#instance: remembrance

[lotro-tooltips-daily]

[jenoonej423]

pavlov and ponytails

NOT MY WORK all rights to hyucksie, she deactivated years ago but I managed to get a hold of my own personal copy of her work and noticed many users were looking for one so here it is <3

synopsis: it was the perfect combination: you (the girlfriend), jeno (the boyfriend), and a sexual twist on psychological conditioning. after some thorough but fun experimentation, you finally see the results you were hoping for: you can now get your boyfriend hard just by tying your hair up. 

“Pavlov and Ponytails” is copyright 2020 hyucksie, all rights reserved.

pairing: jeno x fem!reader ft. bff!haechan genre: smut, fluff, crack, established relationship, slice of life, college!au, rich kid!jeno

word count: 22k words lmfao

warnings: language, explicit detailed sex honestly the amount of smut in this i’m almost ashamed, some cringe fluff | smut specifications under the cut

smut warnings: mostly soft dom!jeno but also some hard dom!jeno, sex in various locations, lots of blowjobs (obviously) and generous use of spit (practical! because water is never a substitute for lube, my friends), dirty talk, heavy petting, degradation, fingering, edging, handjob, pussyjob, cumming in panties, blowjobs, spanking, dick slapping, deepthroating, hair pulling, face fucking, facials, cum feeding/eating, just lots and lots of cumplay you’ve been warned, overstimulation, unprotected sex, manhandling, exhibitionism, punishment sex, edging, biting, marking, thigh fucking, unprotected sex, facials, cumplay, creampie, vibrator, just the slightest bit of a daddy kink as in just one instance, jeno. yes jeno is a warning.

The day you moved in with Jeno, he refused to let you lift any of the heavy boxes. 

“But they’re my stuff,” you complained, “is this a fragile masculinity thing?” 

He had one arm reaching into the trunk when he looked back, met with the sight of your crossed arms and accusing frown. He spun round to face you, a glass bowl of chocolate coins in hand. It was the only thing left outside of the boxes, something you had stolen taken as remembrance from Donghyuck, your best friend and previous roommate in uni.

“This,” he stressed, pulling your arm and securing the bowl in your embrace, “is the only fragile thing around here.” He spun back to arrange the boxes left inside. “Think of it this way: you have a boyfriend who’s extremely grateful that you agreed to start living with him and his way of saying ‘thanks’ is by saving you the hassle and taking care of the heavy things.” He held two boxes stacked atop each other before setting them on the cart, facing you again. “Besides, you should know by now that I respect you too much to demean you like that,” he continued with a hand on his hip, head tilted to the side as he leaned closer, a skewed smile ghosting his lips. “Unless we’re in bed and you’re in that mood.” 

He was slowly closing the gap between you, and instinctively you stepped backwards before your ego caught up and rooted you in place. “Chicken shit,” you whispered. “You’re saying you’d only give it to me in bed?” He was so close that your only clue of his smirk growing into a wicked grin was the way his eyes shrunk into crescents.

And you’re saying you just got here but you already want me on every surface?” 

You scoffed despite the surprise painted on your face. “I didn’t say that!”

“Of course you didn’t,” he chuckled, “but I did and I think it’s a great idea.” His voice dived deep. “Just to prove how grateful I am to you.” His hands rested low on your waist. “And that my masculinity,” he whispered to your ear, “is anything but fragile.” 

There was no way you could have concealed the sharp shiver that cut through you. Your breath was stolen, muscles taut and frozen, and lips slightly parted when Jeno parted from you, regarding you with an amused smile. You watched as he gripped the handles of the cart, your gaze dripping onto the veins that ran down his arms… 

“Baby?” An absentminded huh? was all you managed. “Be a gentleman and open the door for me?” he said, clearly entertained by his own joke. 

You rolled your eyes but did his bidding nonetheless. You swung the door open and stretched an arm out in an exaggerated gesture of welcome, other arm still hugging the bowl of chocolate. “Ladies first!” you shouted, making him laugh loud and pinch your ear between his fingers before rolling the cart in with you in tow.

You were sprawled on the couch as Jeno went out for the last few boxes. You had to admit, you did end up pleased with his volunteer spirit. It allowed you to relax on your back, a hand reaching behind to the bowl you left on the end table, picking up yet another one of the circular treats. By now, there was a growing pile of the crumpled foil bits on your tummy as your eyes wandered, admiring the place.

It didn’t look like the man cave you expected it to be. Despite the sleekness of the minimal interior, the place seemed to radiate warmth from its walls. Like it was receiving you with a hug, happy that you were certainly, finally, here. Jeno told you his parents had signed it off to his name the day he turned legal, but he opted for the on-campus dormitories in university to avoid the 45-minute drive. Obviously, his family was well-off. It was good ammo for the rich-sheltered-kid trope you teased him with, but it was hardly even the surface to his many layers you’ve grown to love. On your part, you made sure that he knew you were in it for him and nothing else. That same conviction was what delayed you from moving in with him for so long, until today.

The timing was just right: you were having your third anniversary soon, your last year of uni was approaching faster than you’d like, and you were eventually gonna go your separate ways from Donghyuck (your best friend slash roommate) anyways, as he was spending the next semester at a specialized research center off-campus. It just made sense when Jeno whined for the nth time about the convenience of living together that you shrugged and said “Sure” so nonchalantly that he almost missed it. 

Dumb silence was followed by his repetitive “Seriously?” and then hours of clinging to your side like an overgrown koala, ditching your date in favor of crowding in your single bed, fantasizing about how you’ll spend the last summer break and the last year of college under the same roof.

You smiled at the memory, letting an arm dangle off the sofa as you traced lines with your finger on the spotless wooden floor beneath you. “What about mornings?” You asked back then. “You’ll have to be up early if you get any morning classes.” It was a small but genuine concern. Your boyfriend loved his sleep and set alarms for half an hour before class when he lived on-campus. 

He looked at you as if you were crazy and he’d been rising before dawn all his life, clutching your chin in his hand and rocking your face side to side. “I don’t think waking up is a problem if I’m waking up to you. Getting us out of bed is a wholly different question, though…”

Your heart was seizing just as Jeno returned, unloading the boxes. You were feeling playful, deep in that teasing mood that arose whenever you were brimming with attachment. “Babe, quick!” Without waiting for him to face your way, you catapulted the piece of chocolate from your hand into the air, going full speed in his direction. Jeno was fast, but only fast enough to catch the trinket in his hand after it bounced off his forehead. He stared at it for some moments, puzzled by the attack.

Oops.” Jeno lifted his gaze to find your coy smile. “Sorry, thank you, I love you!” You chimed, all in one breath. 

A warm sensation bloomed in his chest at the sight of you giggling so comfortably, looking so ‘at home’ at his home. No, not just his. It was yours. ‘Your home too,’ he thought, a match lighting up in his heart. ‘You’re home, too’ and suddenly his body was ablaze with affection for you.

