#idk! hey guys i think the loneliness is getting to me again

[creachercrunch]

wait sorry give me a second in the tags

[too-deviant]

idk if you’d be comfortable writing this but I was wondering if you could whip up an Aphrodite!reader who’s fed up with her beauty. She stops attending school and stays the full term at camp which makes Luke confused. So she tells him about how random dudes would hit on her and be creepy at her school or something. She’d prolly join him with Kronos bc she wants to feel respected for once. Would be such an angsty but filled with femme rage although totally cool if you choose not to write this~ Just wanted to share it with someone 💛

Pairing: Luke Castellan x Aphrodite!Reader

Summary: Maybe you didn't want to be beautiful anymore.

Content: pretty angsty, brief mentions of male harassment but nothing explicit or triggering, again sorry for the wait i had w block pls forgive me. also not proofread sorry yall its been a rough week.

You were only faintly aware of the noise around you.

The chatter of the city was a mere buzz in the back of your head as you marched down the street. It amazed you, really, just how unbelievably dickish mortal boys could be. This one in particular; Mike Schwartz, a five foot something jock who sat on the bench at every game. He’d been a bother in your life since you started high school. Back then, you took the endless prospects as a compliment – you truly were your mother’s daughter. It was a boost to your weak teenage confidence. 

But as the years went by, the constant asking for your hand became an irritant. Especially when they couldn’t get the hint – at fourteen, turning down guys felt amazing, but when those same guys kept coming back for more, it made your eye twitch. Couldn’t they take the first no, tuck their tail between their legs and fuck off?

Apparently not. 

After four years of putting up with it, you were done. Storming out of the cafeteria, grabbing all your things, hailing a cab and getting the hell outta dodge. Maybe you should’ve stopped to think — called your dad, taken a few deep breaths. But the harder you thought about it, after trying not to for so many years, you came to the conclusion that you would’ve ended up here anyway. 

Here being the peak of HalfBlood Hill in the middle of September. It was only slightly unusual, because when you usually arrive at the start of summer you get to watch the crowds of arrivals setting up shop at camp. Now, however, it was fairly desolate. Less people, you knew. 

It was also a split second shock when you stepped across the border and felt the drastic change in weather. From the cool breeze of the autumn air to the warm summery spring that camp was in year-round. A shift that made you pause, but you kept on down the hill anyway. 

Chiron was waiting for you on the porch of the Big House, and without so much as a word, gestured for you to follow him inside. He was fairly understanding of your situation, but made you Iris Message your dad and tell him of your decision. He, too, was more glad you were safe than angry you ran off. 

“We can talk about this when you feel like talking.” He’d said. 

So you’d done it. Finally, you’d gotten yourself away from the hey hot stuffs and the you seeing anyone baby?s. You were back at camp, you were where you were most happy. 

But you weren’t happy. 

Being a year-rounder, you’d discovered, was a lot less busy than being a summer camper. You got more days off, longer breaks between activities. You found yourself spending more time in your own company; something you never really got to do before. Most of the time you were with your siblings, or your mortal friends, or you were being hounded by some frat boy and their friends.

It took a minute to get used to the loneliness, but you did. You explored camp, found places you hadn’t seen before. A cute clearing near a stream on the east side of the forest, or a Satyr sanctuary on the far end of the beach. You read more books, you trained a little harder, you perfected six new hairstyles on your little sister Elena and Annabeth from the Athena Cabin. 

And yet, you were still pissed off. 

“Why?” 

Luke Castellan was a name everyone knew in this little corner of Long Island. One of the oldest campers, head counsellor of the rowdiest cabin, token tour guide for the new kids. Oh, and the best swordsman camp had seen in, like, three centuries. He was cute, that much you’d heard all around your cabin. But you’d never really held a solid conversation with him until you became a year-rounder. The fewer people around, the more you run into him. 

You’d been practising a few neat tricks with a dagger when he spotted you. Said he was there to train himself for once and that you wouldn’t even notice he was there. You did, though. Especially when he took his shirt off twenty minutes in. 

You shared a water break, he asked you why you’d transferred to being a year rounder, and you indulge him in the story. He was super nice about it too, which made you angry. Was Luke the only nice guy on the planet? 

“But at least you’re happier now, right?” He’d said. You weren’t, you told him that much. He gave you this knowing look you’d never seen on him before, and asked Why?

You shrugged, “I don’t know. I love it here, I do. But I shouldn’t have to uproot my entire life and bring it here just to get some semblance of peace. I shouldn’t have to give up my education, my friends, my dad, just so I don’t have to get harassed every day. It’s not even like my mom gave me anything to help combat it, either. She just made me beautiful and told me to deal with the consequences! I mean,” You let out a weak chuckle, holding up the dagger you’d been toying with, “This was a birthday present from a friend in Cabin Six. Not even my mother, who is a warrior herself, could bother sending me a weapon. They really don’t give two shits about us, do they?” 

He’d parted his lips, eyes shining with something, and looked at you through his bottom lashes, “No. They don’t.”

You and Luke grew closer after that. A lot closer. By the time summer rolled around and the rest of the campers returned, you were inseparable. Many rumours spread but you two ignored them in favour of sneaking into that clearing you’d found and talking in whispers about your hatred for the gods. Who cared if they could hear you? Let them. 

It was Luke who had come up with the idea to steal the bolt. A quick job, in and out, and maybe then they’d listen to what you’d have to say. But they didn’t — they did exactly what they always did and risked the lives of two young demigods and a satyr just because they couldn’t be bothered doing it themselves. Selfish — that’s what they were. They didn’t care about anyone —

“ — but themselves!” You glared at Thalia, who stood before you atop Mount Tamalpais with her spear in your direction. “I mean, look at your dad. He didn’t care enough to stop the monsters from killing you, oh, but it’s okay because he turned you into a damn tree!”

“This isn’t the way!” Annabeth yelled from afar. Her hair was twisted in a style you’d taught her how to do that first year as a year-rounder. It broke your heart that she couldn’t see how right you and Luke were. 

“Curse them, Thalia.” You said plainly, holding up your dagger. Half mortal metal, half celestial bronze. A gift from Luke. “Curse your father and his children. His brothers. Curse them all like they deserve to be cursed! They deserve to be toppled.”

��You tilted your head, looking at them all. Luke and your army were heading steadily up the mountain. If you could convince them now, there wouldn’t need to be a battle. 

“Where are they now, huh?” You raised both your arms, “You’re fighting for your life against a titan on a mountain and the only god who came to help out was Artemis? And that’s just because she was here already.” You scoffed out a laugh, “You should thank us, really, for taking her. Had we not, you’d be dead already.” 

Annabeth watched. You were unrecognisable in that moment — your face streaked with dirt and blood, curled into a dark sneer that any of your siblings would berate you for because of the wrinkles you’d get. You didn’t seem to care all that much, though. Not when Thalia was lunging for you and attempting to pull you out of the rage you were in. Not when her spear and shield were no match for your measly dagger and you went toppling down the mountain. 

The next time any of them saw you was in Manhattan — after believing you to be dead for a year and a half, it came as a shock when you emerged from the crowd of monsters. Your hair was hacked short, and one of your legs had been replaced with a bronze prosthetic. You fought with a ruthlessness none of them had seen in you before, whether it be because you were on the losing side or because Luke had given his body to the Lord of Time before you had the chance to tell him you loved him. You were still angry, and even if you hated Kronos, you didn’t hate him nearly as much as you hated the gods. 

When Luke died, you were kneeled beside him. Your face was dirty, your hair was knotty, and there was a dent in your bronze leg. He lifted a hand to your face, “I’m sorry to have to say this, but…you’re sorta beautiful.”

“Sorta?”

He grinned, and then he died, and you were filled with such unbridled rage that you pushed yourself down to the ground of Manhattan and tore through Kronos’ army with fire in your eyes, not stopping until Apollo got rid of your sight and forced you to calm down. You didn’t know if you’d ever be calm, since the only person who ever understood you just died in your arms, but you dropped your dagger and stomped your way back up to Olympus like a bratty child anyway. 

Zeus didn’t punish you for what you did, but he did say he’d be keeping a firm eye on you. You joined the hunters, much to your mothers disdain, and didn’t ever allow yourself to look back.

[vampiric-succulent]

OUAW EP 20:

It’s not even past the bean footage yet and already I have a thing to comment about—

“Hey. Keep working. Keep your hands down.” Idk if it’s just Mace or if it’s me but this is an interesting thing to start the episode with

Also I lowkey already watched this but considering that I wasn’t really paying attention due to Sleep im rewatching

Oh this is the Silly Goofy episode. Got it.

Watching this is so different now that I know how tall each of these people actually are in real life

“Mr Kremyyyyy….. Torbek had a nightmaaaare………..” torb <3

Hot jones?

Why is Mikey using the King Shmebulon voice

Oh the energy here is so weird today

NEXT YOURE GONNA TELL TORBEK THAT A SHRIMP FRIED THAT RICE and they’re gone

The improv shenanigans here are SO GOOD— “the wee hours” watches and the blue J and the bottle of something

HOT JONES!!!

“There was that guy and he was like… woah.” Bi Gricko!!!! “Why you always watching these kingly types and looking at their woah?” Lmfao Gideon you are no better

Degenerate Jones

TABAXI TORBEK and eughhh Mammon Tiefling Gricko (applying for all Mammon Tiefling Gricko)

I love how Kremy is super paranoid thinks everyone is out to get him but still immediately tells Gideon everything (I need to see Gideon do some sort of something back bc coalecroux is feeling increasingly one sided and it is making me sad)

“Torbek was happy with the infinite abyss”

THE FEDS

Poor Twig she went from dealing with absolute loneliness to dealing with all this bullshit. She needs to have the space to Bogart out a little bit like get this woman a destruction room

Twig 🤝 Torbek

coping mechanisms

Gideon has such older brother who acts like a father figure to Twig vibes

THE FEDS THEYRE IN THE CLOTHES

Torbek is simply following suit… following the suit to the ground lmfao

PENIS NOSE?????? HOW IS THAT AN OPTION

Gideon is overwhelmed by Penis im sorry

This is just reminding me of when Frost got the proud nudist curse and Derek made that slapping turn joke 😭

Obligatory “im walkin here” please stop

Nvm we have the coalecroux and also poly party affirmations (long shots and headcanons)

OH!!! Woah there Kremy

“Think of the Federal government!” Quick Gid take your clothes off!! The government!!!

OH NO THE ORCIFICATION

NO THE FUCKING CABINET

DEREK. DEREK WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT DEREK WE COULD HAVE NEVER GONE DOWN THAT ROAD

Love Torbek’s Spring Aladrin voice. It’s like some sort of old English aristocratic friend of Oscar Wilde.

Oop! Theseus’s Ship mentioned (kind of)

“Did we do a bunch of drugs before bed again?” Funny you should have asked that Gideon given what is now happening

“Tentacles probe me” “yes Gideon join us the time is now get naked”

WHY IS IT ERECT NOW DEREK. PUT THAT DOWN. “Something about beekeeper helmets…” HUH

Oh god Twig is gonna bogart out

PUT IT DOWN. PUT THAT THING DOWN AND AWAY.

“STOP BEING ERECT. STOP EATING MY BONES”

Love how Nikkie says “your mind is back to Gricko” and Mikey just starts screaming

Whoops!

It is so impressive how Twig is so controlled. Like she has every justification to absolutely freak out right now and she’s keeping calm and trying to manage things.

Thank god Hootsie is out of this lol

NO TWIG LOOK AWAY

“Torbek was *very* thorough.”

Okay seriously how old is Twig?? This is a very important question. Like REALLY important.

I’m imagining Spring Aladrin Torbek lying on a couch like he’s gonna say “draw me like one of your French girls”

Guys. Please. We are nearly halfway through this video. Please.

YES CAST SILENCE. HUSH MICHAEL.

No Twig it’s not your fault!!!!!!! No!!!!!!!!!!!

Not the Pennsylvanian sperm trees

“After what I’ve watched today I don’t think you’ll accomplish anything of value.”

Not the milk joke PLEASE y’all not the cilk

Frost is so sweet tho

No more Hot Joneses :(

Yesss Twig establish those boundaries!!!!

Tom is such a deep cut

Okay so Twig is at least 200 years old. Good. That’s really good. Good to know.

Grinko is having a stronk. Please call the Gronkulance.

WHAT HAPPENED TO HOOTSIE.

Omg she’s their niece!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But also HOLY FUCK HE HIT HER??? WITH A CABINET????????

“Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.”

Menasith, and their older sibling Menapauthe.

The Glowing Anus 😭

Oh this is Nikkie’s fault. Fantastic.

MORNING FROTH CONGRATULATIONS EVERYONE

“That’s very funny Gricko. Your daughter is possibly bleeding out.”

Ohhhh Hootsie’s okay thank god

Gricko however is really not

Okay so I know this is a fantasy campaign and we are in the literal Feywild so this like kind of doesn’t matter but how does Gideon get energy??? Does he need to absorb nutrients or is it just sort of as long as he keeps his internal furnace alive he’s okay?

Twig boundaries 100 with regards to Torbek but fully get the party’s concerns

Also Twigsy ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Not Gricko being hypnotized by Spring Aladrin Torbek’s hip sway

Torbek does not know but Torbek must dance!!!!

Oh Torbek’s ticket is so sad

“This is an Acorn Satchel!!!”

Mikey annoying Nikkie so much that she just takes things away

Frost getting jealous over the Gricko impression ����❤️

What is a mud meffet?????

I love Andy so much. Oh he’s wonderful. So glad he’s here.

KLUTZY RETURNS for like two seconds

Love these guys. Oh my lord. Also what the fuck happened in the first like hour???? Still a fun little episode.

[imtheiliad]

Hello I want your advice on something if you don’t mind? So I’m 23 and haven’t had like a group of friends since high school and I had only my best friend for a few years after I graduated, even though we were living a few hours apart then, but then she passed away and I have had no (in person) friends. I’ve just been really lonely but I had my best friend even if we weren’t in the same space but since losing her I’ve been much lonelier, and my depression is bad but I think it’s a lot from being lonely. Anyways on Saturday my local LGBTQ+ center is having a “speed friending” event and part of me wants to go but part of me is terrified because I’m very awkward socially and I don’t know that I’d have anything interesting to say and I also don’t know exactly how the event works or how structured it is?? I just don’t know how I’d make friends any other way as an adult but the anxiety about going to it is super bad but do you think I should force myself to go? My mom sent the info to me and thinks so but idk what my thoughts are and cannot make a decision to save my life

sweet nonnie, first i am so sorry for your loss <3 my short answer is absolutely you should go! i went through very similar anxiety before deciding to go to my local yarn store's weekly craft circle, and i will give you the same advice both my mom and my therapist gave me: go to the center beforehand and check it out, test the commute, see the space so that part isn't all new on saturday. when you are there you can ask questions about it -- just say "hey i saw you're hosting this event this weekend and i wanted more information" if doing that in person sounds too scary DM them on instagram or see if there is an email on their site, answering the what ifs that i can has always helped me be somewhat less anxious. depending on the structure it might be really easy to be a listener, so be active, ask questions, and they will probably ask you about things too, people usually love talking about themselves! also its kinda like the guy on the bus meme with both sides saying "nobody knows you" so even the littlest things you kind of forget about yourself are brand new information to everyone you'll talk to, which is scary but also makes you interesting! the first time i was going to go to the craft circle, all the signs in the universe were telling me not to go, i missed my bus, i didnt have the money to get a lyft, and i was running late, so i called my mom on the verge of a panic attack because it's not perfect im giving up i will try again next week, and she sent me the money for the lyft and stayed on the phone with me until i got there. all that to say, use your support system, it sounds like your mom is rooting for you so use that to your advantage <3 another thing you can do it just keep showing up at the center's events in the future too! even if they are not friending specific, if you have time see if they need volunteers. just keep showing up and someone will see you. I am also terribly socially awkward and anxious so i 100% get it, all of that is much easier said than done, but i promise it is worth it to do it scared. you are doing a hard thing, so be kind and gracious with yourself, but also do a little tough self love. i believe in you. you got this.

[khodorkovskaya]

21.03.23

i remember this time around last year my friend from maths told me that she has "reverse" seasonal depression as in she gets depressed when it's spring/summer, instead of autumn/winter how it usually goes for most people. and i was baffled! how can you get depressed when days get longer, the sun gets warmer, trees start blooming, birds start singing, etc? in winter everything is dark and cold and gloomy, it makes sense to be a little depressed. but spring..?!

but this year i really feel her... ive been dreading the arrival of spring. because spring means warm weather and warm weather means going on walks and going on walks means going on walks with B. but this year there is no B. there's just me and my loneliness and my shitty nostalgia. and every time the sun shines a little too brightly or the birds sing a little too happily, i want to burst into tears. so all i want to do is stay inside and pretend it's still winter and im still in my comfortable warm cocoon because hey it's normal to stay inside and be alone when it's winter, right? but fuck. i go outside and want to kms.

this "reverse" seasonal depression thing has turned into paranoia. whenever im out and about in town, im constantly looking around myself, staring into the face of every passing stranger, convinced that i am going to bump into B. i can't sit still, i can't walk straight, no no no... i have to constantly be looking left and right, turning my head, always checking... and when i get a glimpse of some tall guy with dark hair or, worse, someone crouched on a bike, i get a manic adrenalin rush like oh my god it's him! but it's never him, of course.

what's worse is that that one lana song has gotten quite popular on instagram and it seems like every reel i watch has it. and that song takes me back to one particular moment with B.

every time i discover a new song i like, i listen to it on repeat until i get sick of it. and in spring of 2018 that song was "say yes to heaven". it already made me all teary eyed when i first heard it. there's something about it idk, it really touched me.

so it was the beginning of spring and B and i went for our usual walk in the countryside by the bridge. and we were talking about love and he started telling me about his ex. in a very neutral manner, nothing extraordinary, just like "this is how my first relationship went". and, sure, to him it felt like a story from the past. he was like what, 16 when it happened? and he was 29 when he was telling me about it. it was a typical first love story that everyone has, really nothing special. but to my teenage self it was the most heartbreaking thing i had ever experienced. i couldn't fathom the fact that B was my first love, but his first love was someone else.

i listened to his story, of course, and i was curious about it. her name was antoinette and they met at scouts. he seduced her by playing guitar. i don't know why but i had always imagined her with bright red hair. not as in ginger, but as in dyed cartoonish red hair. and a striped shirt with black skinny jeans. maybe it was because her name sounded so damn french that she absolutely had to have a stiped shirt in my imagination. but yeah, dyed red hair and bright red freckles. that was B's first love for me. when i came home that day, i listened to "say yes to heaven" and cried, imagining B being as innocently in love with her as i was with him, mourning the fact that he would never love me this way and how i could never be his first. and now whenever i hear that song, i think about 19 year old me crying and i want to cry again.

i later learned about B's other ex, meriç. this was a whole different story and at first i thought that it would be easier for me to digest. after all, they hadn't parted on good terms and B would often use her as a bad example. they were toxic, he said. but the more i thought about meriç, the worse i felt about myself. i couldn't get over the fact that B moved to turkey for her! and for me, well... i once mentioned the fact that i was thinking about going to another city for uni and B threw a tantrum. he would never sacrifice anything for me, i thought, he would never move to a different country for me. that meriç girl must've had something i didn't.

after giving it some thought, id made up my mind about meriç and drew a clear picture of her in my mind just like i had done with antoinette. my imaginary meriç was sexy. that's why he moved to turkey for her, i explained to myself. and toxic relationships are always extremely sexual, right? the whole fighting and making up and fucking thing. there's always a thrill, always a chase... men love that shit, right? meriç was exciting, feisty, sexually liberated. and when B would whine about me not wanting to do anal or being shy while giving him blowjobs, the thought of meriç would occupy my mind. she probably said yes to anal, i thought. she probably looked into his eyes while sucking his dick and im too fucking sexually useless to do any of this shit. that's why he moved to turkey for her and wouldn't want to move to a city that's 3 hours away for me.

and so there i was, the most boring and forgettable girlfriend. antoinette had the infatuation, the romance, the rush of first love. meriç had the thrill, the lust, the toxic passion. and me? well... no matter how many times B would tell me that i was the best he'd ever had, it would never get through to me. it frustrated me that we weren't on the same page. to me our relationship was exciting and firey and felt like destiny and i would get the strongest butterflies-in-my-stomach feeling while looking at him to the point of feeling intoxicated. and at the same time i would feel devastated and suicidal even when something would go wrong. it was full of ups and downs and crazy hormonal rushes. and to him it was his third serious relationship, calm and calculated, no hard feelings. "i feel so calm when im with you," he would tell me. and it felt like defeat.

i saw a picture of meriç once. i had to stalk her on facebook, of course i had! she looked quite similar to me actually, with a wave in her hair and full cheeks. at least that's what my bestie had pointed out because, of fucking course, i showed her the picture. it was only years later that B had told me that him and meriç had no sexual chemistry and it was quite frustrating. and maybe he lied, but i wish 19 year old me would've known that. she's married now. and so is antoinette. she has a daughter i think? or two. i don't know. but they've moved on. and i will move on from B. and he'll probably tell his next girlfriend about me. or not. who knows what he would say. and what she will think. will she imagine me with red hair and freckles? who knows.

[k-dnyeng]

Story time:

How do you get over an “almost” thing.

it has been 6 years. we didn’t even date, we didn’t even get to that point. I didn’t even want to label it as Mutual Understanding because I wasn’t even flirting at all.

You know that feeling when you have your favorite clothes? you’re brand new shirt. You never wanted to wear it so casually but only on special occasions, when you know it’s gonna be worth it.

Yeah, that’s what I felt. I treasured that person so much I was so afraid to lose him, to take advantage of it, because I know how messy I am. like my favorite was just gonna get stained, and like I took it for granted, so we never get there to that point.

So we remained friends.

With feelings, because I knew he had feelings for me too. We would spend time together, and at the same time suppress and hide our feelings for each other. Yes, we knew because we actually told each other about it and that we weren’t ready to be in a relationship back then. I even told him to be responsible for his feelings for me because I’ll be responsible for mine, and that I didn’t wanna fall harder knowing I’m not ready to be dating and be in a relationship.

But it’s been damn 6 years since then, and up until now, I’m pretty damn sure I want him, and I don’t know how this feeling would go away. Maybe it’s the chase.

I really don’t know. after what i said about keeping our feelings to ourselves, We never ever really talked about it.

Did I regret it? Yes. I regret not giving it a try when I was too naive and too magical before that I thought, destiny was gonna bring us back together. And maybe I’m still hoping and maybe that’s why the feelings never go away.

Did I regret being friends with him? Actually, No.

If anything, I’m happy I got to keep him around till now. We became friends along with our other group of friends.

In the coarse of 6 years, Yeah, I did date someone else. Out of loneliness, and — Alcohol. well, of course. I did fell inlove with that other guy, but I wasn’t 100% sure. It’s like I was hesitant to give my all because of my — could’ve been, would’ve been, should’ve been, never was, and idk, maybe never ever will be? :(

His side of the story, I never really know. He would sometimes joke around about how I was able to be in a relationship with some other guy when I didn’t evenr got the courage to try when it was with him.

