#i’m losing my sanity here lmao

[lightspren]

anyone wanna tell me why my hip and knee are still fucked up despite trying just about everything I can possibly think of to fix it

[jocelynships]

Ngl I’m getting tired of people asking me about my start date for the new role im gonna be taking up soon. Like. The area isn’t done being built yet. The SECOND I know a start date I’m gonna be frolicking around my current location cheering about it, Y’ALL WILL KNOW. I WISH I had a start date but I don’t 😭

[miraclewoozi]

i. genuinely. do not have enough words to say how honestly giddy and overwhelmed and happy reading all this made me. thank you so so so so SO (x10^300) much??? i’ve read your review back, no lie, about 7 times just because it blew my mind that much😭 I’m gonna CRY thank you thank you thank you🫶

DON'T SWEAT IT. - l.jh

Today — the first time in a small forever that he forgot to check the battery on his earphones (and subsequently had them die on him mid-workout) — Jihoon is forced to notice you.

pairing; lee jihoon x fem!reader.  content; fluff / gym crush au / strangers to lovers / kinda idiots to lovers / smut towards the end (MINORS DNI). w/c; just a breezy 18k- and some change? warnings; swearing, this is only proof read once because if i read it again i was going to lose my mind. please let me know if i've forgotten any. smut tags under the cut ( not sure that this counts as a warning but a heads up: the gym weight units, whenever mentioned, are in kilograms not lbs because i’m british and the metric system, am i right? sorry if there are any other british-isms, i try really hard to avoid them/catch them on a proofread but there are inevitably some that have slipped through the net.  )

note; gym-selfie jihoon, you will never not own my ass. ( screaming internally this is the first fic i've written since my dan + phil youtube era. i don't know what i'm doing. this has been in my wips for about two months. it's a bit all over the place. that's. literally just me. bon appetite. <3 )

smut warnings: making out, grinding, fingering (f rec), oral (f rec), blowjob started/implied (at the end), protected sex (be safe out there gang), little bit of biting, no huge power dynamics? reader & jihoon are both switches (and simps), some use of pet-names (good girl/baby).

—————

He first sees you around lunchtime on an otherwise unassuming Sunday. 

As you walk in, the gym is wonderfully quiet. A handful of regulars mill about, making full use of the rare freedom of the machinery. One of the club’s personal trainers is marching an impossibly steep incline on a treadmill. It could just be any other weekend session in this criminally over-equipped and under-used gym: the town’s worst kept secret. But when the door slams shut behind you, his head jerks up; it, in this moment, is the loudest sound in the room. It’s sort of the only one he hears at all.

Today — the first time in a small forever that he forgot to check the battery on his earphones (and subsequently had them die on him mid-workout) — Jihoon is forced to notice you as he sits with dumbbells rested against his thighs. He catches his breath as he wonders who you are, if you’ve ever been to this gym before, why he doesn’t recognise you. Are you a new potential regular, maybe? Or just visiting the area and making good use of the cheap pay-as-you-go rates? Maybe, he considers, lips turning downwards in thought… maybe you’ve been coming here for a long time and he’s somehow just always been so in his own head that he’s never noticed.

The last, he thinks, is sort of unlikely. No. He would definitely remember a face like yours.

His heart rate slows more than he usually lets it as he finds himself watching you fill up your water bottle at the fountain, taking a long sip on your way over to one of the stairmasters. His brain blanks out when he realises that he’s not just looking anymore, he’s sort of staring, and swallows the saliva on his tongue hard, looking back at the mirror. He doesn’t want to be that guy. He isn’t that guy – he just got distracted by the loud noise, and this is exactly why he checks the damn battery on his headphones before he leaves the house. 

The only problem is that now, he can’t remember how many sets he’s done. He lies back and stares straight into a slightly sketchy light-fixture, neglecting to pick up the dumbbells that he put aside for his next set of pushes. Jihoon adjusts the position of his shoulders against the bench, arches his back off it slightly, digs his heels into the spongy floor beneath them and pushes the ones still in his hands until failure. 

Today, he finishes his routine and leaves the gym without allowing himself so much as another glance your way.

He neglects to notice that your eyes are avoiding him right back. 

—————

You smile at him for the first time on a Tuesday. Not the following one – a week and a bit later.

Seungcheol is with him tonight. Jihoon prefers to train alone nine times out of ten: this is a truth widely acknowledged, accepted and respected among his friends. Gym time is his down time, his equivalent of movie marathons and comfort food, of face masks and glasses of wine. But it’s not a hard rule: occasionally, someone will ask to tag along and use one of his guest passes, and Jihoon very rarely says no. There are two reasons. One, he isn’t actually rude, contrary to approximately eighteen running jokes in the group-chat. But also, it adds a little bit of variety to his otherwise very set-in-stone regimen, and mixing it up doesn’t hurt. Like tonight, for example. Seungcheol is pulling him into the studio off the main gym floor, his own gym bag packed with boxing pads and gloves for them to play with.

Variety.

Jihoon grumbles a little at the idea, at first. He has a very love-hate relationship with cardio, favouring a simple steady-state run over everything else, and it just feels a bit against his moral code to use gym time for something like this. However, he comes to discover very quickly that smacking Seungcheol’s hands is very therapeutic; Jihoon knows he’s maybe getting a little too into it when his friend asks if they can switch around, grimacing and shaking out his wrist after a particularly beefy punch. 

He agrees, albeit reluctantly, tugging off the gloves he’s wearing and pulling on the pads instead.

This half of the activity is considerably less enjoyable for Jihoon; he starts to cool down and loses his flow almost straight away and after about thirty seconds, his breathing is back to normal and he feels ready to go again. Even so, he does what he needs to do to be a good workout partner, and goes one step further into ‘good friend’ territory as he allows Seungcheol to vent about the bad day he had at work in-between hits, offering murmurs and looks of disgust when it feels appropriate. Suddenly, the impromptu request to come to the gym tonight makes much more sense, as does the slightly bizarre choice of activity, but Jihoon tries not to ask about it in too much detail.

They swing at each other for a few more rounds apiece, working up a healthy sweat and getting out a few frustrations as the hour wears on. On the last set, Jihoon switches out Seungcheol’s hands for a punching bag, putting a lot more of his weight behind every hit and really tiring himself out. By the end, his hair sticks to his forehead and his cheeks have flushed bright red; he only stops when he gets that weird, metallic taste in the back of his mouth that says he’s probably overdone it. Again.

“Hit the shower?” Seungcheol asks breathlessly as he finishes his last set of Russian twists and lies down flat on the floor, equally sticky and flushed all over. 

Jihoon pats his face dry with his towel, shaking his head. “You go ahead. I’ll have one at home.” 

He doesn’t give Seungcheol much of a chance to respond, already cleaning down anything he’s touched or managed to sweat on and riding out the high of the endorphins flooding his veins. Secretly, he hasn’t had a cardio session this high energy or this satisfying in a long time. He isn’t going to readily admit to that though.

“Nah, I’ll do the same,” Seungcheol agrees. He starts packing the gear he brought with him into his bag and they leave together after, heading towards the exit. 

That’s when he sees you again. 

He doesn’t notice at first; you’re stowing your things into one of the higher lockers, and you have your headphones slung around your neck as he walks past. It’s the sound of a song he vaguely recognises through your speakers that makes his head snap over from the conversation he’s in the middle of. They walk past at the moment you drop down from your tiptoes, and you flash a small (but insanely pretty) smile at Jihoon.

By the time he manages to process this fact, he’s already walked past you and you’re headed over into the main gym area, so even though he turns around to try and catch your eye, all he sees is your retreating figure. He stumbles over his own feet, not looking where he’s going, and just barely catches himself on Seungcheol’s upper arm before he actually does fall over. His older friend glances down at his bicep before he adopts a look that Jihoon has seen many, many times before: just never directed at him. His cheeks heat up further and he looks away.

“What was that?” Seungcheol asks, one eyebrow so far up his forehead that it’s disappeared almost entirely under his soggy hair. He looks so smug, so incredibly entertained. Jihoon wants to smack that expression off his face, immediately.

“Nothing,” Jihoon rushes, managing not to act on the violent thought even though he wants to. He clears his throat. “No-one. I-... they’re new, I think. I don’t know.”

Seungcheol lets out a soft laugh, pushing the door open for them both to leave through. “Yeah,” he scoffs, eyes glimmering with something Jihoon doesn’t think he likes the look of. “Nothing, my ass.”

—————

Three days later, he hears you speak for the first time.

Granted, you aren’t speaking to him – at least, not at first. But that’s not really what matters.

It’s late, and it’s a Friday night. Fridays are usually Jihoon’s days rest days, but sitting around his apartment had him feeling impossibly twitchy, with far too much energy to burn and no way to do so without leaving the house. And he knows that he needs to take days off, now and again. He knows that they’re good for recovery and that it’s healthy to take time to himself that involves not lifting weights. But what he also knows is that if he doesn’t manage to shake the weird buzzing feeling in his muscles, in his joints, in his veins, he’s never going to get to sleep. So, here he finds himself at almost 10PM, walking down the street to get to the gym.

To begin with, he doesn’t know (or really care) who it is that’s coming up behind him. He can hear quite clearly that the mystery person is on the phone, and that they’re in the middle of what seems to be a rather heated argument: his brain latches onto occasional words, phrases, curses. Every now and again, their voice drops to a deep, frustrated mutter and he cringes slightly, making a point to keep his eyes forward and down so as not to draw attention to the fact that this presumably private conversation has become everything but.

He touches his entry fob to the sensor on the door as he arrives and pushes it open. Jihoon uses the opportunity to stand still, to glance back at whoever it is that’s walked behind him for the past four and a half minutes, and his eyes come to land on you. He falters, noting how your eyes are a bit glassy and your cheeks are stained with what he can safely assume are tear-tracks. In this moment, he wants to run; he doesn’t want anything to do with that, and he certainly doesn’t want to hear any more of your call. It’s none of his business, and he feels plenty weird enough already with what he has overheard. But, for some unknown reason, he stays in place.

“No – no, you don’t get to-...” you hiss into your phone. “It was our fucking anniversary, you asshole.” Jihoon’s face tightens at that, lips drawn between his teeth and his eyes blowing slightly wide. You pass through the door in front of him, flashing a small smile as you go. Another smile, he thinks to himself, but he’d be an idiot to compare them in any way; this one is so dramatically dissimilar to the first, he thinks it could almost have come from a totally different person. 

Unfortunately, there’s nothing ‘insanely pretty’ about it this time. Your smile is tight-lipped and exhausted, slightly apologetic. Maybe even forced. He does try to return a warmer one to you, but he doesn’t know if you notice. 

“Look, I’m at the gym – we’re not doing this right now. I’ll call you later.” You hang up the phone with the kind of sigh that groans in the back of your throat.

A small part of him wants to take this moment and use it to ask if you’re all right, but an even larger part of him doesn’t. It isn’t because he doesn’t care. In a weird way, considering this is only the first time he’s clearly heard your voice and he knows absolutely nothing about you, he does care. But there are a few things that stop him. Not only are you a near-complete stranger, not only would he have no idea what to say to you if the answer happened to come out as a ‘no’, not only is he already coming over a little bit clammy at the thought of having a conversation with you… Jihoon isn’t stupid. He knows from the sound of your voice and the way you’re rather aggressively typing a message into your phone that it’s a ridiculous question.

You’re walking into the gym at 10 o’clock on a Friday night, your eyes literally brimming with tears. Of course you’re not all right.

He’s still standing in the open doorway mulling all this over, but Jihoon only realises when a gust of wind slaps over his calves and sends a draught not only through the reception area, but up the length of his spine. He comes inside fully as you close the locker you’re using – he notices, but he isn’t sure why, that it’s the same one as last time – and throws his things into the one he always uses. Two below and one to the left of yours.

It’s quiet tonight: just the pair of you and one middle-aged guy. Jihoon recognises him as the friendly man who seemingly knows everyone who comes in here – including you, apparently, judging by the way he strikes up a short but energetic conversation. When the other guy walks away, you clamp your headphones back over your ears and return to what you were doing before, occasionally bobbing your head or moving your lips in time with whatever it is that you’re listening to. Jihoon steals little glances at you now and again when you’re in-between sets, watching how you breathe deeper, how your skin glows with sweat as you tap your fingertips against your thighs.

He almost drops the bar he’s holding when you catch his eyes in the long line of mirrors. He turns away, swallowing hard, completely missing how your own gaze lingers.

Jihoon becomes so obsessed with not being caught looking at you again that he doesn’t even notice when you disappear off the gym floor completely. It’s only when he pulls his headphones off at the end of his session and glances around that he registers your absence: your third companion is long gone, and he assumes you must have snuck out without him noticing too. He settles the speakers back over his ears before pulling on an old zip-up, flicking the hood over his head to shelter him a little better once he gets outside. But he’s in no rush to get home so he takes his time, resting his bag between his abdomen and the lockers, replying to a few messages and clicking his tongue at some of the nonsense being spewed into the group-chat. 

He isn’t sure exactly how long he’s standing there for, but he does know precisely what pulls him back to the world outside of the device in his hands.

To begin with, he doesn’t notice you approach, lost completely in his screen. He doesn’t hear your footsteps, or the way you politely clear your throat to announce your presence so he can move out of the way. He misses your moment of realisation that he’s listening to music and has no idea that you’re standing three feet behind him. He doesn’t even see you walk up next to him, your hair still damp from your shower and sitting loose over your shoulders.

It’s only when you try to reach over him to grab the last of your things that he snaps out of his trance. The fragrance of your body wash hits him first, and oh boy, does it hit him. Sweet, and delicate. Then, he gets something beautifully fruity: it’s not a perfume (it doesn’t smell like a perfume), but it’s you. Your shampoo, maybe? A conditioner? He can’t tell. Whatever it is, the combination of fragrances has him feeling like he’s been slammed into by a damn freight train. He drops his bag to the floor, freezing for a second, and then finally moves away just as the little door swings open. 

“I’m so sorry,” he says hurriedly, tugging his hood down and pulling his headphones off completely. “I didn’t even think you were still here.” He can’t shake the smell of you, nor the feeling of your warm frame leaning so close to his own. God, why is his heart pounding like he’s just finished a round of sprints? Why can’t he breathe?

“No – hey, no, don’t be,” you rush, shaking your head. You finally succeed in pulling your coat free and start trying to get it on; Jihoon wonders if you often struggle to find your sleeves like this, if you’re always chasing them around like a puppy after its own tail. He does it too, sometimes. He gets it. It’s cute. “It’s okay. I was trying not to disturb-... I’m sorry.”

“You’re fine,” he tells you. For the first time, he’s able to smile back at you properly. 

Why is it so hot in here, all of a sudden? Do they shut off the air conditioning after hours or something? He’s breaking out in a sweat.

“Call it even?” you suggest shyly, extending out a hand now you’ve managed to get both arms through your sleeves. He looks down at your fingers for a second before reaching to shake your hand once, a semi-firm grip securing the ‘deal’. (He feels a bit like he’s been electrocuted after, but he tries not to make that too obvious).

It goes awkwardly quiet for a moment then, and Jihoon wishes deeply that he had it in him to say something. Anything. But his brain has gone completely empty and apparently, all he knows how to do is stand completely still like a fucking statue. He shifts his gaze from you, to the wall behind you, to the carpet beneath his shoes, all the while tugging at the collar of his sweatshirt as if it might bring him a tiny breath of fresh air. The gentle sound of you clearing your throat has him looking back at your face again though; he assumes for a second that this is maybe you about to announce taking your leave. All the while, he’s cursing himself out in his own head for being totally inept, and he’s not entirely sure that it isn’t written all over his face.

“Alone, today?” you ask, idly fiddling with your zipper and succeeding in taking him by surprise. He really didn’t think you were going to continue this. And yet…

“Hm?” he questions. 

You swallow before answering. “You… the last time, you were with a friend?” you explain, and now it’s your turn to look away. He wonders if you’re a little warm too, if he’s right in what he was thinking about the air-conditioning. 

“Oh. Right.” 

He nods. An annoying train of doubt in his mind wants to know why you’re asking about Seungcheol; if maybe it was him that you smiled at the other night, even though he knows your eyes weren’t looking up at the man he brought with him. He thinks maybe he should be used to these turns in conversation by now – you certainly wouldn’t be the first person to ask if one of his friends is available, after all – but somehow, he isn’t, and he has a slightly bitter taste in the back of his mouth as he goes on.

He really didn’t have ‘you being interested in one of his best friends’ on his bingo card for tonight, that’s for sure. 

“Yeah. I think he’s with his partner, or… I don’t know. I don’t really bring other people, often. That was a one-off.”

You nod silently and Jihoon can’t quite get a read on what that means. He wonders if you’re upset at the revelation of Seungcheol’s partner, or maybe that he doesn’t tag along to every session. Or maybe, maybe, you were just being polite, and you don’t really care what his friend is up to that means he isn’t here. But whatever it is that you’re feeling, you do far too good a job at hiding it; he’s suddenly very overcome with the desire to run, again, except this time he might just bury his head in the sand too for good measure.

“How much were you deadlifting, just then?” you ask in the lull, just as he thinks he might have perfected the best way to say goodbye that doesn’t make him come across as even more of a tool than he probably already has. It throws him off kilter, but somehow, he manages to answer you in reasonable time.

“Oh, God… uh, one… 160?” He says uncertainly. “That’s not… I can do heavier-...” In his mind, he slaps his forehead. “Wait, no, that’s-... I mean, it’s true, but I didn’t mean-...”

You bite back your smile as he talks himself in a circle but Jihoon is too flustered to notice, convinced that he now sounds like every arrogant gym rat on the planet. God, he’s given himself the ick.

“I guessed you could,” you say. 

Oh boy, this freezes him. Mid-thought, mid blink, mid-breath: he’s completely stuck. What does that mean? What does that mean? He only just manages to unstick his now suddenly dry tongue from the roof of his mouth, looking at you with surprised, confused eyes and parted lips. There aren’t any words on them, though. Like a deer in headlights, he just… stares.

“I mean, okay. Come on.” Your eyes visibly drop as you look him over, gaze lingering at his shoulders, his biceps, his waist. “You can get another twenty on that at least, right?”