The urge to kiss you breathless was itching at his bones but he put a hand back on the cart, wanting everything out of the way before he got his way with you. “One sec,” he turned on his heels, rushing to the door. 

“One!” You shouted after him. 

“Ten seconds!” He corrected, spurring more giggles to pour out of you. 

You counted in your head while you reached for another chocolate. By three, you’ve unwrapped the foil. Five, Jeno was running back in. Six, the thin piece dangled between your teeth.

And then you lost count, because suddenly your boyfriend was on top of you, his knee spreading your thighs apart as he slotted his lower body between you and pulled you in by the hips. His hand dipped to the back of your neck, lifting your face closer to his. You held your breath from the anticipation, and you nearly lost it when the tip of his tongue darted out to moisten his lips. 

He sank down, closing the distance between your faces. You expected the familiar brush of soft lips against yours as you shut your eyes, but you moaned at the cold graze of his teeth instead. Your eyes fluttered open, and you huffed when you realized he wound you up just to snatch the chocolate from your lips. He looked so delighted with himself it was almost too hard for you to maintain a scowl. 

“What?” He challenged between chews. 

“Asshole,” you muttered, “thought you were gonna kiss me.” You watched as he swallowed, eyes so focused on the bob of his Adam’s apple that you didn’t notice his hand on your neck lifting you up again, his smirk unwavering. 

“I am now.” 

Not a second later, his lips collided with yours. His hand cupped your jaw, strained breath escaping you when his thumb nudged at your chin and forced your lips to part against his, tipping you further into him like he was starved and desperate to taste all of you. You propped yourself higher on one elbow, chasing him with the same eagerness as your mouths moved in sync. His tongue delved past your lips and you moaned at the taste of chocolate that lingered on him. He was kissing you like an apology, like he was feeding the stolen sweetness back into you.

He broke away, giving you a chance to catch your breath. His hand dragged to the small of your back and pulled you towards him, giving you two gentle pecks on the lips once he had you upright. His palms settled on your ass, kneading at the clothed skin before lifting you up with him, adjusting to a more comfortable position with him sitting and you straddling his hips.

Despite you being on top, it was clear that you were under his control. This time, he wanted you slow. He drew you into him, your arms resting atop his shoulders as he ghosted another peck on your mouth, scarcely breaking away from you before swiping his tongue across your still-closed lips. You opened up to him instinctively, wanting to feel his mouth back on yours, to have him steal your breath, give it back, and take it from you again and again until your lungs knew nothing but him, him, him.

He indulged your silent wishes, molding your lips together and matching the slow pace of his hands rubbing up and down the sides of your thighs. You could have kissed him like that forever if it weren’t for the need to breathe, or the slip of soft gasps and whimpers, or the impatient heat between your legs that compelled your body to meld even closer to his, not knowing when you began to rock back and forth on his growing need, only knowing that you had to have more.

He groaned into the kiss, slipping both his hands into your back pockets and halting your lewd motions. You whined, attempting to resume your grinding, but his hand squeezing hard on your plump flesh called the last shot, the fleeting but sharp pain ripping a mewl from you and drawing you still.

“I’m starting to think you’re trying to get fucked on this couch.” You shuddered from his words and his voice, deep and swimming in the same lust you were drowning in. 

“Yeah? That would be a smart guess.”

“So you do want me on every available surface.” He smiled, planting a kiss to the corner of your lip. Despite wanting to tease you and make you wait, it somehow felt wrong for his lips to be away from your skin for too long. 

“Don’t be too sure…” you paused, kissing up his neck, ��…I haven’t even seen the rooms yet.” He grunted when you sucked on the bolt of his jaw, eyes closing and head tilting back as he let you work your magic on him. 

“Fuck, baby. I promise I’ll show you around.” His breath hitched. “Promise I’ll fuck you in each one.” Hearing that sent heat rushing to your core, your head whirring over his lust-driven vows to give you exactly what you wanted and more. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? On this couch, the showers, the guest room, the kitchen…” Your toes curled in when he started to move you in his grip, the hands that kept you still now grinding you on him. “Even against the windows, right baby?” He whispered in your ear, tickling you with his breath before nibbling gently on the lobe. You keen from the sensation, picking up the pace of your hips until he held you firmly in place again, cutting off the momentum with his final words, “But right now, bedroom.”

You looked at him with scrunched eyebrows, patience already worn thin. “But I want you here,” you whined. “Want you now.” 

He only smiled at your eagerness, your desperation. “Not here baby.” 

“Why not?”

“Because,” he began, his hand landing on top of yours that was trying to lift his shirt off, “I want your first proper fucking here to be in our bed.” 

You breathed out a sound of appreciation despite how frustrated you felt beneath your clothes. “Jen,” your head rested on his shoulder as you drawled your words, “I love that you’re so sweet, but you don’t have to be sweet with me right now.” You lifted your gaze back to his eyes. “And this,” you detached your body from his, watching his confusion grow as you stood before him, “doesn’t have to be a proper fucking.”

He could only gape at you as you shoved your shorts off, not a hint of grace in your hurried, desperate motions. His eyes trained steady at the dark patch on your underwear, waiting as you neared and caged him between your knees again. You took his hand in yours, guiding his fingers to the pool of moisture in the fabric, making him groan at the feeling. “Shit, baby. You’re soaked through.”

“Mmm,” your delighted sounds began to pour out of you as you rutted onto his stretched fingers, the tips bumping enticingly on your clothed clit, “Jeno… need you to take care of me. Please.” The need was rising to a crescendo within you, your chest heaving for relief. You guide his hand again, using his fingers to draw the line of your slit through your panties and making a show of trying to sink down on them despite the thin barrier of clothing. “Just need you inside me, please. Any part of you.”

He inhaled through his teeth, moving his hand back to your front to rub at your clothed clit. “God, always too needy to wait.” He didn’t seem eager to wait either as he pushed the fabric to the side, his middle finger immediately running between your drooling folds, dipping just a little into you each time he went past your entrance. 

You must have been making the most unintelligent sounds, but you couldn’t bring yourself to care. You were too preoccupied trying to get your boyfriend to just stick his damned finger where you needed it, but he kept pulling his hand away each time you tried to fuck yourself on him. 

“Wanted to treat you like a princess but you go and act like a slut.” He spat the last word, punctuating his sentence with a stinging slap to your ass, the impact forcing you to sit down, your gasp breaking off into a needy moan as his finger finally breached inside of you. You were too drunk on the feeling to wait for his reaction. You closed your eyes, letting your cries spill freely as you began bouncing on his finger. 

You couldn’t see him, but his grunts were confirmation enough that he enjoyed the sight. “More,” you choked out. “Want more of you.” He didn’t deny you this time, a hand flying to your waist to slow you down as he re-entered you with both his middle and ring finger, giving you a few hard pumps before he curled the digits, grazing at your front walls. “Fuck,” you cried out, your arms flying out to the backrest of the couch to keep your legs from collapsing in. 