But you know, it’s complicated. I’m not that easy.

I’m at a phase in my life now, where I don’t want complicated anymore.

I want it to come my way, like if it was really meant to be.

I just feel so stuck in this situation, like deym. it’s been 6 years and what, am I waiting or what? because sometimes, I still feel it. Like what it was before.

LIKE WHAT IF.

Because you know what, If it’s him? There are no second guessing for me. 6 years ago, I was thinking about preservation. Now, I’m ready and I’m sure.

But, idk. Maybe he just have a lot on his plate yet and still can’t figure this out, 20s is a crazy phase. There’s this anxiety about the future, the career, the culture shock of being an adult instantly. And yes, maybe he’s just not into me. 😊

Sad truth, but. Again, point is, idk what to do with my feelings with him.

And yes, he kind of still flirts as a friend, but there’s a really thin line between if it’s just a banter, idk.

But deyum, it’s been 6 years and I even tried dating others but there’s always that space in my heart, that what if he comes back?

or what if we just tried. Maybe if we tried now and it fails then I would know and it’s over and it’s better than not knowing at all.

But hey, I don’t even have the guts to tell him this. 🤭 coz yeah, I too am scared of the answers.

[bonvoyagenoona]

so apparently i found this deep in the bowels of my camera roll on my phone while cleaning it up and it’s an ss from reddit. obviously idk how to send this ss to you but let me just copy-paste what’s in it:

“Sex workers of reddit: What is the saddest experience (client wise) you've had while on the job?

Not my story but I knew a girl who did "rent a night" type of stuff.

Guy asks her if she could come over. Doesn't talk about sex over the phone just if she could come over and to come hungry. She thinks he is into feeding or some shit. She arrives at like 6 p.m., pretty early for her work. She asks what he would like to do. He just cooks for her. A really big delicious meal. Later he starts to open up: his wife had passed and always loved his cooking, but he hates cooking for himself.”

if you were to write a fic based off of this, which member do you see would fit the role of the guy? it’s so sad… hope whoever this guy is has found a second chance at happiness 😣

Agh, this was absolutely touching. Thank you for sharing this, anon! Here's what came to mind. 

For Two

Pairings: Yoongi x Reader

Rating: 13+ / PG-13

Word Count: 1.4k | read on ao3

Content Warnings, Themes, & More Info: Allusions to chronic illness, death, loneliness, and sex work.

That scent again. Lemon Pledge. Enough of it to bounce the overhead Edison bulb's shine to make a glint in your eye. Which sharpens when you finally ask.

"...Why?"

It's not like you to ask why. Who, what, where, when, and how cover the basics. Besides, after years in the business, you can usually deduce why simply by the nature of the request. 

But not once in all these years have you received a request like this.

"I mean, it's been months," you backtrack, in an attempt to retroactively preface, "and dinner is always great, believe me, I'm not complaining by any means, I just..."

The kitchen faucet turns on. A gentle trickle. Subdued. Still cleansing, but not above your voice. Background noise rather than signal.

You smile to yourself, feeling safe to keep your eyes on his back while you continue with, "I know these evenings mean something to you. Believe me. In my line of work. I know this is a band-aid, or an escape, or a playground. All three, more often than not. I'm just... Like, if you're looking for someone to talk about it with..." Your eyes latch on as his elbows start to move, fingers working a soapy sponge into nooks and crannies. "I dunno, I guess I'm saying that---" Your eyebrows flick up. "I'm here to listen--- Hey, are you sure I can't help with the dishes or something?"

Loyal customers are surprisingly routined, even with their fetishes. Especially so. When you started your career, you assumed that so much of your work would be propelled by happenstance, fleeting moments that overwhelmed someone enough to be in search of you. Now, you know that for many of your clients, it takes forethought. There are systems in place. Languages to learn. And, in some ways, it becomes easier to indulge in those fantasies when you find someone who will help you figure out exactly where and when and how you will get to. When you feel safe.

So it doesn't surprise you when his ear turns at the sound of you scraping your chair back, body lifting with every intention of joining him at the sink. And it doesn't surprise you when he counters with a pleasant but firm, "No, I'm alright here. Thank you."

It doesn't even register anymore. With no more than that to go off every week, you realize that curiosity has evolved into charm has evolved into concern. You realize that you're not actually asking him why. You're asking if he feels safe.

He glances over his shoulder at you. A quick peek. A flashed smile. "How about you try that dessert?"

It's not a hard thing for you to do, you happily think, as you sit back down and reaquaint yourself with the banana bread pudding. You grin as you take a spoonful, crowning it with the caramel ice cream on the side. But you keep your eyes on his back as you do.

Once the dishes from the main course are clean, he takes a deep and satisfied breath, places his hands on his hips, arches back, cricks his neck, and shakes his head as he removes his rubber gloves.

He turns around and is thrilled to see that nearly half of the banana bread pudding is gone.

Feeling slightly guilty, you keep your spoon in your mouth.

"It's for you!" he laughs, walking back over to the table and taking his seat, "Please. Have as much as you like. There's more in the fridge."

You look down at the other, still-clean spoon in the bowl. And then you look back up at him.

"Alright, alright," he says, smiling slightly, as he leans forward for the spoon.

You take another dollop, and he gently scrapes along the sides.

You still want to know why.

Why weekly dinners. Why just dinner. Why just dinner when you know you could be doing so much more for him.

Is it you?

And does he even want more than this from you?

Maybe if you break down the "why"s. Like---

"Why banana bread pudding?" you ask.

He blinks. "Huh?"

"What made you think to make banana bread pudding?" You shrug and reach for your glass of water. "Or anything? Why did you decide on seaweed salad and spicy pork belly and banana bread pudding?"

His smile goes a little funny. "Uh," he laughs, "I dunno... I was craving seaweed salad, and when I was at the store, I saw the pork belly cuts, and I thought of this really great spice blend I had here at home..."

His eyes go a little foggy. "And then I thought it might be nice to have something sweeter for dessert to balance that out... But it's also still a little cool outside, so I wanted something warm..."

His lips widen a little more freely. "Then I looked up and realized I had somehow made it over to the produce section, and the bananas on display were overripe." 

You gawk at him. And as you dig into the pudding again, you mutter, "Ugh. That's so cool."

He smiles. He tilts his head. He goes in for more caramel ice cream. "It is?"

"I don't know the first thing about cooking," you say, treats pushed into your left cheek. "Anyone who can do it is a magician. And you---" Your eyes meet his. "You might be a god, y'know, just---" You wave your spoon around in the air. "---divining a menu like that!"

He licks his spoon clean. "Well. When you put it that way."

You switch sides, and he follows your lead, building bigger and bigger bites of banana bread and taller and taller tiaras of ice cream.

Your spoon clinks against the bowl when you ask, "Why do you wash the dishes before we finish dessert?" you ask. 

He takes a moment to swallow his spoonful. He licks his lips, more nooks and crannies to clean. And then he seems to decide something. His shoulders ease. His eyes widen with newfound clarity. His entire aura softens.

"Dessert is a treat," he says. "It's a good note to end on."

"Wait, so you leave the dishes for the next day?" you clarify.

"Who wants to do dishes after having dessert?" he asks.

You find yourself laughing. "That's so true!"

He chuckles along with you, setting his spoon face down on the lip of the bowl, the end of the handle balancing on the tabletop. 

"...That’s something that she used to say a lot."

His face shows no sharp angles. No shadows. No walls.

So you ask. 

"Why do you invite me over for... dinner?"

When he hesitates, you try to hold onto the in that you think you've found. "I'm so happy that you invite me. I'm just wondering if I can make the experience better for you. Help you ease into things. I’m open."

"Ah," he says with a knowing smile. "No need. It's actually not about sex at all."

You'd better pay attention. You have so much to learn.

"I was married," he says. He looks a little paler all of a sudden. "She, uh, died... about a year ago..."

You nod softly, your breaths a little jagged.

"She was sick. Lots of stuff. All these meds and..." He stares at the end of his spoon, still balancing on the tabletop. And then he smiles. "Y'know, even after she couldn't eat solid foods anymore, she still insisted I make her a plate."

He lifts his eyes to meet your teary ones.

"I was actually really excited to bust out those spices," he says, making you laugh.

Both of you relish a little in the warm whisky of the Edison bulb glow.

"What should I make next week?" he asks, sitting up a little. 

"Oh, no, don't ask me," you say, dabbing your eyes with the back of one hand while sticking your spoon in the ice cream and waving him off with the other. "Not getting in the way of whatever mystical thing you do."

He laughs and says, "OK, well, tell me something that might guide me. You have any taste preferences? Craving anything in particular?"

You have an idea. You don't know if it'd be pushing too far. But now that you understand more of the why, you're getting a better picture of the whats and hows.

"How about you make something that's tied to a happy memory?" you ask. "You can tell me more about her."

He brightens. Maybe not like dawn breaking. More like light creeping, sun returning after a thunderstorm.

He lets you help him place the last few dishes in the sink. And then he walks you to the door with a grateful smile.

You reach out for your customary handshake.

He takes your palm in his.

"Goodnight, Yoongi," you say.

When you give his hand a warm squeeze, he squeezes back.

[arminty7]

𝘚𝘸𝘪𝘮𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯 𝘞𝘪𝘯𝘦

Mermaid!Jungkook x Reader [Part 3]

Trapped in this life of expensive wine and judgemental eyes Y/N met an unusual lady who offered her a job at an aquarium a few towns away. Despite being hesitant and uncertain for the future she decided to take the offer as it was her only way out, not knowing that many dangers might come her way.

Jungkook swam his way through the small tunnel in wonder. He didn’t realise what he was ‘walking’ into as he took the entire night to explore a tunnel. He thought it might lead to you, how naive. It is only when he heard the piercing sound of drilling from the small tunnel entrance did he know what was happening, he was trapped. With that, his instincts took over.

Chapter: #3 Swimming in Wine

Words: 4843

Warnings: Mild Swearing // Fluff // Eventual Smut? Idk maybe depends // Jungkook obsessive // Evil Namjoon (im sorry guys) // It might be a little messed up.

AN - It's been a while. I know. 

© arminty7 2020 - All rights reserved.

This work shall not be copied, reproduced, translated and/or modified in any way without my permission. In a case where this might happen, legal action will be taken as it would be a criminal act under the law and breaching these terms. Upon reading my work you are acknowledging that this work is mine and that you know the consequences if this work is copied, reproduced, translated and/or modified in any way without my permission.

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It was early in the morning when the sun started to creep its way into the room. You were sitting on your bed and surprisingly enough, you were already awake. You never used to be such an early bird, but throughout these past few nights, you would wake up drenched in sweat. No matter how hard you tried you couldn't stop thinking about the incident on the cliff. Upon sleeping, you could almost feel the arms of the creature wrapped around you, like its haunting touch has placed a permanent mark on you. When thinking about it more deeply, it felt human to you. The arms of a human, but its touch too deeply pressed on your skin: the coldness you felt, reached down to your bones. It was like death was clinging onto you, with you as its life source.  

 "Hey Y/N? You up?" You heard a whisper and you saw Julie poking her head through the door as she opened it slightly. You look over at her with a relaxed expression and a soft smile.  

"Yeah, I'm already up. Did you want to go and get a coffee near the waterfront before dropping me off to work?" You stand up from your bed and start fixing the blankets and pillows. 

 "Yeah that sounds like a good idea, let me go get my bag and we can leave soon." She spoke as she left the room, closing the door but not all the way. 

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Looking out onto the ocean, it felt calm today. Although the tranquillity that you felt while looking out onto the shore exhibited a chaotic kind of peace. The calm before the storm. You could feel it, the anger of the waves crashing down and the freeing nature of the water wanting to come out. But it held restraint, it couldn't do anything even if it tried. Something was missing but you didn't know what. All you knew was that the feeling you had felt when looking out towards the ocean, changed somehow. The calm waters seemed too good to be true.

 You sat there at the coffee shop across from the beach near where you work. The smell of sea-salt and fish mixed with coffee seemed like a horrible combination, but the locals were used to it. You found comfort in the idea that you might get used to it too. The coffee that you held in your hands was hot against the cool air. You sipped your coffee while waiting for Julie to come back with her usual morning cravings of insatiable sweet pastries. 

 “So, tell me. Have you made any work friends? Any of them cute?” Julie sat down across from you, taking you away from your thoughts. You looked over at her and chuckled, rolling your eyes.

“I have made some friends, not many but hopefully that will change in time” You smiled slightly looking out at the ocean again, feeling yourself get distracted but not with anything in particular. "Well it’s your first day today so make sure to stay on your toes, but don't overwork yourself," Julie spoke while her mouth is full of sweet dough-like pastries, more focused on the icing coating the top of her lips, not realising that you have been spacing out this entire time. 

Thankfully you're good at multi-tasking and you chuckle at her comment, "It’s funny, people keep forgetting that I have worked at an aquarium before you know? It's not that much of a big deal." You sip your coffee but immediately placed it back down on the table, it was too sweet.

You look at your watch, realising its time to go. Plus, you would rather be at work than trying to have a normal conversation with her, you know she's trying but she's not your caretaker or mother, she doesn't need to try so hard.

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As you walk through the entrance of the Aquarium you could immediately feel the difference in atmosphere from the other day. The busy environment that you knew so well back home at the aquarium suddenly felt familiar. The buzzing sounds of life engulfed the reception as many families and residents were chatting away while waiting in line. Kids nagging at their parents and young couples looking at each other lovingly while waiting in line.  There were not many people though as it was early, and it wasn't officially open for another 30 minutes. 

You walked past them towards the reception and saw Seokjin who looked busy talking to the people in line. He glanced over at you and he made an expression as if he remembered something.

"Ah Y/N, Jimin told me to tell you to wait for him at the food court at the bar. You'll be working with him today. Taehyung is meant to be here, but he called in sick". You nodded, silently chuckling to yourself as Taehyung probably just called in sick because he was "too busy" or had some "emergency". While in reality, he's probably watching a new season of a drama he recently got addicted to. 

You head your way to the food court after you say goodbye to Seokjin. It seemed quiet in the food court but simultaneously busy as workers prepared for the day. You could see some workers running around in their little cafes or tourist shops as you walk towards the main bar. You could hear your heels hit the glassy floor, echoing as it bounced off the wall of the gigantic room. 

The bar had no one in it. You suppose it didn't open till later in the day. It was weird to you, you have never seen an Aquarium that had a bar before. Mind you, you never really travelled anywhere so you wouldn't know if it's a common thing to have at Aquariums. 

You sat on the stool, looking at the giant tank circling the entire food court, acting as a wall around the large room. You tried to look through it to see how far it went but all you could see was the light blue ocean that seemed almost endless. Some small school fish could also be seen swimming in the tank. It felt as though you were in the middle of the ocean. All alone. 

In contrast to the light blue colour that is seen throughout the rest of the room, the small tank that was built into the wall behind the bar looked darker and overgrown. It was a very small square tank that resembled a small window. You could barely see through it, a thick layer of algae covering the glass, it looked so dark in there. Maybe it was connected to another section of the aquarium, perhaps it even descended underground?

You shivered and looked around the food court, were you being watched? You could feel the sudden nervousness tingling throughout your body.

It was a weird feeling that came upon you, an icy cold feeling of loneliness like the air had suddenly shifted. The voices of the other workers in the food court were drifting away and you were slowly slipping away from reality. An alluring voice crept into your ear, singing an enchanting but hypnotising harmony. Somehow you could sense that it wasn't one of the workers for the voice sounded too angelic, too sweet to even be real. Your bones were chilled as you sensed the familiar feeling of cold strong arms enveloping around your waistline and chest as if you were reliving the moment by the cliff. You could physically feel it, its touch… his touch. Closing your eyes, you could feel the cold sharp wind from that moment above the water as it brushed against your cheeks. The creature’s hot breath giving you some type of warmth in the moment, yet it felt unknown to you. Mortality was clutching you in its hands, but you felt so safe. Like it was saving you despite drowning you at the same time. 

You shook your head, awaking from the trance that you were in. Glancing back over at the tank behind the bar and you saw a dark figure in the water. It stayed there looking through the algae ridden glass. You could only see a face, black and blue scales on its cheekbones and jaw. It looked human, but at the same time, you knew it wasn't. Its alluring golden eyes, shining in the water, staring into your own. Its eyes were soulless. 

By the time you blinked, it was gone.

You stood up, wanting to go closer to the small tank behind the bar. Making your way behind the bar, you were stopped by a strong hand pulling your shoulder back. "What are you doing here?" You turned to see a man who held your shoulder with a firm grip, his eyes staring straight into yours.

Oh, if looks could kill.

"I uhh.." Your mind went blank as you stepped back a bit, away from the man. He looked annoyed while you struggled to let the words out. By this time, you forgot what just happened moments ago.

"Answer my question" He spoke quietly but sternly, letting go of your shoulder but moving a step closer to make sure you can't run away. 

"I was waiting for-" 

"Yoongi-Hyung, what are you doing?? Leave the poor girl alone, you'll give her a heart attack" You sighed in relief as you saw Jimin walk up to the bar. 

'You know this girl?" He spoke in a serious tone, you remembered what Taehyung said earlier about the Bartender, I guess this is him.

Jimin nodded, leaning on the bar. "Her name is Y/N, she's the new recruit Hoseok was telling us about" Jimin looks over at you with a charming smile while you take the opportunity to escape the bar and onto Jimin's side. 

Yoongi looked at you and then back at Jimin, "well get outta here will you, the aquarium opens up soon”.  

You nodded and Jimin just smirks before looking over at you "Come on Y/N, we have a busy day ahead of us" He stands up, grabbing your hand, giving you his signature smile before leading you out of the food court and down the hall.

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Third Person POV

"I can't believe we are opening up the aquarium a day after we caught it, what if it escapes?!" Hoseok looked down at the ground continuously tapping his foot on the ground as he leaned on the bookshelf in the office. Namjoon sat there in the chair in front of him. 

"Don't worry, it can't escape" Namjoon reassured him and then continued. 

"We have reason to believe it got stuck in an old tunnel filled with water that was built throughout the aquarium. We constructed the tunnel ages ago for the public and we were going to add glass windows to it, so you can look through the tunnel. However, the construction wasn't going as planned and we halted the idea." 

"So, it's just swimming in a small tunnel throughout the aquarium walls with no way out? Like a maze? In pitch-black darkness?" Hoseok widened his eyes, he never heard of such a thing. 

"You have nothing to worry about, the tunnel that he swam through to get in the aquarium was connected to the ocean, but we blocked it off as soon as we found out he swam in it. He's stuck in there." 

"Are you certain? Have you swum through the tunnel yourself? How do you know there's no other way he can reach the other aquariums for the public to see?" Hoseok said, his voice raised. He walked up to the front of the desk, his hands crossed, Namjoon could sense his doubt radiating off of him. 

"Before this place was opened to the public, I got some divers to check it out, it has no pockets or windows. It's pitch black down there" he tried to reassure Hoseok again. Namjoon looked up at Hoseok and he nodded, uncrossing his arms. 

"Let's hope he doesn't go too crazy down there, we'll have to get him out soon." He continued, "Oh, by the way, Jackson called. He said yes to the deal." Hoseok 

"Good. We will prepare the creature for transport soon".  

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It was a busy day. 

You sat off to the side as Jimin stood in his wetsuit on the platform of the dolphin's tank. He had a big smile stretched across his face as he instructed the dolphins while the crowd watched from the bleachers. With every flick of his hand, the dolphins would jump up in the air and the echoes of cheering would fill the small arena. You had a bucket of fish with you and you watched as each dolphin would come up to you after doing a trick. You sat on the side of the tank, you were visible to the public eye, but they weren't paying attention to you. It was sad really, you knew what went on in aquariums. How ironic that you want to be free yourself when working at an establishment that rejects freedom. You looked at the next dolphin that swam your way, it seemed weaker than the others. You went closer to the tank and sat on the edge. It slowly swam up to you, it was at that very moment that you saw a gash stretched out on its back. It wasn't bleeding, and you could easily see that it’s been there for a while.

You looked up at Jimin in worry although he didn't take notice. He held the microphone as he catered to the audience. You looked back at the dolphin and reached a fish from the bucket. Perhaps it was self-inflicted somehow. You heard that stuff can happen in aquariums. You watched the dolphin gently swim away, back down into the water, following the strict routine that was given to them before the show. 

After the show ended, you still couldn't get that dolphin out of your head. Its empty expression in its eyes is still burned in your mind. All the hope and optimism you once associated with dolphins was now gone. 

You stood there in the tiny tin room out the back of the aquarium near the dolphin tank, cleaning buckets of fish that were now empty. Jimin left you and went to go help another co-worker and gave you the task of cleaning out buckets that radiated the smell of decaying fish. You remember the innocent smile he gave you when he asked you for this little favour. It was your job, you couldn't say no - and he knew that. 

"Thanks, Y/N! I owe you" Jimin yelled out, waving his hand as he ran off. 

It was around 4 pm when you finished cleaning. Your body felt tired from the long day and you and Jimin were headed to the bar.

As you stepped into the food court the feeling you had before suddenly crept through your body. You shivered, and a sudden feeling of dread came upon you. It was weird, you didn't even think about the incident after it happened. Like you suddenly forgot about it. But now, as you slowly walk up towards the bar, you felt a chill encompassed around your bones. 

Jimin sat down on the stool on the bar and placed a hand under his chin. He looked up at Yoongi with a smirk, "So, how's business?". Yoongi took a glance up at the both of you and looked back down again, wiping the bar down. 

"It was pretty slow today. It was weird, I expected more people to come" Yoongi said quietly. You sat down next to Jimin and crossed your arms over the bar, letting your head rest gently on your arms. 

"Hey, I just cleaned that" Yoongi looked over at you but after the day you had, you couldn't care less. You replied with a monotone "sorry" but stayed in your current position. He could tell that you were tired and surprisingly enough, he didn't push it. 

"So, you remember that key I gave to you right? The one I found?" Jimin straightened up at Yoongi's words and looked over at you for a split second. 

"Yeah I remember, what about it?" Yoongi sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. "Well I need it back" Jimin looked confused, "but I thought you found it, that it had no meaning to you. That's why you gave it to me in the first place"

Yoongi sighed, "To be honest it was actually Hoseok's. I was curious to know what it's for, so I gave it to you. I didn't realise you wouldn't tell me after you found out. Still, after all these years, you haven't told me! To think, I was the one who gave you the key in the first place". Yoongi grabbed a glass from under the bar and shoved some ice in it before filling it up with apple juice. He passed it to you as if to tell you that he still remembers that you're here.

Jimin rolled his eyes, "Yeah, you gave me the key because you were too lazy to figure it out on your own". 

"The point is, I need it. Where is it?" Yoongi looked somewhat anxious as he wiped down the bar for the third time. 

Jimin shrugs, reaching his arm over to take your drink from the table that you haven't touched.