He doesn’t know how to explain what’s happening to him, but if he thought he was burning up before? It was nothing compared to this, now. And there’s no way you haven’t noticed how everything from the base of his neck to the tips of his ears has suddenly started staining scarlet. He bows his head and pinches his lips tight, wrestling away the train of thought that appears as you drag your bottom lip between your teeth momentarily, still eyeing his arms. God, he’s never felt so overwhelmed in his life. 

“Something like that, yeah,” he strains. He’s trying so hard to be nonchalant, even though he knows all of his personal bests by heart. Deadlift, 195kg. He hit it a few weeks ago: a couple of days before he first saw you.

“Mm. You can tell.”

Jihoon tries to shake off the compliment, but he fails. In equal measure he wishes you’d stop (he doesn’t know how much more blood can rush to his cheeks before he keels over) and never wants you to stop talking. It’s all going straight to his stomach, though, and he doesn’t remember having felt this specific brand of nervous and excited and stupidly shy since he was in high school.

He can hardly keep up. This is the danger zone.

Maybe it’s a bad idea that he says the next thing that comes into his head in a desperate attempt to change the conversation away from how much he can pull. But somehow, his voice doesn’t break when he asks, “are you parked far away?”

What? It’s dark outside, and this part of town isn’t exactly known for its upstanding citizens and pretty flowerbeds.

“Oh,” you say, eyes a little wide. “I’m-... just staying close-by. I walked here.” The space between his eyebrows must crease a little too quickly because you immediately hurry to speak again. “Really. It’s like… not even ten minutes. All main streets. It’s nothing.”

“Ten minutes longer than I’d walk around here at night on my own,” he says lightheartedly. In tone, at least. He’s actually completely serious.

You laugh at that; he lets out a chuckle, too. Now, Jihoon doesn’t believe in fairies but he thinks that if they were real, they’d giggle just like you do. 

With a smile still on your face, you say, “what? A strong guy like you? Come on, now.”

Do you have to keep doing that? Fuck, he’s absolutely done for.

He tilts his head forwards, eyes closed, trying so hard to stop the muscles in his cheeks from lifting in a grin that it becomes a workout in and of itself.

“I mean it,” he says, taking what he hopes is a subtle breath to settle the fluttering in his chest. The next thing he knows, he’s leaning one shoulder against the lockers, a little reminiscent of every douchebag in every teen movie ever made. If he doesn’t think about it too much, he won’t cringe into oblivion until he gets home and replays this interaction over and over in his head instead of going to sleep. “Maybe I’ve just lived here too long. I might be jaded, but it’s still true.”

“How long is too long?” you ask.

“All my life,” he tells you.

“No way?”

“Mm.” A beat. “What about you?”

“I’m just staying with a friend, right now.”

“Oh, right.” He falls quiet again as he remembers the first time he saw you, remembers making the list in his head of all the possible reasons he hadn’t seen you before. The second was true, then.

Why does that feel like the worst possible scenario? He decides not to unpack that here.

“Maybe-...” you start, glancing down at your hands, which have been twisting in front of you for a few seconds now. Your chest inflates, filled with the words you’re about to speak, but only a breath comes out when you shake your head instead of saying them. “No, don’t worry. Scratch that.”

“Are you sure?” he asks, because he thinks that whatever you were about to suggest, there’s not much he would have said no to. He feels like it’s only fair to give you another chance to say it.

But you don’t.

“Yeah, it’s nothing.” You pause. “I… should probably get going.” He glances over your shoulder at the clock mounted on the far wall, squinting to see the time. 11:45.

“Shit. Yeah, me too,” Jihoon agrees. He didn’t realise it had gotten so late, so fast: he’s hardly ever out at this time. Lord, he already knows it’s going to be an open inquisition when he gets back to his apartment. His neighbours, Soonyoung and Seokmin, are about to have a fucking field day. 

But it’s already long past the time he usually goes to bed, so he asks his next question anyway. He still can’t shake the thought of you walking back on your own at this hour. “Do-… you need a ride?” 

He’s not sure if you actually consider it, or just wait a moment before you answer just to be polite. Either way, you end up shaking your head.

“It’s okay. I’ve-… got a call to make, so.” Your voice is a little quieter, lips tweaking up into a regretful half-smile, and Jihoon curses in his own head. How had he forgotten about that? “Thank you, though. Really.”

“Don’t mention it,” he says. “Just… get back safe.”

You smile and nod, taking a step towards the door and Jihoon does the same. He reaches the exit first and holds it open for you; when you’re both out in the street, he suppresses a shiver and looks in the direction of where he left his car earlier. Feeling the full force of the cold, it crosses his mind to ask again if you’re sure about walking home, but you’re already pulling a beanie down over your still damp hair and tapping something into your phone, so he doesn’t say anything.

“I’ll see you around, uh-…” you start to say, only looking back up when you falter, realising that this is the first time you’re about to use his name and it occurs to you both, at the same time, that you haven’t done this part, yet.

“Jihoon,” he introduces himself, lips quirking into a side-smile. His gaze is expectant and you respond to it perfectly. 

“Y/n,” you introduce yourself. 

“See you around, y/n.”

You split off in the opposite direction to where he’s heading. Before he clamps his headphones over his ears for the short walk up to his car, the last thing he hears is the retreating sound of a dial-tone. 

—————

He doesn’t see you then for two whole weeks. 

For the first couple of days, he only idly notices; it’s not a big deal — it’s not like you’re always there when he is, and he’s sure it’s the same vice versa. But he notices your absence, nonetheless. By the end of the first week, he casually wonders if you’ve had a change in schedule. Maybe you’re on a different working pattern, something that means you can’t be there on Monday and Thursday evenings and at 11:45am on Sundays. 

It’s not weird. He only knows this because prior to that first conversation, acknowledging you as you crossed paths by the free-weights became part of his routine. It’s fine that he sort of misses those little interactions, isn’t it?

Maybe you’ve decided to start training ridiculously early in the morning instead? He tried that once. Never again. It then occurs to him, in the middle of a self-enforced rest day as he sits in the dark nursing a headache, that perhaps you’re not well. He sort of wishes he’d had the guts to ask for your number the last time he saw you, now: he thinks he’d check in, see if you were okay, ask how work was going or something. 

Deep down he knows he’d probably actually just be staring at a blank text thread with a ‘casual’ message typed, tweaked a few hundred times, and ultimately unsent. But that’s fine. It’s the thought that counts. 

The next time he sees you isn’t even in the gym, at all. It’s a Sunday afternoon — he finished his morning session, went home, showered, and headed back out into town after some lunch with a few errands to run. He finds himself spoiled with the luxury of a spare few hours to kill and dips into his favourite coffee place, thrilled beyond belief to find that it’s not obnoxiously busy and that there’s only one other person in the queue waiting to be served. 

Oh, he thinks when he looks up from his phone and sees a vaguely familiar set of headphones sitting on top of a definitely familiar mane of hair, standing right in front of him. Oh, shit. It’s you.

Jihoon goes back and forth with himself over it but ultimately decides he probably doesn’t know you well enough to just say hello out in the wild like this, so even though the urge to do so strikes, he holds himself back. It’s agonising, though. He really wants to. 

You step forward to order and he’s typing out a reply to a message in his, Seokmin and Soonyoung’s three-way group chat, in which he’s literally been fighting for his life as of late. He made the mistake of mentioning you in passing a few days ago and ever since, he’s had to vehemently deny that he has developed his first gym crush, insisting that actually, he’s just made a friend. They don’t believe him, because of course they don’t. That would be far too reasonable. Seokmin says that Jihoon wouldn’t be blushing just from saying your name if you were really ‘just a friend’. Soonyoung argues Jihoon wouldn’t have mentioned you at all.

“I’m so sorry — bear with me, just-…” your voice is quiet but Jihoon hears you apologising to the cashier in front of you, and it snaps him clean away from the tiff he’s having with the men who live in his building. He glances up and you’re elbow-deep in the bag over your shoulder, red in the face with your bottom lip pulled between your teeth. He turns his head slightly and sees the small hand-written sign that says the card machine isn’t working, and they’re cash only, today. 

He can hazard a guess at your predicament. 

After another few seconds of you trying to find whatever it is you’re looking for in your bag, he starts feeling bad for you. This, right here, is his own worst nightmare. Should the roles be reversed, he thinks he would’ve just turned around and walked out. It’s exactly why he doesn’t bother with backpacks and satchels day-to-day: if it doesn’t fit in his pockets, he doesn’t take it out with him. The system isn’t perfect but it has saved Jihoon a decent amount of public distress. 

But the roles aren’t reversed, and he has his wallet already in his hand, so… he only gives himself a few seconds to wonder if it’s appropriate before he does the stupid thing anyway.

“Don’t worry — I’ve got it,” he says, stepping around you, pulling out the cash to pay for your order. You’re dumbstruck when you look  at him, head tilted to the side. The person stood behind the counter glances at you, then at him, and back at you; you don’t see this, however, because your eyes haven’t left Jihoon’s face since he appeared — as far as you’re concerned — out of thin air.

“I can’t ask you to…” you start to protest, but your hands have stopped fishing around and he’s moving the cash further towards the barista, who hesitates just a second longer. 

“You’re not asking. I’m offering. I’ve got you.” He says this with such finality that you quite literally can’t argue with him. The lady behind the counter accepts the cash and you nod, shyly, mouthing a thank you. He orders his own drink — an Americano, nothing exciting — and you both go to stand at the other end of the counter while you wait.

“Hi,” you finally say, and Jihoon can’t help but give a small chuckle. 

He doesn’t have anything hugely witty or creative in his arsenal, though, so he comes back with a matching, “hey.”

“How… have you been?” you ask. 

“Can’t complain, really,” he says. “Are you okay? I haven’t seen you around for a few weeks.” Oh, God — the second the words are out of his mouth, he wishes he could take them back. Why did he have to add that last part? Why didn’t he just leave it at the question? 

“Yeah — about that,” you breathe, ducking your head to conceal the heat that’s spreading over your cheeks. “You know how I said I was staying with that friend?” He nods, and you continue. “I was waiting for some stuff to get sorted out with an apartment and it all finally got resolved, so… I’ve been moving my stuff over to a new place.”

Jihoon feels his heart sink for a moment, but he keeps his expression pleasant and engaged. His fingers threaten to give him away as they fiddle with the aglet on the drawstring of his sweatpants. 

“Sounds tiring,” he says lightly, and you laugh again, nodding. It’s odd, having his heart taking residence low in his stomach and somehow also in his throat, all while hammering away at a mile a minute. All the caffeine in the world couldn’t have this effect on him. “Is it going okay so far?”

“Yeah.” You nod. “It’s a process, but… it’ll be worth it.”

The barista behind the counter announces herself by clearing her throat and slides your drinks across the marble surface with a little glimmer in her eye. Jihoon picks them both up, extending yours out to you. There’s a pause (in which he swallows a large helping of self-doubt) as he glances to the door, working through several combinations of his next words in his mind before he looks back at you. 

“Do you… maybe have ten minutes to sit with these?” He asks. You light up immediately, not even checking the time on any of your devices, nor the wall clock behind your head. He doesn’t let himself think about why it makes him giddy that you’re accepting the offer, just like that.

“Yeah — yeah, sure.” You smile, walking through the lines of tables and sliding into one of the big, comfy chairs by the window. He unzips his jacket and slings it over the arm of the other chair before settling in himself, his long fingers wrapping around the to-go cup. The drink warms his perpetually cold palms and he sighs sweetly.

“You must be excited to get into the new place, then?” he asks after taking a sip, letting it heat him up from the inside. It could be argued that this job is already being taken care of, but Jihoon is not about to go there.

“Oh, God yes.” You nod, relaxing back in the seat with your own cup. Jihoon subconsciously leans a little forward in tandem. “It’s been fun staying with my friend, but…” You pause, lips slightly parted, before going on. “Okay, a warning: I’m a terrible person for this, I know. She’s done me a huge favour, letting me stay there — but I can’t deal with how untidy she is. It’s driving me nuts.”

A chuckle bubbles in Jihoon’s chest, cheeks starting to ache as his smile grows and grows. It hasn’t fallen since he sat down opposite you, and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, any time soon. “That bad?” he asks.

“You have no idea,” you groan, covering your face with one hand. He wishes you hadn’t — he thinks you look quite lovely when you’re all lit up like this. “She doesn’t clean her dishes after she eats — she piles them up in the sink for like, three days. I don’t think she’s used the vacuum the entire time I’ve been there. I keep finding wrappers and packets and mismatched socks everywhere —” 

His snort of laughter rolls off the back of his throat rather ungraciously and he settles back into his chair. You gently bump his ankle under the table with your foot, beaming at him. “I’m serious! I can’t live like this, Jihoon. I can’t!”

The more you speak, the less he can control the fits he’s descended into, and his abs start to ache after a while; there’s desperation in your voice but it’s just wrapped up so cutely in your lighthearted frustration and decoratively tied together with your sunshine smile… he can’t help it — he’s in pieces. It’s okay though, because you’re laughing too: it makes him think of fairies again, and he can picture you with dainty, intricately patterned wings under the soft lighting in the café. He wipes the corner of his eye with the heel of his hand as he starts to calm down, taking a few deep breaths all the way into his stomach.

“You’re so much stronger than I am,” he says.. “I couldn’t deal with that.”

“You know, I had a feeling you’d be a clean person, too,” you say, sipping at your coffee again. “I mean… I’ve never seen you use the gym showers, so I wasn’t sure, but…”

“Hey,” he says, mock-defensively. “I don’t trust the locks, okay? I shower at home!”

Your cup is lifted to your mouth and he can only see you from the nose upwards, but by the creases at the corners of your eyes, he knows you’re concealing a smile behind it as you nod back at him.

Ten minutes turns to twenty and then somehow becomes thirty — Jihoon starts feeling like you’re someone he’s known for years, and not just the person he accidentally ended up paying attention to in the gym just a couple of weeks ago. He bounces off you and you bounce off him. Both of you have long-since finished your drinks, too: there’s no real reason for either of you to still be here.

Except the obvious. 

“So, the apartment,” Jihoon says, leaning forwards again with his elbows resting on his knees. “Is it…?” He makes a few circular gestures with his hands with which he tries to imply something to the effect of ‘local’, or ‘nearby’, but he can’t quite bring himself to say that out loud. You seem to catch on though. Somehow.

Then again, you did say — a few subject changes ago — that Jihoon is on your wavelength. Maybe that’s it.

“About… a fifteen minute walk from here? Give or take,” you say, and his eyebrows shoot up his forehead so fast it’s like they’re on strings, being controlled by someone else. He doesn’t realise for a few seconds, by which point he isn’t even sure how to relax them. 

“No way?” he says, trying to feign nothing more than an idle interest. Obviously, he’s soaring. 

“Yeah. I’ll want to get back training soon, too, so there’s some incentive to get this done quickly. I miss it,” you tell him.

Jihoon comes out with what he says next without thinking. His mouth is moving before fully engaging his brain. It’s the coffee jitters. Apparently.

“Well, if you need any help with anything, I’ve got a car.”

“You’re too sweet,” you say. “I really couldn’t put you out like that, but…”

“You wouldn’t be,” he assures you with a shrug. “If I’m not working or in the gym… I’m never really that busy. It’s up to you, but-… I’d be happy to.”

You bite the inside of your lip for a moment, apparently mulling this over, before wiggling in your seat to pull your phone out of the front pocket of your jeans. You unlock the device and hand it over on a ‘new contact’ screen. 

Jihoon goes completely stupid: he thinks his brain stops functioning as he takes it to put his number in — for a moment, he’s staring dumbstruck, struggling to even remember the order of the digits now he’s under pressure, but it comes back to him eventually. His thumbs dart across the screen and he checks, double checks and triple checks that he’s typed it right before placing it back in your waiting palm. 

His fingertips brush against yours and it tickles, sending small shockwaves up his arms and straight into his chest. You smile down at your phone before glancing up at him.

“You need an emoji,” you tell him, and he raises an eyebrow at you.

“Huh?”

“Everyone in my contacts has one — I’ve been doing this since I was in high-school. You need to pick one, too.”

“Oh, uh-…” Jihoon swallows, and for some reason he’s completely forgotten every single little emoticon option there is. He draws a blank. “I can’t — you pick one for me. I don’t know.”

You narrow your eyes at him for a second, pouting your lips as you seem to scroll through the endless options. Now and again, you look up at him, as if trying to see what best fits him before you continue your search. He waits. And waits. And waits. He’s about to throw in an admittedly useless suggestion of some sort of boring animal when you turn your phone around to show him what you’ve chosen.

Jihoon, the contact name reads. And there’s the little angel face next to it.

“Oh, come on,” he says, blushing deeply. “You can’t be serious.”

“I totally am,” you say proudly, turning it back and pressing to save it. He hides his face in his hands. “If you won’t pick your own, you get what you’re given. You did this to yourself.”

“Wow,” he chuckles weakly, sliding his hands up into his hair and raking it back off his face. Your eyes move quickly across every inch and boy, does he notice. You shrug in response and test it, sending the same little emoticon to him. He blushes harder when it comes through and he saves your number into his own phone before placing it face-down on the table. 

More than an hour after buying your coffee, Jihoon stretches his arms above his head and checks the time on his watch. He frowns slightly, not sure how the afternoon got away from him so fast, and lets out a sigh.

“I think I need to get going,” he says reluctantly. Leaving you is absolutely the opposite of what he wants to do, actually. Alas, “I have some friends coming over tonight.”

“Yeah — yeah, of course,” you smile, leaning to one side to pick your bag up off the floor. “No worries.”

You both move to stand up and he throws his coat over his arm, leading the way out. He holds open the door for you to leave first, then follows you outside into the afternoon sun. 

“It was really nice to see you,” you say, turning to face him. 

“You too,” he agrees. “Text me if you need anything, okay? But actually do. Don’t just say you will?”

You laugh sweetly. Fairies. His ears might have actually caught fire this time. “Okay, okay. I promise. I’ll text you — thank you.” There’s a pause, but only a tiny one. “And for the coffee, too.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he insists, waving it off. You shake your head. He thinks your hands are twitching when you stuff them into your pockets but he can’t be sure. Your breath definitely stutters, though. 

“No, really. Um… next one’s on me?” 

He blinks, and blinks again. Next one? The next one? He feels like he’s malfunctioned and been forcibly rebooted. The next one? 