“You like that?” His fingers eased into the rhythm of pushing in and out of you, angling his hand just right so he keeps brushing against your sweet spot. 

“Yes! Like it so much, feels so good.” His other hand pulled on your scoop neckline, enough to expose the cups of your strapless bra. He tugged even that down, pulling until your bra was stuck mid-torso, your breasts spilled out, and the collar of your shirt ruined. He circled his tongue around your nipple and blew cold air on it, drawing a gasp from you before he took it in his mouth, giving it multiple short but rapid sucks and at times gently grazing it with the front of his teeth, pausing only to give your other nub the same dizzying attack. 

His digits kept pumping into you, going faster and harder while proof of your arousal kept oozing down his fingers. The wetness collected on his palm until he pushed his hand up against you, the heel rubbing on your clit, spreading your slick back onto your lips. “You’re making a mess on my hands, baby.” You couldn’t find any words to say back, littering the air with just your whimpers and the wet sounds of his digits fucking into you. 

You were shaking at the knees, your pitch going higher and the succession of small, gradually tightening clenches of your walls blared at him, all telltale signs that you were getting closer and closer and, “Fuck fuck fuck, please, oh my god, please!” You were already hanging on the precipice when he withdrew his fingers and mouth from your skin, snatching you back to the ground before you could plunge into the depths of white heat.

You sobbed, dropping your head to the crook of his neck, grabbing fistfuls of his shirt in protest. Chocolate and orgasms; it seemed your boyfriend was stealing everything from you today. You felt the small vibrations as he chuckled, trying to soothe your betrayed feelings with soft kisses to your shoulder and a hand rubbing your lower back. “Sorry,” he mumbled, “it’s not a proper fucking, but I still want you to cum on my cock.” 

You were appeased just enough with the promise of more. You lift your hips higher, helping him pull his pants and boxers down to free his erection. You wasted no time as you swiped your palm on his glistening tip, spreading his pre-cum as you glided your fist on his cock. You bowed closer to his cock, and Jeno groaned as he watched you push spit out of your mouth, landing it on his tip and gradually spreading it on his shaft with each pump of your hand. There was a trail of it left hanging from your lips, the clear liquid bridging your mouth to the head of his cock while you looked up at him with half-lidded eyes, hand tight around him, moving up and down in flicking motions.

“You’re so fucking beautiful,” he growled deep, a hand sneaking to the back of your neck and pulling you towards him, re-connecting your lips as the air around you grew thinner and hotter than ever. Your bare pussy was now hovering above his cock as you kept pumping him through the kiss, and it was taking every bit of restraint in you to keep it that way, imagining how easy it would be to just lower your hips and swallow him into your waiting heat.

He must have been thinking the same as you felt him buck into your touch, his tip pressing lightly on your slit, your gasp breaking the kiss. “Thought you wanted to fuck me on the bed first…” you mumbled. He replaced your hand with his, jerking himself off a few times as he pushed the fabric of your ruined panties further out to expose you even more. 

“You thought right.” He slid the head of his cock along your slit, prodding the tip against your hole ever so slightly before running it back to the front, rubbing it on your clit and then going back again. His other hand guided your hips down on him, watching with dark eyes as your folds spread around the girth of his cock, the wetness dribbling on his length inciting a growl from him. “Can you cum from just this, baby?” He began thrusting forward, his cock sandwiched between your pussy lips rubbing you all the right ways, leaving you devoid of intelligent vocabulary. 

“Mmm… ah! Fuck, yes, keep going.” He had an arm braced around you, keeping you upright while you grind on each other, your clit swollen and sensitive from the friction. You were both panting hard, speeding up as you were getting closer to your highs, but the burn in your thighs was getting too much to ignore. “Jen…” you managed to whine as you slowed down. He hummed in response, a hand reaching out to the messy hair on your face and tucking it behind your ear. The delicate gesture was so out of place from the carnal things he was doing to your body, and you keened at the swirl of feeling so loved and so ruined all at once.

You stopped your motions altogether and melted into his embrace. Your eyes were closed, forehead leaned against his as small squeaks slipped past your lips from his every thrust. His chest tightened with endearment, and you didn’t have to say anything as he picked up on your cue, holding you by the hips and ardently bringing pleasure to both of you. “Is my baby tired?” You moaned in his ear, blood rushing to his cock at the feeble sound. “S’okay. I’ll take you there. Make you feel so good.”

Jeno was always good with his promises. He positioned his tip against your clit, his face contorting in pleasure as he rubbed your most sensitive parts together. His hand sneaked to your pussy from behind, plunging his middle and ring finger into you and making you cry out from the added sensation of him pumping into you once again. Your hands were shaking as they reached down to his cock to stroke his shaft, everything a blur of sloppy hands and filthy squelching sounds.

His fingers were relentless, your walls sucking them so deep he was barely pulling them out of you anymore, driving into you harsh and rapid. Your engorged clit was throbbing, each circle of his tip gliding around it sending shockwaves through you. Your jaw hung loose, choked sobs pouring out of you, legs trembling as an intense heat unfurled within you. Jeno knew you were close, your walls lightly spasming around his digits. He kept his pace constant, his mouth kissing on your jaw, ready to catch you from below when you reach your peak.

“Fuckfuckfuck! You’re making me cum!” Your broken sobs drew a groan from him, “Fuck, I’m there, I’m there! Jeno!” Your whole body tenses up, spasming in time with your powerful orgasm. Jeno stops moving against you, the contraction of your walls pushing his fingers in and out of you without his guidance.

He didn’t take his digits out of you even after you’ve calmed down, keeping them buried deep as he started jerking himself with his other hand, occasionally bumping into your still sensitive clit, making you hiss. He looked so hot, so focused with his eyes looking directly into yours, eyebrows scrunched together, breathing ragged. His cock was rock hard, twitching in his hand, the tip an angry red. 

“Cum in my panties,” you rasped, barely thinking when you let the order slip out before adding, “please?” He moaned, voice higher than usual, muttering under his breath, 

“You’re so dirty for me today.” You smiled, knowing this kind of behavior wrecked him a hundred times over inside. You fixed your underwear, spreading the fabric below to cover as much of yourself as possible with his fingers still inside you. You pulled at the top hem, angling it down and showing your eagerness to catch every drop of his cum.

Your other hand reached down to his balls, fondling them gently, urging him to come undone. Your name and a flurry of curses tumbled out of him soon after, strangled noises escaping him as he came. His hips lurched with each shot of his load onto your exposed skin, the warmth dripping down and collecting at the bottom of your panties. You shuddered at the feeling, hitching a breath when he bit on your shoulder. His fingers scissored inside you, and you realized you’ve been clenching around them hard since he started cumming on you.

His teeth were replaced by his soft lips pressing wet kisses on your shoulder. His fingers slipped out of you slowly, your bodies gradually untensing as you basked in the calm after frenzied sex. You pressed a hand gently to his chest, watching its rise and fall grow steadier. 