It’s too sweet. He sipped it casually and looked over at you before landing his eyes towards Yoongi again. "I don't know, I threw it away, I found no use for it". 

Yoongi crossed his arms frowned, "that's bullshit, you are lying, and you know it, you've always been a bad liar". Yoongi then looks at you, your arms still crossed as you lay your head there, if they didn't know any better, they would have assumed you were asleep. Except you laid there, silently listening. 

Jimin then also frowns, "look I don't know what to tell you, it's been years since you gave me that thing. The truth is, I lost it." Jimin looks up at Yoongi but Yoongi scoffs. 

"So, you threw it away or lost it? Come on Jimin, just give it to me, I know you have it". Yoongi looked right through Jimin's eyes, you looked over at both of them, you could tell there was tension in the air. 

Jimin was silent and Yoongi sighed grabbing the drink that you obviously weren’t going to finish and pouring it into the sink before placing the glass in the dishwasher under the bar. 

Yoongi spoke quietly but you could tell that his words held a lot of weight, "Promise me". 

Jimin looked up, "I don't get why you are so obsessed with this key, I don't even have it!" 

"Promise me that you don't have it" Yoongi looked at him, his facial expression was the look of hurt more than anything. You could tell that there was more to this than what Yoongi was letting on. You sat there next to them, waiting for Jimin to spill the beans about giving the key to you.

Jimin was hesitant for a second before strongly responding, "I promise I don't have it." Yoongi stood there silent before nodding, mumbling a soft "sorry" under his lips before going back to cleaning the bar, even though he already finished. 

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"I can't believe you lied for me," You spoke as you walked around the dolphin tank outside, Jimin walking beside you.

"I didn't lie. I don't have it. You do." Jimin smiled at you brightly, although you could tell that something was bothering him. You both kept walking before Jimin looked at his watch, "I'm sorry I got to go, feel free to stay here as long as you want, Namjoon doesn't mind us staying after hours. Although you do realise our shift ended an hour ago, right?" Jimin smiled brightly as he looked down at you, his eyes shining in the moonlight. 

You chuckled, "Yes I knew, I just like your company. Thanks for being there for me. I haven't known you long, but you made me feel comfortable on my first day" You smiled, it seemed like you and Jimin were going to become really good friends. 

"I'll always be here Y/N... Anyways I'll see you at work tomorrow yeah? Have a nice night" Jimin waved goodbye and walked away. 

You sighed, reaching for the key from your pocket. 

"Might as well check it out while I still can?" You thought. 

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It was late, really late and you found yourself questioning Jimin's earlier statement about being allowed here after hours. You wandered through the halls of the aquarium, following the directions Jimin and Taehyung showed you last time, careful not to make any loud noises to gain any attention. 

The halls were cold, and you could hear were the sounds of your heels tapping against the hard floor. While walking, you felt your chest become heavy, looking around you started to hear weird sounds coming from the walls. You shrugged it off however, you've been in aquariums long enough to know that it could be anything and that it's never completely quiet. 

Finally reaching your destination you head down the metal steps. You've never been to this part of the building apart from when Jimin and Taehyung took you, you suppose it's for private personnel only. Continuing down the steps you reach the door to the moonpool, the sounds of water can be heard dripping and sloshing from behind. Inserting the keys and turning the metal handle you slowly walked inside. It was darker than the last time you saw it. What was surprising was the glow worms on the roof of the moonpool illuminating the moonpool and stone walls that surrounded it. You didn't see them during the day. They were beautiful.

Walking along the gravel towards the moonpool, you took off shoes your socks and placed your backpack next to the moonpool. You sat on the edge, dipping your legs in as you rolled up your pants, so they don't get wet. You closed your eyes, feeling the water reach up to your kneecaps. The water was lukewarm, and the smell of sea salt radiating off of it. 

What a long day. 

If you were being honest, all of this was too much for you. You never thought you would say this, but you miss home. You miss Marina's cooking and weirdly enough, you miss your mother. She hasn't called, even texted since you left. You felt like you thought this would be different, the people here are nice but every so often you get reminded about the flaws of this world, the treatment of animals, – the dolphin – the uneasiness you felt about Julie and her intentions. Even Jimin and Yoongi, you didn’t want to cause a fight between them because of some stupid key.

The water had suddenly started to turn cold, starting from your feet you feel a rush of icy water spread to your knees, eliminating any prior warmth you felt. The dripping stopped, the sloshing of the water halted. You opened your eyes curiously to see a figure from the other side of the moonpool staring right at you. You looked right in its eyes. Time stopped, and you could barely see anything else but the wide golden piercing gaze of the creature. You sat there frozen in place. You don't know how long you stayed like this for, but it took a while to realise what was happening. It didn't say a word, but you could tell by its knowing facial expression that it somehow knows who you are. Looking down in the now murky water you could see an outline of a human’s body, his muscles and broad shoulders prominent underneath the dark blue scales that stretched over its torso. You continued to examine the long outline of a tale - a big tale at that - with the front looking slimy however you could guess that the back of the tale was sharp enough to cut through any piece of flesh that it would encounter. One aspect of the creature that seemed almost beautiful were some parts of his scales that were brighter than others, acting as a highlighter around his cheekbones and arms. 

You didn't want to make any sudden movements, frightened that the creature would drag you under. Eat you. Kill you. You decided that it was now or never and spoke quietly under your breath, looking back up at its eyes that never left yours. "Hi, my name is Y/N". Your breath was shaky, and your lips were dry. 

"It probably can't even understand you," You thought to yourself. 

The creature stopped staring into your eyes and lowered its focus to your legs that were swaying in the water. You shivered, the cold air getting to you. Goosebumps appeared on your legs and arms and you could have sworn you sore the remnant of a smirk that appeared on its lips. 

You suddenly had an idea. 

Carefully, you looked up at the creature, "I'm just going to grab something out from my backpack, okay?" Slowly you stretched your arm out towards your backpack while maintaining eye contact with the creature. The creature stayed still, however you knocked something metal in your bag and it made a loud noise that echoed throughout the moonpool. The creature’s facial expression turned darker and it went full force towards you, grabbing your calves as it didn't let you go. It was close to your face, its golden eyes peering into yours as you could feel its grip and claws on your legs tighten, its body between your thighs leaning in on you. You breathed in slowly, feeling almost petrified, but somehow you knew the creature didn't mean any harm. It looked over at your hand that was inside your backpack. You waited a few seconds before slowly, lifting your hand out of the bag, to reveal a container of prawns that was meant to be your lunch today. 

The creature's grip loosened from your calves as it watched you open the container, taking a prawn before slowly reaching over to the creature's lips. One of its hands let go of your calf as it held your hand, guiding it towards its lips before it opened its mouth biting the prawns head off. You looked at the creature, a little startled. Its teeth were sharper than a normal human, like razors. In fact, you looked closely at the details of the creature's face, noticing the similarities to that of a human. Everything was the same except for the scales on the sides of his face, neck and on his cheekbones. The outline of his eyes was darker though, making his golden eyes brighter than usual. It had brown locks of hair, wet but you could see it was starting to dry. He resembled a male in his 20s.

He finished the prawn quickly and looked back at the container, wanting more. You spoke softly, "have more if you would like". 

He looked down at your hand and then back up at you as if it was asking you to feed him again. His grip on one of your calves was softer and you could feel his thumb running circles over your calf. You grabbed another prawn, reaching over to his lips as he was careful not to cut your fingers with his teeth as he ate the prawn. 

You sat there, feeding him the rest as he grew more comfortable around you. His hand reached out of the water towards the gravel next to your thigh as he spelled out the words "Jungkook" on the gravel. 

"Jungkook?" You questioned, "is that your name?". Jungkook looked up at you before placing his hand on your thigh. 

"Yes", he answered. Your eyes widen in shock, you didn't think he could understand you. You frowned and asked him curiously, "could you understand me this whole time?". 

He smirked slightly, "I'm not the best at this human language but yes, yes I could" He looked up at you, his eyes shining. You frowned, feeling a little messed around with since he could have at least answered you the many times you spoke to him. But then again you understood, he doesn't know you, and you don't know him. 

His grip on your calf and thigh tightened as he started to pull you in the water. You freaked, holding on to the edge of the moonpool. "Wait, wait, wait! I can't get these clothes wet and I uhh, have to get going soon..." Jungkook frowned but stopped pulling. He let go of you. 

"Promise me you'll come back?" He looked at you with a sad expression, lowering himself in the water. 

You looked down at him as you took your legs out of the water and grabbed your bag with your shoes and socks.

"I promise"

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AN: I know I haven’t updated, but I do really wanna update more. I feel like this chapter was a good one, give me some feedback? :)

tags:  @mjlock​

[violetrainbow412-blog]

Hey!! Idk if requests are open, but if they are may I request a Sirius fic where both reader and Sirius like each other but don’t know it so they date other people to get over their feelings. Both relationships are unhappy and after some time sirius and reader get alone together and in the heat of the moment they kiss. You can decide how it ends. Thank you I’m sorry if it’s too specific lol. I love your writing!!

Always you [S.B]

Word count: 4.8k

N/A: again I couldn't help but think of one of my favorite songs (Always you by Louis Tomlinson) and I even put some of the lyrics, an apology haha

I hope you like it, nonny! I don't know if it was really the idea you had but I imagined it that way

You felt his lips roughly running down your neck and his hands roaming all over your body, as if he was desperate to feel every part of you.

It was grotesque.

"Wait," you said disgusted. The guy in your house was a co-worker who had insisted on having a few drinks countless times and that day you had decided to give it a go. The guy was handsome, he had a good position and if it weren't for the fact that he looked like a complete animal while he kissed you, he might have convinced you to continue dating him.

But something was missing. As always.

"What's going on?" he asked in a drawl. It is obvious that he was drunk and that his only objective was to get into your pants. "Don't tell me that now you're going to regret it," he said, almost annoyed. Maybe it was just the alcohol.

“We are a little drunk. I… I want us to do this later, I want to be able to remember it” you replied, almost tenderly. Lie, it was all lies. You'd had one-night stands many, many times and enjoyed them, but this time you just didn't want to do it with an idiot like him.

He was drunk, he smelled bad and he had shit on his head. But at the end of the day, that was better than nothing to lessen the loneliness that inhabited your apartment.

"So there will be another date?" he asked almost hopefully. You felt guilty, but you nodded your head gently.

"While we can… eat something if you want," you muttered with a shrug.

"What if I eat you?" he asked with a smile that he claimed was seductive. But the truth is, he looked like he was about to shit.

He wanted to get closer to kiss your lips again but luckily you heard a screech at the window that forced you to spring up and get rid of the guy.

It was a beautiful owl, with bright white feathers.

"Hey, hello little friend," you said with relief. He snorted as he flopped down on the bed and you took the letter that the bird was carrying in its beak, which he almost kindly handed to you.

It came from Hogwarts College Of Witchcraft And Wizardry.

"Why is that bird around here?" the boy behind you asked, but you ignored him monumentally.

You were able to read all the signatures corresponding to the school authorities and then a message. It was an invitation to an alumni reunion, hosted by a select group of those same alumni. They had managed to communicate with McGonagall and she had agreed to call all the generation.

It would be organized in a Muggle compound that belonged to the school, for those who had begun to live in a world far from magic, including you.

"What is that, love?" he insisted, as he stumbled in your direction. Love, it sounded horrible coming from his lips.

"It's a letter, a reunion of alumni from my old school," you said softly. Did you think you had spent about... five years? Or would there be more?

You had gotten so far away from your friends, from the magical world, that you considered not going to that event. After all, nobody would notice your absence, right?

"I know that place!" He said. You hadn't even realized it when I had snatched the parchment paper from you. "But I've never heard of this school, or did they misspell "Harvard"?" he asked confused "Whatever, I can take you there in my car if you want" he murmured kindly. But your mind was already traveling to all the things you could find at that party, nostalgically remembering the years you studied in that beautiful castle.

"Sure, I’d love that" you lied without much interest, still deep in thought. Alcohol clouded your senses and made things seem like good ideas that you would never have done sober. That was why, to divert his attention from the letter and prevent him from asking any more Hogwarts-related questions, you pulled your friend by his tie until you both rolled onto the bed and stayed in it until dawn.

When he mentioned that he could drive you in his car, you didn't think he meant to accompany you to the party as well.

It had taken you a long time to decide whether to go or not to go, but in the end you thought that maybe you deserved it. You were under a lot of stress, you worked hard, and it was a long time since you enjoyed going out with friends, except for a day or two that you spent dating a man.

But those weren't things your heart really enjoyed.

It has been years since you really felt full or happy. The routine had you fed up and although you pretended to have a good time at work events when you got home it was very difficult to be this empty. At the end of the day, all the lights couldn't put out the dark.

"Come in" the man at the door said, snapping you out of your thoughts. It was not the first time that had happened since that owl had entered through your window, because your head seemed to like to walk through the memories instead of concentrating on the present.

You wiped your hands on the fabric of your pants, a little nervous, and entered the place. It was already full of people, who were laughing happily, but still no one you could recognize.

"Wow, they really know how to plan parties" argued the boy next to you, who you had already forgotten. A few sparks were floating over the place and a couple of other things that could evidence magical powers that you hadn't told him about. It was clear that for you it was not a 'big party' because you were used to celebrating at Hogwarts surrounded by all kinds of things, even the craziest things you could imagine. But out of respect for some students who had raised a family with Muggle people, they had decided to use the minimum of magic or things that were difficult to perceive. Like some enchanted electric blue drinks that you had once drank in your student years but now for everyone's safety you were going to avoid.

You watched a blond man happily dancing on the dance floor and then waving his hand at you. Xenophilius Lovegood wore a very colorful outfit that caught the eye of anyone around, just like when you were young. You smiled when you noticed that at least he hadn't changed one bit.

You went ahead to sneak into the crowd, intending to find someone you knew, until suddenly someone grabbed your arm to stop you. You thought it would be some bully looking to tease you or an idiot who was going to pretend to know you so that he could dance with you, but when you turned around you felt the air get stuck in your throat abruptly.

"Y/N?" the man asked, still not very convinced. He was afraid he had mistaken you for someone else, but you could still recognize him with all the changes he had made to his appearance.

"Sirius!" you answered almost in a scream. A smile appeared on your face so big that it hurt a little and without wasting time you threw yourself into his arms.

It was true that you had not thought about him for some time, but seeing him there and being able to feel his skin taking yours made the ghost that sometimes accompanied you become real and that the memories of your youth fell like a bucket of cold water on you.

You heard him laugh next to your ear and you felt him press you against him by the middle of your waist. He was slightly taller than before and definitely more muscular. He was no longer the skinny boy who liked to climb the Whomping Willow and whose wounds you then had to treat.

Sirius Black… How long have you stopped thinking about him?

There, in his arms, your mind traveled to one of the last memories you had next to him.

It was cold, the fire in the fireplace seemed not to be enough to warm you up after a small crying session. You were sitting with your knees hugged against you when you heard a hesitant step beside you and turned quickly, to find an embarrassed Sirius.

"I'm sorry, I didn't want to..."

"Sirius" you called him, wiping your tears with the sleeve of your sweater "What are you doing here?"

"I couldn't sleep," he confessed to you. What a coincidence that neither of you could sleep the last night you were at school. He was still standing shyly in front of you, but seeing you turn your gaze to the fireplace he walked up to you and took a seat on the sofa next to you.

"Logically, you can’t sleep if Mary is in your room," you said, with that mocking tone that you had rehearsed to perfection. Neither Sirius nor anyone else could realize the pain that lurked behind those words.

"Don't be silly, it's not that kind of insomnia" he replied, with the same amusement as you. You were silent for a moment and then he spoke again "I know why you are crying."

And in the dark you felt that you paled from the simple idea of ​​imagining that he knew your motives. He couldn't know, of course, but you still got nervous.

"Yes?" you said in a whisper, with your head resting on your knee. You didn't want to look at Sirius because you'd break down in tears again.

"Yes," he exclaimed as he got out of his place and sat next to you. You still weren't watching him. "I heard what happened with Robert, I'm so sorry," he murmured and you felt his hip collide with yours. Robert was a guy from Ravenclaw who you started dating a few weeks ago, but the day before you had broken your fleeting relationship because you couldn't take it anymore.

"It’s okay, don't worry," you replied without interest, keeping your gaze on the flames that burned weakly on the stone floor. You felt his hand slide slowly around your waist, in a way that made you shiver, and then you collided with his side.

“You don't have to hold it back, if you want to cry for it that's fine. I know breakups hurt a lot,” he said against your hair, trying to cheer you up. But he did the opposite because as soon as you turned in his direction you burst into tears that stained his pajama shirt.

Sirius held you tenderly while tears ran from your cheeks, but not knowing that your reasons for it were not even remotely what he imagined. You weren't crying for your boyfriend of three weeks, it would have been idiotic to dedicate your tears to that, you were so sad for the boy who held you in his arms.

It was the last day that they would share and it hurt you that it was not you who was laughing in class with him, nor who was in his room that night, nor who was really next to him.

And of course it was worth crying for him, how could it not be worth it? If you had been in love with that boy for years. From his beautiful eyes, from his lips, from his laugh. Of all his qualities and all his flaws.

"Sirius" you called him with a sob, fearing that he had fallen asleep. It was obvious that he couldn't fall asleep to the sounds you were making, but you were still afraid of it.

"What is it, beautiful?" he asked softly. You loved when he called you that or any other cute nickname. As if he really felt them come from his lips with total sincerity.

But you didn't say anything else, fearing you would make an inappropriate confession that you had guarded suspiciously for years. Instead, you tangled your hands around his torso to the point of completely colliding with his chest and you were surprised when you felt his hands lift up from his waist until you were sitting on his lap, still hugging him.

Sirius also felt on the tip of his tongue those words that he longed to say to you, like one last chance after everything they had been through together. But, like you, he didn't utter a word either.

You stayed embraced, pressed one against the other and lost that opportunity that fate had served them on a silver platter.

And being there with him, holding each other in an identical way to that night, made it seem like not a single second had passed since that day.

"By Merlin, I barely recognized you," he said with joy, as he separated from you. His hands went up to your face and began to touch it gently, to make sure you were real.

"And what about you, Pads?" you joked as you brought your fingers to his padlock beard "Looks like you cut your hair and glued it to your face" you sneered cruelly, but he laughed.

"It's been a long time, darling"

"You call all the girls darling?"

"Only the pretty ones"

"What an honor then," you said rolling your eyes, but keeping your smile. It was invigorating to be able to tease him like that, it was a complete joy to be able to look at his face again.

"I thought I wouldn't see you around here, it was lucky I found you" he murmured sincerely. His hands were still resting somewhere on your body. "I craved one of those brightly colored liquors with a dubious origin, do you want to come?" he asked kindly and you nodded with a huge smile.

"So we can catch up on everything we've missed, right?" you said animatedly. You had forgotten to look for your old friends or anyone else because seeing him had been enough for the night to become something special that made you feel grateful for having decided to go.

You felt him take your hand firmly and then he pulled you in the direction of the bar, like a harbinger of the fantastic night you were sure you would have.

Not even five minutes passed when you were already being sought out by the guy who originally thought was your date. You had completely forgotten about him and needed to find a way to rid yourself of his presence, but you couldn't just send him home. With a little cleverness worthy of a Slytherin you had solved that problem and thus had several free hours to enjoy in the company of Sirius until you could not postpone the inevitable and he returned to look for you around the room.

"Shit..." you whispered, interrupting Sirius, as you desperately searched for your wand.

"What happens?" he asked concerned, as he thought that both of you were very entertained talking about you. Simultaneously with when you found your wand he found you and began to make his way through people to get to where you were.

You slyly raised your wand to point it at the man while muttering 'Confundus' and making the movement for the spell. Sirius's gaze followed your wand and met a blond man who squirmed in a shudder and then walked casually across the room to the food area.

"It seems you don't want someone to find us," he said raising an eyebrow and with a mocking tone. He was already drunk enough that the joking part of him came out without shame. You laughed as you put your wand back in your bag and breathed a sigh of relief when you saw that they were out of danger, but apparently the situation did not go unnoticed by the man in front of you “Can you accompany me outside? I need some air,” he said, raising his voice over the music that was being heard all over the place.

You nodded and, for the second time that night, he took you by the hand to start walking towards the exit to a small garden. When you were young it was very common to see you like this in the corridors, because the excuse that Sirius used was that you were very silly and you could get lost if he did not take you that way. It always seemed to you something of the most beautiful and apparently the custom had stayed with him.

When you left you felt the sudden change in temperature that made you shiver and Sirius noticed that, so he took off his suit jacket to place it on your shoulders.

"What a gentleman," you said with a smile as you put your hands in the sleeves of his blazer. He smelled a bit like old clothes, like his wet clothes, but you thought that was Sirius's trademark smell. When you were young you knew it because the main smell of your amortentia was that and you had no doubt that this was how he smelled.

"My best to you, lady," he murmured with a mocking bow. He leaned a little more against you to the point where his faces were in a very compromising position. You held your breath when you found his eyes so close to yours, but a second later it was back to his original position.

You realized that in that approach he had taken something from the inner pocket of his blazer and you let out an exhalation of disbelief.

"Are you still smoking that crap?" you asked, watching the man bring the cigarette to his mouth and reach for a lighter in his back pocket.

"In my defense..." he said, still waving his cigar as he spoke "you weren't there to scold me every time I smoked so I ended up getting into the habit" he apologized, but you rolled your eyes and walked to the edge of the place, resting your arms on a balcony that had a view of the city.

"What an idiot" you replied, not knowing what else to say to him. Sirius laughed with satisfaction and took a drag, while he mimicked your position. It was nice to have his company in such a peaceful place, away from all the yelling and alcohol you were so used to.

"That boy" he began to say, while you kept your gaze on the horizon. It was night and the stars were already adorning the sky "Is he your boyfriend?"

"The one who was looking for me?" you asked with a frown and he shook his head yes "He's an asshole from work, his name is Andy or Arnold or something that starts with A. I don't remember," you said sincerely, making him laugh.

"But is he your boyfriend?"

"I wouldn't call him that" you continued. You took a deep breath and then let it out loud “I haven't had something serious in a long time, I don't know if you understand me. I'm with someone for a while, then I end up getting bored or they with me and then I seek comfort in the arms of another unfortunate person who is unlucky enough to know me” you made fun of yourself. But it wasn't funny, deep down it hurt you that things were like this "I hope you don't judge me"

"Why should I do that?" he asked almost immediately "I mean ... it's your life and I haven't been in it for a long time so I have no right to say anything" he murmured, with a smile. Sometimes he could be a fool, but Sirius never lost that respect for other people's lives. "Besides, I don't blame you, I haven't done anything well in love either," he said with a grimace of bitterness.

"Since when?" you asked curiously.

"Hmm, let me think about it a bit ..." he murmured, while he pretended to reflect. "since school"

"Are you kidding me!" you said pointing a finger at him accusingly "You had a new girlfriend every week and all the girls at school went crazy for you"

"And who said that is to have love stability?" he asked, with the same mocking tone "I've never had something that really makes me happy, I think even you could realize that" he murmured. His confession left you cold because you always imagined that Sirius had enjoyed his years at Hogwarts more than anyone, much more his love life during that period.