“I-…” he starts, his throat dry. “Yeah, okay. If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.” You nod, smiling with — what he doesn’t realise is — relief. “I’ll see you around, okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah — I’ll see you, y/n.”

—————

Jihoon has no choice but to admit defeat to the group chat that night when Seungcheol and Jeonghan come over for a takeout.

Within minutes, his oldest friend is asking about the girl from the gym — he’s been just as relentless as Seokmin and Soonyoung in quizzing Jihoon, except it’s slightly harder to deny to Seungcheol because he did witness, first-hand, the way you had his friend tripping over his own feet with a single smile. At first, Jihoon tries to shrug it off. Play it down. Change the subject. He doesn’t mention that he’s actually spoken to you since he and Cheol trained together, or that he accidentally bumped into you and paid for your coffee, or that you stayed talking with him for as long as you did. He definitely doesn’t say that you exchanged phone numbers. 

He absolutely won’t confess to being smitten. 

All Jihoon willingly admits to is that from what he’s seen of you around, you seem nice, and with a roll of his eyes he does agree that he thinks you’re attractive. He gets a bit of a glare later in the evening when  Jeonghan asks if he’s thought about where he wants to take you on your first date, and Jihoon tells him to stop asking stupid questions and eat his chicken before he eats it for him. But all in all he thinks he evades the worst of it pretty well. For now, anyway — he knows their pestering isn’t going away any time soon. 

Especially not when, on their way out, Seungcheol leans close and whispers that whatever is going on with his gym crush, it suits him. Jihoon jabs him on the arm and the two men leave, laughing brightly.

It’s about an hour after his friends have gone home, having washed the dishes and cleaned up his apartment that Jihoon is sitting on his living room floor doing a few lower body stretches before he turns in for the night. He finds himself tapping into your text thread — not for the first time this evening — and skimming over the short conversation you had earlier. You messaged him when you got back to your friend’s place to thank him for the third time, and Jihoon replied back telling you that if you didn’t stop being silly, he was never going to respond to you again. Your reply came in the form of a “:(“ and his was a simple “:)”. That was it, but he’s been thinking about the exchange ever since. 

He’s not sure why. Nor is he certain what about that has him looking down at the messages and grinning like a fool in his apartment, alone, at 10:30pm on a Sunday night. He could probably take a stab in the dark at what it means, though. He rubs at the back of his neck with one hand as he changes conversations and types out a short message with the other. 

jihoon: fine. you’re right. 

seokmin: ?

soonyoung: probs true, does need context

jihoon: about the gym girl. you’re right. 

soonyoung: OH

seokmin: Hahahahahaha

seokmin: Yeah, you’re definitely the last to know, dude

soonyoung: fr even chan and hansol know atp lmao 

jihoon: they what?

jihoon: how do they know?

jihoon: they don’t go to my gym! i haven’t seen them in weeks!

soonyoung: because we told them????? 

seokmin: So, we might have told everyone

jihoon: blocking both of your numbers immediately.

seokmin: Hey! We’re just glad you’ve accepted it

seokmin: When do we get to meet her?

jihoon: blocked.

Well, great, Jihoon thinks as he fights the urge to lay face down on the floor and let the laminate cool his searingly hot cheeks. 

At least he’s admitted it now. 

He’s vaguely confirmed in writing that maybe he has a bit of a thing for you — it’s out in the open and at minimum, two of his friends know that it’s real. Straight from the horse’s mouth. Fingers. Whatever. No doubt by morning, all of his friends will have found out. The point stands that he hasn’t confessed to something like this since he was approximately sixteen years old, so whatever you’re doing to him, whatever this… is, it matters. 

So, he asks himself, standing up off the hardwood floor and stretching his spine, arms locked behind him and pushed back as far as they can go. He turns off all the lights, checks the front door, goes through the motions to get himself ready for bed. So… what the fuck am I supposed to do now?

—————

Come Monday evening, he’s about ready to hit the roof.

As far as bad days go, Jihoon thinks he’s in the running for one of the worst ever. He slept awfully, tossing and turning through the night despite the usual winning combination of freshly washed bed sheets and his white noise machine drowning out the occasional disturbance from the street below. He wakes up two minutes before his alarm is due to go off, only to discover he fell asleep before plugging his phone in to charge overnight, and it’s sitting at a very risky 13%. The gel he uses to keep his hair off his face at work has gone weird and only does half a job, strands tumbling back in front of his eyes the second he goes to leave his apartment, very nearly forgetting his keys. Then, to really put the cherry on top, he sees that — at some point between getting home yesterday and now — someone has scraped his car while parking up next to him. There’s a large scratch right down the passenger side, with no note nor reliable CCTV in his apartment’s parking lot to confirm who it was, and of course, the space is currently empty. 

All this before he even gets to work.

He fundamentally knows that starting the week off with a bad attitude will only lead to a really shitty remainder, but when Vernon sends his routine ‘Monday Motivation’ booster message — “you’re going to have a great day, today!” — into the group chat, Jihoon responds with a crude photo of his middle finger, right in front of the massive scuff on the bodywork of his Hyundai. Jeonghan replies with an ‘oof’, Wonwoo with a ‘yikes’, and Joshua, ever the comedian, sends a picture of Garfield lying face-down captioned ‘Mondays’ that nobody replies to. All responses feel kind of appropriate. But he pockets his phone without sending anything else, sighing again; he locks the car and checks the handle just in case before he finally heads into the building.

It’s going to be a long day. He just has to get through it.

Things don’t necessarily improve. He ends up in and out of meetings all day, so when 5 o’clock rolls around and he’s on his way out the door, he’s feeling a bit like he’s done nothing of actual value. Just, for some reason, thinking about you and tapping out a catchy beat on the top of his desk as he pretends to pay attention to useless presentation after useless presentation. But it’s still somehow been exhausting on his brain and on the drive back to his apartment, Jihoon feels so drained that he contemplates skipping the gym altogether and going straight to bed. This internal argument takes up most of his journey, but it does keep him occupied during the rush-hour traffic if it does nothing else. 

Nothing has ever been fixed by ruining a perfectly good routine, however — so no sooner than he’s back in his apartment, he changes out of his button-down and trousers and into his regular gym gear. His protein shaker is ready on the counter for when he’s home again, the lights are off, his bag is on his shoulder and the door is locked. He pushes against it a few times, checking out of habit, despite the fact that his only neighbours on this floor are Soonyoung, Seokmin and an elderly couple with a cat they’re not technically supposed to have. Nobody tells, though, because Boots has become everyone’s emotional support animal. The only actual security threat is Seokmin maybe stealing something from his fridge, but he’s only ever satisfied after the third test anyway. 

A quick warmup and a few easy stretches later, Jihoon sets about his business. Mondays are for training legs (and often, as a result, incapacitating himself for the rest of the week), and these workouts are always some of his most intense.

So intense, in fact, that he’s sweating buckets and cherry red when he steps away from the squat rack, tugging up the hem of his t-shirt to dry his face, a brief flash of his toned abdomen on full view. He’s just about catching his breath when he glances in the mirror, and his knees nearly give out when he sees you walking in. You lock eyes and smile at him in the reflection as you start to walk towards him.

It’s not just any smile, but he’s way too flustered to notice.

He spins around to face you, mortally embarrassed that you definitely just saw that, but in a weird way… kind of elated? You drop your headphones to sit around the back of your neck to greet him as you get closer. He pushes his hair back off his forehead and tries to act as cool as he can, but Jihoon suddenly becomes incredibly aware of everything about himself in this moment: his posture, how his arms hang by his sides, the exact positioning of his feet. The fact that he’s breathing pretty deeply, that his pulse is so loud in his ears that he can see your lips moving but can’t quite hear what you’re saying.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit — you’re talking. Focus. He needs to focus. 

“Sorry — what was that?” he asks, eliciting a soft laugh from you.

“I like your shirt,” you repeat, a fraction clearer. Jihoon glances down at himself, at the same sweatpants and tight black workout top he wears in here several times a week, and looks back at you with a raised eyebrow. God, he lets himself think for half a second, entertaining his own stupidity with the idea that you’re finding this as hard as he is, too. Maybe I’m not alone in this. 

“Oh?” he says. “Um — thank you?”

“How’d it go with your friends last night?” you ask, hardly skipping a beat, and he’s a little thankful that you skim over his poor attempt at gratitude for a compliment he isn’t sure he deserves. Instead, his confusion wraps itself around the fact that you actually remembered what he was doing last night. Hell, even he’d forgotten in the heat of the day he’d had, but you remembered. He’s sweating over it a little and briefly wonders what the chances are of the gym floor opening up and swallowing him whole.

Slim, he decides. But not zero. 

There’s hope.

“Yeah — yeah, it was nice,” he says, internally kicking himself for overthinking this so much that he’s apparently lost his ability to speak. In the space of 24 hours, he’s gone from giggling over coffee with you to completely weak just at the sound of your voice. It should be easier here, if anything — this is home turf for him. His comfort space. He supposes the tight fit of your gym clothes accentuating your hips and thighs isn’t helping matters, and neither is the wide neckline of your own t-shirt exposing your throat and a collarbone. But still. He’s not a teenager. He should be able to handle a little bit of skin. 

He clears his throat, rolling his head side-to-side. Focus. “Sorry — I’m-… I just didn’t expect to see you back here so soon.”

“Yeah,” you chuckle. “I-… couldn’t stay away. Missed it a little too much.”

“I get that,” he concurs, willing his eyes not to drop down your frame to a newly exposed area of skin just around your waist, your t-shirt riding up as you adjust your bag on your shoulder. “It’s good to-… have you back, anyway.”

“Good to be back,” you agree. “Hey — can you leave that set up for me, when you’re done? I’m on legs today, too.”

Jihoon doesn’t want to say that he knows Mondays are your leg days, as well, so he doesn’t. Even if it is true. He wonders if you would find it odd that he’s remembered. “Sure,” he says with a small smile, which you return. Just as you’re about to walk off to drop your things into a locker, he pipes up again. “I mean — hey, if you wanted a spot, or to-… do, you know… anything…”

“Are you asking me to train with you?” you ask, eyes bright and smile wider than he thinks he’s ever seen it. This is torture. He’s not even lifting anything and his heart is about to burst out of his fucking chest — God, maybe this was a bad suggestion.

“I-…” he starts, but he lets the breath out of his lungs and shrugs his shoulders. “Yeah. I am.”

“Give me two minutes,” you agree, hurrying off to put your stuff away and fill up your bottle.

He manages to squeeze another set of squats in before you get back, which is sort of a miracle seeing as how his knees have gone completely weak ever since you arrived. He’s scrolling through his playlist as you cross the gym floor on your way back to him, but he looks up and smiles as you approach. 

“You go ahead — I’ve just finished.”

He knows he’s really fucking done for when, after the first round, you add plates onto the bar to out-lift him. All before he’s even positioned himself behind you to be a good spotter.

Jihoon doesn’t go down without a fight though, and things get a little competitive from there. Both of you throw some of your favourite (see: most agonising) exercises into the mix over the course of the hour, taking it in turns on the equipment and creating a session that just about has him able to move by the time you’re finished. You talk to each other when you’ve got the breath to do so, otherwise focussing on your workout with more intensity than either of you remember training with for a long time. 

And so what if he has to turn away from you once or twice to compose himself when breathless whines spill from between your lips on your last few reps, the sheer effort of the movements pushing your muscles to their absolute limit? So what if he feels his entire body run a thousand degrees every time you sweetly encourage him to manage just one more? So what if his palm stays tingling for fifteen seconds every time you high-five him for a set well done?

You slide out of the hamstring curl machine with a deep breath and legs like two sticks of jelly at the end of the session, and he holds a hand out to steady you as you regain your ability to weight-bear.

“You okay?” he asks, and you nod, patting what’s exposed of your chest and neck with your towel. 

“Yeah. Yeah — just… fuck.” You laugh, laying your hand over the top of his and squeezing. Only for a second — not even, only for a breath — and really just to let him know that you’re okay to stand on your own, but Jihoon feels a bit like he’s been electrocuted straight up his arm all the same. “You don’t come to play, do you?”

“Says you,” he scoffs, only now moving his hand from your upper arm. “I was wrong about you — you’re insane. Clinically insane.” 

Using the paper towels he went to gather while you were finishing up, he wipes the machine clean as you stretch out your now slightly exercise-swollen thighs. 

“I was just gonna finish up on one of the stairmasters,” you tell him, taking a long sip of your water. His eyes widen to the point of comedy, eyebrows high on his forehead. You snicker at his horror, the rim of your bottle hovering tantalisingly over your bottom lip. “What?”

“That’s-… got to be a form of masochism,” he says, exhausted just at the idea of marching up the never ending staircase even for a minute. You almost choke on your mouthful of water, only just swallowing it in time before a sudden, uncontrollable laugh erupts from your chest. 

“How?!” you ask, covering your mouth with your hand. Just like yesterday, the urge to pull your arm away, to reveal your hidden smile strikes him. He doesn’t act on it, but he wants to.

“What do you mean, how? Why would you put yourself through that after what you’ve just done?” It’s completely lighthearted, and the rush of heat on your cheeks intensifies at the cocktail of shock and awe in his gaze.

You shrug your shoulders once. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just better than you.” The way the tip of your tongue teasingly sits between your teeth as you grin at him sends bullets of adrenaline through his veins and Jihoon runs his hand over his face.

For about three seconds, he tells himself he isn’t going to take the bait. He’ll lose, he’ll admit it — he’ll put his hands up and say you’re absolutely, definitely better than he is, if it means he doesn’t have to push through a round of cardio after surpassing every single one of his physical limits. But God, he thinks you look completely irresistible standing there challenging him like this, your hands on your hips. His eyes don’t leave yours and yours don’t leave his; both of your chests stutter, just a little bit, and he can see your smile grow in his periphery.

How the fuck is he supposed to walk away?

“Ten minutes,” he concedes, matching your footsteps as you start to walk backwards towards his least favourite line of equipment in any gym, ever. “And you’re definitely getting the next coffee, now.”

——————

That Friday, you finally text him again.

His muscles have just about returned to a working state and Jihoon is quite proud to say that he has regained the ability to sit down without needing something to hold onto. He got home from work, showered the day away and has just settled down into the sofa to start on the book Wonwoo has been on his ass about reading when his phone vibrates on the side table. He reaches over for it, trying to figure out which of his friends might be trying to get hold of him early evening on a Friday, and already going over excuses in his head as to why he can’t go out to do whatever they’re inviting him to. But when your contact name flashes up on the screen, every single thought disappears from his brain.

y/n: hey :)

y/n: just out of interest, how good are you at assembling furniture?

He furrows his brows at this. There’s a very obvious answer, which is that he’s not. He doesn’t want to reply saying so, though, so he goes for what he thinks is the next best thing.

jh: well…

jh: what are you trying to put together?

y/n: a bed :(

y/n: today’s your rest day, right?

y/n: can i bribe you with dinner after? :)

Oh? His brain stalls, fingers hovering over the keypad. He can literally see your face forming a little pout before growing into a hopeful grin in his mind’s eye. He doesn’t see how he could ever say no. 

jh: apparently yes, you can.

jh: text me the address? i’ll leave in 5.

He changes out of his basketball shorts and hoodie in record time, abandoning Wonwoo’s book on his couch in favour of attempting to look at least somewhat presentable for you. He tugs on a pair of jeans that he hasn’t touched in about 6 months and one of his nicer t-shirts instead, even going as far as to spritz aftershave on the column of his throat. You’ve sent him your address and he makes to leave, doing his regular essential item pat-down on his way out the door. He puts your new apartment into his phone as he crosses the parking lot, stupidly delighted to discover it’s only 7 and a half minutes away from where he lives, and settles into his car with a series of deep exhales.

The breathing exercises don’t achieve much. His head is still spinning when he parks up in the street by your new place and lingers just outside the building. He sends you a text to say he’s arrived and you reply saying you’re on your way down. You appear in the lobby just a few minutes later.

“Hey,” you greet him warmly, crossing the space and putting your arms around him in a hug. He goes limp for a fraction of a second before his arms slide around you, too. God, he hopes you can’t feel his heartbeat right now. He thinks that the effect you have on him should be considered dangerous. But whether you can or not, you tighten your arms to squeeze him once before you unwind them from around his neck and step away. 

“Hi,” he says, feverish from the tops of his ears all the way down to his toes. His hands find his pockets as you take a few more polite steps back.

“Thank you so much for this.” Your bottom lip finds temporary home between your teeth before you’re nodding back towards the stairwell. “I’m on the third floor. Follow me.”

He does. He walks up the stairs behind you as you ask about his day at work, and he tells you that he thinks today has probably been one of the best he’s had in about 2 months. When he asks how your day went, you turn your head back to look at him and stumble on the next step, gently laughing and saying that you think you’re at your tether’s end with D.I.Y, but it’s been pretty good otherwise. By the time you reach your floor, his thighs are aching, a bit of residual fatigue from your session earlier in the week making it a little harder than it ought to be. He can’t imagine how you’ve coped every day since then; if his own building didn’t have an elevator, Jihoon thinks he’d have been sleeping in his car.

You give him a little tour of the apartment, and he stands next to you at the window as you point out where you were staying with your friend a few blocks away. He thinks the view is seriously pretty in the evening light, enchanted by how he can see the tops of the slightly lower buildings and the street below, lined with neon storefronts and currently alive with shoppers and bar-goers, but… He cringes at himself for thinking it, but the view through the glass is nothing compared to the one he has inside. 

You’ve started to put up a few decorations and knick-knacks around the place too. He doesn’t know you very well, but he still thinks it’s very you — all of it, and he likes them. Even with the room full of boxes and half-unpacked cases, there’s so much personality in it already. Charm. He brushes off your attempts to apologise for the ‘mess’, as you called it, despite everything being neatly pushed out of the way of the main space. It’s easily tidier than any other mid-move apartment he’s ever been in. 

“Did you want a drink?” you ask him, walking over to the refrigerator and resting a hand on the door. “I’ve got wine, or-… anything, really.” 

“Just some water would be great,” he says appreciatively, and a few seconds later you’re handing him a bottle, turning another one over in your hand. “I really wouldn’t be much help after a couple of glasses, trust me.”