When he lifted his head, your disheveled appearance brought a smile to his face. He kissed your chin, “I love you.” 

You kissed him back on the forehead, “Love you too.”

You had to break the tender moment, the feeling of your soiled underwear now less sexy and more uncomfortable against your skin. You tried to lift your thigh over to one side but unlike you, your boyfriend was clearly having a hard time moving on. His hands were on your waist, keeping you from moving, his eyes focused on your ruined panties. 

“Jen?” He hummed absentmindedly. “I need to clean up.” He was a little dazed as he looked up to you, his hands suddenly letting go as if he just realized he was caging you in. You tried standing, and you cringed from the sensitive and utterly wet feeling between your thighs. “Can you get me some undies from my suitcase?” You had your legs twisted slightly inwards, your stance awkward as you tried to keep the fluids from dripping out.

“I don’t know…” he pondered, “I kinda like the look of that.” You groaned at his response. Trickles of white were beginning to ooze from the edges of the fabric, and you knew if you didn’t handle it now there would be a bigger mess to take care of. 

“Jeno,” you whined, “please? I can’t move.” He only smiled wider at your predicament. “Ugh, why are you even so wound up…”

“Really? You don’t get why all I’m riled up thinking of you walking around full of my cum?” Well, when he puts it like that… 

“Okay, fine. Maybe I do get it.” You were careful not to show how his remark made goosebumps rise on the back of your neck. “Now get my underwear or get cumstains on your immaculate floor.”

He laughed at your threat but stood to fulfill your wishes, fixing himself up a little before going into the bedroom, coming back a minute later. You snatched the folded bundle in his hand, turning to the direction of the bathroom before a thought snagged in your head. You pivoted back to the couch, Jeno amused as he watched you try to lean over to the end table without walking.

“Gotcha,” you mumbled after struggling to fish through the clear bowl, holding a golden piece between your fingers. You faced him and threw the chocolate in the air, and it seems this time he’s learned his lesson, catching it easily in one hand. 

“Good boy!” You cooed, walking over to him carefully so you could ruffle his hair. He scrunched his nose at you, pretending to ward you off as he ate the confection. You huffed at his reaction, turning your back to him and waddling to the bathroom as he giggled behind you.

It was the habits developed since that day which led you down the weirdest, most preposterous mission of your life yet. When you realized what was happening, you swore to yourself that it was unintentional. It was just that the bowl of chocolate coins was always there. Sat within your reach, looking all convenient, plentiful, tempting. 

Every time Jeno would do you a little favor⁠ (the subtle ways he liked to take care of you like handing you the remote, getting you a glass of water from the kitchen, standing up to draw the curtains when he noticed that the midday sunlight was a little too harsh on your face⁠) it was all too easy for you to reach for a golden piece, tossing it his way or feeding it to him yourself, the treat paired with the various ways you liked to show how much you appreciate him.

Your rewarding system was quite generous, and a few days later you’ve almost exhausted the supply. Despite that, you still munched on the gold pieces as you binge watched The Big Bang Theory with Jeno. You were half-sat and snuggled up on the bed, his arm hugging round behind you, ending with his hand laying softly on your tummy. His head was tilted to the side, resting against yours. The only bit of affection you had to offer was your leg strewn over his, your arms cradling the clear bowl instead. 

You popped a piece in your mouth in time as one of the characters, Sheldon, offered the same to Penny. You giggled at the coincidence, shifting a little to your side before holding up the last piece from the bowl. “Chocolate?” Jeno chuckled at your offered mimicry, pushing your wrist down with his hand. “You sure?” 

There was a hint of conflict in the way he pursed his lips before asking you, “Do you need anything?” 

“Um, no.” Your eyebrows scrunched a bit from the untimely question. “Just you.” He smiled at your answer. His hand trailed from your stomach to your thigh, expressing his sentiments through a light squeeze. “This is the last piece, though. Sure you don’t want it?” His eyes darted between you and the chocolate. 

“If it’s the last one…” He took it gingerly from your fingers, lifting his hand from your thigh to remove the wrapper. “…then you can have it.” His hand squeezed your cheeks, making you jump a little as he quickly fed you the treat with his other hand, his finger brushing the inside of your puckered lips. You blinked at him, mouth still parted when his touch left you. “What? Not even a ‘thank you?’” He cocked his head in amusement, tempering your surprise into embarrassment as you pulled your gaze away.

You rolled your eyes although warmth still coated your cheeks. Jeno was always the affectionate kind, but that was only when the two of you were alone, free from any outward stares. Now that you lived together, it’s been three days of having you all to himself and subjecting you to the full extent of his mushy tendencies, as if making up for all the opportunities he lost to wandering eyes. 

Not once in the last three days has he failed to send your heart lurching to your ribs, but not once have you directly admitted to it either, refusing to be the one who’s always on the flustered end of the relationship. He’s just been more attentive to your needs, more shameless in expressing his feelings, and even more helpful than he was before, which was already a lot as it was. 

Like he was privy to your thoughts, he broke the silence with an “Are you feeling hungry? Iʼll go make ramyeon for us.” You nodded, perfectly aware that heʼd take your portion into account regardless of your answer. “Just in case you change your mind,” heʼd say. 

You shimmied onto his spot once he left the bedroom, burrowing your back into his side of the bed and bunching the covers up against you. “His butt’s so warm,” you thought, snickering to yourself.

Minutes into watching the episode alone, the apartment scenes weaved back into the story and your laughter wafted through the air as you watched the repetitive interaction between the two characters. Penny cleared up the table after eating, followed by “Chocolate?” from Sheldon, taking and eating it without a second thought. She sat on the couch, careful to keep Sheldon’s seat vacant, “Chocolate?” She excused herself to the hallway for a phone call, “Chocolate?” She caught herself from disrupting anime night, “Chocolate?” You giggled at the first few instances, but it grew weaker and weaker as an eerie feeling overcame you, and soon the fake sitcom laughter was left unaccompanied in your silence.

“I know what you’re doing,” Leonard told Sheldon. “You’re using chocolate as a positive reinforcement for what you consider correct behavior!” 

“Very good! Chocolate?” 

You gawked at the screen as an epiphany landed on you. Is that the reason for Jeno’s amplified devotion? “Chocolate?” You whisper-shouted to yourself, mind replaying all the times you tossed a sweet trinket his way, flickering between doubt and shock at the revelation. 

“Stop using my girlfriend as your lab rat!” Leonard whined. 

To your surprise, you answered a defensive “I’m not!” to the screen. “I’m not… right? Holy shit.” The discovery was like a douse of cold water and the longer you pondered on it the more it made sense, the more ideas blossomed in your mind, and you plunged deep into a world that was equal parts strange and full of curious, unexplored possibilities. 