You were silent for a few minutes when he didn't speak either. You thought about so many times when you had been silent and so many silences that it was perfect opportunities to confess your feelings, all those moments that had slipped from your hands like sea water until they were reunited with the rest.

You were an adult, damn it, those fears were for teenagers in love.

But even though you were no longer a teenager, your love for him had not diminished a single gram. And that was what kept you dreading.

"There was a time..." you started to say. Fuck it, you weren't going to stay like this your whole life. Because if not now... Then when? "I was very in love with you," you said, jokingly, with a smile.

Sirius paled and started coughing up the smoke from his cigar, which you found most amusing. You thought that you could blurt out the whole thing as a joke and your friendship could remain the same. After all, you could justify yourself by saying that it was only a childish love.

"What you what?" he asked in a shrill voice, once he managed to collect himself.

"Don't get excited either, that was a long time ago" you said with a smile. Contrary to what you thought it felt good to be able to get it out. "I think from the beginning I liked the boy with long hair and silly jokes with whom I sat in class, it was only a matter of time before puberty did its thing and I ended up falling in love" you began to tell him "You were very funny and kind with me, I remember it well. I loved hearing you laugh, seeing you running through the corridors and then dragging me along with you” you smiled wistfully, still not daring to look at him. "And of course you were very handsome, who could deny it" you continued. You took your wand, which was still very accessible inside your bag, and with one movement you removed all the facial hair that Sirius had just to see a bit of the ghost of your past. You heard him complain and now if you looked at him, knowing that his expression could only be angry and there would be nothing that could reveal his reaction to the confession of your feelings "This way you look much better" you teased, but he looked at you with disbelief.

"Did you really do that?"

"It will grow, calm down" you murmured with a smile. It was easier to say things like that, with a bit of humor “Anyway, I think when we got to the fifth year I was convinced that we were just friends. And I stopped trying,” you informed him, shrugging slightly.

There was an empty space, less than a minute, and then he spoke:

"And I think that's when I started to like you"

You thought you had misheard and had to turn abruptly toward him, looking for any trace of lies. But there was nothing and it didn't seem like he regretted what he had said.

"What did you say?" you asked, afraid it was just your brain playing tricks on you. After so many years, it couldn't be true.

“When you first dated someone I realized that I was in love with you. It was total torture to see you walk hand in hand with someone other than me, to see that someone else made you laugh, that you… kissed someone else. So I realized that he had been the biggest fool at Hogwarts and that I had never missed everything about you like at that moment because I always had it. I lost you, in a very strange way and the hole I had every morning when I woke up was the one that yelled at me what I felt for you” he spoke. He was silent for a second and then continued “But then you started having more boyfriends, just like me, and it seemed that whenever I broke up with a girl you started a relationship with someone and when I started with them you stayed single” he laughed. You were surprised and feared that you would pass out at any moment.

"Why didn't you ever tell me?"

"Why didn't you ever tell me?" he asked back, with a sad smile.

You were silent, again, processing everything you had just said. It was difficult to accept your feelings, but knowing that you always felt the same and that you could have something together was even more difficult.

"Do you still feel it?" he asked, turning his gaze to you. His voice was soft like he didn't want anyone to know what you were talking about. You looked at him, with crystallized eyes and when you met his gaze he knew the answer. When your gaze traveled to his parted lips, he didn't need a second more to think about his actions and closed the distance between you with a kiss.

It was nice to taste his lips, tasting like alcohol, sweets, and tobacco, but it was something so unreal that you almost pinched yourself to see that it was not a dream.

How could you miss something that you've never had? You didn't know, nor did you want to find out, but that was just what it felt like to have Sirius's lips on yours.

And as you were so many nights, he held you tightly against his body.

When you felt like you were short of breath you tried to walk away, but Sirius stopped you. He continued kissing you over and over and over again until he managed to get a smile out of you.

"Sirius..." you called out to him, tilting your head back with the intention that he would stop. But he didn't, instead he continued to insistently caress your lips.

If someone else had done that, you would have hated it and it would have made you too uncomfortable. But coming from Sirius it was a gesture that made your heart race.

You decided to let yourself go and continued kissing him for a little longer until he finally broke away. You felt his warm breath entering your mouth and his swollen lips resting on yours as if they refused to separate from you.

“All of them were missing something that I never understood. I spent so many years looking for you in their faces and in the end, I realize that it was always you. You were always what I couldn't find in anyone else” he confessed. The words that came out of his mouth bounced off your skin and from there they were impregnated in it to stay there forever "Should have never let you go, now I know" he whispered. He pulled away a bit until you could look into his eyes and his hand went up to gently hold your face "Let me take you home"

"I can't," you said in a whisper. Disappointment quickly colored the man's gaze. You have always adored his eyes so bright and expressive "I come with the boy whose name begins with A, remember?" you joked and watched all the worry disappear from his face.

"I would be surprised if he remembers his own name after the spell you cast on him," he said between giggles that quickly rubbed off on you.

So before he said anything else, you grabbed him by the neck and put your mouths together again just to be sure that all of it was real. And even if it was physically real, in your brain there was still a young girl dreaming of that moment.

“I don't just want you to take me home tonight, Sirius. I want you to take me tomorrow, and the next day, and the next month and the next year and if Merlin allows it, I want to have you there for life, you understand? "

And so he did.

TAG LIST: @acciorudolphx @voidamy @blackst0nes7077 @bruxa0007 @fictionalcharactersworld @falcvns

[eye-symbolize]

I will shut up about Critical Ditto eventually I promise

But first! A list as to why you should 100% turn that on before I pass out from exhaustion. Keep in mind. I’m still in the midsts of binging it.

Holy shit it’s really funny. Like, Jesus, I was trying to be in a sullen mood today and I keep fucking laughing instead

Oh, yeah - it’s not a D&D podcast or something like that, I know basically jack about D&D, it’s Pokémon. It’s Pokémon as a table top game - which I wasn’t aware was an option

You Will Not Be Able To Pick A Favorite Character. They’re all great. My brain stutters and skips every time I try to think about it too hard - because they’re all wonderful in completely different ways

Seriously though, my brain just, can’t compute. The main cast consists of these three [ft. The Three Genders] :

Brandi [Girl] - Small town girl has a minor mental break down after a storm destroys her mom’s shop and decides to become the Pokémon champion at age twenty-one

Kenny [Boy] - Even smaller town boy is traveling to find literally anyone who can help him get a grip on these powers he has that keeps hurting people. Lot of whump. Nature Boy

Theo [Mischief] - Basically, a paladin who kinda realized the Church sucks, but only after getting framed for what I think might be a war crime. They’re pretty level, pretty smart - would probably follow them irl without a second thought

Gotta be honest - the voices are really fun. Maybe that’s a minor point, but they are great fun to listen to

Oh hey, it’s a podcast. You know what that means for the rep 🏳️‍🌈

Great secondary characters. Could genuinely imagine basically anyone of them being real people. Just, great. Great writing, great improv

Wimpy the Buneary

It’s Pokémon but everyone can be actual adults

Surprisingly fun worldbuilding. I don’t think I’ll ever look at a Shroomish the same way again

Idk. Idk , this has been on my mind all day but - in a world that constantly feels like it’s crumbling around us, sometimes you don’t want to listen to something like TMA, or WTNV. You don’t want to talk about free will, or acknowledge the fact that the world is kinda ending and there’s nothing you can do about it except listen to some satire. Sometimes, it’s okay to have a bit of a lighter story to listen to, and focus on, and this one is just… really good. And it’s making me very happy when for all intents and purposes I shouldn’t be right now, because everything kinda sucks. And that alone, I think, is good. And I want to share that good, if I can. So, if you need a laugh, or want some nostalgia because you can no longer afford playing each new Pokémon game as it comes out - give this a listen

The guys who make this show possible - Stew, Ali, Tom, David - are just… idk, they seem like genuinely good guys. They feel like they’re friends, and maybe it’s just my loneliness, but it’s really nice to listen to. Listening to each episode is basically like sitting around listening to four good people, four friends, mess around in the Pokémon world

Link to Podcast : Apple Podcast Spotify

[bamboobrat]

succession s3 e8 recap: macaroni and memorial services 4/5

ok a conundrum for you all: you get to drink exceptional wine and eat fresh pasta and nice cheese, but it has to be seated at a table with these guys:

do you do it?

i'd probably do it. i'd do it for pasta.

anyway, logan agrees to see kendall for dinner, but is a bit wary of having his chefs cook for him. he says there are things he can't eat because of his health, but really, he seems legitimately scared that ken might poison him.

throwback to the donuts!!! but ken would never, surely!

logan is still is paranoid self, though, so he has iverson take a bite of mozzarella.

ken wants out because he has realized his father is better than him at this. but instead of just saying that, he adds that his father is a corrupt man in a corrupt world, so of course he is better than ken.

ken is just a good, nice guy who can't make it in this horrible business....

to which logan plays the dead waiter card.

ouch...

he asks kendall how long he thinks the kid was breathing in water before he died, implying that ken could have saved him. logan knows exactly where to point a sharp stick.

i'm annoyed ken couldn't just be like "you won, that's it". then he'd probably walk away with two billion... or am i being naive?

back in shiv and tom's room, shiv says they should have a baby because her mother told her she shouldn't do it (she left that last part out). in terms of rebelling against her parents, shiv is very obvious...

she's also ready to fight again, after a brief moment depressed in bed. they talk business. they talk dirty. she tells tom she doesn't love him and he looks sad. not exactly what i consider a turn on, but hey, what do i know of this sex vegas shiv is speaking of...

greg is flirting with some royal who sells fermented yoghurt on the side. at least he got some use out of that lil watch of his. ew.

there's another laurie spotting!!!

upon rewatch, i highly doubt that roman's obsession with gerri is going to end any time soon, despite the whole drama... his father not allowing it will surely just make it more forbidden end tempting, no?

i know i'm meant to ship these people and want them to like... idk get married? but i don't. i just want them in scenes together and i'm here for the drama:)

shiv's idea of "lets have a baby" is "let's freeze some embryos and make a possible future baby popsicle.

she's so romantic.

roman leaves for lake como in order to save the deal with gojo.

mattson is being especially scandi, if you ask me, talking about all his ennuie and loneliness.

people always disappoint this bootleg elon musk, it seems, and he only wants the best the world has to offer.

long story short: he is asking for more than roman thinks waystar is willing to give him. roman's trip to lake como was seemingly a waste. but i guess that's better than finding yourself, i don't know, in tom and shiv's marriage?

[mgsdays]

i wonder whats in store for time skip tianshan. bcoz like,,, idk i feel like we need a lil more character development from mo :( i wonder how he’ll react when finds out that tian is gonna be gone for a while

Hey dear. I think their relationship post skip really, truly depends on what note He Tian leaves on. Does He Tian tell him he's leaving? Does he just disappear? Do they keep in any kind of contact while he's gone?

At the risk of being obvious: Mo's lonely. He doesn't let others in. We are given enough to guess he has reason to be like this - the other kids pick on him because of his dad, he fell in with a bad crowd before and fought their leader. Mo has dealt with all of that by building his walls high. He doesn't know how to ask for help. Isolation sits heavy on his shoulders, but he believes it is keeping him safe, even when the loneliness hurts.

He Tian has been steadily warming his way into Mo's heart. Mo asks for studs. He tells He Tian about She Li (and is vulnnerable enough to cry on He Tian's shoulder). When Mo sees She Li at a subway now he runs into He Tian's arms, when he has a bad dream he seeks out He Tian for comfort. He has been doing progress. I'd say even more, the progress Mo has been doing is monumental for how little time they've know each other and for how deep Mo was in his own pain.

Remember this? They've know each other for a month!

The crux of their relationship will be how they leave things. Mo has been trusting He Tian, little by little. If He Tian disappears without a trace Mo will feel betrayed. It will be a reinforcement of all he felt before - he really should be alone. Anyone that wants in will just use him in the end.

Think from Mo's perspective. He Tian has been saying 'you can count on me' with everything he does. If he leaves without word Mo can't actually count on him at all. For a guy like Mo, a half a sign of rejection is enough for him to rebuild his walls high all over again, imagine abandoning him after this.

Where does that leave them? I'd say barely better than when they started. On the future Mo is willing to sort of hang-out as friends but that's it. He Tian will have to work from zero to earn the trust he had before - and the journey would be harder the second time around.

If He Tian warns him, and they keep in occasional touch, that's a different story. Mo will know why He Tian left, even if he doesn't get it, and he won't feel betrayed. He will miss He Tian, and it will hurt, but he'll still know that He Tian wouldn't be doing this if he didn't have to. It will be easier Mo to trust him again.

Big 'if' though.

Knowing He Tian, I wouldn't bet on that one.

He Tian hasn't said a word yet because he doesn't want to ruin what they have, even if it kills him, even if it hurts. For a goodbye, I'd find it more likely for him to invite Mo over on some feeble reason and spend the entire time committing Mo to memory, trying to remember every detail. The words hang on the tip of his tongue. Mo looks happy though, and that's how He Tian wants to remember him. He Tian doesn't say goodbye. He says something non committal like 'don't forget me' or 'do well in school' while running his fingers through Mo's hair, he holds on for as long as he can, and then he lets go. Mo dismisses it as He Tian being He Tian, and doesn't get what happened for a long time.

(Later, much later, after it all, he replays the scene a million times inside his head, a tiny voice in him wondering if he said something wrong. If he made He Tian do this somehow. Mo hurts, and he goes to sleep and wakes up still hurting and never getting why. And when he decides to shut that down, he shuts it all down, further into his 'i don't need anyone' mentality than he's ever been before. It will be a rough road for them).

[sluttyten]

All the Stars in the Night Sky

summary: hendery is a rich playboy type in public, lonely in private, and when he lets you into his life, neither of you are sure you’ll ever be able to leave

length: 16,255 words

tags: male reader, smut, daddy kink, angst, idk it felt like it got a little emotionally dark sometimes, some family troubles, happy ending (I promise)

Hendery would never admit to his friends (if he could really call them that at all) how miserably lonely he found this life. 

He was rich, sure, and that meant that many doors were opened to him, that he had dozens and dozens of people vying to be his friends or to warm his bed for a night or two. When he’d once attempted to go near the topic with his close friend (the most genuine one of the bunch), Xuxi had laughed and gestured around them while saying, “How can you ever feel bad about anything in your life when you have all this? Like you’ve got an entire chest of drawers and an additional display case just for jewelry.”

That was true.

Jewelry was nice, it could buy him attention and a few friends, but it was nothing real or meaningful.

So Hendery set out on a great journey to find something that would fill the gaping hole of loneliness. Along the way, he earned the name of richest playboy in East Asia, Huang Guanheng, or Hendery to his friends.

He fucked his way across the world’s map, his body count growing each day. None of the girls or boys in his bed were it, they couldn’t fill up that void of loneliness. Xuxi and Dejun tried their best, but they were both in a similar state to him—earning money faster than they can hemorrhage it in an attempt to feel better about their lives.

On the first night you met Hendery, you were covering a gala where his father was the guest of honor. Most of the reporters were left outside the event, but you had managed to catch the eye of the eligible Guanheng as you’d dressed for the gala in the hopes of getting inside, a nice sleek suit paired with a bowtie.

He looked you up and down then gestured for the security team to allow you inside. You couldn’t miss the hisses and curses behind your back as you left the cluster of other reporters to enter the party. As you came up beside Guanheng in his handsome suit, his hands glimmering with rings, he plucked your phone out of your hand and watched as a guard stepped forward to frisk you.

“Hey!” You smacked at the guard’s hand as he got a bit too handsy at your inseam.

Guanheng called off the guard, but didn’t hand back your phone. Instead he tucked it into a hidden pocket of his suit jacket. “You can have this back later. It’s a media blackout event, so I can’t have you taking photos or recordings, you know, but it would be such a shame for someone like you to miss out an event like this.”

You decide that you don’t really mind. Even without photos or video inside the gala, you would still have the experience of being inside, and your boss would love that more than whatever pictures you got from outside. And besides, you were personally being invited inside by the most notorious young man on this side of the world.

“You can call me Hendery.” He said as you stepped through into the heart of the event. And then as you looked over at him, he smiled and leaned closer, laying the charm on so thick that you could almost taste it, and he said, “Or you can call me Daddy.”

If you weren’t already so attracted to Hendery, you would have left right then. Fuck your phone, a line like that one he’d just given you would usually have you walking the other way. You’d known him for less than five minutes. You were a reporter meant to be covering this event in an official capacity, and he had to go and make an inappropriate comment like that? Cocky assholes were not your type.

But, lucky for him, you actually did have a weakness for guys who liked being called Daddy, and more importantly, you had a weakness for the pretty curl of his smile and his dark eyes and the comforting weight of his hand at the small of your back.

Your knees felt weak.

You’d heard about the games he played before. A friend of yours had once met him at a party and she’d given you the step-by-step of his seduction. The way he’d charmed her thoroughly and then he’d gotten himself drunk before he fucked the breath from her lungs and left her so jelly-legged that she was still a little unstable when you saw her two days afterwards.

So you weren’t terribly surprised by anything that followed. Hendery was charming. He knew all the right things to say, he knew the way to look at you to break through the last of your walls, and he definitely knew just the right things to whisper in your ear any time that you began to mentally talk yourself down from pursuing where the night was inevitably going to end.

And that’s how you found yourself in the bathroom with Hendery, facing yourself in the mirror as he fucked you. The sound of your bodies colliding and your moans, his low instructions for you to call him daddy, all the sounds of the two of you together echoed off the dark tiles and the mirrors of the bathroom, and you gazed into the reflection as you felt yourself growing closer and closer to your orgasm.

Hendery’s ringed fingers came down hard on your ass, and the sting of pleasure sent you crashing through your orgasm.

You only barely managed to hold yourself up to still look into the mirror as you came for Hendery. You looked up at the reflection of his face, and what you saw there scared you a little. You saw the dark look in his eyes, an emptiness as he fucked you like it would make him really feel something, but it was then that you saw that all his charm and seduction was just a mask, and right then you were seeing Hendery without his mask, robotically fucking you to make himself feel something.

When he cums inside the condom a moment later, you look away from his face, and the next time you look up after he’s pulled out and is disposing of the condom, you find his mask back in place. A cocky smile as he tells you that you sounded so sexy moaning daddy for him, begging for his cock.

But now that you’ve seen beneath his mask, you can hear the hollow sounds behind his words.

He rocked your world absolutely, you’ve never had a better orgasm. But even after you leave the event that night, you can’t forget the way he’d looked, and how even with all of that lack of true emotion or passion for what he was doing, he’d still treated you so good all night.

Your body craved another orgasm by his hand, or rather by his cock.

Luckily, you had the perfect excuse. You’d left your phone in that hidden pocket of his jacket. A full day and a half passed before you finally really needed your phone and you finally confirmed to yourself that you could go to a Hendery again if he would have you.

You called your phone from a friend’s, and you were so pleased when three rings in, someone picked up on the other end.

“Hendery?” You asked cautiously as he’d not said a word.

“Yeah, I’m guessing you want your phone back?” He says.

You cradle the phone closer. “I do sort of need it. Have I missed any calls?”

Hendery’s quiet for a second and then. “Two from your boss. Hope that doesn’t mean anything bad for you.” His voice is flat, tired, and you wonder if you just woke him even though it’s edging toward two in the afternoon. He yawns. “You can come pick it up at my place.” He rattles off the address, and you write it down on your hand.

His house is huge, gorgeous, and so out of reach from your position in life that it almost hurts when the gates swing open after you press the buzzer button. The taxi you’d taken here still rumbles and puffs exhaust behind you, and you just know the driver is still craning his neck to take in the place, probably thinking he should’ve charged you more for the ride. But the gates clank shut behind you, and then it’s just you, a massive drive way and a fountain and large green shrubs that are neatly trimmed, and the house looming up before you.

A butler—an honest to god butler with the penguin suit and everything—opens the door for you and tells you he’ll lead you to “Master Hendery.”

It takes the entire walk through the house to Hendery for you to decide that the butler is not joking about calling Hendery ‘Master’ as he even begins addressing you formally. You pass maids as well, handfuls of them dusting and sweeping and carrying laundry. And it’s all just incredible to you because it takes you as long to reach Hendery’s bedroom from the front door as it takes you to walk from your favorite take out place to your sofa in your apartment.

“This is fucking insane,” you say as you step through the doorway the butler holds open.

The door snaps shut behind you, and you take a moment to look around at the entryway you’re in. There’s a sitting area to your left, a spacious bathroom visible through a doorway to your right. And just right there you’re overwhelmed with the luxuriousness of Hendery’s lifestyle.

“Are you coming in?” Hendery asks, his voice from somewhere deeper inside his palatial suite of rooms. You finally do walk further inside, passing through the sitting area to eventually find yourself in his bedroom.

There’s a large unmade bed with a pair of feet hanging out the side and someone still snoring beneath the blankets. A bay of windows looks out over the side lawn of Hendery’s home, a manicured lawn with a pool and more neatly trimmed shrubbery. It’s against those windows that you find Hendery. He’s got his legs stretched out the length of the windows eat while he stares down into the yard and pops mouthfuls of something into his mouth from the plate in his lap.

You clear your throat, and he snaps away from the window, looking at you. Your gaze slides away, back to the figure in his bed.

Hendery stands up, dropping the plate onto the window seat as he gesture for you to follow him. “That’s just Xuxi. You know, Huang Xuxi.”

You do know. Everyone who’s paid any attention to the life of Hendery knows Xuxi as well as Dejun, the two most wealthy and most prolific with their sexual encounters, just one rung below Hendery on the list.

Hendery doesn’t say anything else about his friend, instead he leads you back through the sitting room, in through the spacious bathroom, and out the other side into his closet. You try not to let your eyes grow to wide at the wealth you see amassed in this one room. Hendery ignores your expression, the look of wonder on your face, and he points at the window into the room, another window seat, where your phone is plugged into a charger.

You don’t even consider what a strange place this is for your phone to be. You just walk over and scoop it up, sit down to check your notifications. You have two voicemails from your boss, the first irate, the second still irate but slightly concerned as you normally return his calls within an hour at most, and his two calls were 24 hours apart. You quickly shoot off a message to him apologizing and explaining the situation in as few words as possible, promising him that you have a story for him.

Being at the gala hadn’t been all fun and fucking with Hendery. You had actually been working too, gathering bits of information for you to compose into a story, which you’d begun on during the last day and a half.

“So everything okay with your boss? Not fired?” Hendery asks, and you look up at him, having half-forgotten that he was there and halfway believing that he would’ve left the room and returned to his bed and best friend.

“Not fired, I hope. He was just angry that he hadn’t heard from me.” You stand up and unplug your phone, tucking it into your pocket. And then you hesitate. You came all this way for your phone, it seems such a shame to leave so quickly. Especially after you’ve been thinking almost non-stop about Hendery’s cock.