“Does this mean you are good at it, then? Before a drink?” you ask him. Is it hope in your voice? Or do you somehow know how hopeless he is, and are you teasing? He can’t tell. Regardless, clearly his evasion earlier wasn’t quite as successful as he hoped it would be.

“About that…” He chuckles, taking a sip from the bottle and glancing sideways at you. “I’m sure between the two of us, we’ll figure it out.”

“My knight in shining armour,” you say with a laugh, closing your fingers around his wrist and leading him through the door to your bedroom. You’ve managed to separate all of the individual pieces, but you haven’t made any real progress otherwise. He settles himself down on the floor and reaches for the assembly manual, pursing his lips as he looks at the little baggies of screws and bolts and various other things he doesn’t know the names of.

“Okay.” He frowns, looking back up at you where you’ve kneeled down a couple of feet away. You’re grinning innocently back at him, but Jihoon’s lips are more aligned with a pout. “You maybe should have mentioned that the instructions are in Swedish.”

——-

Ignoring the fact that you can’t understand the directions printed on the flimsy little pieces of paper, you get to work. It’s… an interesting process, but somehow between the pair of you, you successfully manage to assemble the bed in just under two hours by mostly following the diagrams (and having to backtrack several times because Jihoon managed to miss a few steps). At three minutes to nine, you’re both finally standing up off the floor, stretching out stiff joints and tight muscles; the bed is fully assembled and made up with your sheets in the centre of the room, headboard against the back wall, the lamp you set on the dresser casting a pleasant orangey glow on every surface.

“We did it,” you say, a little in shock, a lot exhausted, and absolutely starving. At least, that’s what he assumes you’re feeling, because it’s what he is. “We actually did it.”

“I mean, you did most of it,” Jihoon says. It’s true; at a point, he was just handing you the pieces you asked him for and holding parts steady so that you could fit them together. But if you want to call it a joint effort, he isn’t going to stop you, and the roll of your eyes tells him that you do want to call it that. 

“Shh. You helped,” you scold him, bumping his upper arm with your elbow. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“If you say so,” he chuckles, taking another sip of his water. Jihoon isn’t sure he believes you, but the way you’re challenging him to argue further with your tongue pressed against the inside of your cheek scrambles his brain. Any remaining argument dies on his lips. “We make a good team.”

“We do,” you agree, expression shifting into a shy smile, bumping his arm again, your elbow lingering against him for a second longer. “Come on, I think I promised to feed you, too. What are you in the mood for?”

A movie has been playing in the background for about an hour by the time your food arrives and you’ve eaten everything. Jihoon relaxes back against the cushions of the couch and you’re settled comfortably next to him: there’s plenty of space on either side of you both, so there isn’t really any need for you to have your upper arm basically pressing against his, but Jihoon is too comfortable to say anything and you certainly aren’t making any attempts to move away. You shift your legs after about ninety minutes, bringing them up underneath you so your thigh is pressed against his now, as well, and you’re twisted slightly so you’re physically facing him but your head is still turned towards the TV.

Everywhere your clothed body touches him is scorching, and he wonders if maybe he should’ve worn a thinner t-shirt, or at the very least something a little less heavy on his legs. His jeans, slightly tighter around the thighs than perhaps would be their peak level of comfort, are clinging to him everywhere and he’s so aware of himself, so aware of you, of your sweet body wash, your fruity shampoo, every single one of your breaths… He’s cursed people out for breathing too loudly around him before, but he thinks he could replace his white noise machine with an eight hour track of just this and he would sleep like a fucking baby.

One of your elbows is propped against the top of the cushions behind you and you’re resting your head in your palm, and (not for the first time this evening) he glances sideways to look at you. They’ve been fleeting glances thus far, only stealing fractions of a moment before he turns his attention back to the TV. But this? This is the wrong moment. Entirely the wrong fucking moment because as his head turns, so does yours, and you catch him in the act. Fuck, if he thought he was burning up, before? He’s pretty sure he’s somehow just descended straight to the second circle of hell, greeting all the other lusty sinners like old friends. Several of his thoughts tonight have been considerably impure, and in this half second of blistering eye contact, they all come rushing back.

The universe is really testing him this evening, and Jihoon is stumbling. It feels like any minute now, he’s going to explode.

He straightens his spine and looks back at the TV, trying to force his eyes to focus even though he’s completely swallowed by the feeling of your arm straightening across the back of the couch, your fingertips grazing over the skin at the bottom of his hairline. He can feel your eyes still on him, your gaze burning into his cheek, no doubt following as his tongue darts out subconsciously over his lips. But he can’t quite help himself, can’t get the image of how sweet you looked out of his head; he clears his throat quietly and looks over at you again, coming over almost completely blank the second he notices the glimmer your eyes hold when they’re trained on him. 

Any. Fucking. Minute. 

“Jihoon, I-…” you start to say, and he turns himself a little bit so that he’s facing you better, completely forgetting about the movie now. That’s not a great loss: he couldn’t explain the plot even if he tried. “I don’t know if-… you can tell me if I’ve read you wrong…”

“You haven’t,” he hurries. Relief starts to ease the tension between your brows, before you scrunch them again and cock your head to the side. “I’m sure you haven’t, I mean.”

In this new position, one of his legs is bent and sitting up on the couch beneath him and you’ve adjusted your own posture to accommodate. Your knee sits just over the top of his, more of your impossible body heat radiating through his clothes, and he glances down at the site of contact before he looks back at you. 

“I just-... I don’t know, I think I knew I was interested in you from the first time I saw you, but the last few weeks especially…” You’ve been rehearsing this. He can feel it. It’s written in your eyes, holding the weight of the words you’re struggling to say, and behind them he can see cogs turning as you try to get the words in the right order. (He knows how that goes, because he’s been trying to figure out how to tell you, too.) He nods, urging you to keep going.

“I can’t get you out of my head. I really like you.”

He short-circuits, then. Even though part of him knew what you were going to say, hearing it out loud flips a switch inside him and he stops functioning. Blinking at you slowly, lips parted, heart racing – he feels as if his brain has been sucked clean out of his ears and is floating somewhere way above his head. Way outside of a contactable range, way beyond any level of rational decision-making. Jihoon knows what he wants to say, of course – he knows that he wants to say that he likes you, and that he has for a while, and that maybe you should let him take you out on a date or something, but all of that sits just behind the barrier of his teeth, so…

He leans forward and kisses you, instead.

He almost can’t believe that he’s only wanted this for as short of a time as he has; it feels like it’s been building inside him for so much longer. Relief floods through his veins, the emotional dam finally breaching. It only lasts a few seconds, but with his lips pressed to yours and yours pressing back, the static in his brain goes quiet, the movie falls silent: everything stops, except you. He thinks you could’ve been carved from stone around each other — he thinks something just feels so inexplicably right. Your hand tightens in his hair and he gasps softly as he pulls an inch back, eyes heavily lidded and looking straight at you through his lashes. You move forward, leaning your forehead against his, and the feather-light hold he has on your chin slides up to your cheek instead. 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know how to-…” he says after a long, long moment of remembering how to breathe, how to blink, how to exist in your space without combusting on the spot. He still isn’t sure he knows how to do any of those things, especially not now he can see every single line of your face this close. He’s trying, though. “But — shit, I’m crazy about you.”

You kiss him, then, harder than before, colliding in a mess of half-finished breaths and bumped, stinging noses. His other hand comes up to sit against your rib cage, yours pressing into the material of his t-shirt over his chest. He smiles and parts his lips as yours move against them, your tongue gently sweeping into his mouth, finding his own; a soft, low moan tickles the back of his throat, his fingertips curling slightly to tighten his hold. 

Jihoon isn’t sure how you end up on your knees, straddled astride his legs with one of his hands tucked between your thigh and calf, the other on the curve of your ass — he just knows that he doesn’t mind one bit. You’re warm and comfortable, the arch of your back pressing you into him deliciously. He’s kissing you like his life depends on it (he really fears that it might), and you’re doing the same back, licking against his tongue and rocking slightly with every separation and reconnection of your lips. He feels your fingers brush at the hem of his t-shirt and slip just underneath at the same moment as you pull away from him, and he’s so dazed, so fuzzy, so lost in you that he can only tilt his head back to stare up at your face. In your current position, you’re towering over him. It’s easily the best view he’s ever had.

“Can I-…?” you ask breathlessly. The new roughness to your voice goes straight to his cock and he has to restrain himself from bucking his hips upwards.

“Yeah,” he says, leaning forward slightly to try and aid you. Your hands tug at the bottom of his shirt and peel it up over his chest: he raises his arms slightly and soon, you can toss it to the unoccupied side of the couch. He shivers slightly as he relaxes back, both at the chill in your unheated apartment and upon noticing the way you’re staring down at him. It’s addictive. 

“Oh my God,” you whisper, jaw a little slack, smoothing your hands over his shoulders to feel every ridge of hard-earned muscle. You travel down his arms, over to his chest, down his stomach… Jihoon sucks in a breath, your warm hands absolutely searing against his skin, and his abdominals tighten beneath them. Tilting your head, you press a line of kisses down the side of his neck, your lips brushing against one almost unbearably sensitive spot when you continue. “Fuck, you’re so hot.”

He smiles bashfully, rolling his head to the side and giving you all the access you want. Your lips tickle euphorically against him as he tugs you flush against his chest, both his hands now tightly pressing against your ass, fingers kneading the muscle concealed by your pants. You’re sitting right over his clothed cock and he’s reasonably sure he can feel your pulse between your thighs, letting out a soft grunt when you roll your hips deliberately down into his own. Your kisses travel to the swell at the curve of his shoulder before moving back up to his lips, where he meets you with a fire that he’s never kissed anyone with, before.

“Says you,” he murmurs into your mouth, your teeth clashing, his hips pushing slightly up off the couch. Just enough to make you sit back from him, just enough for Jihoon to open his eyes and look at you. His hair, thoroughly scrunched up and pulled around by your desperately gripping fingers, fans out at all sorts of angles and his chest has taken on a rosy hue since you last looked at it. With swollen, shiny lips, glossy eyes, breathing deep, he looks completely blissed out, like a man who could unravel beneath you if you moved just right. All from a little tongue action. He’d usually feel embarrassed, but it’s hard to when you’re the person on top of him; to be honest, neither of you would mind much if he did.

You’re pushing yourself up and off him before he can really get his bearings and an audible whine of despair parts his lips at the loss of your weight against his cock. Fuck, these jeans were a bad idea: he’s straining against the denim so much that it hurts, and there’s a near perfect outline of his hard-on. He stops pouting the second you take hold of his hand and tug him upright, though, your eyes dark and determined and intense. He thinks he might faint, actually: from standing too fast and feeling as though all the blood in his body is pulsing through his aching dick, he has to take a moment to stop the edges of his vision going dark before you’re pulling him through to your bedroom.

Something flips inside him the second you have him there. Jihoon, who was more than happy to sit beneath you and let you take all the control in the living room, is pushing you back onto the mattress by your shoulder and slotting himself between your parted thighs the moment the door is closed behind him. He’s past the point of wanting you, now: he needs you, and he needs you to need him, too. 

And God, do you. You prop yourself up on one elbow, staring at where he’s now leaning over you with wide eyes and your bottom lip drawn between your teeth. He bends down and kisses along your jawline in response, nipping gently just below your ear. Your back arches up and in a flash, one of his hands is beneath you, snapping open the clasp on your bra with a few slides of his fingers.

“Wh-…” you start, giggling and panting at the same time. He smirks against your pulse point. 

He flattens his tongue against you and licks a salty bead of sweat off your skin. “What?”

“Had no idea you could-…” You’re cut off by a gasp as one of his hands slides under your sweater, slipping beneath the garment he just unfastened. His fingertips graze over your breast and a pleading sob escapes you. His smile grows even wider. “You were so…”

“So what?” he prompts, pinching your nipple between his thumb and forefinger. Another one of those beautiful sounds breaks the air above you. He does it again, massaging your breast with the palm of his hand. “Come on… talk to me.”

“So good,” you gasp, lying down flat and tilting your head back against the pillows. He rocks forwards to press his cock against you again and your thighs tighten around his hips, one leg hooking around his to keep him there. “So-… fucking good.”

You’re so impossibly irresistible to him, especially like this, and he sits up, settling on his knees to look down at you. Jihoon doesn’t even get the chance to move his hands towards the hem of your sweater to tug it off you though: you’re already grabbing it yourself, crossing your arms to pull it over the top of your head. He can see your bra now, and hell, it’s pretty even if it is just hanging off you. Baby pink and lacy. He thumbs over the material as he helps you pull it down your arms, briefly letting himself wonder if-…

“If only you’d been patient enough to see the set together.”

Oh, so you can read his mind now, too? 

You glance down to the small space between your bodies and his eyes follow, lips slightly parted, a heavy sigh on his breath. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck — he wishes he had. Even imagining it, he’s throbbing.

“You wear all this for me?” he asks, hands creeping up the insides of your thighs. You nod up at him and he smiles down at you. “Fuck. I bet you didn’t even need my help tonight at all, did you?”

You’re bucking your hips now as his thumb brushes, agonisingly slowly, over your clothed cunt. One arm has come up to cover your face: for the first time, he acts on his impulsive need to see you shy, see you needy, and leans over you to gently pull it away and pins your wrist down against the mattress. He kisses you, his fingers on the other hand pressing slightly more firmly to where he’s pretty sure your clit is.

“Y/n, you’re so pretty. Let me see you.”

“I didn’t,” you admit, voice wobbling as he works you up so much you’re actually soaking through not just your pretty underwear, but the leggings you’ve had on all night, too. He can feel it against the pad of his thumb and he raises his eyebrows for you to continue. “Just… really wanted you to come over…”

“Mhm. I know,” he soothes, bending low again and kissing down towards your chest. His lips purse over one of your nipples and he sucks it up into his mouth, flicking his tongue over the bud. He releases your wrist with the hand currently taking most of his weight and leans on his elbow, teasing your other tit with his fingers. The weight of it in his palm has him murmuring soft praises against your skin, telling you over and over how good you feel. You push up onto your elbows to try and press him closer — when his teeth tug just slightly, you’re about ready to beg.

“Jihoon, please,” you murmur. He short-circuits, again. Goes blank. His name has always sounded so much sweeter on your tongue, but this? This? Oh, he doesn’t know if he’s ever going to recover. That sound is going to stick in his head for days, months, forever, if he has anything to say about it. But even if his brain isn’t working, his body moves on autopilot: he sits up and hooks his fingers under your waistband, pulling your pants down your legs and discarding them onto the floor. 

He’s staring between your thighs with zero functioning brain cells and literal galaxies in his eyes, trying to figure out what cosmic miracle brought someone like you into his life, how on Earth he’s ended up between your thighs. The question is so overwhelming in his mind that he barely notices that you’re moving, at first. Jihoon doesn’t know what causes you to try and bring your thighs together — if it’s shyness or arousal, desperation, a search for friction? — but he stops you as soon as he realises, laying a hand on each of your legs, pinning your knees down now, instead.

“Keep your legs wide for me?” he asks, to which you punctuate a nod with an assenting hum. “Good girl.” 

You’re so wet that when he strokes two fingers over your covered pussy, pressing the fabric of your panties into your heat, they come away thinly coated in the arousal that’s seeped through them. He brings his fingers to his lips then, eyes fluttering as he licks your slick off them. You taste otherworldly and he doesn’t hesitate to tell you so with a groan.

“God,” he murmurs, tugging at the waistband of your panties with his other hand. His eyes ask if you’re ready — if you’re sure, and when you nod down at him, he pulls them off completely too. His middle finger slips between your folds, collecting the wetness dribbling out of you, and he drags it slowly upwards towards your clit. He repositions himself again, leaning down over you with his head at your neck, the heel of his hand resting against your lower abdomen. He draws small circles over the bud, laying open-mouthed kisses at your collarbone and listening to the gorgeous sounds you make, learning what you like, following each gasp and moan and chasing as many of them as he can draw out of you.   

At the same time as you start rocking your hips up to meet his hand, your nails scratching gently against his scalp again, Jihoon slips his finger down from your swollen clit to press it inside you. You gasp, high-pitched and needy, your cunt spasming around his finger and pulling it in deeper. He’s only in up to his second knuckle but the way you keen for him has him pushing further until it’s buried inside your pussy completely. 

“S’this okay?” he asks, but he knows your answer thanks to your vocal responses to him already slowly easing his finger in and out, in and out. You nod your head almost aggressively as he glances up at your face, your eyes squeezed tightly shut, jaw tense, throat bobbing as you swallow hard. 

“More — please,” you say not long after. A breath hitches in your throat when he does exactly what you ask, pressing the heel of his hand against your clit and positioning another finger at your entrance. He flexes his wrist slightly to get comfortable, pumping both fingers into you now, and he curls them upwards at just the right time to make your back arch off the bed. “Fuck — mhm, just like that—…”

He moves down your body slightly, reattaching his lips to one of your nipples as he fingers you deep and slow. He’s in no rush: Jihoon thinks he could do this all day and just deal with the RSI later on. You look so unbelievably hot with your face scrunched in pleasure, your thighs quivering as you fight to keep them apart like he asked you to, with your hips twisting down against his hand to try and get his fingers deeper and faster. When he lowers himself all the way down, settling completely between your thighs, he flicks his tongue out over your clit and your back arches up off the bed with a gasp.

“Don’t stop,” you whine, all high-pitched and rushed, both syllables merging into one hurried sound. “Fuck, fuck — please, don’t stop.”

“I’m not going to,” he murmurs, keeping pace and rhythm as he works you towards your high. God, he thinks there couldn’t possibly be anything in the world more sexy than watching you come undone from this angle. Your chest rising and falling in stuttered breaths, your hips rocking down against his hand, your pussy right on his mouth. Just the thought of it has his cock jumping in his boxers. “You gonna come for me, huh?”

“I-…” you start, releasing your death-grip on the bedsheets to bring a hand to cover your face. He clears his throat deliberately — perhaps it’s sort of closer to a growl than a cough — and he thinks maybe you really can read his mind, or maybe you’re learning that he wants to see every inch of you (especially like this), because a second later, it’s tangled up in his hair and holding him in place. “Y-yeah, fuck, I…”

“Good girl,” he coos again, and that breaks you. Your pussy tightens around his fingers and you feel yourself convulse, muscles clenching and releasing as you go over the edge with a cry. He eases you through your climax, tongue laving over your clit, fingers slowing but not stopping inside your cunt until your thighs close around his head in your oversensitivity. He takes the hint, then, and he slowly pulls away, sucking his fingers clean of your arousal while you take a few breaths to recover.

