaniel startles, staring back at him. Marc can’t help but smirk back, amusement growing as the other boy blushes and instantly starts to comb his fingers through his hair, flattening it back in place and re-arranging it so he doesn’t look like he’d just tripped out of bed.

Even with his efforts, his red hair looks tousled, full of flyaway strands that just won’t sit still.

And coupled with his blushing face, well. Nathaniel looks like he’s done more than just take a cat nap.

Marc turns right around and speed-walks away before Nathaniel can say anything else, or his own mind can fall deeper into the gutter.

-----

As Marc makes his way to class, he clutches his notebook to his chest and bites his lip, but the smile spreads wide and crooked in his mouth anyways.

He just…He just made Nathaniel blush.

He giggles a bit under his breath, pressing his knuckles against his lips, no doubt smearing his lip gloss. But he can’t even bring himself to care. He’s too giddy. The butterflies buzz and flutter in his chest, alongside his heart.

He can’t wait for Nathaniel to join him under the stairs again.

Marc may like the quiet and solitude, but…He thinks he likes being quiet with Nathaniel even more.