You’re not given enough time to process it as you’re called out to the dining table. You carried the empty bowl with you, your bare feet dragging on the floor as you walked your way to your boyfriend whose back was turned to you. You propped the bowl at the end of the table and sat opposite him, his lips tugging upwards at the sight of you. He dug in rather enthusiastically, and after a few happy bites he took notice of your stillness. “Why aren’t you eating?” 

You sounded an oh at the question, broken from the jumbled thoughts still running about your head, and took a small sip. He frowned, grabbing the spoon from your hand. “Want me to feed you myself?” He said it like a threat, the beginnings of a skewed smile on his expression. 

Your nose scrunched at the suggestion, but you untensed as you considered using it as a chance test of sorts. You looked up to him with unsure eyes, clearing your throat. “That—I’d like that,” you mumbled, your gaze focused at the skin between his eyebrows. It was a trick you learned whenever you couldn’t look him in the eyes, something that’s been happening a lot lately. 

Pleasant surprise painted over his features, and he didn’t question your easy compliance. Soon enough his elbows were leaned on the table, and he was feeding you and eating alternately out of the same utensils. Getting spoonfed wasn’t as bad as you imagined, but what you couldn’t take was the proximity. His face was so near yours that you could see each of his eyelashes in the awkward intervals when both of you just chewed in silence. 

“Too close…” You gave him a weak push on the arm he was leaning on just as he was trying to give you the next bite. 

“I can go even closer—”

The dull thud of wood, metal screeching against tiles, and the sharp clang of silver was the background music to your surprise when Jeno leaned in even more. You had whacked at his hand and pushed your chair back, the silverware flying from his hand to the table before flopping to the floor. 

The sound of disapproving tuts pulled your gaze from the mess of soup and noodles on the floor, landing on the bright orange stain on your boyfriend’s shirt. An apology hung by the tip of your tongue, only to fizzle when you felt his thumb swipe on your cheek.

“Bad girl,” he mumbled as he wiped off the few drops that splashed onto you.

You kept shifting your glance around the dining area before gathering the wits to stand up and get a cleaning rag. Your stubborn refusal to look his way was enough for him to know that the feeding session was over, so he cleared up the ceramics as you took care of the mess. Once everything was spick and span again, you were ready to drown in the bedsheets and forget about how flustered you got at being called a bad girl, until the source of your embarrassment cleared his throat, calling your attention.

“Aren’t you forgetting something…?” He raised an eyebrow.

“Uh, I’m sorry?” you tried, the hint of a wince on your features as he chuckled at your reaction. 

“No…” His gaze whipped to the end of the table, face falling at the sight of the clear bowl being empty. “Oh.”

“Didn’t you say you wanted me to have the last piece?” The confidence swelled in you at the reminder that this was your little test, and his reaction might have just proved your hypothesis. 

“I did…” he mumbled, eyes not leaving the bowl, a little crease between his eyebrows and his lips set to a pout. You almost felt bad thinking he looked adorable like this, almost considered if you could have conditioned yourself into spoiling him with the chocolates. You brushed the thought off, heading to the fridge to get water for both of you. As the door swung back, something glinted in the corner of your eye, sandwiched between two eggs in the tray. Gold.

You had no idea how it got there, but you snatched it up, completely forgetting about the water. “Jen?” He looked up, lips still pouting. “Fetch!” 

It was comical, strangely caricature-like when he trapped the projectile chocolate in both hands, face lighting up as he held the gold circle in his palm. A weird feeling crept on your nerves as you watched him eat it, your mind playing little games on you as the image of him with a happy, wagging tail flashed before your eyes. 

You shook the thought away, walking over to him and wrapping your arms loosely around his waist. The embrace doesnʼt last, the wet feeling from the stain on his shirt making you back away. 

“You need to wash up,” you commented, nose scrunched. 

“This is your fault, you know.” 

“Yeah, and I said sorry.” He laughed, cupping your face in his hands. 

“Alright then. Wanna join me in the shower?” You slapped a hand to his chest, making him laugh even louder. “Right, fine. Iʼll have you in there someday, though. I promised every room, remember?” He wiggled his eyebrows, pressing a chaste kiss to your nose before making his way to the bedroom. 

You walked behind him, plopping onto the bed as he got ready for a shower. You waited for him to close the bathroom door before fishing your phone out. 

There was an urgent call you needed to make. 

“Hello, Peaches!” It only took two rings before you heard the familiar nickname greet you, Donghyuck’s teasing voice penetrating through the line. Hearing your best friend brought a smile to your face, a little disbelief coursing through you that you didnʼt talk a peep in the last three days. “How’s marital bliss?” The question stretched your smile even further. You used to get annoyed from how he always referred to you and Jeno as a married couple, but you were quite used to it now.

“It’s the worst.” Your tone dripped with faux exaggeration. “I do nothing all day but get smothered with love, attention, and food. A divorce might be in the works soon.”

“Sounds tough, but I’ll throw you the biggest bachelorette party post-divorce and get you drunk out of your wits you might just wake up married to me.”

You snorted. That sounded exactly like something he would do. “Funny, but bachelorette parties are for unmarried—” You halt your own words, analyzing the notions of his statement in your head. “Wait…. that actually makes more sense than tradition.”

“Right? I’m the genius everyone refuses to acknowledge.” You heard a clatter in the background, likely that he knocked something down with the animated hand gestures he always did.

“Anyway, how’s life?” you asked. “You haven’t burned anything down in my absence, have you?” He still had a couple weeks left before he moves out of the flat you used to share.

“I had to hold myself back from torching the sofa, you know? All those nights I had to feign ignorance when Jeno finger banged you under the blanket on movie nights,” he sighed. “If only the memory could go down in flames.”

Your jaw dropped at the confession. “You what—”

“Oh, the things you thought you got away with!” Your eyes only grew wider. You knew perfectly well about those things, alright. It made you feel a little guilty, but considering Donghyuck had his fun acting all mean towards your boyfriend most of the time, you thought it was only fair. “Don’t you remember? Magnolias, violets, freesias…”

The names of flowers seemed random and only sparked confusion. Hyuck suddenly sparked an interest for floral scents when you began university, although he could never for the life of him do any actual gardening. You remembered how he could always sense them though no one can, asking “Doesn’t it smell like carnations?” to both you and Jeno on the nights he came over—

Oh. 

“I was trying to send signals but who was I kidding? Neither of you could even come close to my wavelength,” he bragged.

You couldn’t stop the images that flashed through your head of all the quickies and hushed sexcapades, coating you in embarrassment as you realized that almost without fail, there was a mention of a flower from your best friend after every deed. 

“Hyuck! Couldn’t you have just told me like a normal person?”

“And act like a total cockblock? Jeno and I don’t always see eye to eye, but I wouldn’t do that to anyone. What’s good for me is I’ve collected enough blackmail material to ask for your firstborn,” he snickered. “Now tell me why did you decide to disturb my perfectly peaceful present? Wait, no, hold your thoughts. Did you notice my genius there? Alleviation.”