“Oh, my God,” you sigh as he moves back up and starts pressing small pecks over your chest and collarbones, your fingers lacing through his hair again to pull him up to kiss you. You groan softly at the taste of yourself on his lips, and can’t blame you. He still isn’t over it, either.

“You’re so gorgeous,” he tells you in-between kisses, one hand supporting the back of your neck to keep you close. “So pretty. So sweet. So good.”

“Shh,” you giggle, but he doesn’t. Just about every adoring adjective Jihoon has in his arsenal is murmured against your lips until you’ve gathered enough strength to get up on your knees and push him back onto the mattress, fumbling with the button of his jeans. 

He groans at the relief as you tug them down over his hips and thighs. “We don’t have to do anything else if you’re—”

“Shh.” This one’s a little more insistent, and he makes a show of clamping his lips back together. “You wore the tightest jeans on the planet, had your cock on-fucking-display for me all evening, and you think I wanna stop now?”

His jaw falls slack at the words that come out of your mouth. The incredulous way with which you say them has him involuntarily bucking up into nothing. Your expression matches his when you finally get his jeans all the way off and his thin, black boxer-briefs are the only barrier between you. The outline of his cock strains against them, tenting the fabric: Jihoon doesn’t miss the way you lick over your lips before glancing up at him through your eyelashes. It’s your turn to give him the look, now, asking that this last part is okay, with your fingertips hooked underneath the elastic waistband. He nods feverishly up at your heavy gaze.

“Please,” he groans, lifting his hips so you can pull them off. His length springs free the moment they’re pulled low enough, slapping back against his abdomen, sitting pretty against his toned muscles, thick and veiny and red-tipped. Desperate. His underwear joins the pile of clothes down the side of the bed as you throw one leg over him; sitting across his thighs, you take his cock into your hand, giving it a few gentle strokes. He fucks up into your palm when you squeeze your fingers around it.

“I need you so fucking bad,” you murmur, head spinning, and Jihoon isn’t in much of a better state himself; he’s fighting to keep his eyes open, fighting to keep his breaths coming. He sits upright, one arm behind him for support, and kisses you hard as you continue to tug at his length. 

“Need you, too,” he breathes, shifting so he has both arms around you. In a swift movement, muscles rippling, he lifts you off him and turns you over so he has you sitting on your now impossibly scrunched comforter.

He finds home back between your legs as you reach over into the drawer at your bedside and fumble around for a few seconds. He hears a little clatter and a rustling and when your hand resurfaces, you’ve pulled free a small foil square. You don’t even give him a chance to lean forward and take it; you’re ripping it open and looking up at him with the biggest doe-eyed stare he thinks he’s ever seen. He nods at the silent question, a grunt tumbling free as you roll the condom down his length. This is the most pathetic little bit of contact and he’s fighting demons.

“Okay?” he asks, shuffling back a little and giving you space to lie down flat on your back. You nod up at him, already wrapping your arms around his shoulders. 

“Mhm, just-... take it slow?” you ask him, anticipation rendering you already a little breathless. “S’been a while.” 

A grin blooms all the way from his lips to his eyes and he leans down to kiss you again, positioning his tip at your hole and pressing forward just enough to tease.

Your thighs tighten around his hips and he pushes himself further inside you with a stuttered groan, agonisingly slowly, inch by inch. He stills every few seconds, both to give you the time to adjust and so that he can take a steadying few breaths and not collapse at how good you feel wrapped around him; he stops pressing his hips forward before he’s fully sheathed inside your pussy and you let a whine slip, the stretch slowly easing. 

“You can move,” you tell him, laying a kiss to his chest. “I’m okay.” 

Jihoon gives a soft laugh. Oh, he wishes this was just to be polite, but no. He’s in real danger of losing control any second. “Yeah, this isn’t for you, baby.”

“Oh?” you ask. You clamp around him and he gasps at the tightness, hips jerking forward until he’s buried up to the hilt. Fuck, there’s a bruised cervix if you’ve ever had one; a high-pitched whine erupts out of your lips and he ducks his head down to your ear.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “You just-... fuck, you feel so good.”

“Mm, says you.” 

It’s another moment before he thrusts with intent, though. But when he does? When he pulls out halfway before sliding all the way back inside you, losing and regaining the feeling of your heat enveloping him entirely, hearing your gasps against his collarbone? The invisible reigns holding him back unravel and he settles into a slow but intensely deep rhythm, guiding your legs around his waist. You hook your ankles behind his back and somehow, you suck him in deeper still, your bodies touching everywhere they possibly can, so impossibly close.

The arm not holding his weight slides beneath your hips and raises them just a little. Now, at this angle, every time he rolls into you he grazes against your sweet-spot and you’re reduced to an incoherent mess within a few minutes. Good, he thinks, because he’s not doing much better, himself.

You hug him tighter after one particularly well-angled thrust, sinking your teeth into the muscle of his shoulder. He hisses at the sting, and your lips part as if you’re about to apologise but he doesn’t give you the chance to; he bumps your nose with his own to ask you to lift your head slightly, before he bends down and kisses you hard.

“Do that again,” he gasps, almost all of his weight against you as the hand not around your hips comes up to rest on your cheek. When your brows tighten, he swipes his thumb over your spit-covered, swollen lips. “Please. ”

So, you do.

Maybe not as harshly as the first time, but your teeth find his collarbone and you suck a bruise into his skin, drawing from him the highest pitched sound you think he could possibly make. He squares his jaw, ducking his head back down, biting on his bottom lip before he has no choice but to speak.

“I’m close, y/n,” he confesses, fucking into you slower, trying to stave it off for a few more seconds, his hips stuttering. “Can-... can you give me one more…?”

You nod, the knot in your stomach already growing tighter and tighter with every movement he makes, and when one of your hands unwinds from around his back to slide between your sweat-slicked bodies, he moves slightly away, letting you reach down.

It’s the sight of two of your fingers finding your clit and rubbing your favourite movements out on yourself that takes him past the point of no return, his cock sliding in and out of you messily, desperately, chasing the high that he’s right on the brink of. He kisses and nips just below your ear, breathy groans tickling your neck, and your high-pitched whine tells him you’ve hit your orgasm just as he starts to spill his into the condom, gushing around him, your walls fluttering and milking him for all he’s worth. 

—

You offer for him to shower first – an offer he gratefully accepts. While you’re taking your turn afterwards, Jihoon hunts down a fresh duvet cover in your room; he changes it, grabs you a glass of water for when you’re done, and sits on the edge of his bed with just the towel wrapped around his waist, scrolling through his phone. He looks up with a bright grin as the door opens and you emerge through it in your pyjamas, glowing from the light behind you, stray droplets of water clinging to your arms. 

You pause gently rubbing your hair dry with the towel, eyes brightening when you see him. “You didn’t have to do all this,” you say, and he pushes a hand through his own still damp hair with a laugh.

“It was the least I could do,” he counters. You raise your eyebrows at him, crossing the room to sit opposite him. He drops his phone down onto the mattress. “I couldn’t leave and make you change them yourself.”

“Leave?” you ask, picking up one of his hands and playing idly with his fingers. 

“I mean, it’s getting pretty late, so…” he says. “I probably need to get going at some point.”

“Or…” you say, tongue darting out over your lips. “Maybe you don’t.”

Jihoon looks down at your hands, then back up at you. Are you suggesting what he thinks you are, or has he still not quite come back to himself from earlier? It’s hard to say if the look on your face is hope, or something else.

“Are you… asking me to stay?” he asks. 

“Only if you want to,” you tell him. He lifts your hands up, pressing a kiss to one of your knuckles, then using it to tug you closer to him until he can plant one on your own lips. “I’ve probably got an old t-shirt you could sleep in.”

“Of course I want to.”

So you slip away from him to go rummaging through your drawers, trying to find the promised article of clothing. The whole time, he’s awestruck. Jihoon can’t take his eyes off you.

——————

He wakes up next to you for the first time on a Saturday morning. His sleep-fogged brain registers lying on an unfamiliar mattress, tucked beneath new bedsheets, eyes fluttering open to take in a room he doesn’t quite recognise at first. Part of him wonders if he’s still dreaming. When he rolls over onto his side, and his eyes land on the curve of your shoulders, the fall of your hair down your back, he has to ask himself the same thing again. 

All of last night must’ve been a dream, he muses, smiling shyly to himself and watching your frame rise and fall with every slow breath you take. There’s no way you really told him you liked him, too. There’s no way any of it could have really happened.

“Y/n?” He asks in the gentlest of whispers, only wanting to stir you if you’re awake already. When there’s no response, he moves a tiny bit closer to you, hesitating before he slips his arm around your waist and settles with his chest pressed against your back. A wildly insecure part of his brain tries to argue that just because you wanted what happened last night, that doesn’t mean you want all of this now. Maybe you only wanted to sleep with him, or maybe you’ll have changed your mind somehow now the sun’s come up. He considers moving away again, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling until you wake up and he can have a real conversation about where both of your heads are at with everything, but he barely gets a chance.

Those thoughts are silenced almost immediately, his brain falling quiet the second you roll over in his arms. You bury your head in the valley between his pectorals, tucked away from the world beneath his chin. His arms tighten around your sleep-warmed body.

“What time is it?” You ask. He contains a shiver at the softness of your voice, bliss running the length of his spine. Jihoon thinks that he could get used to this.

“I don’t know. Early, I think,” he murmurs, and you whine softly, burrowing deeper against his chest. “Go back to sleep.”

“Not if you’re awake,” you say. He’s not entirely convinced you can stick to that promise, though, with the way you yawn and he feels your eyelashes fluttering. 

“Don’t worry about me,” he tells you, the tips of his fingers ticking against your side. He ducks his head, pressing a kiss to your hair. A soft hum rumbles in your throat and he can’t hold back the smile that spreads over his lips. “It’s okay. I don’t mind.”

True enough, you fall back asleep curled up against him and Jihoon, to the sounds of your slowing breaths, drifts off too. A few hours later, at a far more reasonable time, you wake him up with a press of your lips to the tip of his nose.

Innocent, exploratory kisses grow heated in the warmth of the sun that streams through your blinds. Hands start to travel, sleep clothes get discarded, and you have him lying on his back, pressing kisses down his chiselled stomach when his phone starts to vibrate on the floor next to the bed.

He groans at the distraction, again as you shuffle up to sit on your knees and look at him expectantly. 

“Are you gonna answer that?” you ask, the tips of your fingers grazing his thighs. He shakes his head, no. “Come on, Jihoon. It might be important.”

“Not important enough,” he sighs. 

“At least see who it is,” you laugh. Despite a huffed protest, he props himself up on one elbow, leaning over the side of the bed and glancing down at his phone screen.

Seungcheol.

The arrangement to go for a run this morning comes rushing back to Jihoon, who slaps a hand to his forehead and reaches down to grab his phone off the floor, looking at you apologetically.

“Give me two seconds,” he says, and you grin wickedly up at him, ducking low to press a kiss to one of the lines that disappears down into his boxers. 

“Take all the time you need.”

He answers the call frowning, flopping his head back against the pillows. 

“Hey, look – I’m really sorry,” he starts to say, but Seungcheol’s voice cuts him off almost straight away.

“Jihoon, where the hell are you? I got to your apartment and your car wasn’t here, and Seokmin said he didn’t hear you come home last night. We all thought you’d died,” he hurries. Jihoon can picture the expression on the other man’s face perfectly, which is pretty unfortunate seeing as how you’ve moved to start palming his hardening cock through his briefs.

“I stayed out,” Jihoon says, a little wobbly. “I can’t make the run, someth-... shit.” You press an open-mouthed kiss to the outline of his length, the heat of your breath through the fabric sending him into overdrive. “Something came up-...”

The line goes silent for a second, and his breath stutters as you do the same thing again. Each press of your lips is euphoric agony, and he’s really not hiding this as well as he wishes he could. One look down at you tells him that you’re very proud of that.

“Dude,” Seungcheol gasps, snickering suddenly. “Tell me you’re not with a girl right now.”

“Shut up. Go away,” Jihoon grunts. “I’ll call you later.”

“Oh my God, is it gym girl? Did you finally-...”

“Bye, Cheol,” he hurries, hanging up before his friend can say anything else. He drops his phone onto the mattress, fake-glaring down at you and shaking his head. “You’re the worst, you know that?”

“Yeah?” you ask, pulling at the waistband of his briefs to tug them down his legs. “Let me make it up to you, huh?”

[bubooo]

↬ rock candy

prev | the sound of restored peace | next

cw: kys joke

✧ rocking facts :

iwa sure hopes either the reassurance on his part to yn and the pushing on noya’s part from the boys™️ will mean one of them will make a move and do it soon

yn is genuinely so terrified of losing noya even with constant assurance from her friends and even being partially sure herself noya feels the same she feels there’s still risks to telling him how she feels and possibly losing him

yn did, in fact, give yachi the biggest fattest wettest juiciest kiss on the cheek when she got back (hey look she and noya are matching lipstick marks!!)

yn and noya kissing all over each other face’s anywhere but the lips is pretty normal to them (throwback to when yachi said noya gives yn forehead kisses yeah jokes on her they be kissing all over each other’s faces- but it’s also not exactly out of the ordinary for yn because she kisses like everyone on the cheek all the time- just one of her things she does)

kuroo was sitting on the couch and recorded yn chasing noya around the apartment and was laughing his ass off when they went to the floor and started wrestling

noya can deny it all he wants everyone knows he was in paradise being kissed all over his face by yn (flushed ass face absolutely zero thoughts but pretending he hated it like ok mf) he didn’t wash the lipstick off for a while and took a lot more pictures than the one he posted (yn later sets the one he posted as her lockscreen)

iwa JUST left ten minutes ago from the apartment that had JUST been cleaned he was not about to let it get destroyed

kuroo did prevent any destruction and the apartment was in perfect condition when iwa eventually returned

man i sure wonder what happened between yn and noya in the past,,,

↬ a/n : soo,,, that happened!! sorry it took me a bit to get this part out but it is here and i suppose forcing myself to write it might have gotten me back in the swing of things? anyways! delving some more into yn’s past and some of the doubts and fears she hold,,, eheheh i’m so excited for the next part because there is some stupidity that will have you guys tearing your hair out (yn noya ily but i fear you are both DUMB)

# taglist : @eujoana89 @loveelylacey @walllflowerrrsss @le000xxgrd @punkhazardlaw @csbnova @jaynawayna @hyenagoated @lvtilzs @nbcvs @nyxlai @kazunish @dawnisatotalqueen @piapiaweee3 @kuroosmikasavolleyball @empress-pug-pug @eggyrocks @keelsforreals @spicana @mfcherry @myromanempiree @beckixwsm (send an ask to be added !! for my sanity LMAO)

[eeblouissant]

in this essay I need to talk about the way Dorothy acts around & reacts to stan in this clip (season 4 ep 5) specifically or I will simply perish.

enjoy the unorganized (unedited, and definitely not reread) chaos, this will be more of a ramble than anything - it’s so late & I need to get these thoughts out of my head before I explode.

Firstly, the clip in question:

( 1:15 - 2:22 )

now. Oh boy. Where do I even begin.

As much as I know it was done for comedic effect; the way Dorothy doesn’t hesitate to let herself cuddle into stan (STAN!!! CUDDLING. with STAN. And **publicly** there are so many layers here) when he puts an arm around her, describing what probably were the happier times Dorothy’s mentioned having with him despite it all (or at least a version of them. his version, that he’d created in an attempt to persuade her, as we learn pretty quickly) - oh god it just breaks my heart. She lets herself feel those memories for just a moment, before it all inevitably comes crashing down again. The way she snaps so quickly… that’s something we do not see in younger Dorothy. Younger Dorothy comes off much more passive-aggressive leaning more on the passive (shy?) side, she’s just very logical & no nonsense (but not in the way she is now). That’s something that Dorothy never really loses - Whereas current Dorothy has lost that (passiveness) completely with stan, and seems find it natural to come off as “aggressive” & dominating around/toward others. So - that ability to shut off & become defensive like that, & so fast, was developed later on. She’s got a bite now that was learned, because she had to bite to survive. For her own sanity. Do you know how much work that would take to unlearn & heal, if she ever even tried? oh my. Yeah I’m not well. I don’t think she would have much faith in it changing either, it’s become such a part of her. I think she would feel a little lost without it.

That first bit kills me - but what kills me about this scene most, is that last bit. Where she tries to push back further with a comment she know will be funny and just a little hurtful (towards stan, im sure she thought) and that will further deflect. But it backfires and hurts her instead. Her voice breaks. It breaks and her eyes soften and it looks like that just for a moment she lets the hurt shine through. Because that is especially painful, she cannot bury it. Her entire demeanour changes as those last few words are delivered (and Oh My God do they register fast - like she’d reopened that wound having no idea it was going to sting so badly.) and I just - oh my GOD. For that split second she looks like she might crack, the pain in her voice is so clear. & then the walls go right back up & it’s pushed right back down. I cannot deal. I absolutely cannot. Dorothy has let herself be vulnerable in the past, but has there ever been more than maybe (maybe) a handfull of instances where her voice & face soften that way? Anyway, I’m absolutely losing it over those little details. I’ve yet to find another scene where it feels like younger Dorothy shines through in the current. It hurt my heart so good and I cannot stop thinking about it :’) I think this is my sign to rebinge every episode in order. Because I am definitely forgetting - there has to be more.

Okay that’s all for now! If any of you have any thoughts or personal fav scenes (etc) to share as well please feel free!!! Dorothy angst seems to be my drug of choice lately lmao

(like two bits of this were my own interpretations of Dorothy’s character based on observation, don’t take them as canon nor am I claiming they are, because we obviously don’t know exactly what happened in between + younger Dorothy didn’t have much screen time :’)! Headcanons are just so much fun to throw around!!)

She <333 <33333333 <3 <3 <3 heart heart heart xxoo literal angel

[promisedclan]

Can we learn more about the cat's personalities? So we can also know what to expect from them, or have a general idea? :D

The babies don’t get posts yet because personalities change between kit -> apprenticehood and apprenticehood -> adulthood

Extended Ramblings beneath the Cut!