Something in that must show in your eyes because Hendery smirks. “You’re a thirsty bitch, aren’t you?” You gaze works down from his smirk to his chest and then even lower to the loose linen sleep pants he wears. “Bet you forgot your phone in my pocket on purpose so you could come try to get me to fuck you again.”

You hadn’t planned that, but it truly had worked out that way.

Hendery comes closer, and you sink back down onto the windowseat, and when he stands right before you, you find your mouth level with his swollen bulge in the front of his pants.

“Do you want me to fuck your mouth, slut? Want Daddy to make a mess of you?” Hendery asks, and he pushes his fingers through your hair, tilting your head back so you’re forced to look up at his face again. “You want Daddy’s cock again?”

You swallow and suddenly your tongue feels too big for your mouth. You nod silently.

“Then open up.” Hendery runs a hand down to your jaw, thumbing at your bottom lip. “Show me what you want.”

Your mouth drops open, and you look up at his face, ready for your mouth to be filled with his big cock. Hendery tsks at you, and he reaches down to push his pants down, freeing his cock, and then he pushes immediately into your mouth.

Hendery doesn’t wait for you, he just pushes in, setting off your gag reflex, and he moans as you choke around him. He only pulls back slightly to let you breathe a bit, and then he pushes forward again. This time you take him slightly better, still gagging a bit, but Hendery seems to love that. He swears and moans, puts his hand on the back of your head and sinks forward until you’re straining to take all of him in, but you’re pretty sure that you can’t possibly take even the little bit of him that’s not yet between your lips.

“You’re taking Daddy’s cock so well,” Hendery tells you, stroking the back of your head. He starts thrusting, pulling back to thrust in sharply again. Your jaw aches already and you’ve barely even started, but the hunger for Hendery makes you brush off the ache as if it’s nothing.

You close your eyes, open up your mouth as wide as you can, and you let Hendery fuck your throat. You reach for his hips, trying to hold yourself steady, and Hendery fucks your mouth harder at your touch, he sinks into you like he’s searching for something, hungry for the feel of you around him. You think again of that look in his eyes while he fucked you at the gala.

Looking up at him now, you see him watching his cock pushing between your lips. The light coming in through the window sets his face alight, all sharp angles and perfection. His jaw clenches when you moan and suddenly try to push forward, fucking your throat down on his cock instead of the other way around.

Hendery swears and the hand on the back of your head pushes your forward, his other hand curls against the back of your neck, his thumb brushing the length of your throat in the front. You feel at last the final bit of his cock passing between your lips, your face buried against his abdomen and you’re actually choking around him now, your body rejecting this and you love it, the way that Hendery keeps holding you down on him.

He cums to the feel of your throat convulsing around him, shooting his load deep down your throat. You can feel the drool leaking from the corners of your mouth, even some tears dripping down your cheeks.

Hendery starts to pull out, and you make an awful noise of choking again. He strokes your neck and throat, murmuring some words to you that you can’t make out over the sound of your heartbeat and your own coughing.

Hendery pulls most of the way out, but you’re not ready for him to leave you yet, so you suck around what of his cock is left in your mouth, and he thrusts shallowly a few more times, weak pumps of cum leaving him, and at last you both pull away from each other.

It’s quiet for a moment.

“Who’s that?” Xuxi asks where he leans in the doorway, clearly amused at what he stumbled in upon. You wipe at your mouth, and Hendery just tucks his dick away.

“Don’t worry about it.” Hendery turns away, moving toward a smaller doorway that you missed before, leading into yet another room in this labyrinthine suite of rooms. “You know the way out!”

You’re not sure if he’s addressing Xuxi, but you’re positive that he’s addressing you. You push to your feet and brush by the other wealthy man, who turns to watch you. After a few feet, you hear him walking to catch up with you.

“So, what are you doing hiding in Hendery’s closet?” He sticks close even when you push out the door of Hendery’s room. You can’t remember which way you came from, but Xuxi taps your shoulder and then points to your left. You start that way with him tagging along. “I know you weren’t here when I passed out this morning, and Hendery never mentioned a booty call.”

“He had my phone,” you finally tell him. “We met at the gala the other night. He took my phone and I forgot to get it back before I left.”

Xuxi hums in thought, and before he can think of anything else to say, you’ve reached the front door and shoved your feet back into your shoes, dancing through the door so he can’t try to say anything more. But unfortunately, his legs are longer than yours and he catches up.

“Let me give you a ride home.” He suggests. You don’t know what he’s playing at, so you turn him down.

“I’ve got a friend on their way to come get me.” You lie, but you’re already pulling your phone out to message one of your friends who doesn’t live too far away to come pick you up. “It’s too late now for me to cancel on her. She’d be pissed.”

Xuxi doesn’t seem too impressed by what you’ve just said. He offers it up once more and then heads away to his shiny luxury car parked nearby. You’re still standing there waiting for a response from your friend when Xuxi’s speakers begin booming from the bass, and he shoots off around the driveway, sending up a small shower of the little white pebbles that make up the drive. The gates open and close behind him, the booming of the bass fades away.

Still no answer from your friend. You try another. Call your first option. No answer from either of them.

It’s not necessarily cold outside, but you shiver as a breeze skirts around the side of the house. Your phone sits silent in your hand, and you feel like all the windows of the house are watching you, the maids and the butler and most of all Hendery. You tell yourself that’s foolish.

But even if it’s foolish, you think it must be true that you were being watched in some way, because after ten whole minutes of waiting with no response from your friends, the front door of the house open behind you.

“You can come back inside, if you’d like.” Hendery stands there, looking weary. He looks so different from how he looked when you first laid eyes on him. Gone is that glamor, the rich boy polished to a shine in front of all the cameras. Here you see the tiredness, the soft edges that had been so sharp in public. “You’re clearly waiting on your ride, and it’s rude of me to just leave you waiting outside. Plus, I owe you an orgasm, don’t I? Come inside.”

He sweeps his hand in a gesture for you to step through the doorway, and it doesn’t take much more than that for you to return inside Hendery’s home.

Back within his suite of rooms, Hendery plucks at your clothes while you walk toward his bed. You shed them obediently, leaving a trail from his door until the mess of his sheets, which he tumbles you into.

In the haze of lust that takes you over, you’re not even sure what all positions Hendery bends you into. You’re aware only of the pleasure, of his cock and fingers breaking you apart only to pull you back together and do it all over again. His stamina is incredible, and it’s only when you cannot physically stand another orgasm, that Hendery finally backs off, rolling over into his back, and casting the condom toward the trash half hidden in the corner.

You curl up and look at him. The cool shuttered look on his face. He stares up at the ceiling.

“Hendery.” You reach over and hit him in the chest. He jumps and grabs your hand, pushing it away. You try not to feel hurt, but you do anyway. After all that you just did together and he rejects even just a little touch of your hand? You clear your throat and try again. “Hendery, are you—“

The last word, okay?, hovers unspoken in the air when Hendery sits up and walks away, grabbing his pants from the floor and yanking them up. You wait for a moment to see if he’ll come back, and when he doesn’t, you go looking.

You find him in the bathroom washing his face. Or, more accurately, staring down into the sink with water dripping from his face.

Part of you thinks that now is the time for you to leave. He’s clearly going through some stuff and doesn’t really want you there. He just wants someone he can bury his cock inside of, nothing more. Even if you have to walk home from here, maybe it’s better than staying.

The other part of you feels that you should stay. He’s clearly going through something, and maybe he just needs to someone to stick around and be there for him through whatever this is. But when you take a step closer to him, Hendery looks up, and the second that he spots you he comes over and sweeps you into his arms, trying to kiss you and pick up again where you left off in bed.

You push at his chest. “Stop. Are you okay?”

Hendery makes a sound of frustration, and tries to kiss you again. You push at his chest again.

Hendery spins away, walking into his closet, walking deeper and deeper, and you follow him this time, slipping through that narrow doorway from one room of the closet into the next.

He walks through a section that is nothing but shoes, another that seems to be just suits. You follow him through a private laundry room, and you see a maid slipping back through a narrow door as Hendery passes by. You follow him until there’s nowhere else to go.

In a small square room at this end of his suite, there are windows set into three of the four walls. Half of the ceiling is also glass, and below that is a pile of pillows and beanbag chairs. Hendery collapses down into one of them, and then looks over at you. There’s a flicker of surprise before it’s replaced once more by a somewhat petulant expression.

“Why did you follow me?” He asks.

You fold your arms in front of you. “Because you’re clearly upset about something. I don’t know what. I know I’ve only known you for hardly even two days, but there’s clearly something going on with you and you’re using sex to cope.”

Hendery rolls his eyes, grabs a pillow and squeezes it against his chest. “You can leave now. You got your phone. You’ve had my dick as well as a month’s worth of orgasms. Bye.”

His absolutely dismissive tone stokes a fire to life inside you. You hate the way that you’re just trying to show some genuine concern for him, and he’s just brushing you off and being rude about it. He was mostly fine until you denied him fucking your again. And now he’s throwing a tantrum basically, like a spoiled rich boy, unused to not getting what he wants.

“You’re such a rich brat, you know that?” You stand firmly in the doorway.

Hendery doesn’t look at you, but the way that his head turns ever so slightly lets you know that he’s listening.

“Throwing a tantrum because I won’t let you fuck me for the fifteenth time today? And getting genuinely pissed off when I’m trying to find out if you’re okay.” You want to storm out of the room but you also want to storm over to him and drop down in his lap, make him look at you and tell you why he is the way that he is. “But maybe you’re right, Hendery. Maybe I should leave you here all alone in your ivory tower. You’re right, I got what I came for: my phone. And I got to be fucked by you again. Maybe you’re used to just being used for sex, for what you can give to others without being given much of anything else in return to recognize when someone is trying to actually show some interest in you and your personal wellbeing.”

Hendery turns his head again, almost facing you, but just looking at the floor, refusing to make eye contact. You think you must’ve hit a nerve of some sort.

“If you really want me to leave then tell me to leave. I’ll go. But I hope we’ll see each other again, Huang Guanheng. I hope the next time I see you, you’ll smile and mean it, that you won’t just drop the smile as soon as you think no one’s looking. I’ll see you around.” You turn today leave.

A hand catches your wrist. “Wait,” Hendery says. “Don’t leave me alone.”

You half turn back to him, and he squeezes your wrist.

“Stay.” He says, and with just that one word, a part of you breaks and you feel like you’ll never leave him.

Hendery pulls on your hand, drawing you closer and down to sink into the beanbag chair with him. He doesn’t look at you, but he softly pleas again, “Just stay. I hate sleeping alone.”

You sit for a while together silently, squished together in a beanbag chair as the sun sets, and at some point you rest your head on his arm and you just look at him. Hendery falls asleep, his head tilted back to look up at the glass part of the ceiling, and you watch his eyes close and hear his breathing fall steady and slow.

Maybe it’s weird to just watch him while he sleeps, but where else are you going to look? Any time that you shift, his arms twitches beneath you, as if he’s ready to pull you back to keep you from leaving him.

Hendery looks so soft as he sleeps. So relaxed, freed of whatever it is that plagued him while he’s awake. His pretty hair falls back from his face, leaving his forehead visible, unblemished by a frown or stern set of his eyebrows. His lips are parted and you notice that they’re turned up in a slight smile. You admire his profile—the line of his nose, the length of his eyelashes, all of the little attractive qualities about him. The sound of his breathing is like a lullaby.

You’re nearly about to fall asleep yourself when you realize that Hendery is awake again.

You don’t know when his eyes opened, but between one slow blink of your heavy eyes and the next, you realized that Hendery was gazing up at the sky through the ceiling, the stars growing more visible as night settled.

“I’m lonely, that’s my problem.” Hendery says the words softly as if he’s not sure if he really wants you to listen. “No one ever sticks around, and even if they do, they don’t really care.”

You get more comfortable with your head on his shoulder, and you tell him, “I’m here, Hendery.”

“Because you wanted dick.” Hendery keeps staring up at the ceiling, beyond it to the stars. “That’s why you’re still here.”

“Yes, at first.” You answer honestly. “What are you looking at, anyway?” You shift your head closer to his. His ear touches your cheek. “Do you know astronomy, Hendery?”

He jerks his head. “No. I just like looking. It’s dark enough and clear enough around here that we can actually see the stars somewhat decently.”

His arm beneath your head curls, draping over your shoulder. It’s comfortable, and you sink into Hendery’s touch, keeping your eyes up on the night sky as well. “Do you know anything about any of the stars?”

So Hendery begins telling you a few things, pointing out the constellation you can see, telling you stories behind the constellations, stories that you’re not familiar with, but the longer Hendery talks about them, the more you can see that he’s put some time into learning them. After a while you look away from the stars and back to his face, to the passion in his eyes and the smile on his face, the way that he stares up at the stars in awe.

You wake up in the morning with an achy neck and no memory of actually falling asleep. The last thing you remember is Hendery’s musical voice painting a story of a dragon across the night sky.

But now, Hendery is nowhere in sight.

Sunlight pours through the windows of the room, and you squint, shielding your eyes against the blaze. You rub at your eyes as you sit up, and a blanket falls down into your lap. You drag it up around your shoulders like a cape as you pass back through his extensive closet and the bathroom. The sitting room is empty as well, but he’s sitting on the edge of his bed, raking his fingers through his hair and talking on his phone.

Not wanting to pry, you quietly head back to the bathroom, hoping that by the time you’re finished showering and everything, his phone call will have ended.

His shower is massive, and it takes you somewhere close to three minutes to figure out all the controls, but finally you do stand in the glass shower, steam pressing against the walls, warm water massaging your back, racing through your hair and relaxing the ache in your neck. You start singing, quietly to yourself at first and then louder. The acoustics in the bathroom are wonderful, and you’re admiring that as you wash down your body, when another voice joins in.

You swear and turn around toward where you think the door. Your voices echo around the room, but Hendery speaks again, “You’re awake.”

You feel a spray of cold air cutting through the steam, and then you see Hendery, his bare form stepping up to stand beside you under the showerhead. He smiles, once again that charming playboy rather than the vulnerable side of himself he’d shown you last night.

“Plans today?” You ask him.

“Not really. Do you?” His gaze flicks up and down your frame, dragging slowly up from your feet, lingering when he reaches the apex of your thighs, then suddenly he’s gazing into your eyes with a fiery hunger, a half-hidden plea for you to stay, to clear your schedule for him.

You drape your arms over his shoulders, moving so you’re standing in front of him, your wet bodies fitting together. “No plans. I can send my boss my story from the gala tomorrow. As long as you promise to keep me entertained today?”

Hendery lowers his mouth to yours. He slides a hand around to palm at your ass, the other comes up to press between your shoulders, holding your chest firmly against his. His busy fingers on your ass slip into the cleft between your cheeks, dipping in deeper and deeper until you moan and press back on his fingers, just wanting him inside you.

“You gonna be good for Daddy?” Hendery speaks the question against your lips, backing off just enough that you can moan for him. “Yeah, you want me to fuck you again? Thought you weren’t here just for my dick?”

You shake your head. “I’m not, but fuck, you’ve got me all worked up now.” You reach back to hold onto his wrist, keeping him from pulling his curious fingers away from your entrance. “Just touch me, please. Daddy.”

That’s what does it.

Hendery kisses you again, his mouth hot and sharp on yours as he steps forward, pressing you backwards until you feel the glass wall of the shower cool and damp against your back. He pulls your hips forward so his wrist isn’t trapped so uncomfortably between your ass and the glass. And then he slides his finger over your needy entrance, and when you make just the sound he’s been listening for, he presses it inside you.

You pull your mouth away from his, dropping it back almost painfully against the glass. Your moan echoes between the glass walls. Hendery fingers you and mouths at your throat, soon working another fingers inside you, opening you up for his cock.

When you’re bucking your hips forward, rubbing against his erection, moaning for him, that’s when Hendery pulls his fingers away.

He flips you around, pressing your chest against the glass, drawing your hips back flush against his.

“Look at you, slut, hungry for my cock, just needing to be stuffed full.” His hand comes down on your ass. You whimper. Hendery swears and you know he just saw you clenching around nothing, looking so invitingly snug for his cock. “You want Daddy to fuck you?”

“Yeah, fuck me.” You push back, only to feel his hand burning against your ass again. “Please, Daddy, want you to put your big cock in me, I need it so bad.”

Hendery takes hold of his erection, drags it between your legs, teasing it over your entrance. You feel weak, twitching with the need to get off and touch yourself, but you don’t even have to try that to know that Hendery doesn’t want you to touch yourself. He wants you to cum solely from what he does to you.

He slaps his dick against your ass cheeks, and then pushes into you.

It burns sweetly as he pushes in deep, as you stretch around him. Even though you had him multiple times yesterday, it feels all new today. Hendery pounds into you, nailing right into that spot inside of you that sends stars across your vision, pleasure unfurling through you and turning your vision white.

Hendery presses in as deep as he can go as you cum, your walls squeezing around his cock, feeling so sensitive but still craving to be touched.

He’s so into the feel of you around him, that you don’t think he notices when your hand slips from the glass, reaching around to wrap your hand around yourself, whimpering daddy all the while. Hendery thrusts into you still, continuing on to his orgasm, carrying you too toward a second one which you feel swiftly coming towards you.

“Ah, fuck,” Hendery groans, snapping his hips forward so harshly that you knock against the glass. A whimper spills from your lips. Hendery reaches around you, drawing you back again, and that’s when he notices that you’ve been touching yourself. He clicks his tongue in disapproval. “Trying to cum again on my cock? Well, come on, baby.”

He fits his hand against yours, his fingers lining up with yours, touching you while you touch yourself, pumping his hand on your cock all while he still thrusts deeply inside you.

You feel yourself growing close again, pushing back on his cock. Your moans and cries of daddy and Hendery! are swallowed up by the steam billowing around the pair of you, and Hendery cums without warning, pulling out of you so quickly that you don’t even have time to miss him before you feel his hot cum painting stripes over your ass, his soft moans he leaves against your shoulder along with soft kisses.

Your joined hands continue to work on getting you to your second orgasm, and it’s when Hendery bites down on your shoulder that you spill over. Hendery rubs you through it, kissing your shoulder and murmuring to you how sweet you look cumming like this, dripping cum over your fingers and the glass, making such a mess.

“I’m tired again,” you tell him, slumping forward against the glass.

Hendery hums and pulls his hand away, bringing it to his mouth to lick his fingers clean. You rest your cheek on the glass, watching him do this, and it makes you feel warm with desire still, but you can’t take more right now. Not even when he grabs you by the hips and drags you back under the shower’s spray, cleaning the cum off of you carefully. 

You end up down in a large overly fancy kitchen. A chef has several things going at once, and you’re not sure what to look at or do, but Hendery sits down at the table, pours himself a glass of juice, then pushes out the chair beside him, nodding pointedly at it. “Sit down.”

Breakfast, which is really more like brunch given the hour, is extraordinary and rich. You feel absolutely stuffed by the time you’re finished, ready to just laze about with Hendery. Until he gives you the news.

“I’m having a party here tonight.” He rubs a hand on your thigh, smiling a bit conspiratorially. “All sorts of friends are going to be here. Booze, drugs, whatever you like. Just don’t go writing about it.”

Being with Hendery makes you almost forget about your job. And you like him. You wouldn’t gossip about him even to get paid.

“DJ’s coming. Xuxi too.” And then he lists several other names that sound vaguely familiar, like you’ve heard them in connection with his name before—celebrities and other rich kids—and some less familiar names as well. “Will you stay?”

Hendery kisses your cheek and then goes lower to your neck.

You grown and push at him. You’re still sitting at the kitchen table. His chef is just a few feet away. His hands are constantly moving, massaging, stroking, attempting to entice you to stay.

When he kisses a sensitive spot on your neck and strokes at your thighs, you almost moan.

Instead you push him away more firmly this time. “You don’t have to make everything about sex, you know? Why don’t you show me around? Or tell me more about you?”

Hendery grumbles a little bit, but he stands up, takes your hand, and leads you out of the kitchen. He shows you around, showing the pantries, a greenhouse, the gym and sauna, the pool, the private movie theatre. There’s the great room, the sitting room, another sitting room, a study that holds so many books you can’t even take them all in before he’s whisking you away. He shows you the garden and the outdoor pool, the mini golf course his father had put in when he was younger.

“And where is your father?” You ask him as Hendery you pass by a gardener and the groundskeeper who are arguing over a flowerbed. “He lives here too, right?”

Hendery looks sideways at you. “Oh, you have a real Daddy kink don’t you? You trying to bump into my dad, baby?” He laughs and you can tell he’s completely joking with you. “Trust me, you’re not my dad’s type. He likes them pretty and dumb with big tits. You might be very easy on the eyes, but you’re not dumb at all. And your dick might be a bit of a problem for him.”

You can hear the bitterness clear in his tone.

You’re familiar with the story. Mr. Huang had been married to Hendery’s mother, by all accounts was head-over-heels crazy for her, but she passed away when Hendery was still very young. Mr. Huang quickly moved on to a young, hot girl. And after her there was another and another and another. An endless stream of models and actresses and heiresses, all beautiful and sweet, but none of them lasted too long.

“My father is in Moscow on business at the moment,” Hendery says coldly. “He’ll probably come back with my next mom.”

To change the subject (because you really don’t like the dark cloud that suddenly rains on Hendery’s parade), you ask him, “What’s your favorite room?”

Hendery brightens up a bit. “We’re on our way there now.”

You walk through a bit more of the garden, fragrant flowers and neatly trimmed grass, stepping stones cross a small pond swimming with koi fish. There’s a tall tree and a small picnic area, and then Hendery pulls you beneath a pergola woven with wisteria, then right through a pair of glass double doors.

The room inside is shaded on one side but on the other side sunlight spills through windows set high on the wall. It’s quiet inside, just dust motes dancing through soft sunlight. There’s a piano and drums, a violin and cello, guitars and microphones and every instrument you can imagine.

“Father always had me study music. I think he thought it would calm me down as a child. Pretty sure it made me louder and didn’t teach me nearly as much discipline as he’d have liked.” Hendery walks away from you, trailing his fingers almost lovingly over the instruments he passes.

When he reaches the piano, he looks back at you.

“Can you play them all?” You ask.

“Most of them. Not always well.” He sits down at the piano bench. “Do you play?”

You shake your head no.

As a child you’d often dreamt of playing the piano. Not necessarily to become a master of it, but just simply because you enjoyed the sound and that watching a pianists fingers flowing smoothly over the ivory keys was mesmerizing. Your parents hadn’t been able to afford the lessons and when you once attempted to play the piano in the music room at your school, you’d realized it was a little more difficult than you’d imagined. So you’d given up and never looked back.

Until now.

You slide down beside Hendery on the bench. “No I don’t play. But if you do, I’d love to hear.”

Hendery smiles. “Anything in particular you’d like to request?” He flexes his fingers, stretching them in preparation.