“What?” You’re pulled back to reality by the out-of-place word, not understanding what “alleviation” he was talking about. Was it some new kind of slang?

“The three p’s! Perfectly peaceful present. Uh-lee-vee-aye-shun. Geez, woman. Aren’t you supposed to complete 18 units of English for law admission?” You soaked in a few seconds of silence as you processed what he meant. 

“Hyuckie…” 

“What?” 

“Alliteration!” You barely got the word out before bursting into a fit of giggles. “You’re talking about alliteration!” Your laughter rang out uninhibited as you imagined the frozen look he would have on his face whenever he was flustered.

“Well! It’s not my area of expertise.”

“Right. Sure. Whatever,” you said in between snorts.

“I’m hanging up—”

“Wait, no! Iʼm in dire need of your expertise right now. There’s something I’m not quite sure about and I think you would know about it.” Your best friend loved to tease, but he never liked it when it was mutual. He was petty and you knew he would have dropped the call and not picked up for the rest of the evening if you didn’t suck up.

“I’m listening.”

“I might have done something involving Jeno and chocolate…” you trailed off, not sure how to introduce the situation directly.

“When you said ‘area of expertise,’ I thought you meant psychology, not some kinky shit—”

“No!” 

“—although neither is wrong—”

“Oh, shut up! I am referring to psychology.” You didn’t give him any more chances to derail the conversation, the events of earlier tumbling out of you quick and easy. Jeno, chocolate, big bang, positive reinforcement.

“That’s where my chocolates went? You bitch! Although I can’t say I’m surprised.” You shrugged at his reaction out of habit. “The show’s right for the most part. Positive reinforcement. It’s under a process called operant conditioning, wherein an association is formed between the behavior and the consequences of a behavior through positive or negative—”

“In English, maybe?” 

“I am speaking English. You just speak dumb.” Your eyebrows furrowed at the insult, ready to retort until he cut you off. “Anyway! Operant conditioning is rewarding or punishing to either reinforce or discourage certain behaviors. It’s a learned response and it’s voluntary. That’s what you think you did by bribing your kind boyfriend into becoming your slave over some cheap ass chocolate coins.”

You frowned at the explanation and his choice of words, but you expected just as much. “Great. Thanks for that perspective. Now I feel guilty, thanks.” It was his turn to laugh on the other line.

“It’s not that deep, Peaches! I bet Jeno’s just a soft dom who wants you to be his baby.” You heaved retching sounds into the air. “Serious! That boy’s an open book and I’ve been reading him since day one. Dom vibes all over. Has he asked you to call him Daddy yet?” The retching sounds intensified. “Even if you did somehow condition him, it’s nothing to fret over. We do that to children! They use it in schools. It’s a teaching technique and it’s normal. Plus, if you succeeded I would count it as a damn good feat. God knows I tried to get you to regularly wash the dishes with ice cream.”

You resonated with his point, but you had to sigh. “And here I was thinking you treated me so often out of the kindness in your heart.”

“Kindness and a heart? You ask too much of me,” he continued as you chuckled. “You know what would be really fun though? There’s another kind of conditioning. Classical conditioning. It trains involuntary response. There was this guy named Pavlov who did an experiment on dogs—he was a piece of shit, by the way—and what he did was he rang a bell every feeding time. Eventually the dogs would salivate with just the sound of that bell, even without the presence of food. They’ve equated the two stimuli, food and sound, to the same involuntary response.” You shaped an O with your lips in shades of understanding and amazement. “So what I’m saying is, since he seems to respond so easily, you should try Pavlov dogging your boyfriend.”

Your hand slapped the mattress as you shook your head. “No. Absolutely not.”

“Why not?” His voice was exasperated at your swift rejection.

“You just called this Pavlov guy a piece of shit and you want me to follow in his light?” 

“He was an animal abuser. I doubt youʼll be using any torture methods on little old Jeno, unless your few days in pleasure island have already turned you into some nasty freak—” 

“Wouldnʼt that be illegal? Sounds like it could be a tiny bit illegal,” you cut him off before he could interrogate further on your bedroom habits.

“Last time I checked, you’re the one who’s going into law school, but if I say youʼre in the clear then don’t worry. I got 99% on my ethics final, after all.”

You scoffed. “This must be the missing 1%, then.” 

He groaned into the call, letting out a prolonged sigh before pushing the agenda once more. “Just give it a good old fashioned try, you boring little sourpuss. I doubt Jeno would be too mad at all the oral heʼs gonna get.” Your thoughts froze over at that last sentence. 

“Wait, no, rewind. Oral?” 

“You didn’t think I was suggesting you do the bell thing, did you?” Your silence was the only answer you offered. “You absolute dum-dum. Of course I was suggesting something sexual!”

“Yeah. Right. Of course. Why would I think you would ever suggest otherwise,” you deadpanned. You were still in a bit of shock as the magnitude of his suggestion doubled down on you.

He hummed into the phone. “Do something like… playing the macarena each time you go down on him.”

“Are you mental?” You almost shrieked, toning it down midway as you remembered Jeno was showering just some meters away.

“It’s a marvelous idea! Like an alarm tone for his dick. Hit him with a ‘Dale a tu cuerpo alegría Macarena’ and Jeno junior is up and ready to dance!”

“God, I think I’m actually gonna be sick,” you grimaced, clutching your tummy for unseen effect.

“What do you suggest, then?” Hyuck challenged.

“Nothing! I’m not doing it.” You crossed your arms under your chest, sitting up on the bed.

“Pussy.”

“Nut case.”

“Wimp.”

“Loony!”

“I bet you’re just scared.” You scoffed at his drop of the magic word. “I bet your head game is too weak to make it happen, anyways.”

“Excuse me!” You huffed, about to defend yourself, but how does one do that on the topic of fellatio, of all things?

“Yes? Excuse you? What is it?” By the sing-songy tone of his voice, you just knew that he could sense your predicament. This was Donghyuck’s specialty, baiting you with bets. There was just something about being friends with the boy that naturally came with that childish competitive spirit, his snide arrogance only there to make matters worse.

“What are the stakes?” Your voice was uncharacteristically calm, almost unnerving.

“Glad you asked. See, you might have taken my chocolates but I guess you forgot something of yours.” You raised an eyebrow. You couldn’t have forgotten anything, you even had a checklist. “You know those two giant bags of dehydrated marshmallows you bought online? Are they even bags? They’re the size of sacks aren’t they? They arrived two days ago.”

“Oh my god.” Your heart dropped at the mention of the marshmallows. Lucky Charms are only valid for their marshmallows, and when you found out that 40 pounds of just the marshmallows were being sold online for a limited period, you made the quickest impulse purchase of your life. How could you forget? “They’re called marbits,” you whispered. Marshmallow bits.

“Oh your god indeed, and they can be called chalk bits for all I care. I’ve already opened one—”

“You did not!”

“—so stakes are on the one I left untouched. Unless, of course, your generosity wants to leave that to me too—”

“No. Deal. You’re on.”