The following ramblings have spoilers for: Character arcs, general lore, behind the scenes stuff. If you would prefer to experience Promiseclan blind, this post is NOT for you.

Firstly, to pull back the curtain a bit, I do plan to play the file Promiseclan lives on in 12 moon intervals. This is for my own sanity’s sake. As having an idea of point A and the rough point B these cats need to be in by moon 12 makes things infinitely easier lmao.

“But what of the choices you promise!” You say.

Well, As mentioned, the save file is moreso of a *guide*.

If you get a cat severely injured//in a relationship/killed/banished never to be seen again I’ll just. Retroactively edit the file.

The wonderful thing about being a human artist is I can look at what the game file says happens vs what I believe would happen because your choices put Shadedstar in the pear wiggler and simply. Draw the latter.

Secondly, the Founder Arc of Promiseclan is very much about individual tragedies and collective hopes and determinations existing in spite of said horrors. Take that as you will.

Preamble over, here are my extended and in-depth personality notes.

Shadedstar is essentially being held together by nine rapidly fraying threads, and those threads all coincidentally share names with her fellow founders. I’ll be completely honest with you, dear readers. She’s only going to get worse. After a certain event happens to her a few moons from now, she begins to go from “I don’t know what I got into but I’m trying to stay strong and moral” to Jimmy Mouthwashing levels of delusional.

It’s very:

“I’m the hero!! Me!!! Look at what I do and give up to save the rest of you!!! Aren’t I such a martyr? Aren’t I such a good leader?”

(She is not only actively making things worse, but she is causing problems that didn’t need to happen to begin with)

Unlike Jimmy Mouthwashing, Shadedstar unfortunately has a very enabling benevolent(?) voice whispering in her ear that she’s doing a great job and everyone should love her. So when someone like Twigstripe goes “You’re delusional. Stop.” She can just turn to her spiritual yes-man and ignore the ugly truth ❤️

As an additional note: For those of you who are on the path to becoming Shadedstar enjoyers, here are my Nuance Notes you can cling to when she inevitably starts REALLY losing it:

- The Fell Star targeted her during a period of raw grief, and actively preys on doubts she has had for a looong while. Said grief is bad enough that first thing after getting loaded into the Promiseclan savefile, I went and manually gave her the lasting grief condition.

- The note in her less-spoilery personality introduction about her not sleeping much wasn’t just some “Haha funny she’s overworked” note. I draw her with perpetual eye bags for a reason. As anyone who’s been sleep deprived can tell you, you don’t exactly think straight when you’re running on low and inconsistent amounts of sleep.

- I will also say there is a HEAVY correlation between number of Founders dead and how off the rails Shaded is being. Will you see that in effect this year? Perhaps.

Anyway!! Onto Brownspot.

(I’m just going to call her Brownie. As weird as the name is out of context, her housefolk named her after the dessert and I think that’s cute.)

Brownie’s kind of a weird one? She and Fallenspeckle are the most mentally stable out of the cats who start the story as adults. Brownie’s issues are less crazy delusions and more a very unwavering “I can fix this” mentality.

Briar’s sick? She can fix this. Her former apprentice is depressed and kinda losing it after [REDACTED] happens? She can fix this. Twigstripe and Shadedstar are at each other’s throats for vague yet clearly serious reasons? She can fix this. She doesn’t know how to ask for help, and she doesn’t understand when she should back down and let things take their course.

To Shadedstar, that kinda made her a no-brainer for the deputy pick because her other options were:

- Guy who is already the doctor of the group

- Guy who is terrified of his own shadow

- Girl who could not care less about responsibility. Fuck it we ball and fuck it we find out!!

As another note:

Brownie and Twig’s dynamic is planned to ultimately be left kinda ambiguous. As Moon 0 indirectly stated, she’s been traveling around with him for a few years at least. I personally think they’re cute as a couple and would work really well together, but Twig has a lot of baggage and Brownie would rather choke on her own feelings than add to it. For now she is his best friend in the whole wide world, and that’s enough for her.

Twigstripe.. Twiggy boy.. Oh god, there’s a lot to talk about with him. Twig also suffers from crippling responsibility complex. He’s 134 moons old as of Moon 1 and is NOT getting any younger. The constant references to him flipping off Shadedstar and wanting to retire are only half a joke, because Twigstripe is TIRED. He never really got over Briar dying in the way she did for reasons. Which I’m not elaborating on now because they WILL be pretty explicitly explored in Moon 8 at the absolute latest.

He does care a lot. Brownie was right about that, those apprentices are his not-biological babies, dammit. (Conifer is both his favorite and least favorite child for. Reasons. One of which the observant reader might already be able to piece together. But we’ll get there.)

Unfortunately he’s really bad at saying he cares. Mostly because everyone he does that to. Dies. So he’ll kinda just unnervingly stare at you until you get the point instead.

Leafshimmer is the oldest of the clan’s actual warriors and is honestly just not having a good time. He’s not party rocking, his mental soundtrack at any given time is Jhariah’s “PRESSURE BOMB 3?!?!?!”. He and Shadedstar both sit on the “Keeping you all alive makes me stressed as fuck” reaction spectrum, but at opposite ends. Shaded is in a crucible, Leaf is just on fire. Save for the training he has to do with Ripplepaw, Brownie tries to keep him assigned to tasks in and around the actual camp to help his nerves. He needs a weighted blanket and some kitty weed and he’d be. More Functional than he is right now at least.

Anxiety aside, he’s actually very clever. He likes working with his paws and doing den maintenance. He also LOVES telling riddles.

(The answer to the one he poses in his personality intro is “Your Heartbeat” by the way.)

I don’t have much else to say on him besides the fact he is ALWAYS beefing with Fallenspeckle. All their relationship events seem to be stuff like “They have an argument over who gets a pretty feather and destroy it” “They disagree on something trivial” “Fallenspeckle thinks Leafshimmer is a fucking moron”. In my humble (correct) opinion, it’s moreso of a one sided beef Fallenspeckle has and Leafshimmer is just like “Waugh. Uh. Okay 👍👍”

Speaking of which. Fallenspeckle!! She is the only cat in Promiseclan who shouldn’t be in the retirement home or middle school. For a long while she was effectively the Young Cat Wrangler™️ because she could keep up with them better than the rest of the group could. Fallen.. kinda copes with all of this with a “I’m here for a good time, not a long time” mentality. She likes games, avoiding responsibility, and not thinking about the horrors ❤️

I label her and Brownie as the most stable because out of everyone, they change the least. She knows what she’s about and honestly? I support her.

Palepaw!! The oldest of the baby gang. He kinda sees himself as the de facto leader, and being Shaded’s apprentice does NOT help this mentality. Depending on how you want to look at it, him wanting to imitate Shadedstar is either very cute! (He looks up to her!) Or very scary! (Noooo little German cat!! Don’t imitate your warlock clan leader!!!) He’s very Fred Scooby Doo to me. Smart, but also a golden retriever of a guy.

I’ll say this much. Coniferpaw gets protagonist rights for a reason. She undergoes a LOOOT of change in this first year. Trauma makes a girlie grow up too fast, I’m afraid. Up until that point, she’s probably the most optimistic of the baby squad. She loves life and her clan. It would be very sad if anything happened to them. ❤️

Vinepaw Is just a sassy little lady who is too smart for her own good, and her mentor enables the hell out of that. She eventually has a very interesting dynamic with a cat I can’t talk about just yet. But know I have plans for her. She’s also one of two Promiseclan founders that can eventually canonically understand/work basic human technology. Now she just needs to figure out how to change batteries 😔

Ripplepaw. Pathetic little man. He is VERY pathetic. Super DUPER pathetic. Having Leafshimmer as a mentor doesn’t help this in the slightest since that guy has a negative backbone himself. Ripple has the worst nest in the den and usually gets stuck with Vinepaw’s chores she doesn’t want to do.

Bluekit was honestly raised more by the Apprentice squad and Fallenspeckle then a Rational Adult and it shows 💀 He’s trying to be a good kid, but it’s a little hard when most of your influences are menaces to polite cat society or going through horrific trauma. I don’t have much to say about him until he gets into his apprentice moons. Which considering what happens. I’ll just let speak for themselves.

[arthuluart]

Hiii - wanted to say first thing first I love your art style, it's so dynamic and fun and those color palettes? Stunning ^^

And second thing second, just some food for thought if you ever want to get angsty about Jerry and Dean, coffee by Chappell Roan sounds like it was written about their break up specifically and I can't stop thinking abt it dndnden

*Cue me losing my mind*

Hiii- they say flattery gets you everywhere and turns out with me, it gets you animatics- jkjk but I do appreciate the kind comments ^^

I’ll put up the animatic separately and take the opportunity to leave the preamble here to keep the video post neat bc until someone tells me to shut up and just post art- I’m gonna ramble… So here’s the commentary you didn’t ask for along with my favourite panels:

First off- You turned me into a big time Chappell Roan listener which is great bc I need music recs to fix my listening habits before Spotify wrapped drops. My roundup last year was shameful… Red Wine Supernova is my new dish washing song.

Even tho it’s not the song’s vibe I kept the content as silly as I could for my own sanity. I don’t love getting too deep into the serious/sad side of M+L for a few reasons but I do find it all very interesting. Point being this song was too good to pass up doing something a bit bigger for.

Ngl tho- this did have me pulling out hair at multiple points. I never colour animatics, rarely even tone them- but you mentioned colour palettes and I was determined to deliver so pardon the messy colouring but (that was the tradeoff) I did not have it in me to stay in the lines. I’m choosing to be kind to myself and opt to call it an artistic choice and not midway burnout. And nothing was gonna get me to open after effects/premiere not even the janky ass golf ball OML this only makes sense if u watch the video.

There are parts of this I’m SO happy with and others I hate. I think it’s really obvious which sections I started losing steam on but overall I lowkey like the end product. Nothing I make will ever be good/perfect- this was one hell of a practice in accepting that lmao- but I can still be ok with the work problems and all yknow? I very nearly shelved this completely bc I got so worked up about the maybe 5 panels I dislike out of 106 total. Counting them was eye opening to ask myself: you’re gonna let that small a ratio stop you from sharing this after putting in days and days of effort? The insecurity goes deep and TBH getting asks has been a nice way of working through it since I post the art I make for answers no matter what only bc I KNOW someone out there wants to see it. It might not sound it but it’s actually quite positive.

Also, although I feel I’ve done my fair share of reading, I’m no expert. So if anything is really off point- sorry my bad (I won’t fix it tho bc I cannot physically stand to look at this another second lol)

I tried to stick to real things found in articles/books/photos/interviews etc bc outside of obviously fictional AUs I’m not super into making stuff up about them (and who needs to I mean the legit stuff is already insane enough) Sure I framed the events in specific ways to suit the song and some aspects are fictionalized (mainly bc the referenced written accounts lacked detail to draw 100% faithfully from anyhow) but otherwise I got my sources cited.

ANYWAYS… sorry for hijacking this answer I need to learn to chill out. Irl I’m a pretty reserved talker so you can tell I’m in a comfy place when I let loose and blather on endlessly lmao brevity is not a skill I possess.

You were probably expecting illustrations or smth but I hope what I came up with is still somewhat alright AND please don’t let my complaining fool you, I genuinely loved making this.

One FINAL Relevant Note: the line “nowhere else is safe every place leads back to your place” is gut wrenching. You’re so right about this song perfectly describing the break up. They always came back to each other and there’s something so devastating about that kind of haunting human connection.

OkAY I’m done promise- I thought I’d implode if I didn’t get all that out

[purplecomputersoul]

hi guys back on track after a few weeks. but i’m totally motivated this time! currently at week 2 so why not share my tips & tricks with y’all😝

- absolutely NO (regular) condiments. the way it has so much saturated fats and calories it could renourish actual ⭐️ving children in africa in a span of a couple of days. if there isn’t a low fat version, salt unfortunately better do the trick.

- i always have a meta day once a week (for your own sanity but also to not mess up your metabolism so you can keep losing weight), ⭐️ving for a whole week is already very hard, do not make it harder for yourself in the future. with a meta day every sunday a few hours before bed you’ll have tons of excess energy for atleast a couple of days.

- no school lunch, ever. there’s absolutely no way of knowing how much you’re eating or how many calories. do you really want to take that risk for some mid school lunch?

- some days i’ll binge but even then i’ll never go over my maintenance cals. maintaining is always better than gaining. i know it can be hard but usually, maintenance cals are about 1500-1900 cals (google for exact numbers) so just choose them wisely and you’ll be okay.

- i know we love fruits and veggies over here but chickpeas are actually tiny little devils, i hate them. all those calories to taste so mid. absolutely not 😂😂 never buying them again lmao please.

- idc what i’m going through, 7-9 hours of sleep every night is a must. it is impossible to hit your gw without sleeping properly, you burn the most calories while asleep.

- protein and fiber is a must. i thought that the steroid gymbros on tiktok were lying when they said protein keeps you full for way longer than any other food type but it’s so real. get yourself some low fat, high protein yoghurt with some chia pudding and banana slices, you will never go back to eating apples for breakfast and binging halfway through the day i promise.

- if you’re eating less than 700 cals a day it is very hard to not over eat them. you need to exercise, atleast 10k steps a day or even just jogging for 30 minutes will make things so much easier. i’m eating 400 cals and jog at the gym it’s such a lifesaver cause i can really eat almost anything.

- idk how to say this but you won’t be seeing any progress if you don’t weigh your food unless you’re only eating green. there’s no point in counting calories if you don’t even know how much you’re eating, the portion sizes can be very confusing and misleading.

- make sure to always weigh yourself with the same circumstances, i usually do it immediately after i wake up after i pee for the most accurate results.

that’s about it!

[rainchyna]

𓆩♡𓆪 episode six: IT BEGINS.

HEHE this episode is a major L ngl but look i had to add hunter one way or another he’s so fucking hot oh my god yo smut warning btw LMAO ,, anyways, the y/n fanboy club will only expand from here so get ready yall all the boys and girls wanna kiss y/n

10:31 am, at the hotel.

it was in the air.

what was ‘it’?

chaos.

chaos was in the air.

ever since your promo with The Undertaker last week, it felt like you were sitting on a volcano waiting to erupt.

you were put in several storyline that got cancelled, had three separate gimmick changes pitched, two underdeveloped love angles, twelve - you counted - times you almost turned heel, and you almost got yourself and Shawn suspended for a fight you had backstage.

fun, exciting even, to say the least.

Lita almost got dropped off of Taker’s team because of an injury she got during a house show, Owen had twisted his ankle, and Steve and Bret were now in a feud within the Taker-Y/n angle and Sherri and Luna seemed to be wrestling each other in every house show.

Vince was clearly beginning to lose his sanity bit by bit everyday and it was showing. he fired and rehired six wrestlers and twenty staff members in the same hour, almost completely cancelled you and Taker’s feud and allegedly - has been in talks with some ex WCW guys to sign in them with the WWF, since WCW seemed to be stealing all the top stars he had.

one of the WCW guys that came was Hunter Hearst Helmsley. you’ve always seen him around, but nothing ever stuck. he’s pretty cool, sweet guy, very much talented. you two only began building a friendship after his debut, he was the new comer who was trying to make his way through the company.

several people advised him to get to know you if he wanted to get to the top, after all no one knows how to jump to the top of the mountain like you do. but also, he was advised to befriend Shawn as well.

swell.

poor Hunter, he quickly found himself being the middleman in you and Shawn’s bullshit. he wound up quickly befriending Chyna as well since she was the middleman in your shit as well.

fuck it. new friend group, why not? maybe being friends with Shawn will shut him up.

“’fuck are you looking at?” Shawn asks.

or not.

“did I say a fucking a thing?” you ask.

Chyna groans putting her fork down, “here we go again..” Hunter mutters. all four of you were trying to have breakfast as a friends, a way to get to know Hunter better and to make him feel welcomed. but god forbid Shawn lets you exist in peace.

“quit staring at me” Shawn huffs and you raise your eyebrows, “that’s rich coming from the guy who calls me pretty all the time” you cross your arms. “so what? do you not like compliments?” he asks. “don’t you?” you counter.

“what does that have to do with anything?” he asks, “what if i’m looking at you trying to compliment you?” you snicker.

“then compliment me.” he crosses his arms.

“trash bag hoe.” you smile.

“one meal. can we have one meal in peace?” Chyna says through gritted teeth. “how are you guys always fighting?” Hunter asks.

sweet, innocent, baby Hunter. hasn’t seen a thing yet.

Chyna chuckles, “should’ve seen them when they first met”.

“anyways” you look Shawn up and down before diverting your attention to Hunter, “nitro boy!” you run your hand up his muscular bicep, “what do you bring to the company?”

“well, youth hopefully? a bit sick of Hogan, Warrior and the rest” Hunter answers. “tell me about it” Shawn mutters.

“you’re pretty good, I’ve seen some of your matches” Chyna comments, “thank you!” Hunter smiles.

Hunter was Vince’s ideal type of male wrestler. 6 foot 3 inches tall, muscular as fuck, blond, beautiful and coquettish, hm…

you couldn’t deny, the man was attractive. very attractive.

Hunter on the other hand, was unintentionally giving you the eyes, unintentionally! he didn’t mean to, but you yourself were … oh god, you were something.

you weren’t exactly paying attention to what he was saying, nor were Chyna and Shawn. Chyna was more focused on eating her breakfast that you and Shawn’s bickering stopped her from, and Shawn… well. He was more focused on the look Hunter was giving you.

Shawn has made it very clear, several times, that he wants you - or to at least sleep with you - but here you were giving his friend all your attention. he’s known you for longer! and he’s hotter! what makes Hunter better than him?

the look on Shawn’s face was unmatched. he was jealous and he couldn’t hide it, at all.

“y’all wanna go out later?” Chyna asked without a mouthful, “yeah, why not.” Shawn said forcing a smile. “there’s a club down the block if y’all wanna head there” you suggest. “yeah, that’s sounds nice” Hunter smiles. “I’ll call Scott and Kev, they’ll really like you, Hunt.” Shawn says.

“Chy, you wanna workout?” Shawn asks, and the dark haired girl looks at him like he just asked the impossible. “I can never understand how you eat a big meal then immediately got to the gym. bro, I’m ready to take a nap” Chyna leans back in her seat. “i’ll walk with you there though” she adds.