Suddenly you can’t think of a single song. Your mind goes blank and you just gaze at Hendery, all lit up in a heavenly golden glow. He’s so handsome, and right then as you sit shoulder-to-shoulder with him in his favorite room of this massive home of his, you really look at him and feel an ache deep in your chest. A stupid, silly ache. Like you’re falling in love with this rich playboy who’s just using you so he doesn’t feel lonely.

When you don’t give him a song to play, just continuing to stare at him distractedly, Hendery laughs his goofy but wonderful laugh, and he starts playing anyway. It’s not a song you recognize, but it’s lovely all the same. After that he plays another and another, and you listen intently, amazed by how well he plays, watching his fingers move over the keys.

“You’re really good,” you tell him.

Hendery runs a hand through his hair, messing with it nervously. “Thanks. Part of me always dreamed of playing, pursuing music as some form of a career, but my father insists that I follow him with the business. A career in music wouldn’t allow that.”

“Do you sing?” You ask, nudging him. “I bet you have a lovely voice.”

Hendery laughs, the sound filling the whole room. “I can. I’m better at rapping. When I was younger, Xuxi, Dejun, and a couple other guys seriously considered forming a group. Father brought his fist down on that. Even though he’s the one that got me started on music in the first place. So now I just satisfy myself with coming in here to mess around sometimes.”

For the better part of the next hour, Hendery picks up different instruments, playing a bit for you on each one. He’s still actually humming along to a melody as you leave the music room, exiting back out under the wisteria. The sunlight of the early afternoon feels great, kissing your cheeks, the breeze pushing pleasantly warm air over your arms. You tilt your face up to feel it all the better.

Hours later you find yourself emulating that pose. Your face is turned up to the sight of Hendery standing on the second floor of the house, speaking to the crowd of partygoers. He’s decked out again, hands gleaming silver with rings and bracelets. A drunken couple of girls giggles beside you, falling over each other, and one of them mentions how sexy Guanheng looks with his hair like that.

You have to agree. Sex hair that he’d never fixed does look quite good on him.

You’d raked your fingers through it as he went down on you, sucking your life through your dick until a knock on the door of his suite of rooms announced the arrival of Xuxi and Dejun, who in turn announced that other party guests were starting to show up.

And now he presented his hair messed by your fingers in front of the whole party while you stood below, drinking something Hendery had shoved into your hands before he dashed up the stairs to make a speech.

He’d already introduced you around to a few people. Xuxi and Dejun, of course, and then also a singer, an actor, a producer, a rich kid whose daddy owned a car company and made the guy a racecar driver the minute he turned 18. All old friends, he told you, and as you looked at them and Hendery, you could see the connections, the constellation that they made. Age-old lights gleamed in their eyes.

You wanted to tell Hendery that he wasn’t nearly as alone as he might think. He was like all the stars in the night sky, part of something greater than they could see from where they stood.

The party raged on. You saw faces you’d only ever seen in entertainment spreads before, heard names that you’d written about. There were things going on there that you knew would fetch a pretty penny if you wrote about them, but though your hands itched to write, they were tied behind your back by your promise to Hendery. Nothing you saw tonight would make it to the gossip columns.

Even when you saw Sicheng, Hendery’s actor friend, flirting with a pretty young actress who was rumored to be dating an actor that she was filming a movie with, you kept your hands still. Even when he pulled her into his lap and she kissed his face and giggled, you just distracted yourself from the urge to write a news story by instead staring at Hendery, reminding yourself of the promise, distracting yourself with fantasies.

Hendery caught you looking a few times. It’s the fifth time as you’re looking at him over the edge of your glass that he grins back at you, draping his arm over your shoulders. “What’re you looking at?” He laughs, pulling you close enough that he can affectionately rub his head against yours.

“Just you,” you tell him.

Hendery keeps smiling a wide, loose smile that spreads wider than normal due to the alcohol. He slides his arm from your shoulders, instead laying a hand on your thigh. You stare at it, remembering the way his fingers had moved on the keys of the piano earlier, wishing that he would touch you as he’d touched that instrument, to master playing your strings and keys as well as he was with the instruments in that room.

“You really like him, don’t you?” The boy sitting across from you both says. You look up and see one of Hendery’s friends looking at the pair of you and how close you sit, the familiar way in which he touches you. “How long have you known each other?”

Xuxi butts in then, “Like two days. I caught him blowing Hendery in his closet when I was leaving yesterday. They didn’t seem too close, something about a phone, right?” He squints at you and you nod. That is what it had been. Then. But things had changed for you since then. “Clearly I was wrong, and you’ve gotten closer since I left. I thought we both were leaving, huh? Not fair that you traded me in your bed for him, Hendery.” He raises his eyebrows at you and Hendery.

Hendery’s hand leaves your thigh, and he grabs for the drink in Xuxi’s hand instead. “Fuck off. As if it means anything when we mess around, Xuxi? And it’s not like it’s a big deal.” He gestures between you and him, and then tilts his head back and downs the glass in one gulp.

You want him to lean back beside you, settling his warmth around you like a comfort in this strange atmosphere of his friends and his guests, but Hendery moves farther away, drowning himself for a few moments in a drink that someone hands to him. And then after that he leaves you there as he goes to talk to someone he spotted across the room.

The night had been going well.

Hendery kept his distance after that, winding deeper and deeper into the maze of the house, always fitting himself into the hearts of groups, dancing away any time that you finally spot him. You comfort yourself in the company of his producer friend, Kun, talking about some of the tracks and artists he’s been working with lately, talking about the time you did a story on him and his partner before he branched off to make a solo production company.

You try not to feel hurt that Hendery’s abandoned you at the party he invited you to stay for. But as the night grows later, edging toward dawn, Kun leaves the party, and you consider leaving as well. You did tell your boss you’d send him your story today, and Hendery’s not paying any attention to you, so maybe you should head home. You go in search of Hendery to tell him you’re leaving.

One of the pretty girls from earlier in the night has edged her way closer to him, and you find Hendery with this girl pressed up on him, perched in his lap. She’s laughing and clinging to him, and Hendery lets her. And then his eyes land on you. His arm on the girl’s waist tightens and she squeals in delight, kissing at his neck, giggling and murmuring sweet words to him, slipping her hand down between them so she can touch him.

His eyes slide from yours as he turns toward the girl, pulling her mouth to his.

You shouldn’t be upset. You knew what this was.

You were a hook up at the gala, a one night stand when you came to get your phone. Hendery is just a rich boy, a playboy who fucks around with anyone pretty who catches his eye. It’s not anything more than just a no-strings hook up when you’re with him. You have no right to feel upset by what you see.

But you do anyway.

You turn on your heel before you see anything else. You move through the party without noticing anyone or anything, brushing by people, knocking over something that luckily doesn’t break onto the ground (no matter how much you want it to, just to see something that looks the way you’re feeling right now—jagged and broken and out of place, all spread over the floor).

Already you’re out the door and halfway down the drive when you realize you don’t have your phone. Or your clothes. You’re still wearing Hendery’s borrowed clothes and you’d left your phone in his room, and you’ll be damned if you have to come back here for either of those reasons again.

You’re already stripping out of the clothes the second you step through the doors into his room, and before the door swings shut behind you, you hear footsteps, and then the door pushes open again, Hendery says your name.

You glance back at him, at the even more unkempt state of his hair and the way that his shirt’s collar is tugged askew. There’s a smear of that girl’s lipstick on his throat.

He says your name again.

“What? Why’d you leave her? It seemed you really liked her, Hendery. I mean, please, don’t let me leaving ruin the fun you were about to have.” You say. “I’m just getting my phone and my clothes and then I’ll be gone, and you can go back to using sex as a coping mechanism and a means of distancing yourself from people who want to be close to you. Have you ever thought maybe you want to be alone? That you cause this for yourself by pushing people away, not letting them get close to you?”

You drop his borrowed shirt over the back of a chair in his sitting room, and you keep walking toward the bedroom. You hear him following you.

“Maybe,” you continue, “you don’t want to be vulnerable and open. You just want to keep to your dark broodiness, you want to keep yourself isolated so you have something you can complain about because you’re so incomprehensibly wealthy that you don’t have any other problems to deal with, so you’ve created one for yourself.”

You drop the pants, and then reach for your own clothes that are piled right where you left them the day before. His bedsheets are still a mess, you can see a gross cumstain on the sheets, and you freeze, remembering for a moment how it had felt as he fucked you on his bed, his body covering yours from behind, your hips grinding against the sheets, his teeth digging into your shoulder and neck, and the way you’d moaned at the feel of his cock pounding inside you, right against your prostate.

A hand touches yours, and Hendery brings you around to face him.

“Are you really going to leave?” His voice sounds small. “Don’t go.”

He dips forward as if to kiss you, to reel you back in to his orbit so easily. But you push at his shoulders, and say, “This is what I’m talking about. You’re using sex to make yourself feel better, to manipulate people into getting close. But you don’t want anyone to stay.”

“Please?” Hendery latches onto your hand again. “Stay. The chef’s already up, he’ll make us whatever we order, anything at all. Name the most delicious thing you can think of, and I’ll send down for him to make it. Stay for breakfast.”

“Hendery.” You groan, and push at his chest again. “I don’t care about that. I’m going to leave because I need to go home and sleep so I can finish my story for my boss. I’ll grab a burger on my way home, a cheap, disgustingly greasy burger. Why don’t you go find that pretty girl who was so eager to get into your pants. Or Xuxi, you’ve already made it obvious that he’s fine with warming your bed. Or I’m sure you’ve still got guests down there who would be so excited to have you fuck them or throw your wealth at them. And even if not, you’ve got all this around you, I’m sure you can preoccupy yourself somehow. Maybe count all that jewelry in your closet, but don’t pretend for a second that you want me to stay because I actually mean something to you.”

“I don’t care about all that! I don’t want it!” Hendery cries in frustration as he pulls the rings from his fingers and throws them across the room. You hear them bouncing and plinking off the tiles and the wall and the windows. “Don’t you get it? Haven’t I already made it clear? All of this money doesn’t do a damn thing for me! I’m still lonely. I still feel like no one appreciates me for anything other than my money or for sex. They all are only interested in what I can give them!”

But then he steps forward, his hand touches your cheek, and then he touches the other, cupping your face between his hands. And in a voice far gentler than the one he’d just been using, Hendery says, “Except for you. You are the first person I’ve met in I don’t even know how long who’s made me feel like I’m more. The way you look at me, I don’t feel like you’re looking at just me on the surface, you’re looking deeper. Maybe that’s a lame thing to say, but I feel like a person when I’m with you. Like I can feel things and want things, like I don’t have to give and give and give. I can see that you want me, that you love the way I make you feel when we have sex, but it’s not like that’s all I see when you look at me. You listen. Even when I’m talking absolute nonsense about stories of dragons in the sky, when I’m banging out a bad tune on the piano, anything I’ve said, you’ve listened.

“And you’re right. I do use sex to cope, to fill in this gaping hole of loneliness, and I fail every time and I’m still hollow and aching. I want to have people close to me, but it scares me. I haven’t— I haven’t been open with someone totally in years and I got hurt, and maybe I shouldn’t be telling you all this because we don’t really know each other well and you’re a reporter so if things go wrong then you’ve got this shit to write a story about. But I opened up and got hurt and I’m so lonely and tired of feeling used, and you’re the one person I’ve met in so long who doesn’t make me feel like a vending machine for what other people want of me.

“So stay. Please stay.” Hendery drops his forehead against yours.

And just like that, you do.

Not because he wants you to. Not because of that whole eloquent speech (well, okay, partially because of both of those things), but you stay because you want to. Because over the last approximately thirty-two hours that you’ve spent with Hendery, you got to see a side of him that you really liked. The boy behind the mask his father made for him. A boy who’s more than just lonely, but a boy who wants to be heard and seen, who wants to be loved for who he is. 

You don’t know what that trauma is from his past that hurt him so he pushes people away while  desperately begging them to come closer. All you know is that with his hands on your cheeks and his forehead against yours, you slide your arms around his waist and never want to let him go again.

Dawn finds you wrapped together in the garden, a thick blanket draped around both of you as you sit together and enjoy cheap, disgustingly greasy burgers from a 24 hours place that’s not too far off, just a short drive there and back. You rest your head on Hendery’s shoulder, listening to the sounds of nature waking, and the snores of a few partiers who passed out on the patio nearby.

Eventually, as Hendery starts nodding off, you convince him up onto his feet as the first rays of sunlight spread across the lawn, and together you return to his room, crawling into bed with dew still wet on your toes. 

Hendery really doesn’t like it when you roll out of bed when the clock shows it’s nearly noon. He groans and reaches for you, trying to grab onto any part of you to pull you back in, but you dance out of his reach. 

“I really do have to go home. If I want to keep my job, I can’t miss a deadline. I’m already cutting it dangerously close.” You lean back in and kiss his forehead, earning yourself a handsome smile from him. “I’ll see you later, right?”

Hendery nods. “Yeah, I’m not pushing you away. Hey.” He grabs onto your hand, squeezing. “I am really, really sorry about things. I like you, I genuinely truly like you, and you’re totally right about my coping mechanism and everything, and I’m stupid for trying to hook up with that girl last night when I’m fully aware of how much I like you. Like, a crazy amount. I promise,” he says so honestly and soberly that your heart beats faster, “That I am going to try my hardest to not do anything that will mess this up. So, please, come back after you’ve written a wonderful story about my father’s gala and the handsome and charming Huang Guanheng that you met there.”

A week later you find yourself back in Hendery’s arms, though this time he’s at your humble abode, squeezed into your bed, both of you pretending that you can’t hear your upstairs neighbor yelling at her husband. 

“It’s not as nice as your house.” You apologized when you let Hendery in, but he didn’t seem to care. His eyes moved over every square inch of your apartment. The small kitchen, the living room which was a futon and a coffee table that was covered with half-drunk coffee mugs, old drafts of stories your editor had sent you all marked up in red with necessary revisions, your laptop, a goldfish bowl that was now home to a lovely little cactus ever since your beta fish died, and a tall stack of books.

At the other end of your single-room apartment was a divider you’d drawn across the space to shield your bed from view if ever you decided to entertain anyone. Not that the divider seemed to block Hendery’s curiosity, and a few seconds after he stepped inside he was guiding you by the hand toward your own bed. It took no time to strip each other and then Hendery had you on your back, your fingers twisted in his hair as he sucked your cock.

Hendery’s mouth was heaven, his talent with his tongue left you speechless, tugging on his hair in a way that had him moaning in delight, and just as you’re riding up to the edge of your orgasm with your hips rocking up off the bed, Hendery pulls off, dropping all contact.

You gasp and sit up, ready to whine and beg, but Hendery’s just stepping back to root through his pocket for a condom.

“What are you doing?” You ask, clenching your bedsheets in your fingers. “I have condoms. Get back over here.” You reach under the edge of your bed, bringing out a condom as well as a bottle of lube. Hendery drops his pants back on the floor, and you tip back onto your back, spreading your knees apart for him to fit between your legs.

You look up at your ceiling as you listen to Hendery popping the cap on the bottle of lube, squirting some out onto his fingers. He kisses your thighs, nipping at them lightly with his teeth as he works the lube over his fingers, warming it up a bit before he carefully eases one finger inside you, opening you up for him, sucking at your cock once again.

In no time, Hendery has you close again.Three fingers in, his mouth working magic on you as well. You tug and pull on his hair, dragging him up off your cock, and Hendery kisses a fiery trail up your body until he reaches your lips. 

“I need you. Now.” You moan.

Hendery swiftly rolls the condom down his length, then pulls you up as he lies down. “I want you to ride, Daddy.” 

Too eager to have him inside of you, you immediately move to straddle him, sitting right down on him. Hendery wraps his hand around your dick, swiping his thumb over your tip, cooing at you and telling you how good you look riding Daddy’s cock. It’s hard to not focus on just getting yourself off.

The way Hendery’s hitting so deep inside you, his cock brushing past your prostate each time you drop your hips back on him. And his hand on your cock, jerking you off at the same pace as you’re riding him. It’s all too much.

“Hendery!” You cry out, so close to your orgasm. He pulls his hand away, instead grabbing at your hips, holding you right where he wants you so he can thrust up into you, fucking you with hard, quick thrusts that soon have you cumming untouched onto his belly. And as soon as you’ve finished, he’s touching you again, a hand wrapped around your spent, sensitive cock, and he continues fucking you at a brutal pace.

You’re certain your neighbors can probably hear you, but you can’t hold in your moans, whimpers of oversensitivity.

Hendery nails your prostate with each thrust, and your cock keeps blurting out drops of cum onto his belly, his hand milking you for all you’ve got. 

When you can take no more, you collapse on top of him, and Hendery just holds your hips tighter and chases his own orgasm, moaning in your ear, saying, “You feel so right around Daddy’s cock. God, so tight. Like you were made for me.” 

You moan and tuck your face into his shoulder, biting his skin lightly between your teeth as Hendery cums. His body shudders under you, his cock jerking and filling the condom inside you, and you cum again too at the feeling, just adding more to the sticky mess on your bellies. 

Hendery wraps his arms around you and you stay like that, dozing off with him still buried inside you. It’s only when your neighbors start arguing that you wake, and Hendery reluctantly leaves the bed at last to dispose of the condom. 

You roll over and bundle up in your sheets, then you notice him reaching for his clothes. “What are you doing? Stay.” 

You throw back the blankets, ready to forcefully pull Hendery back into bed with you, but you find that unnecessary as he drops his clothes and tackles you back into bed as if all he’d been waiting on was an invitation to stay. As if all he wanted was to be wanted in return. 

This time you wrap your arms around him, his head on your shoulder as you play with his hair, and you tell him that later you’ll make dinner for him, there’s a recipe you saw online you wanted to try out. Hendery clings to you, presses a smile against your bare skin, and tells you, “I can’t wait.”

And later, when you do finally drag yourselves out of bed (after another round or two), you cook dinner with Hendery hovering at your side, not quite sure how to help you but eagerly wanting to take part. And so what if it doesn’t turn out quite the way you want it? A little bit burnt around the edges, a dash or eight too much salt. You and Hendery made it together and you eat it together and laugh and then drown out the flavor with the alcohol he digs out for you. 

That night, after drinking yourselves to a point where you both feel light and happy, Hendery lets you do whatever you want with him. He lets you spread him out on your bed so you can kiss over every inch of him. He sighs with pleasure when you drip wine over his chest and lick it off his skin, drinking it from the hollow of his throat. 

Hendery cums embarrassingly quick when you grind against him, licking and sucking at his throat and murmuring dirty things against his skin, whimpering how needy you are for Daddy’s cock to fill you up again. 

He fucks you later against the window, telling you that he wants the whole city to see how you look with him inside you, and you look at your reflection in the glass. 

You see Hendery behind you, like the first time you were together, but this time his face isn’t cold indifference just trying to feel something. No, this time Hendery’s eyes burn with passion, his face shows the strain of trying not to cum again already as your walls flutter and clench around him. 

This time Hendery touches you all over, his fingers leaving burning trails over your skin, like asteroid tails on the night sky. 

This time Hendery kisses your neck and pulls you back against him so he can reach around you and palm at your cock, so he can feel it when you cum, dripping down over his fingers, painting the window. 

This time Hendery buries his face against your shoulder and doesn’t let go. He doesn’t put a mask on to hide his face from you. He just holds you close enough that you can feel his heart beating against your back. 

When you wake in the morning, it’s to the feel of Hendery slipping back into bed. His socks touch your bare leg. Cold fingertips skim your back, and you shiver, flinching away. His breath warms your shoulder and he sneaks his cold hand once more onto your skin, over your belly where he presses his palm flat as he whispers to you, “I got breakfast.”

You open one eye and look at him. There’s a flush in his cheeks like he’d run up the stairs. He’s wearing your jacket. 

“How did you get back inside?” You yawn and roll over, stretching your arms up and then flopping into place on top of Hendery’s chest. 

“An older lady was leaving just as I was coming back. She let me in.” Hendery pokes at you. “But I brought breakfast back. Get up and come eat it.”

Everything feels so domestic as you sit down on your futon with Hendery. He unloads the breakfast. You open your laptop, checking your emails to see if your editor has any news for you. You eat together. Hendery tells you about his dream from last night about being on an airplane, and something about a pregnant woman and a cat. It’s simple and easy and you both bask in the pleasure of each other’s company.

Hendery’s in the middle of pulling you apart on his fingers, swallowing your moans as he stretches your hole wider, when there’s a knock on the door of his rooms. You whine as he rolls you off of him, drags the sheet up to cover you both, and calls for whoever it is to enter. 

The man who comes inside is no one you've ever met, but you recognize him all the same. Hendery’s father. 

His eyes land on you first, half-hidden in his son’s bed, and then he looks at Hendery. “You’ve been keeping busy while I was away. My assistant says you haven’t been into the office.”

It’s been weeks that this has been going on with Hendery. You’ve spent nearly every day together to at least some degree, and you’ve definitely not heard him say anything about going into the office. Instead the two of you have mostly been spending time together, in between making out and having sex, you’ve also been watching movies together, teaching Hendery how to cook, he’s started teaching you a bit on the piano.  You’ve hung out with some of his friends, particularly Kun, the producer, as you convinced both of them to try to make some music together, and Hendery dove headfirst eagerly into it, and Kun was extremely supportive. 

But now, with Hendery’s father standing in front of the pair of you, you can already see that light that’s been growing steadily brighter in Hendery diminishing again. You slide a hand onto his shoulder, giving it a comforting squeeze. His father notices. 

“Maybe if you weren’t so focused on fucking whatever pretty creature slithers into your bed, Guanheng, maybe then you wouldn’t be such a disappointment,” his father says. 

Hendery drops his head forward, not looking at his father anymore. 

But you do. You glare at the older man. “Just because he’s not following the rigid life you chose for him doesn’t make him a disappointment. Hendery is amazing. He’s incredibly talented and smart, and he doesn’t need you to tell him how to succeed.”

Hendery grabs your hand tightly. “Stop.”

You look at him, at the downtrodden look on his face. He jerks his head. You close your mouth, but you have so much more you want to say. Hendery is a fantastic person. His father is an asshole. You want to say as much, but you know that it’s not what Hendery wants or needs right now. 

“I’m sorry, Father.” Hendery ducks his head lower in apology. “I allowed myself to get distracted. I’ll come by this office this afternoon.”

His father nods and then turns and leaves the room. The door of the suite slams shut behind him, and as soon as it does, Hendery slumps back into the pillows. 

“Hendery....”

He shakes his head and closes his eyes. “Don’t.” 

You wish you could leave it. Hendery clearly doesn’t want to talk about what just happened. But you do. 

“Why do you let him walk all over you like that? If you don’t want to follow him in the business then don’t.” You crinkle the bedsheets up between your fingers. “Follow music. Or something else you’re passionate about. Don’t make yourself miserable to make your father or anyone else happy.”

Hendery groans and rolls away, rising out of bed so he can pace. You watch him like this, admiring his body in the clear light streaming through the windows. He rakes his fingers through his hair. “You don’t understand what it’s like. The business is my future. It always has been, and my father makes sure that it always will be.”