His squealing laughter pierced through the speaker, making you hold the phone away from your ear. “Deal’s on what, though? How do you plan on Pavlov dogging the boyfriend?” 

You nibbled on the corner of your bottom lip, still a little intimidated by the concept of… Pavlov dogging, but you also couldn’t deny the feeling of excitement slowly bubbling in you. “I don’t know yet, but I’m certain it’s not gonna involve the macarena in any way possible.” You grimaced at the reminder of that scarring mental image.

“Bo-ring!” He genuinely yawned at the end of the word, and you were reminded of his screwed up sleeping schedule, likely that he hasn’t had a wink of rest yet.

“I’ll figure it out and tell you ASAP,” you promised. 

“You better. And I want full reports, detailed rundowns—”

“You’re disgusting.” Your nose scrunched at the implications.

“Of the progress, Peaches! What do you think of me? I’m purely academic on this, a professional researcher,” he insisted.

“Can’t believe I’m getting myself into this…” you muttered.

“You said the same thing when I bet you couldn’t get that popular biochem major’s number in our freshman year,” he said, “and look where you are now: in a loving, sexually fulfilling relationship with said biochem major for, what? Almost three years? You’re welcome, by the way.” You grumbled at the reminder. He wasn’t wrong, though. He just wouldn’t stop mentioning it every chance he got.

“Thank you, Hyuck. Meanwhile, get some sleep and do not touch the last bag of marbits.” He muttered his half-hearted assurances and exchanged goodbyes, and soon you were left to your own thoughts.

“What the hell did I just sign up for?” You’ve been pacing around the bedroom since the call dropped. Still, it had to be done. If not for shoving it on Donghyuck’s face, then for the marbits. And if not for the marbits… well, for your own curiosity. The most important thing was it had to be inconspicuous enough for Jeno to not notice. You didn’t know if self-awareness contributed to the effectiveness of conditioning, but you were enforcing this rule to save yourself the embarrassment of explaining the whole situation to Jeno. You walked in little uneven circles around the room until you stepped on something slippery, something silky. You looked down, and there was a shimmery purple peeking from under your toes. 

A scrunchie.

You picked it up, sliding it over your wrist then bunching your hair up in your hands, thinking it might help your brainstorming if your hair was out of the way—

“Wait. That’s it!” you whisper-yelled. The apple dropping on Newton’s head was the hair tie suffocating your wrist. Blowjobs and ponytails! It was subtle and it was perfect. You went back around the room in excited little hops, like Archimedes running naked through Syracuse shouting ‘Eureka!’ except your journey to the closed bathroom door was in silence. You leaned an ear against it, and it brought a sly smile to your face to hear the shower still running. You peeked at your left hand with the purple silk around it, bolstering your confidence as you turned the unlocked knob and entered quietly.

The door opened to a wide space of black tiles, a large built-in bathtub to the right. The sinks and mirrors were some feet before you, attached to the singular wall of white marble that stood in the middle of the room. The shower area was on the opposite side of the partition, and you walked barefoot and nimble towards it, stopping a few steps in front of the mirror as you contemplated whether to take your white shirt and booty shorts off. You decided in favor of leaving them on, wanting to give him a full show of you in wet clothes as you took care of him.

You stepped past the wall, into the area in front of the glass shower encasement where the tiles transitioned into a patch of white smooth decorative rocks. Jeno had his eyes closed with his back to the shower head, giving you a slightly clouded view of his nude front as you stood just outside the sliding door unbeknownst to him. Your eyes trailed along with the water caressing his skin, flowing down from the side of his face, his neck, the defined ridges of his abs, and downwards more until you’re met with a stroke of unexpected luck.

He was already hard, curved cock proudly pointing upwards.

The sight had you taken aback, startled and aroused, and in your daze your foot slipped a little on the rocks, the noise distinct against the sound of running water that alerted Jeno to open his eyes. He didn’t look surprised to find you in front of him, his expression slowly morphing into a smirk as he regarded you with half-lidded eyes.

“I was just thinking of you,” he said, not moving from where he stood.

“What about me?” you answered softly, stepping a little closer to the sliding door, eyes trained on his.

“About every which way I planned on ruining you tonight,” his lips tugged higher upwards, “and it seems you appeared right out of my imagination. Are you here to help me fulfill my promise?”

You didn’t answer, sliding the door open in front of you, a gust of warmth and humidity invading your atmosphere. You stepped inside, feet met with cold wet tiles, not bothering to shut the door behind you as you walked straight up to your boyfriend and caught his lips in yours in a soft kiss, your arms wrapped loosely around his neck. The warm water traveled from his bare chest down to your clothes, soaking you and making the fabric cling to your skin. His erection rubbed against you as you pressed closer to him, breaking the kiss as he groaned.

You slid down to your knees, hands dragging on his body, settling on the backs of his thighs. Jeno found it harder to breathe, the air going through his parted lips heavier as he drank in the sight below him. Your white shirt was soaked see through, hinting at the lace bra you had underneath as you stared at him with a wide-eyed, guileless expression.

You rubbed your palms up and down his thighs, breathing hard on purpose so he could feel your warm breath so close to his need. He placed his hands on top of yours, ceasing their motion as he nudged his hips a little, just enough to bump his tip against your moist lips.

“No teasing baby,” he whispered. “I’ve been dreaming of your pretty mouth for too long in here.”

You smiled innocently before ducking your head down to lick a stripe on the underside of his cock, from the base just until the ridge of his tip, careful not to touch his most sensitive part yet. He exhaled slowly from the warm, wet feel of the flat of your tongue, hitching abruptly when you took a ball in your mouth, suckling gently, drawing breathy grunts from him before you switched to the other one.

You sat back for a second, admiring his cock looking even stiffer than before, the veins wrapped around it bulging. Your core ached to have it buried in your walls, thighs squeezing together for some relief, but that’s not what you were here for right now. 

You pulled your hands to the front, and you’re greeted by the bright purple on your left hand again, smirk pulling at your lips. You wrapped both hands on his length, fists going back and forth as you twisted them in opposite directions, applying just the right pressure to make him lean an arm on the wall beside him, watching you with eyebrows scrunched and mouth dropped open.

His receptiveness made you smile wider, your grip growing firmer, a deep, strangled moan escaping him. You pressed a light, chaste kiss to his tip, and he immediately bucked his hips forward, trying to push past your tightly shut lips. You looked up gain, smiling as you shook your head no.

His tip was leaking pre-cum, and you stuck your tongue out as you kept your motions constant, watching it collect and drip down before you caught it on your wet muscle, moaning and licking your lips before poking your tongue against his tip, trying to taste more of the clear liquid while Jeno hissed and pushed harder against your tongue. 