“y’all coming?” Shawn asks as he and Chyna get up. Hunter shakes his head, “I think we’ll stay here a bit longer..” Hunter looks at you, hand hovering over yours. Chyna gives you a knowing smirk while Shawn clenches his jaw.

alright then.

4:44 pm, the girls’ room.

“where have you been?” Lita asked, you close the door behind you and walk into the flat. “breakfast down in the hotel restaurant” you answer. you sit on the couch opposite the t.v. “why are you laying in the floor?” you ask.

she shrugs, “I don’t know, it’s kinda comfortable” she replied. “but your ankle..?” you begin, “it’s fine, don’t worry about it” Lita waved. “wait…” she sits up. you look at her.

“it’s almost five right now, what are you doing at ‘breakfast’ this late?” Lita asked.

“what do you mean?” you ask.

“dude, they stop serving breakfast at eleven” she explained, “and I know damn well you weren’t down there with Shawn”.

you bite back a smile and Lita instantly gets it.

“oh my god” her eyes lit up, “oh my god it’s Hunter isn’t it” she laughs, “maybe..” you mumble. if Lita could jump and do a backflip she would, she knew it. she’s seen the way Hunter interacts with you, she just knew he had a thing for you.

“what did I say!?” she laughs, you roll your eyes as a small smile forms on your lips. “yeah, yeah, you told me, whatever” you say.

“what’s going on?”, you look towards the room behind you, Chyna was shuffling her way out, rubbing her eyes. “you actually slept?” you ask. she yawns, stretching her arms before flopping besides Lita on the floor. “man, I could barely open my eyes” she groggily says. “what are y’all talking about?” she asks.

“Hunter has a crush on y/n!” Lita excitedly answers, “hey! no he doesn’t!” you say. Chyna chuckles, “pfft, he totally does” she says nudging Lita’s shoulder. “you should’ve seen the way they were looking at each other breakfast” Chyna adds.

“okay but have you seen the guy? he’s so hot” you say, both girls smirk at you and you roll your eyes again. you groan with a smile, “ugh, we’re going out later, i’m taking my chances to be honest” you say.

“damn y’all leaving me here?” Lita sarcastically remarked, “oh I’ll carry you on my back if you want, baby” Chyna laughs, “for real though, you need to have him wrapped around your finger” Lita says. “maybe Shawn will leave you alone” she adds.

you hum, “I mean, his friend likes you, I think that should be enough for him to leave you alone” Chyna explains.

Shawn Michaels? leaving you alone? and you get to have a fine man around your finger?

“sign me up honestly”

“i’m hungry” Lita groaned, “me too” you agree. Chyna stands up and stretches again, “weren’t you in the hotel restaurant just now?” she ask, you nod. “they stopped serving, me and Hunter were just talking” you answer.

“they should be serving lunch by now though” Lita picked up a menu that was sitting by the t.v and examined it. “sushi! what do we think?” she asked.

<<5:20 pm>>

“I underestimated how much there will be” Lita said. there was an entire wooden boat that was at least a metre long filled with sushi placed on the kitchen isle. “what did you expect? the menu said ‘sushi boat’” Chyna said sitting on a stool. “we’ll I didn’t expect this much!” Lita said handing you and Chyna chopsticks.

“let me tell y’all about this shit I heard the other” Lita says as you begin to eat. you sat next to Chyna and looked at Lita. “the other day, me and Owen were talking shit about people” she begins.

“per usual” Chyna laughs, “and apparently the Shawn-Sunny thing is picking up again” she says “HM?” you hum with a mouthful and Chyna’s eyes widen. “I know!” she laughs.

“again?” Chyna asks, “we doin this shit again?” she sounds unimpressed. “the locker room is already in shambles, we don’t need this” you say cocking you head. “I know! and also-”

“oh my god, there’s more!?” Chyna asks, “baby that’s your friend” Lita points at her, “he’s the messy one here” she adds. “also, allegedly, allegedly, Shawn is only doing this because a certain someone keeps rejecting him and he wanted to make her jealous” she explains.

both girls look at you and your head falls to your palm, “he deadass needs to give up, like seriously” you sigh. “asking Shawn to stop being a man whore is like asking the earth to stop spinning, trust me I’ve seen some shit” Chyna says.

“what is it with Sunny too? isn’t she and Candido married?” you ask. “mhm” Lita hums again, “she’s a messy bitch and honestly, bring the drama, Vince needs some controversy right now” you say. “not that type of drama though, what the hell” Chyna says.

you three continue gossiping about things you’ve seen and heard this week but the conversation somehow rolled back to you and Hunter.

“I’m considering seriously having him, or at least having him on the side” you say, “I feel like that’ll cause drama too” Chyna says, “how?” you ask.

“well, you know, Shawn isn’t the only one who kinda really really wants you in the locker room…” she said.

“oou, who else?” Lita excitedly asks, “have y’all seen that guy.. uhm.. Rocky! that one!” Chyna says, “Rocky Maiavia or something like at”

you frown a bit, you’ve heard that name backstage, but you couldn’t remember what he looked like.

“there’s also Al Snow, apparently when you first came he couldn’t stop talking about how hot you were and him and Bret almost go into it” Lita comments. “why am I the last person to find out?” your frown gets deeper, “I though that was common knowledge?” Lita questions.

“babe, there’s so many more. Billy Gun, Matt and Jeff, Brain Pillman…”

as the names kept piling up, you immediately noticed that these were people Shawn got into fights with frequently. it has to be because they liked you. it has to be.

when is it going to click that he’s never making it to the final cut?

9:39 pm, the girls’ room.

you woke up disoriented. you didn’t recall going into a room nor falling asleep. you moved your leg and it hit something stiff, you sit up and look around you. the clock opposite the bed was barely visible. you look at what your leg hit, Chyna’s hip.

you look back at the clock, one hand pointed to the nine and the other to the forty minute mark.

damn it’s nine p.m?

you scratch your shoulder and look over to the other bed, Lita was also laying motionless. you cartoonishly smack your lips and rub your eyes, it took a couple minutes for you open them fully and only then did it click to you.

damn it’s nine p.m!

“oh my fucking god” you muttered.

you’re supposed to go out with Hunter! and Chyna and Shawn too.. but here you both were.

you pat on Chyna’s shoulder, then you begin patting aggressively, now you were violently shaking her. she groaned and sat up.

“what are you doing?” she groggily asks, you quickly cover her mouth and point to Lita who was still asleep.

you both tiptoe outside into the living room, “when did we fall asleep?” Chyna asks flopping onto the couch, you quickly grab her arm and pull her away from the couch. “I don’t remember either, but c’mon, we’re going out with Hunter! … and Shawn! him too..” you squeal.

“uuuggghhh” Chyna slowly falls to the ground, “I’m so tttiiirrreeeddd” she whines, “but I wanna get dddrrruuunnnkkk” she whines again making you laugh.

both of you make your way to the other bedroom and quickly shower as Chyna picks out outfits for both of you.

it wasn’t long before you were drying up and slipping into your outfit, and you must admit. Chyna has an incredible sense of fashion.

your corset top pushed up your breasts and it wouldn’t be that hard for anyone to see your cleavage, you mini skirt was as mini as ever. a mini skirt should be the size of a belt, and that wasn’t exactly how short it was but it was quite short. your heels made your legs look longer and pulled your outfit together.

you looked good, per usual.

you applied your makeup and quickly curled two piece of your hair at the front to frame your face, you put on your earrings and grabbed your red bag, “you ready?” Chyna asks and she fixes her hair, “yup!” you nod.

<<10:43>>

the place was obviously noisy, after all people come here to get drunk. Hunter wasn’t letting you go at all, from the moment you walked in his arms clung to your hips, and compliments seemed to naturally leave his mouth.

Scott and Kevin kept complimenting you too, you were really fucking hot. exactly how Shawn described you to them over the phone, the saw exactly why Shawn wanted you so badly.

something about you was so alluring, you had this attractiveness to you, they were attracted to you. they couldn’t tell if it was your eyes … or lips… whatever it is! Hunter’s hands on you sent a clear message to them, especially to Shawn. Shawn was chatting up some random girl he just happened to see, he wasn’t even pretending to care about what she was saying.

he was staring looking at you, sitting comfortably on Hunter’s lap, giggling and smiling against his chest. he can feel this heavy feeling of … something … he wouldn’t call it jealousy, it was straight up envy.

why him? why Hunter? Shawn wanted you, but you were giving Hunter what he wanted.

you really liked Hunter. he was so sickeningly sweet, very gentlemanly, the compliments never seemed to stop. he was spoiling you a lot too, he brought with him a little Tiffany and Co bag, gifting you a gorgeous necklace. he filled your cups, drink after drink, from the most expensive ones with names that were hard to pronounce to the ones that tasted like a broke student’s frat party.

his lips would’ve dripped of honey with how much sweet words were coming out them.

he pulled you closer to him, his hands kept rubbing over your thighs, and hovering over your neck and waist. the place was dark so no one could see what he was doing, unless they were focused on you which would be weird, but for the most part, his touches went unseen.

“your skirt is really short, angel” he spoke into your ear, something about that sent to you into a fight or flight mode. Scott and Kevin were arguing loudly over and game of cards, you look over at the bar and Shawn was ordering a drink for himself and Chyna who was now sitting in the girls’ place.

“mhm” you hummed, Hunter’s large hand slowly slid up your skirt. “wanna go somewhere private?” he asked, you look around you one more time, no one gives a fuck. so why would you?

you straddle him, turning to face him. wrapping your arms around his neck you kiss him deeply, his arms pull on your waist bringing you closer to him. you unconsciously grind on his thigh. “I’ll take that as a yes” he breathlessly says, the ‘innocent’ kissing goes on for a while before you’re interrupted by Kevin announcing that he’ll go get more drinks.

Hunter pulls you off of him as he stands up, taking your hand in his. he dragged you to the darkest corner of the club, you could see everyone from this angle but no one can see you.

Hunter’s leg pushes yours open you continue making out again. his hands guided your hips to grinding on his thigh, his hand slipped up your skirt again but this time he gripped on your panties. he can easily rip them off, so he did.

“Hunter..” you whimper, your pussy felt uncomfortably hot. the rough fabric of his jeans pushing and pulling against your clit. “you got it baby, c’mon” he encouraged directly in your ear, “so pretty for me”.

you wanted to fuck him, for more than one reason. one them being that your could tell by his voice that he was one to whimper, probably verbally vocal too.

Hunter could feel a wet patch form over his pants, it was such a turn on for him. “you know” he began, ever since your debut match, I kinda developed a crush on you” he confessed, “the way you were so effortlessly throwing Alundra around made me wanna .. uhm h-have you..” he trailed off.

you pull his hand down to your waist again, your other hand climbing up to his cheek gently caressing it. “have me what, Hunter?” you ask. Hunter gulps, nervously he leans is a kisses you again. you push him away from you and push him back against the wall your were once at. his hands immediately fly back to your waist, “answer me” you say.

“I want to you fuck me” he breaths out, “I want you control me and throw me around too, I wanna be yours to play with” he confesses again. you smirk, well this should be fun.

“oh yeah?” you ask, he nods. you look up at him, he’s so pretty. “how bad do you want me?” you ask, Hunter grabs your hand and places it right in front of his clothed boner, you could’ve sworn you felt it throb and twitch at your touch.

“really, really bad” Hunter whimpered.

bingo! you knew he was the type to whimper.

the only time you stop by the little booth you were sat in was to grab your bag, Hunter was eagerly pulling you away from everyone. he was really horny, almost unbearably, and you’ve barely done anything. his mind ran wild with ideas of what you’ll do to him.

Shawn’s eyes found you once more, he watched closely as you and Hunter held hands and walked out of the club, both of you smiling.

he looked down at his drink, wondering what was he doing wrong. “you okay?” Chyna asks, yet Shawn, never answered.

[rainmustfallts4]

Challenge ◇ Tiger’s Guide to Losing your Mind Part 45

⊶⊰Information & Index⊱⊷⊶⊰Part 1⊱⊷⊶⊰Chronological⊱⊷

───────────────────────────────────────

More dUeLs. Honestly, it’s not the whole challenge that’s gonna make me lose my final marble, it’s this stupid curse. One would think getting cursed would be EASY but nooooo

Okay, Morgyn is the cutest papa ever. I know who I’m voting for for dad of the year ♡

I kept dueling until my charge got too full then I decided to work on my handiness.

Now listen – I COULD have bought a woodworking table at my house, but why would I waste the simoleons when there’s a perfectly good one at the Pancake household 🙂

fun fact: I forgot about the woodworking table and had to Google how the feck to up my handiness.

So. Many. Statues.

“Um… are you okay?”

“I’m great, why?”

“You’ve been out here for over 24 hours creating statues…”

“Yeah, and?”

“I – nevermind.”

Guys, it is time. SHE IS PREPARED!

Boom, level 10 handiness 🔧

Because I love dragons so much, I had her make a dragon statue as the final one ♡🐉

I love how you need level 10 handiness just to smack a hammer against blocks of wood lmao

Because it was a pain to get here and I’m happy, have some selfies c:

Maybe it’s because I forgot to add this trait for a while, but nothing really happened. I don’t know if a single thing broke after adding this in. Oh well. More sanity for me.

[laufire]

STACKED100 - FEBRUARY POST

what is stacked100?

It’s something I thought up, inspired in part by “stackednatural”, but mostly by myself doing this with The Vampire Diaries this last year (see my #stackediaries tag). The gist of it is that you watch each episode of the show on the anniversary of their airing date. It “officially” started in October (with only two episodes) and it would end in September 2024. You can see the full schedule here.

what are we supposed to do with this

Whatever the hell you want lmao. Tag whatever post you make #stacked100 and go for it! Gifsets, live blogging, discussions… engage with other people as much or as little as you want. Watch some episodes and not others, for any reason. I’m doing this to have some fun with this VERY polarizing show, seeing how my perspective might be changed with hindsight + this specific way of watching it, and a bit because I miss my little corner of this messy as fuck fandom. But this is something you can do in whichever manner works for you, mate.

episodes to watch this month

I'm putting these after a read more, because now we're really in it.

February 1st.

Season 4, Episode 1, "Echoes". Clarke and her friends struggle with how to proceed after the fate of the world is revealed.

February 4th.

Season 2, Episode 11, "Coup de Grâce". Bellamy receives help from an unlikely source after being captured. Meanwhile, Abby fights to stay in control, and Jasper confronts President Wallace.

Season 3, Episode 3, "Ye Who Enter Here". Now with Clarke in her possession, Lexa has the power to force Skikru to become one with the grounders. Kane and Abby journey to the Polis Summit, while the Ice Nation prepares to draw first blood against Skikru and the other grounder clans.

February 8th.

Season 4, Episode 2, "Heavy Lies the Crown". The burden of leading weighs heavily upon Bellamy (Bob Morley) and Clarke (Eliza Taylor) when different challenges force them to determine who will live and die.

Februarh 11th.

Season 2, Episode 12, "Rubicon". Clarke is faced with a difficult choice and Raven helps Bellamy navigate Mount Weather as Dr. Tsing begins to harvest the 47, while Jaha and Murphy encounter a stranger on their journey to the City of Light.

Season 3, Episode 4, "Watch the Thrones". Clarke discovers the mastermind behind a devious plan, while Kane struggles to keep the peace. Meanwhile, Jasper's grief drives him to reckless behavior.

February 15th.

Season 4, Episode 3, "The Four Horsemen". Jaha leads Clarke and Bellamy on a road to possible salvation, while tensions rise in Arkadia and Polis.

February 18th.

Season 2, Episode 13, "Resurrection". Clarke begins to question Lexa's leadership decisions and Indra continues to push Octavia. Meanwhile, at Mount Weather, Jasper steps up into the role of leader, and Cage throws Maya into a life threatening situation.

Season 3, Episode 5, "Hakeldama". Pike's twisted crusade threatens Clarke's attempts for peace. Raven becomes a target, while Murphy tries to conspire against Jaha.

February 22nd.

Season 4, Episode 4, "A Lie Guarded". Clarke's decision on who gets to live causes tension in Arcadia. Jasper loses his sanity when the Black Rain falls. Bellamy and his friends face judgement for their crimes against the Ice Nation.

February 25th.

Season 2, Episode 14, "Bodyguard of Lies". As Jaha and Murphy encounter a perilous obstacle on their journey, Raven and Wick try to figure out how to disable the acid fog, and Bellamy races against time as his cover is blown.

Season 3, Episode 6, "Bitter Harvest". Clarke struggles with her morality while Abby grows suspicious of Jaha's motives.

[silverpelt3600]

Halo 2x8 Spoilers!

It is time. It took me a WEEK to find the time to watch this goddamn finale.

Y’all know the drill, this is just stream of consciousness as I watch the episode. Whether it’s coherent or not, either way I’m losing my mind likely!

- pre-episode recap editing goes CRAZZYYY

- okay first scene who is he talking to I’m lost already

- the microscope view was so confusing for a second LMAO. Also this Jeanine girl is literally losing it.

- ALRIGHT YEAH SHE KILLED SOMEONE LMAO. Crazy virus thing? Also the happy music is killing me lol.

- Kai and her team yay! KAI AND HER TEAM OH GOD. Casual explosion that fucks it all up.

- “Master Chief, I speak for the entire UNSC when I say how happy I am to see you back with us” THIS BITCH.

- OOOHHH YEAH JOHN YOU HANG UP ON HER

- OOH. THATS NASTY WHAT JUST CRAWLED OUT OF JANINES MOUTH.

- fuck I feel so bad for John. Totally torn, and the admiral’s little comment of “there’s nothing anyone can do for them” is just the cherry on top. She pisses me off so much lol

- “you have no idea what I can do” FUCK YEAHHHHHH. THATS WHAT IM TALKING ABOUTT, YOU KNOW I LOVE THAT SHIT.

- Cortana my beloved really hoping she’s okay

- Lmao Kai “you ever fire a plasma rifle? You never forget your first”

- NOOO PEREZ

- “What the hell is that?” THAT MY BOYYYYYYY YEAHHHHHH

- THE SLOMO WALK I’m crushing so hard

- oh god the people frozen in the hallways is so creepy…

- OH GOD WHAT THE FUCK THATS SO GROSS FUCKIN TUMOR ARM. THE GUARD TOO? Oh for fucks sake this is nasty

- FOR FUCKS SAKE pulling the Halsey card is wild.