You frown and scoot to the edge of the bed to be closer to him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” he says as he comes to stand still in front of you, and continues, “that my father has always been the one controlling my life. He chose my friends. He chose my schooling and my teachers. He chose my first girlfriend. It was up to him to approve of anyone that I tried a relationship with, and it was my father who ruined the first real relationship I had, the only time I’ve ever fallen in love.”

You wait, knowing he’ll elaborate if he wants to.

Hendery continues without you having to prompt him for more. “The autumn I turned eighteen, I fell in love with a girl a year older than me. Father had called her in to tutor me in economics, but I was already kinda, I guess, what everyone calls me. A playboy, fuckboy, manwhore. All of the above.” He pushes his fingers nervously through his hair again, squinting as he stares past you out the window into the bright sunlight. “Anyway, I managed to seduce her, so lessons were less likely to be about economics and much more about anatomy. But then it turned slowly from sex and pretending that we were learning economics, to me actually taking her out on dates, and I fell in love with her and she, like you, tried to convince me that I didn’t need my father or the business. She didn’t know about my music, but she tried showing me different career paths. And then one day while she was meant to be tutoring me, Father walked in and found us together and a little bit more digging revealed what she’d been telling me, trying to convince me to do. And then she broke up with me, which was devastating in itself, but then Father told me that he’d paid her to leave me. Just one check from him was enough to eliminate everything between us. And then, to top it all off, a few weeks later she was back, actually tutoring me, and then she became my latest, newest model of a stepmother. She lived it up rich for a few months until Father grew tired of her.”

“I still don’t understand why that means that you have to do something that you’re so dispassionate about?” You ask. 

Hendery sinks down to his knees, and you watch as he lays his head on your lap. “Because. He’ll find a way to ruin anything good I try to make for myself outside of what he wants.” He takes your hand and brings it to the back of his head, so you begin stroking his hair. “It hasn’t really mattered in a long time. Not since her. He didn’t care if I was fucking around, if I was jetting off to parties on the other side of the world as long as he knows there are other wealthy people there to make connections with. He doesn’t care as long as whatever I do will profit him in the end. And it didn't matter because up until a few weeks ago, I didn’t have anything for him to ruin because there was nothing I loved enough for it to matter. But then I met you.”

You pause, your fingers going still in his hair, your breath catching in your throat. 

Hendery, the once cold and indifferent playboy you’d let fuck you in the bathroom for a fun night, now tilts his head in your lap and looks up at you so softly, his gaze tender and warm on your face. 

“I love you,” Hendery tells you in a voice so quiet and small that it could almost get lost in this room. “Please don’t leave me.”

You can’t help the noise you make. One of alarm and sadness and reassurance and love and need. You curl your fingers against whatever part of Hendery you can touch, and you pull him up. He climbs back into the bed, over you, covering your body with his, and then his mouth is smooth and sweet on yours. 

“I love you,” you tell him too, feeling the truth of it swelling, burning and beating in your chest. 

And Hendery repeats, “Don’t leave me.”

You know there’s such a depth behind those words. Now, it’s more than just a lonely boy who doesn’t want to sleep alone. More than a lonely boy who sees someone who finally listens and sees him too for who he really is beneath his facade. Now, you hear the plea of a broken-hearted boy who has had the love bought and sold from right between his fingertips. 

You hold his face in your hands. “Never,” you promise, and seal it with a kiss.

Hendery’s money is the last thing on your mind. You don’t care one bit for it. You like going on cheap dates with him to the movies on a Tuesday afternoon when it’s cheapest, even if the movies showing are only the bad ones. You amuse yourself by taking him with you on public transportation, both of you leaning together and making up stories about the other passengers; some of them are so funny that you both burst into laughter, drawing odd looks from everyone around you. You enjoy lazing about in the garden of his home, sunbathing beside the pond, or sitting beside the pool while you write your latest entertainment story, Hendery swimming laps and singing up at the sky, his voice echoing off the side of the hostage and the trees and hedges on the property. 

His father doesn’t like you, and all three of you know that. 

He doesn’t hide it. 

When you sneak down from Hendery’s bedroom at midnight to steal a snack from the refrigerator, and his father is just concluding a video call, and you bump into him as he comes out of his office, he just scowls at you. When you and Hendery are sitting at the pool with Kun and Xuxi and Dejun, laughing and filming Hendery for a music video for the song he and Kun have put together (with a little vocal assist from Dejun), his father nearly explodes. And while you and the other three boys flee back to the safety of the music room, you can hear Hendery’s father shouting about how music isn’t a viable career choice, that it’s useless. 

Hours later, Hendery fucks you until you’re both numb from the intensity of multiple orgasms, and he wraps himself so tightly around you, that you’re not sure the knots of his fingers with yours will ever untangle. 

And finally, after months, when Kun and Hendery have compiled a few songs, Kun wants to release the music as an EP. 

Naturally, you encourage him to go for it. 

And word of it gets back to his father. 

Hendery’s just left your apartment one morning, the taste of him still lingering on your tongue, and you’ve just sat down to work on your latest story—an exclusive interview you’d snagged with the lead actors of an upcoming film that was slated to be a big hit at international film festivals. There’s a knock on your door, and at the same time as you hear it, you spot Hendery’s wallet left behind in the mess on your coffee table. 

You grab it up and spring toward the door. 

But when you open the door, it’s not Hendery standing on the other side. 

“Mr. Huang?” You stare in confusion at Hendery’s father, looking so out-of-place on your doorstep. “Can I help you?”

“May I come in?” He asks, but he’s already stepping inside. 

He enters your apartment and looks around with such a judgmental eye that you almost just walk out your door to avoid whatever harsh words are surely about to come out of his mouth. But you stick firmly to your spot, letting the door swing shut as you stare at him. 

He turns to face you after he’s had his fill of your apartment. “Mr. Y/L/N, I don’t know what your parents taught you about respecting them, but I have always demanded absolute respect from my son. Guanheng has always been a distracted boy, easily caught up in things, finding himself miles away from where he needs to be. But he’s always respected me and the wishes I have for his path in life. I have done my best to keep him on the straight and narrow, but clearly, there are times when he doesn’t heed my guidance.” He looks pointedly at you. “Right now, he is straying from the path, and it’s my duty to make sure he returns and won’t stray again. You understand?”

Yes, you understand what he’s saying. But no, you don’t agree with it. 

“Mr. Y/L/N, it has come to my attention that you have been encouraging my son to pursue music, which is a fickle industry and not worthy of his time. It’s simply not a good path for him. That friend of his, Mr. Qian, his father has ties in the industry that gave him a great leg up when he began. Mr. Qian has a talented ear, and he lives up to the standards that his father set for him. But those same standards fall far below what I expect of Guanheng, you understand? Guanheng already has his path laid out before him, nice and safe and smooth from his birth until his death. Following me into the business means he’ll never have to worry about a thing.”

On some level you know that, but does a safe, boring life have to take precedence over an uncertain, yet passionate life? 

Hendery’s father looks you straight in the eye and says, “This dangerous path you’re leading him on is unacceptable. I am willing to give you ten million dollars if you will drop this subject and leave my son alone. Ten million, all yours, to just stay out of my son’s life and stop ruining it.”

You can’t help the laugh that bubbles out of you. “Are you kidding? You think I am the one ruining his life by encouraging him, showing him positivity and love, showing an interest in the things that he enjoys, rather than just squashing them out of him until his life is flat and dull and lonely? Sir, I mean no disrespect when I say this, but you are the one ruining his life.” You take a step back, open the door of your apartment, and gesture out of it. “I love your son. Completely. No amount of money or bribery you can offer will convince me to break his heart. Please leave.”

You don’t wait to watch him go. You walk away from the door and back over to where you left your phone. You immediately pick it up and call Hendery. You tell him about what just happened, not to start any shit between him and his father, but just because you feel that being open and honest about what just happened is crucial. You want him to know that you will never leave him, that you don’t want to leave him.

The warmth of summer is finally sticking, penetrating even the house, and you and Hendery hang outside, floating on your backs in the pool or seeking the coolest patch of shade in the garden. 

He’s stretched out on his back in a shady patch of grass as you look down into the koi fish pond nearby. You hear a splash and when you look over you see a little frog. He squirms when you pick him up, but then he sits in your palm, a soft damp little body, quivering in your palm. You walk towards Hendery to show him, but as soon as you call his name and are within a few feet of him, Hendery swears and scrambles away. 

“What are you doing with that? Oh my god! Put it back!” He runs as far away as he can while he can still see you to make sure that you walk back to the pond and leave the frog there. 

“I’m sorry!” You laugh. “I didn’t know you were scared of frogs.” You wipe your hands off on your shorts and settle down in the shade, beckoning him over to join you. He comes over cautiously, as if he thinks you’re going to pull another frog out of nowhere. “Hendery, I’m sorry.”

He makes a face at you and finally does come closer, sitting with his legs folded in front of him, and you take that opportunity to lay your head in his lap. 

“What else are you afraid of?” You ask. “Or is it just frogs?”

“Toads, too. And heights. Sometimes the dark, but only really pitch black dark, like in a cave or somewhere with zero light penetration.” He shivers. “And you know, also, being lonely. Losing you.”

You make a face up at him. “Cheesy.” You grab his hand, holding it over your heart. “But same. I’m scared of losing you. I’m scared of the dark, needles, and this one ridiculous scary story a friend told me when I was a kid.” You shudder just remembering the story, unable to even bring yourself to put it to words. “But we’ve got each other, right? I’ll keep you safe from frogs, and you can keep me safe from needles. But we’ll both have to do something about the dark.”

You’re still laying like that in the grass when afternoon begins to sink towards evening, the sun turning the sky amber, the grass striped emerald and navy. The first early stars begin to peek through. 

And that’s when Hendery’s father strolls out into the garden. He’s on his phone, so he doesn’t seem to notice either of you at first, but Hendery stiffens. 

“Have you spoken to him yet?” You ask. Hendery was so angry that day when you called to tell him about the bribe his father had offered you to leave him. You were so sure that a nasty argument was going to ensue, but Hendery hadn’t said anything to you about it yet.

“No, I’ve been too angry.” Hendery’s fingers clench, flexing against your chest. “And he’s been away. Plus I’m a little bit scared.”

You lay your hand reassuringly over his. “Don’t be afraid. You can’t let him control your life.”

Hendery nods, and you watch his face as a look of pure determination and strong will takes over. He taps your shoulder, and you sit up so he’s free to get to his feet. 

You watch Hendery strut across the garden and come up to his father who is still on the phone. You hear him say, “Father.” The older man holds up a finger, not even sparing Hendery a glance. Hendery looks back at you, then takes a deep breath, steeling himself, and he faces his father again. “Father, I’m marrying Y/N and we’re moving to America.”

Both are outright lies, but they send a thrill through you all the same. You imagine marrying Hendery in a small, formal ceremony. Owning a home together, moving somewhere new together, or just traveling the world together and experiencing all the great places there are to see.

The fantasy fades as you realize that his words caught his father’s attention too. 

“I’ll call you back,” he says into his phone, and then all of his attention is on his son. “What the fuck did you just say to me?”

You watch as Hendery tenses his shoulders, clenches his fists tightly at his sides, and tells his father, “I’m marrying him because I love him, and I’m never going to be alone again because of something you’ve done.” 

His father looks from Hendery to you, and then back at Hendery. “Do you think you’re really going to be happy like that? Married to a mediocre reporter? And what if I cut you off?”

“I’d rather be poor and happy than always second-guessing the motives of people who get close to me.” Hendery spits back. “At least I know he won’t betray me for money, not ten million dollars, not a billion, not for all the stars in the sky. I just want to be happy, Father. He supports me, from the day we met, he’s supported me in pursuing music. I love making music. Kun and I have been working together to produce some stuff, and I want to release it. If it flops, then it flops, and I’ll just continue making music for me and anyone who wants it. If it’s successful, then that’s even better. But I just want to try to be happy, and you’ve made it clear time and again that that is not something you want for me.”

You can hear cars passing by on the road outside the property. Birds singing in the trees. But in the air between father and son, it is entirely silent for a few long seconds. 

It feels like a private moment, something that you shouldn’t really be seeing even though for the past few months, it’s felt like everything has been building toward this moment. You want to look away, yet even when you do turn to look down at your hands, you can still hear them. 

You hear Hendery’s father clear his throat and say a quiet, “Well.” Then it’s silent for another little while before he gathers together the words to say. “I do want you to be happy, Guanheng. I want you to be secure and happy, and that is always why I’ve pushed you toward this future I had planned. A nice stable future where you would never have to worry about anything, where you can be happy. Music is a hobby, not a job. And you fall in love with people who try to tell you that it’s a viable life choice, but it’s not, Guanheng. I’m just trying to protect you. Is following my footsteps into the business such an appalling thing? So horrible to you, so unsettling and disheartening, that you would leave me and disown me as your father?”

It sounds a bit like a guilt trip, in your opinion, but you keep your eyes on your hands, your mouth closed. 

“You’re an adult, and maybe it’s time I let you make your own decisions, your own mistakes to learn from.” He clears his throat again. “I do want you to be happy. Maybe I don’t show it in the proper ways, but I mean it.”

You lift your head then, just checking on them. And as you look, you catch his father’s eye. 

He’s still looking at you as he says, “Release your music, Guanheng. Marry your boyfriend. But I don’t want you to give up on the company. If music falls through, you’re taking a job in the company, and that’s the last I’ll hear of it. Be happy, but be secure in your future too.”

Hendery relaxes. Those tense knots in his body all loosen at once. “Thank you.”

And then you watch as his father claps a hand down on Hendery’s shoulder, then draws him in for a hug. 

“Your mother always loved music too.” The words are spoken quietly, intended only for Hendery, but the garden is so silent you can’t help but overhear. “I guess you got that from her.” 

He pulls out of the hug abruptly and walks back inside, leaving Hendery frozen in his spot. You push up to your feet and go to join him, wrapping your arms around him. 

“He never talks about my mother.” Hendery tells you. “And he said yes? Are we sure that’s my father?” 

You smile and kiss his cheek. “Are you happy?”

“Beyond. I should call Kun, tell him to go ahead.” He reaches for his phone, and as he scrolls through it for Kun’s contact, he looks up to meet your eyes. “And I wasn’t lying, you know. I do believe I want to marry you.”

“I want that too.” 

And after Hendery calls Kun, after they celebrate and excitedly talk over the phone for like an hour and a half while the nighttime settles around you. After it all, it’s just you and Hendery, stretched out together in the now mild summer night, looking up at the stars. 

“Remember that first night?” Hendery asks you. “Do you remember the stories I told you?” 

You look up at the constellations visible overhead, all those tiny stars millions of lightyears away, the patterns that they make from your viewpoint down here. “I remember. I remember the look on your face as you told the stories to me, the way that you looked up at the stars, like all you wanted was to be part of something great like them.”

“Yeah?”

You nod. “Yeah. You were just telling me how lonely you were, and you looked at the stars like you were jealous that they were never lonely, that they’re a part of a constellation, of a story.” You roll up onto your elbows so you can look down at Hendery. “You know, you’ve never really been alone? I’ve watched you, Hendery, the way that you are with your friends. The seven of you make a constellation of your own, and they’re all drawn into the gravity of you. Just like me. Caught in your orbit.” 

“Are you saying I’m a star?” Hendery laughs. Then he teases, “You gonna make a wish on me?”

Leaning down to kiss him, you stop just a breath away from his lips. “Oh, Hendery, I’ve already made countless wishes on you, and I’m pretty sure they’re all coming true.”

And when Hendery lifts his head from the grass so his lips meet yours, that kiss feels like a new wish, burning bright in the sky.

a/n: okay this took me a little longer than it was meant to. I originally started out making this a drabble in response to this message: Aksdhgfdj Hendery the “rich playboy who would definitely treat you right for a few nights” I would like to say I’m here for IT! which was in response to what I said about how Hendery looked during this periscope he did with Xiaojun, like black on black is truly a god-tier look for Hendery (this is only made truer after I saw him during the Wayv Beyond Live concert like oh my god I was dying of thirst)

Anyway, as usual, thank you if you read all this mess. I’m pretty sure there are a few spots that are a little messy, but if you read it all, I still really really appreciate it 💗 comments and reblogs are always greatly appreciated thank you!! 💗💗💗

[spoondrifts]

long post ahead I'm sorry-

crack au where Jonah Magnus is a good guy but everything keeps going wrong and he spends all of his time running around trying to stop his employees from diving headfirst into their Fuck Up™ of the week

in this au Jonah is almost entirely incompetent but he's got the exasperated parent thing down enough to make up for his lack of braincells

he's also at least 7% dumber than he is in canon

s1 Jon: please call pest control there are so many worms

s1 Elias: I already did

Jon: and??

Elias: they ate them

Jon: the worms?

Elias: the pest control guys. the worms ate them

Elias spends the entirety of season 2 desperately trying to convince Jon that none of them killed Gertrude (in this au Gertrude just had a stroke or something in the tunnels). Elias stops Jon from destroying the table but a week later something heavy falls on it and the NotThem escapes anyway. Elias bashes in Leitner's head with a pipe after mistaking him for the monster and Jon gets framed.

now Elias has to convince this hunter that Jon is innocent while Jon runs around and harasses various fear avatars (who are all very amused with Elias' wayward Archivist). Jon assumes Elias knows nothing about all this bullshit because Elias is just his weird and uptight boss who accidentally killed someone, he can't possibly know that there are literally fear gods ruling over them

olive ⚰ has named the group 'Avatars ✨'

JMagnus 👀: Jude please don't hurt him. I'll explain everything when he gets back to the Institute.

🔥: too late

JMagnus 👀: What?

🔥: too late

🔥: burned him

[JMagnus 👀 is typing]

JMagnus 👀: Where is he now.

🔥: going to mike

JMagnus 👀: Mike Crew???

🔥: ya

Elias RACES to Mike's house but he. he fucking misses them. the Beholding helpfully tells him that they're all going back to the Institute so Basira and Daisy can interrogate him, which isn't ideal, he'd really like to not go to jail, so he drafts up an employment contract on the way back and barely manages to escape the whole thing with his life intact.

then he explains everything to Jon because if Jon is going to end up being the Archivist, being uninformed won't do. Jon becomes the Archivist completely on accident and Elias is desperately trying to make all of this work because, haha, the Unknowing is coming up, and Elias is not in the fucking mood to deal with clowns.

olive ⚰ has named the group 'all that is terror uwu'

spidey🕸: lmfaooo jonah how do you make an archivist on accident

JMagnus 👀: He stumbled into it. All I can do now is ensure he doesn't die.

JMagnus 👀: Or get further injured by the rest of you.

🔥: woops

🎭: hEy gUyS lOnG tiMe nO sEe

🎭: gEt iT eLiAs

🎭: sEe

JMagnus 👀: Beholding puns are not amusing from a manifestation of the Stranger.

🎭 has named the group 'eLiAs bE niCe tO niKoLa cHaLlEnGe'

🔥: haha

spidey🕸: I'm sure Nikola will be on her best behavior

🎭: yEaH i wOnT kiDnAp yOuR aRcHiViSt

[JMagnus 👀 is typing]

mike n ike: hey guys what'd I miss

🔥: arent you dead

mike n ike: yeh but I came back

JMagnus 👀: NIKOLA ORSINOV WHERE IS JONATHAN SIMS

🔥: can't you see haha

mike n ike: heh "see"

JMagnus 👀: NIKOLA

spidey🕸: wow he must be pissed

spidey🕸: he left out the punctuation

JMagnus 👀: I WILL BREAK ALL OF YOUR PLASTIC BONES WHERE'S MY ARCHIVIST

🎭 has left the chat.

JMagnus 👀: what the FUCK

since he's still a coward Elias sends Michael to go fetch Jon, only finding out after the fact that he very nearly almost signed Jon's death warrant. Elias is now speedrunning Jon's development because fuck the Unknowing is coming up really quickly and Tim is a self destructive mess and Melanie keeps trying to stab Elias and Martin is a pining idiot and goddammit he didn't sign up for this

Elias prepares Jon the best he can for the Unknowing, because even though he knows the ritual will fail, the Circus can still cause a considerable amount of damage and he needs them out of the way.

the Unknowing happens. Jon ends up in a wack ass coma, Tim is dead, Daisy's in the coffin, and Basira is starting to look like the better choice of Archivist because jesus christ Jon has no self preservation instinct. Elias doesn't get arrested this time around but his ex husband starts coming by the Institute and fucking with all his employees. and the Flesh is attacking. jesus. goddamn.

olive ⚰ has named the group 'bully elias'

JMagnus 👀: Why are you all so mean to me? I'm arguably the nicest one here.

🔥: ur joking right

Peter Lukas: you're not nice you didn't buy me an anniversary gift 😢😢😢

JMagnus 👀: I was busy.

Peter Lukas: doing what

JMagnus 👀: Stopping the Flesh from destroying my Institute. Besides, you didn't remember my birthday.

Peter Lukas: you're 200 years old how could I remember 😓

helen!!!!!: We All Know I'm The Nicest One Here!!

JMagnus 👀: How did you make your text that colorful?

helen!!!!!: IDK

JMagnus 👀: Liar.

helen!!!!!: That's Literally My Job

olive ⚰: hey eli your archivist just woke up I think

🔥: ew why

helen!!!!!: How Delightful!! Maybe I'll Throw Him A Glad You're Alive Party!!

olive ⚰: should we invite him to this chat since he's an avatar now

Peter Lukas: no 🙅 🚫❌

Peter Lukas: I hate archivists 😤😤

olive ⚰: still mad about gertrude huh

🔥: were all still mad about gertrude

🔥: but jons fine once you burn some manners into him

JMagnus 👀: Can you all please stop hurting Jon? Or talking about hurting him? I would like my Archivist to not acquire any more scars.

🔥: damn

Peter Lukas: damn 😔

Elias keeps trying to teach Jon how to pick certain victims to feed off of because personally he has no qualms about feeding from innocents but Jon!! actually trusts him!!! so Elias doesn't want to push Jon into making decisions that will offend his moral sensitivities.

things are actually going okay for a while. Elias starts going home at a reasonable time in the evenings and Jon is actually getting some sleep. and then-

Elias is having a nice dream about Peter trying to fish Simon Fairchild out of a sky filled with eyes when he abruptly sits up in bed, wide awake.

"Ah, fuck," he says to Peter, who is laying on the floor where it is Lonelier™. "Jon's doing something stupid. I Know it."

Peter's mumbled "isn't he always" goes unnoticed as Elias hurries to the Institute, where he finds a fucking rib on Jon's desk and the coffin in the middle of the room.

Peter Lukas has named the chat 'archivists ruin my sleep schedule and my sex life'

JMagnus 👀: What the fuck do I do?? I can't go into the Buried! Why is Jon so stupid? I didn't know he had zero braincells when I hired him!

🔥: ngl why havent you fired him yet

JMagnus 👀: Beholding won't let me. We're all bound to the Institute.

🔥: F

JMagnus 👀: Why are there no Buried avatars in here? Please someone help me.

mike n ike: lol the buried is gross why would anyone go down there

spidey🕸: does he have an anchor?