- ooh she’s helping him now. AND AGAIN WHO THE HELL IS HE TALKING TO.

- “you wouldn’t understand. She knows me” what if I cried. What if I started sobbing.

- OUR GIRL SHES IN THE SYSTEMS.

- “You don’t know everything” WHAT THE HELL IS HE DOING SINCE WHEN COULD HE DO THAT. Is it because of the artifact’s in the ship?

- holy shit he’s on the Halo. And THE MUSIC. AND CORTANA MY BELOVED.

- “so nice to have you back” I LOVE THEM SO MUCH.

- “do you think it’s been waiting all that time? For you?” Alright y’all are gonna stress me out there’s too much to comprehend.

- Holy shit Kai’s crazy. “How hard could it be” well YEAH but come on. “This is gonna hurt”. NO SHIT. Jesus Christ I can’t handle this much emotional strain.

- Alright SHITS HITTING THE FAN IN COMMAND. Oop but that solves the Admiral problem!

- EUGHH THERES SO MANY. Hold up. Hold the fuck UP. Kwan is having a moment. The “Cohesion” needs to FUCK OFF.

- oh fuck. OH FUCK HALSEY HAS IT.

- GIRLY WHAT ARE YOU DOING GODDAMNIT. Ohhh. I see now. Goddamnit.

- OOOH SHIT CRAZY DUEL TIME NOW. Damn John getting his shit rocked before GETTING BACK UP LIKE A BADASS. “We’re not done” DAMN RIGHT!

- oh damn now I feel sad for the covenant homie.

- yooo okay cryofeezing Halsey that’s an idea.

- KAI. BABY GIRL OH MY GOD PLEASE BE ALRIGHT.

- “that can’t be good” well yeah if I saw several spires shoot out of mountains I’d be pretty worried too.

- Again talking to this guy? And he apparently also talks to Makee? YOO WHAT THE FUCK ITS A LITTLE ROBOT????? And the crack in his visor! I’m so confused now have those conversations been in a different time or in John’s conscience or what??

- And then the episode ends, and with it so goes my sanity.

Alright y’all, end of the season! One hell of an episode fr. Without a doubt season 2 has been a fantastic season, developing so much of this storyline in a profound way. The finale sets up for a lot to be handled in Season 3, so here’s to hoping they get the green light to make it.

John has absolutely become a favorite character of mine, and this season has only reinforced that. So much of my emotions while watching have been in empathy for John, which makes these episodes land so much harder.

And shoutout everyone who’s stuck around just for these little posts I make. I started making them just for fun but I kept up with it since y’all seemed to like it, which is cool because now I have a little catalogue of what I was thinking during the episodes that I can look at in the future. And FOR THE RECORD I’m not gonna disappear until season 3 comes out. I still need to get caught up on the storyline in the games lol.

Alright that about sums everything up I think.

*bows to an applause while a single spotlight shines on me and flowers are thrown onto the stage.*

[kiryoutann]

THE GODDESS OF WRITING IS BACK TO PLEASE US WITH HER WRITING >_< 💕💜💖

SO i'm ready to write feedback for the most wonderful prologue of your new series! just like i did it for bk hehehe >:) i hope i'll have the honor of being the first to write feedback for russian roulette hahaha. first of all, i would like to say that i really missed reading your fics, and now i'm very happy!!

i'm very excited that i can imagine myself as a cheeky beauty who can be rude to any person if she wants to. in fact it is, because in real life i'm a very modest and shy person LMAO. russian roulette (we have a new abbreviation like rr) gives me a new experience!!!

ALSO i'm very excited about childe's appearance, because it seems to me that he has some dark sides of his past too. i hope we find out soon!

AND I KNOW ONLY YOU CAN MAKE ME FEEL LIKE OFPSDOFPSDOFSP Y/N AND HER OFFERING TO KISS AT THE END OF THE CHAPTER MADE ME SCREAM ＞︿＜

I'M GREATLY DELIGHTED AND I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO A NEW CHAPTER 🥰i hope you're in a good mood <3 don't forget to relax and take time for yourself!! have a nice day <3 LOVE U ♡

HELLO, SWEETIE!!

YES YES YES. it’s here!! and tbh i don’t really have any outlines for russian roulette so rn my brain is kinda empty but HEYYY WE CAN TRY AND FIND IT ALONG THE WAY. also tysm for always looking forward to my work, hope this one doesn’t disappoint!!<3

and yes.. lemme tell you.. (y/n) here is really insufferable pretty girl and i’ll definitely write childe losing his sanity because of her AND HEY, so glad to know you like her! it’s probably different from your rl personality, but hey, we can explore here since it’s a fic! fun!!!

i need to come up with something for childe’s lore tbh. like why tsaritsa offered him to join the agency etc etc. haven’t thought about that. always open for any suggestions tho!

thank u so so much for reading and supporting me. MUAH! i’m so blessed to have ya! have a nice week ahead and stay healthy MUAH!❤️❤️

[gotyouanyway]

here’s my personal ideal version of what should’ve happened with c’rizz instead of what did happen which i didn’t like

sorry this is so long lmao my brain is broken

so. background bc it was unclear/bad and i’m fixing it:

the church of the foundation believes all things must die. they preach that death = total absolution, salvation, and entrance into the next world. so they kill people who need to be saved whether it’s spiritually (i.e. those that need to be absolved of sin) or more literally (those that need to be saved from danger, illness, etc.). they decide who needs saving and when so yeah they brutally murder people and they’re aware they’re murdering people. killing = killing = saving. but to them it’s necessary and even good. ok. that’s it. no secret projects relating to immortality or building a vessel for dead souls. forget that.

so c’rizz was raised by his father in the church of the foundation and became a monk. a combination of his upbringing, some kind of telepathic sensitivity related to being chameleony, and moderate to severe mental illness lead him to be extremely devout. not only does he believe in the church wholeheartedly, he sometimes hears voices of people asking to be saved and he obliges them (mental illness + church brainwashing) and once he starts killing people he keeps hearing their voices afterwards (telepathic sensitivity, like he does kind of absorb their minds in a chameleon way, but only impressions. they’re not actually there inside him). maybe he (and the others in the church) BELIEVE that he’s saving souls within himself in some way, but not literally. anyway because of this ~communication with the dead, and his devotion and the church/his father’s influence, he becomes the super mudermonk they turned him into. the absolver.

later he meets l’da and all of that stuff happens, she “returns him to sanity” or whatever he said. all of that can stay. now he can draw a line between saving someone and killing them in cold blood (as that IS a difference that exists for him), but he still gets confused sometimes when the delusions flare up. and he still hallucinates. and mostly, he’s happy to use his religion as an excuse to maim people he hates, as a matter of personality. like, he still has his faith, he’s just more mentally stable about it. so much more in touch with reality than when the church was constantly getting up in his head and encouraging his delusions

so then basically everything up to his death can stay the same but within the context that when he says he’s saving someone, he DOES mean in the spiritual or physical sense of rescue and not “saving their soul inside the reliquary of my body”. and, just to reiterate, with the full sound-of-mind understanding that he IS killing and murdering people. like, he always knew that in canon i just can’t put too fine a point on it w/r/t his sanity. his delusions weren’t that he was saving INSTEAD of killing people. his delusions were about who needed to be killed/saved. and he didn’t even experience MANY delusions like that during his time with the doctor, he was more or less stable and just angry. so he leaned back on his faith when threatening and injuring people who harmed him, just bc that’s the way he is as a person. ok uh. um

SO HIS LAST STORY goes something like this -->

1. they land on that planet with all the lost/trapped souls crying out to be saved. c’rizz hears them and oh man he can’t just let them stay trapped, he’s the absolver. he has to save them. 2. he teams up with the guys who are trying to destroy the citadel (or whatever was happening) because he plans to just kill (save) everybody on both sides. the telepathic onslaught makes him start losing it for real 3. the doctor and charley find out what he’s doing. big dramatic scene blah blah blah he finally explains all that ^^ to them. it’s all very intense and they’re kind of horrified and concerned 4. the nature of religious trauma and mental illness are delved into 5. the destruction is immanent, but c’rizz can stop it. it’ll kill him though 6. he does not, at this or any point, turn into any sort of devil creature 7. otherwise the end is the same. the doctor convinces him that he doesn’t have to do what the church programmed him to do and saving their lives is better than “saving” their souls or whatever by killing them 8. he sacrifices himself and dies just the same, but this time with a more satisfying character arc 9. done. easy. someone hire me

[krackkokichi]

Fantasy AU Poll Talk

so I know we’re all basically over the popularity poll, but I saw some comments I didn’t agree with, so I’m going to talk about it and the other fantasy spreads. this is going to be long, so I’ll put it under the read more! the text is basically just breaking down the differences, so if you only want to easily compare those, just look at the pictures I included. (but if you read any of the text, know that hawks does NOT have white wings in the newest spread!)

now as far as an au goes, the fantasy au certainly has its fair share of content. there are, of course the three spreads horikoshi has drawn for it, as well as a volume extra of some of the other students in the au. then it has an ending in the anime, as well as a couple merch runs. for the sake of my sanity, the anime content will only serve as reference material, instead of a point of comparison.

katsuki is the easiest starting point, as his outfits are clearly visible in each spread. while his cape is consistent between the first two spreads, in the third he gets another red cape, but this time it is off the shoulder, with what seems to be a goat hide on it. he has also gained a huge chest scar, presumably the same as the one our katsuki will get after his revival. he wears similar red claw-like earrings in the first two, but the merch runs interpreted the second as dangling earrings instead, which I’m inclined to agree with. while he has beaded necklaces in the first and third spreads, the third’s are only orange, instead of an assortment of colors. his boots, pants, and top (or lack thereof) changed each time. while the colors are similar between the second and third spreads, there is a lack of detail on the second’s pants, and he has high collar in the third, which is missing in the second. there also does not appear to be any lacing. his orange sleeves are similar between the first and third, but not quite the same. his sword in the third spread is reminiscent of the lizard he stands on in the second spread, and he does not seem to have his half of all might’s sword anymore. he is wearing a single shoulder pad in the first and third spreads, though in the third, instead of a turtle-shell motif, it is scaled and purple, matching his sword. izuku has the other pad, just like he had the other half of all might’s sword. katsuki seems to have become slightly less wild, but despite the costume changes, he’s mostly the same. here is the picture of the anime merch from the second fantasy spread:

now onto izuku:

izuku got quite the confidence boost! let’s see. he actually doesn’t have as many changes as katsuki. his pants are slightly different in the first spread, with a seam down the front of each leg. his gloves are different each time, going from form-fitting white to loose brown, and back to form-fitting reddish brown. he loses the vest in the third spread, showing off the high waist of his pants instead. the colors are weird in the second spread, but I believe the cape in the third is supposed to be the same one, just ragged now, though the merch took the colors exactly as presented. instead of the one belt across his torso, he now has two smaller belts going around his shoulder. one is connected to his shoulder pad that matches katsuki’s. he no longer has his half of all might’s sword, instead carrying two short swords. his shoes are different in each spread, with no detailing on the shins in the second spread, and a ram-like design on the third. the lacings are also different each time. in any case, he’s certainly become more rugged and confident across the spreads! here is how the anime merch interpreted it (this was incredibly difficult to find lmao):

next is shouto:

unfortunately, we can only assume that aside from whatever is covering half his face in the second spread, his outfit is identical to the first. his outfit in the third spread is so incredibly different from the first and second that there’s almost no point comparing them. he still has a high collar, and his sleeves and pants remain loose and baggy, but instead of a white and blue color scheme, he is now sporting a black and purple one. he is now wearing some armor and carries a sword. the clip in his hair is almost identical to the corruption/curse/whatever it is from the second spread. it makes me think he overcame it and is now using it to his advantage; that’s just a feeling I have though. here’s how the merch tackled his appearance in the second spread (sorry the quality is awful, but this was the only pic I could find that showed the tears in his costume):

now for tenya:

it’s hard to compare suits of armor, especially when I can’t see the full thing in any of the pictures, but I believe that aside from the scarf, pauldron, arm wrap, and new arm braces, his armor is the same in the first two spreads. his armor in the third is more detailed, with gold trimming and full gauntlets. instead of black cloth on his arms, he now has blue and gold fabric and also gained a high collar. instead of the pale scarf, he has a full green cape, and the red on his arm now appears across his breastplate. he’s no longer wearing glasses, and his eyes seem yellow instead of red, but horikoshi has always been a little inconsistent with that. his sword is now brown instead of blue, but other than that, there’s not much to say! tenya seems as reliable as ever. on to kirishima!

there is really not a whole lot of commonality between these. he wears a vest and scarf in the first and second spreads, though the colors are different for both. the merch gave him the same boots as well. he has heavy padding on (at least one of) his forearms in each spread. he traded the horns he was wearing for a skull-like headress. he weilds two short swords in the first and second spreads, and appears to have at least one in the third. he wears a waistcloth in the first and third spreads, but the third’s pattern is very similar to the pattern on katsuki’s sleeves (it must be much bigger though). kiri seems to have grown up a lot. here is his second sword in the ED and how the merch showed his second outfit:

it’s denki time.

this is actually not the first time that horikoshi has drawn fantasy!denki. the first time was a volume 14 extra! now, we don’t have the colors for the first picture, and we can mostly only see his back in the spread. and to top it off, while he was included in the merch, they didn’t use hori’s design for some reason! how frustrating! seriously, what is this?

we’ll just have to use this one shot from the ED as comparison. instead of a pale yellow vest with dark brown belts, denki now has a brown/black vest with light brown belts. the feathered cap is now a frayed one, but the shape is the same, so it might actually be the same hat? he now has a ruffled collar and loose light brown gloves instead of tight black ones. that’s really all I can gather from what we can see! moving on to aizawa:

aizawa’s outfit seems to be less detailed in the new spread, and many of the black and gray areas have swapped places. he seems to now have more support on his ribcage, and his scarf is now segmented. he is now wearing a hat much like denki’s. he’s also has a cape and a bit of a shoulder pad, along with what appears to be a sword. he seems as tired as ever lol. now for ochako:

her outfits have a very similar vibe, but there are a lot of minute differences. she seems to have a ribbed, sleeveless sweater dress on in the recent spread, rather than the nearly identically colored tunic from the first. she has different colored sleeves and shoulder pads, along with some sort of forearm protection now. her hat-hood combo has been replaced with a distinctly more witchy hat and scarf. the color is now a light pink instead of mauve. her staff is much shorter, and she now sports a pair of horns. her boots are now pink with curled toes, rather than the plain brown ones from before. now for hawks:

okay, first of all, the white things in the latest spread are NOT WINGS! horikoshi has NEVER drawn wings like that!! it appears to instead be a feathery cape, much like a boa but in cape from. they clearly protrude from his shoulder pads, NOT his back! horikoshi always draws hawks’s wings coming from his back, and they have a very distinct shape, which the white ones clearly lack. the feather shape is also completely different! I can only conclude that hawks lost his wings in this universe. his coat has a bit of gold trim around the collar, and some white running down the edge. he also appears to have a light blue scarf of some sort. his hair is much shorter now, and he seems to have the same scar our hawks got when dabi burned his back and neck. and finally, endeavor:

not a lot to go off here!

that’s a little better. basically everything is different. we see enji just has a plain black tunic and pants in the second spread, but now he has an elaborate one with gold, silver, and red detailing. he also isn’t flaunting his flames anymore, which was sort of a strange combo with the nondescript cape anyway. he went from looking like a sort of vagabond to a warrior king.

and that’s all! i was originally planning to talk about momo and toshinori, but this took way too long and i don’t have the energy. if you read all this, thanks! it was probably kinda boring. sorry about that. feel free to let me know if I missed anything important!

[godtiercomplex]

maya fertility journal #2

1/28/2024

alrighty.

i went ahead and bought one vial of sperm as i hit my weight goal—or so i thought. did an official weigh in on friday and according to the doctors scale i still need to lose 5-10 pounds. i’m saying 5-10 because i need to be underneath 260 but im weighing in at 265 at their offices. i’m weighing in at 260 at home so it’s about 5 pounds off. so for my sanity im thinking the closer to 250 i hit the better. so if i weigh in at home at 255 i’ll be at 260 at the doctors office. but if i hit 250 at home ill be 255 at the doctors office.

here’s praying for favors.

oh i just did a weigh in this sunday morning and forget what i typed up earlier. i'm weighing in now at home at 265 so maybe it's just the same as the doctor's office. maybe i don't need to lose an additional pounds to get to 250 and will be fine at like 255, 253....

we'll see!

anyway, i find it Hilarious that i got into TLT at the same time i'm narrowing down potential baby names cuz man a certain name was high on my list of baby boy names and now it's kinda... iffy

my sister's like jealous of a baby that doesn't even exist yet--she doesn't want me to stop spoiling her to spoil my kids instead. she's like 'i'm not ready to be an aunt yet. i'm only 9' ma'am and i'm 30. i'm ready to start my parenting journey lmao. she's just suddenly aware now that when i have kids i can redirect my funds toward buying them things and not always buying her things. it's so funny. she's so fun.

also, i saw the adult photos of my sperm donor and like i'm crying. dude has blond hair. and it's so poorly dyed. like sir! did you dye it yourself? i just find it funny that i was like 'yeah he's a pokenerd' and my coworker came over to see his photos and the first thing she said was 'is he a blond asian?' and i had no response cuz he is!

i personally never want to meet the sperm donor but i do want my kids to have the option so you know. it's nice to have access to all this data that i can save for them in the future.

anyway, overall i'm excited to almost have hit the goal weight and i think i'm gonna be plotting to have at least one of my kids be born in march so that way all of my kids can have bdays in march. leo's so funny. he's like 'oh you need to arrange for them to be born on march 1st' and it's like no. cuz my bday is march 2nd. and leo's is march 3rd. but he claims both the 3rd and the 4th so that leaves like any dates after the 4th available. but as we know babies don't come when you want them to sooo its likely that i'll just fuck around and end up sharing a bday with my kid which i don't wanna do.

as a pisces can i raise another pisces?

i guess when i DO get pregnant the tag will change to #maya pregnancy journal and then #maya parenting misadventures when they're born

god i'm excited