[JMagnus 👀 sent an image]

🔥: is that a fucking rib

spidey🕸: wow that's not a good anchor at all

spidey🕸: he needs someone he loves

JMagnus 👀: Thanks. Gtg.

spidey🕸: np

🔥: are we not going to talk about his rib

🔥: how the fuck did he get that out of his body

🔥: yall

🔥: YALL

it takes three days for Elias to find Martin.

"Please tell me why the fuck you're dabbling in the Lonely," Elias says as Martin steps sheepishly out of the fog.

"Ah. Well. Jon can't See into it very well and sometimes we like to spice up our se-"

"Stop before I have to gouge my eyes out again."

"A-Again-?"

Elias drags Martin back to the Institute. Martin starts setting tapes on the coffin because "Jon loves these" and Elias starts bashing his head into the wall.

Jon climbs out of the coffin with Daisy and Elias almost considers locking Jon in his office so the damn archivist can't do anything else ridiculous. instead, Elias very calmly takes Jon by the shoulders, and shakes him like a rag doll.

"Stop fucking with entities, you stupid, stupid man," Elias says, shaking Jon more viciously now.

after several hours of breathing exercises Elias returns to his house and doesn't take his Sight off of Jon for the rest of the night, which is a fun experience for Peter when he wakes up and finds Elias' bloodshot eyes staring directly at him in the morning.

JMagnus 👀 added Daisy to 'archivists ruin my sleep schedule and my sex life'

Peter Lukas has named the chat 'archivist hate club'

JMagnus 👀 has named the chat 'shut up peter'

Peter Lukas has named the chat 'you love jon more than me'

JMagnus 👀 has named the chat 'I don't love either of you I'm heartless'

Peter Lukas has named the chat 'I want a divorce'

spidey🕸: jeez take your marital dispute elsewhere

spidey🕸 has named the chat 'lonelyeyes dni'

Daisy: wtf is this

mike n ike: it's a chat for avatars

mike n ike: and ex avatars ig

Daisy: didn't I kill you

mike n ike: yea

JMagnus 👀: Hello, Daisy. Welcome to the group chat.

Daisy: why is Jon not in here

Peter Lukas: because I hate him 😁

spidey🕸: Elias talks mad shit in here and Jon would get offended

Daisy: if you talk bad about Jon I'll rip your throat out

Daisy: :)

JMagnus 👀: Noted.

mike n ike: he's kinda rude tho

Daisy: I've killed you once

Elias' only goal now is to keep Jon and his assistants from pulling any more wild stunts without his supervision. his renewed involvement with the archival staff results in a few things he'd hoped to avoid: drink invites, physical contact (Martin is surprisingly quick to start hugging Elias once he realizes Elias won't stop him), and- shudder -feelings. because Elias genuinely cares about his staff and doesn't want any harm to befall them. especially Jon. Jon is his Archivist, the only one to ever succeed like this, and Elias will be damned if he lets anything happen to him.

"Why do you care?" Jon asks, once, compulsion thrumming like static on his tongue. "About us, I mean. I would've assumed you'd want to perform the Beholding's ritual."

Jonah Magnus attempted the Watcher's Crown once, when he was young and new. he'd brought his patron close, but not all the way through, and the backlash of power killed all the inmates at Millbank and severely crippled Jonah's connection to the Eye for months afterward. he grew to assume that the Beholding simply preferred the world as it was--ripe with fear for watching. it didn't need a ritual.

he instead dedicated himself to growing stronger, cultivating his Institute of knowledge, his stronghold. if he tore out a few people's eyes when he got too old, then, well, collateral. but he doesn't want the world to end, and knows now that no ritual will ever succeed unless it brings in all the Powers at once. and he doesn't want that either.

it's concerning to him that Jon seems to be collecting marks regardless. the only ones he's missing are the Dark and the Lonely, and Elias is determined to keep it that way.

he explains all of this to Jon who, to his credit, takes it pretty well. Jon is fascinated with historic life and Elias spends some time simply recounting tales of his youth, when he still bore the name Magnus.

they bond. it's good.

and one day Basira does a little too much research and discovers the dark sun waiting in Ny Alesund. she insists they need to go and see what's left of the People's Church, they need to ensure everything is taken care of. Jon is rather insistent too. and Elias wouldn't have been inclined to let them go, except Peter was finally home after weeks at sea, and it wasn't like Jon was defenseless, he could call Elias if anything went wrong...

so, very reluctantly, Elias gives them the all clear. Basira, Jon, and Martin head north, and Elias almost forgets they've gone when he arrives home and Peter already has dinner prepared.

Jon comes back marked by the Dark.

Elias curses himself, over and over, for being foolish enough to let them go, for not keeping a closer eye on them. he knows the ritual won't work unless a certain incantation is spoken, so he'll just have to keep world-ending written chants away from Jon. easy. and it's not like Jon will even get marked by the Lonely. Peter wouldn't.

(but Martin doesn't have the same level of control, and sometimes...)

it's an accident. Martin and Jon are testing it, pushing the boundaries, when Martin pulls them both into the Lonely. Elias threatens divorce until Peter caves and fetches them, but it's too late. Jon has been marked by all fourteen Powers.

Elias tells him, and warns him to check everything he reads.

helen!!!!! has named the chat 'apocalypse babey'

JMagnus 👀: How are you doing that?

JMagnus 👀: And the apocalypse is not imminent. I have the situation under control.

olive ⚰: ha yeah

JMagnus 👀: What do you mean by that?

olive ⚰: nothing

JMagnus 👀: Well, now I certainly think it's something.

olive ⚰: it's just

olive ⚰: don't you think it's kinda weird that @spidey🕸 has been offline for so long

🔥: thats weird shes always online

JMagnus 👀: Oliver, what are you implying?

olive ⚰: idk

olive ⚰: just weird, that's all

🔥: never good when the spiders are quiet

olive ⚰: hear hear

Elias gets a sinking feeling in his stomach, and beside him, Peter looks alarmed. meanwhile, in his flat with Martin making tea in the other room, Jon has a statement clutched in his grasp.

Hello, Jon.

I would apologize for the deception, but I'm afraid that's quite what I'm good at. I'm not one to monologue, that's more Jonah's shtick, so shall we get on with things?

I admit I underestimated Jonah Magnus. He's still remarkably easy to manipulate, but when he abandoned the Watcher's Crown ritual I knew I would have to take a different approach. The Mother is not so satisfied with the world as she may have insinuated. It is our turn to rise, Jon.

At the age of eight, you were marked by us. We sent you to the Magnus Institute in the hopes that a new Archivist would rekindle Jonah's desire to end the world. Unfortunately, it seemed as though he grew fond of you, and so we brought in a new plan. We marked you. One fear at a time. Jonah gave an admirable attempt at protecting you, but ultimately, he is an incompetent old fool, and I am a Weaver. Even Jonah Magnus dances to invisible strings.

Everyone underestimates a spider until it bites. Poison is poison, Jon, regardless of the medium in which it is served.

You will be safe in this new world. Martin, too. Perhaps even Jonah and his Lukas, if the Mother deems them worthy.

Now, please repeat after me...

Jon reads the ink scratched words, eyes welling up with tears and hands trembling, as thunder crashes outside and a howling gale picks up beyond the windows. Martin is shouting something, there's the crawling press of Elias' gaze as it rests heavy behind Jon, a silent observer. He can feel Elias' soothing presence, cool and calm in the raging storm.

Elias is still watching out for him.

Strings are wrapped around his wrists, jerking his arms up in a poor mockery of religious regard, strange hysterical laughter clawing out from his throat.

Jon's tears run red. Somewhere, Elias is still watching.

The door opens.

[renohasbigtits]

Oh my goodness those Ignis mpreg headcanons were so well written! I really enjoyed them they were really cute, if ya don’t mind me asking could you do Prompto next? I’ll leave all the details up to you but plz give us more uwu

Mpreg Prompto (Final Fantasy 15 Headcanons)

Omg ☺️ I’m glad you liked the Iggy one. Honestly While making the Ignis one, I was thinking about doing a Prompto Mpreg headcanon but I didn’t think someone would ask for a Prompto one.

But I will give the the people what they want!! PROMPTO MPREG!! Expect this to be very silly 🙃

Idk where this takes place, I’ll leave it to your imagination ;) just know that no ones dead! Yay everyone lives!!

One more thing: this does contain Mpreg (Male Pregnancy. Don’t like? Don’t read! Constructive feedback is welcome!)



• He’s a lot of things (being adorable cinnamon roll is one 🥰) but stupid isn’t one of them.

• he’ll noticed 𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘢𝘸𝘢𝘺 how he’s gaining weight and starts to become more insecure (someone hug him pls)

Minor Warning: mentions of eating disorder habits.

• he starts to exercise more but he pushes himself a little to far of what people consider “Normal” and stops eating around people. That caught Ignis’s eye.

• Ignis motherly instincts kick in (Noct ain’t his only kid ya know) he confronts Prompto’s lack of appetite but Prompto doubles down.

• Ignis asks Noctis to, as his Best Friend, To help Prompto. Noctis goes to talk to his Best Friend.

•Noct tries to talk to Prompto about his excessive exercise and seemingly lack of appetite but Noctis’s awkwardness and his unintentional nonchalant attitude, doesn’t help and Prompto just ignores his friends concerns.

•however, one day Prompto passes out while running and is rushed to the hospital.

•it’s only then, he’s given the shocking news; He’s Pregnant! Not just that, he’s already a month Pregnant!

•he’s in shock and disbelief at first. How could that happ-

•oh yeah he had sex (duh)

•to make a long story short, Prompto was at a party, met someone, was getting along great and...well yeah you guess the rest xD (tbh I’m not comfortable or good at describing sex scenes, so I’m not gonna torture you guys 😅)

•after that, Prompto never saw (or heard) from them again.

•Gladio was like “Welp, it least you got laid!”

• meanwhile Noctis and Ignis: 👨‍🦯👨‍🦯

•Now, in a hospital bed, with the news that he’s Pregnant, Prompto feels alone, confused and scared. So he, reluctantly, turns to his friends for help.

•Noctis jaw was on the floor, he wanted it to be a joke. It wasn’t a joke.

•Gladio was: 📉📈📉📈📉📈📉

•Ignis, being the most calmest and levelheaded, tells Prompto to try to contact the baby’s other parent (can you tell I’m trying to be gender neutral? What can I say I love my he’s, she’s, and they’s 🥰)

•this, however, proves to be a colossal failure, since Prompto doesn’t even remember their name!

•Out of stress Prompto begins to cry :’(

• Noctis finally sees the seriousness of the situation, promises his best friend to help him and be there for him.

•Ignis and Gladio as well! Yay Grandma and Grandpa!...I mean Uncles!!!

•One Month: Prompto begun to eat correctly again. He’s lucky that the baby wasn’t harmed.

•this poor boy...gets sick a lot!!

•morning sickness is his worst enemy!!!

• “Now I know what my Mom went through...”

• he has the most RANDOM cravings...poor Ignis.

•he has to make the weirdest shit for Prompto!

•it least he’s eating it, so it’s worth it...kinda.

•Noctis is very protective of his friend. He knows people can be... judge mental.

•if anyone gives Prompto weird looks or glares.

•Oh Hell No!

•Noctis ain’t having none of it!!

•he’ll glare at them back! “What? What the hell are you staring at?!”

•He almost fought someone.

•Gladio had to stop him, he’s making Prompto cry (and that shit ain’t acceptable)

•Ignis just sighs. (Being a single mother is hard guys)

• Second Month: Prompto’s belly keeps gets bigger. He proud and nervous. He feels like he’s getting fat.

•The Doctor assures him that he’s not getting fat, he’s womb is getting bigger, which means the baby is growing fine.

•plus his friends are the best support system!!!

•lris gets him baby clothes, baby toys, etc.

•you better believe he’s taking pics of his baby bump.

•not just because it’s adorable, but because he wants to document it! He wants to scrapbook it!! It’s one of his biggest projects and he wants it to be perfect!

•Third Month: he has to buy new clothes ;-; he’s already outgrowing the ones he has!

• Prompto’s insecurity: 📈📈📈

•Noctis still tries to fight ANYONE who even looks at Prompto.

•Even Gladio gets annoyed with Noct fighting people and arguing with security to not kick them out.

•”Noct stop trying to fight people or your getting nothing but vegetables!!!”

•oh and you just know Prompto is gonna buy some Chocobo plushies, he’s kid is gonna love Chocobo’s as much as he does!

•55% of the baby supplies is Chocobo related.

•Fouth Month: This is it. He finds out the baby’s gender!

•it takes a while cuz the baby was an awkward position.

•”poor little guy, he must feel uncomfortable as much as I do.”

•”she’s actually a girl, Prompto. Congrats it’s a Girl!”

•”AAHAHAAHAH! IT’S A GIRL!” lris had to scream that where Noctis, Gladio and “I haven’t had my Coffee yet” Ignis could hear.

•THAT’S IT! I’M MAKING IT’S A GIRL CAKE!!

•that’s how they celebrate the announcement of the baby’s gender.

•Noct wouldn’t admit it but he’s really excited to be an Uncle.

•Gladio and Ignis as well.

•however, Prompto does not have much experience with taking care of Babies, so he starts practicing.

•for the next couple months, he training to take care of baby.

•he gets better but he fears he won’t be a good father (or mother) to his unborn Daughter.

•he doesn’t want her to feel what he felt growing up; loneliness.

•he promises her that he’ll never let her feel alone. He wants her feel loved and safe.

Eight Months: She’s already kicking. Literally!

•Seriously, She’s the most active baby the Doctor’s ever seen!

•let’s hope she won’t be too energetic....

•lris decides to make a baby shower for Prompto. The plan is simple:

•Ignis makes the food. (So many new Recipeh’s)

•Noctis keeps Prompto distracted. It’s not that hard as it sounds, he takes Prompto to a Chocobo farm!

•all tho, Prompto can’t ride the Chocobros cause he might fall and hurt himself and his unborn daughter, but he’s really enjoying himself. The plan is going smoothly.

•meanwhile Gladio decorates with the material he’s given because Iris doesn’t trust him to bring his own.

•it’s small and not many people came but hey! It’s the thought that that counts.

•Noct gets a text to bring Prompto to the party. The plan is going great!

•Prompto was so moved by all the hard work and the effort his friends made, that he balled his eyes out.

•it went great! They eaten the delicious food (THATS IT! GRANDMA IGNIS ACTIVITY!)

•the gifts were adorable ☺️

•Noct’s gift (note: lris had to drag Noct to a baby store, so she and Noct could get a gift. Much to Noct’s embarrassment) was Rare Black Chocobo plush!

•it was so cute! (In a dark way)

•Gladio’s was an adorable baby book. (He would have gotten a book about Chocobos but they didn’t have any ;-;)

•Ignis’s was a strange one. It was a coffee maker.

•”Iggy...why would I need this l?”

•”Cause your gonna be up all night.”

•believe me. Ignis knows all to well.

•lris’s gift was an Moogle Plush.

•It went amazing! (Prompto got to take some left overs home)

•Nine Month: The last month. The doctor was put Prompto on bed rest. Don’t walk around too much, try to stay hydrated.

•Noctis has to come over to look after Prompto during the last days of his Pregnancy.

•to say Prompto is nervous would be an understatement!!

•he’s sooo scared to feel what labor is like. He knows it’s extremely painful. Yeah he’s having a c-section but....

•Wait! WHAT WILL THE C-SECTION FEEL LIKE?!?!?

•he wouldn’t have to wait long...

•during the night, Prompto was having a hard time sleeping, due to some back pain (you know where this is going...)

•trying to get up, Prompto feels something wet.

•”NOCT!”

•”what I was drea-“

•”Prompto...did your water break?!”

•”I-I don’t know!!”

•unsure what to do, Noct (panicking) calls Ignis.

•”IGGY! I THINK PROMPTO’S WATER BROKE? MAYBE? I DON’T KNOW!”

•”Noct, how about you call the midwife?” Said Ignis calmly. (Let me know if you got that joke 😉)

•Noct calls the midwife, she tell him to bring Prompto to the hospital.

•(weeeeeeeeee wooooooooooo 🚑)

•They figure out pretty quickly that, the baby is coming NOW!

•poor Noct, sitting in the waiting room with a pajama top on and unclean pants (no shoes btw) hoping that it would go well and nothing happen to Prompto and his niece.

•after for what seems like forever, A nurse comes out with a small bundle in his arms.

•”He wanted you to hold her.”

•Noct was stunned. In his arms with Prompto’s baby girl!

•and she was the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen!

•this tiny little thing, has his blond hair, blue eyes, even his freckles! She was the cutest thing ever!!

•Noct even shed a tear. He’s definitely not telling anyone about that.

30 Minutes Earlier

•Prompto just woken up. He passed out after he heard her cries.

•now, waking up; he wants to see his baby girl.

•once he sees her again, he basically falls in love all over again.

•Crying while her eyes were looking at his.

•”Hi there...nice to meet you.”

•She cooed in response. OMG.

•everyone else fell in love with her too.

•”She’s Adorable.”

•”hard to believe she’ll grow up so big.”

•she was basically welcome with open arms.

•over the years, shes basically a mini version of Prompto with a bit of a shy streak.

•he takes so.many.pics that she becomes camera shy.

•She LOVES chocobos and love to ride them with her Daddy ^^

•Noct is basically her second favorite person. She’s almost always falling asleep on him. He’s not complaining tho.

•btw, that Black Chocobo toy? It’s her absolute favorite.

•Ignis has to be her third favorite.

•she always refers to him as Mama Iggy. Much to Iggy’s embarrassment.

•She likes helping him cook. She’s a little mini helper and even passes out food. Ignis greatly appreciates the help.

•Gladio gives the best piggy back rides!

•she helps him a little with his exercise.

•Prompto and his Daughter are the closest you’ll ever see.

•she’s his rock and he’s her Father.

•When he finds out his origins and his “Father” he doubt downs to make sure he’s never like him. Period.

•After Noct disappears, She’s helps him get ready for Noctis’s eventual return.

•while getting stronger herself.

•When Noctis returns (and brings back the light) he’s shocked and happy to see that Prompto’s Daughter, has not changed much (besides age)

•she now helps around the Citadel.

•Prompto? Well

•Prompto is truly great full for having his daughter in his life.

•”Hey D/N?”

•”Yeah Dad?”

•”I love you.”

•”I love you too Dad.”

OMG! I did not expect this to be fucking long! 😅 well I hope I did this Justice. To who requested this, I hope you loved it!

I guess it turned more serious than silly huh? Welp, I still hoped you guys liked it!

Please Reblog!!

[willddheartt]

“I didn’t know where else to go” | JJ Maybank

A/N: I wrote this at like 3am while I was sitting on my kitchen floor. I realize it switched from 2nd person to 1st person multiple times and I hope it doesn’t mess any of you up while reading, I’m too lazy to go back and fix it all. 

Pairing: JJ Maybank x Reader 

Summary: JJ ends up on the readers doorstep after another encounter with his dad. 

Warnings: Idk, a little sad, kinda fluffy

Word count: 900

Masterlist

You thought one hurricane was bad enough for the island to handle in one summer, apparently mother nature planned to test just how much you could handle by sending another one your way. Sure this one wasn’t as big as Agatha but it would still hit hard.  Your dad was away on some business thing and wouldn’t be back until, nearly, the end of summer so you stayed alone in the empty house. Letting any of your friends stay over so you wouldn’t be acquainted with loneliness. 

The dark hurricane clouds rolled in around noon, threatening to spill copious amounts of water at any second. When the wind started picking up around 11pm you knew it was time to lock the house up nice and tight so nothing would blow off the porch or from the yard.  Running around in the dark with a flashlight you put the lawn chairs in the building and took down the wind chimes while also making sure the screen door was on its hinges enough to ensure it wouldn’t blow off some time throughout the night. 

Just as you were settling down to let the rumbling thunder and pounding rain lull you to sleep, something pounding on the front door woke you up. Thinking it was just the screen door you grabbed a flashlight and screwdriver to go fix the flimsy door. When you opened the front door you weren’t expecting to be faced with JJ, seeing his face light up with your flashlight as you opened the door made you jump slightly.  You held the flashlight lower so as to not blind him, but still high enough so you were able to see his bruised face. 

“I didn’t know where else to go.” He sobbed,  Not able to tell if the water running down his face was from the rain or his own tears you pulled him inside and into a hug after shutting the door. His arms wrapped tightly around your waist while you held him close despite being shorter, and biologically smaller than him, in this moment it was JJ who felt small as he sobbed into your shoulder. 

“Hey, JJ, it’s alright.” you said as you rubbed small circles on his back to calm him down. He kept whispering “I didn’t know where else to go,” until he finally calmed down enough to step away from the embrace.  “What happened, J?” I asked, pulling him to sit with me on the couch.  JJ looked at the floor and played with his fingers before finally letting out a breath and looking up at me to answer. “My dad, man.” 

You never heard JJ sound so hurt and broken before, normally he was the one who always had a joke and funny comment to make, if not everyone then yourself laugh but tonight was different.  “Hey, come here.” You said pulling his side into you as you wrapped your arms around him again  “I'm sorry I showed up, I just didn’t know where else to go.”  I shook my head, “Don’t be. You know you’re always welcome here, at any time of the night.”  “Thanks.” He said looking up, forcing a half-smile. 

“Let’s get you some dry clothes now, hm?” I asked, standing up. JJ nodded and followed me to my room where I began looking through my closet to find the clothes I stole from any of the guys throughout the years but hoping for some more recent stuff that would fit him.  “I hope this will be alright,” I said handing him one of my dad’s old t-shirts and a pair of gym shorts  “Yeah, it’s perfect,” he said, taking the clothes from me.  “You know where the bathroom is, or I can just like turn around or leave if you want.” I offered  JJ shrugged, “Alright,” I nodded, turning around and sitting on my bed 

Shuffling and the thudding of wet clothes let me know when it was alright to turn around. JJ sat at the foot of my bed, wearing just the shorts I handed him. 

“You can take my bed for the night,” I said, grabbing a pillow and blanket before making my way to the living room where I planned to take the couch.  “No,” He argued, grabbing my wrist before I could make it out of the room “I can’t let you do that. It’s your house.”  “I’m not letting you sleep on the couch, J.” I sighed  “Looks like we’ll share then,” He said, turning his normal charm back on.  I couldn’t help but crack a small smile at him as he tugged me back to my bed. 

JJ and I laid in my bed, which was thankfully big enough for two to lay comfortably. It started out with me on my side and JJ on his but as the hurricane got worse and lightning began lighting up the sky for seconds at a time I slowly inched closer to him. 

“Scared?” JJ asked with a chuckle  “Just of the lightning,” I replied with my head fully on his chest now  “It’s alright, I got ya,” JJ said wrapping his arms around me and placing a kiss on top of my head, “Nothing will get you,” “Thanks,” I whispered, bringing my knee up over his waist as I got comfortable.  Just as I was about to drift off I whispered a quick ‘goodnight’