You took mercy on him, pulling back to get ready for the main show. Your hands retreated to your hair, and you made sure to look him in the eyes as you twisted the scrunchie in smooth loops. Jeno smiled as he helped push the hair back from your face, but your hand flew to his wrist and pulled it in, holding his hand near your mouth as your tongue darted out to swirl around his index finger, and you giggled at the growl your lewd action incited.

You finally took him in your mouth, going halfway down his cock and bobbing back up and down again, your right hand pumping the rest of his length, your left massaging his balls. He let out a satisfied moan, his hand naturally moving to your bunched up hair and gripping it tight. 

You withdrew with a popping sound, giving him a couple of firm tugs before you cupped both hands under your chin, coating them in your spit. You spread your palms flat on either side of his cock and began gliding them in opposing directions. You felt his thighs quiver a bit, and that was when you swirled your tongue in circles around the head of his cock, the wet sounds accompanying the splash of water behind him. The pitch of his moans climbed higher, and you’re surprised to hear him whine when you took his tip into your hot mouth, hollowing your cheeks around it and sucking in continuous, slow intervals, accompanied by the persistent glide of your palms on him.

“Baby, fuck,” he panted. “My baby’s a goddamn pro. Always so good for me. Love you so fucking much.” The praise had you moaning around him, your mind reeling and your thighs squeezing tighter together. You removed your hands from his cock, grabbing instead at his ass, your fingers digging into his skin. You slid your mouth further and further down his length slowly until you had the entirety of him down your throat. Jeno kept cursing at the air as his cock remained lodged in you, moving only with small bobs of your head, his tip prodding so deep inside you repeatedly, coaxing fat tears to form at the corner of your eyes as you found it harder and harder to breathe.

One of your hands dropped to your core, rubbing your clit through your shorts as you moaned and gargled around your boyfriend’s cock. He started twitching in your mouth and he bucked into you involuntarily, making you swallow and gag around his length, drawing a growl out of him.

To your surprise, his hand tugged on your hair, your lips dragging on his length as he pulled you off. Your first response was to gasp for air, but soon you were whining and pouting, grabbing at his thighs and trying to pull him back closer to you. 

He bent down instead, pulling you up from under your arms until you were both standing. He tugged your shorts and underwear down together, and you lifted each foot up to help before he discarded both, landing with a wet splash behind him. He crouched down before you, pushed your thighs apart and lapped at your clit, his hands squeezing the backs of your thighs. 

Shrill whimpers slipped from your mouth as Jeno kept making out with your pussy, keening when he started fucking you with his middle finger. It wasn’t nearly enough, and you rocked against his face, his nose nudging at your clit. 

He pulled away from you after a few minutes, and before you could even complain his palm landed on your ass, making you gasp at the sharp contact, your body arching above him a little bit. Without warning, he stood up and lifted you by the hips, hoisting you on his shoulder high enough that your feet hovered above the floor, Jeno carrying you out of the shower. A confused squeak came out of you, but you wrapped your arms around his shoulder nonetheless, kissing on his neck.

“I’m fucking you on the bed,” he rasped. “I can get you wetter without all this water.” You didn’t contest, and you felt a little relieved because you were beginning to worry that the constant stream of hot shower was going to dry out his skin. 

By the time he’s walked you out to the bedroom, you’ve already managed to leave two lovebites on his jaw. You lacked the time to admire your handiwork as Jeno dropped you down the mattress, your back landing on the soft cotton sheets. He tugged the hem of your shirt upwards, and you held your hands up as he pulled the wet fabric off you. You began to unhook your bra, but he beat you to it with a simpler solution of ripping the flimsy number into two pieces from the front.

“Jeno!” They weren’t the sturdiest pair, but they were worth the aesthetic and you were not too happy to see them lying ruined on the floor.

“I’ll buy you a whole closet,” he whispered before circling his tongue around your nipple. Your soft cries poured out of you continuously as the licking and sucking grew more intense, but your hand pulled at his hair when you remembered something.

“Wait. Babe, the shower,” you recalled in between pants.

“What?” It was a response on autopilot, Jeno paying you no actual mind as he just dived for your other nipple, fingers playing with the one you forced him to abandon.

“The water’s still running.” There was no response from him, just the feeling of his fingers trailing down your stomach, inching to the inside of your thighs. “Jeno.” Your fingers pulled on his hair again, harder this time, but it elicited a reaction other than what you hoped for as he groaned on your nipple, its effect ricocheting on you as you whimpered at the sound.

“The water bill isn’t a problem, baby.” Your back arched off the bed as he slipped two fingers into you, your already wet heat making it too easy for him to pump into you fast. “Now will you just let me—”

“I’m not worried about your—ah, fuck!—about your fat wallet. I’m thinking of Mother Earth!” Despite your aching need, you steeled your nerves and clamped your thighs together tight, pushing his hand away while your own body screamed at you for your actions. 

He didn’t say anything as he looked at you with dark eyes, tongue poking at the inside of his cheek before he swiftly turned around, striding fast and aggravated as he headed back into the bathroom. His footsteps sounded heavy as he returned, and the look on his face told you that you were truly in for it tonight. He lifted your thighs up on his forearms, hooking onto them before he pulled your body to the foot of the bed and kneeled down the floor, his breath hot on your core.

“Just for that, I’m pulling at least five orgasms out of you tonight,” he declared before diving into you, your hands bunching up the sheets on either side of you, moans flying into the evening.

It was day seven of your determined “trials,” and Jeno was living his best life. Well, you both were, considering he was always more of a giver and liked to repay you five times over the mind blowing orgasms you gave him on the daily. Your hair tie collection was growing in size as well, buying new colors, shapes, sizes and patterns whenever the chance arose, not a day without one at the ready on your wrist. 

Today, however, you were off-schedule for his wake-up blowjob because something else came buzzing at the doorbell, shaking the two of you out of the sleepy haze from last night’s activities. Jeno was anchoring you down with his arm across your body, mumbling that “it’s probably just a package,” and that there was no need to get up because “they’ll just leave it out front.” Thank the deity that looked down on you that day and blessed you with just enough strength to drag the two of you out of bed, because that was no delivery man outside.

It was his mom.

Of course, after the initial surprise wore off you gave her an easy smile, hugging each other before you helped her with the heavy bags she had on both arms, Jeno in turn taking them from you as you all gathered inside.

She fixed the groceries and side dishes she brought along with her, surveying the fridge and pantry to make sure you were both running on actual nutrition and not “all those instant bags of MSG” her son so loved. While she went about her business, she mentioned how she had texted Jeno a few days ago about her pending visit, something you never heard of until today. You gave Jeno a tight smile, one that didn’t quite reach your eyes, and he picked up on your silent warning, quickly looking away and sparking conversation with his mom.

It’s not that you didn’t get along with his family. Oh no, you absolutely loved them and the feeling has been mutual since you were introduced on your first anniversary. But right now, with your hair a bird’s nest, your string top from the night before without even a bra on, you couldn’t wait for the privacy to give him a piece of your mind about the lack of a heads up. Maybe all that sex concentrated his blood down south and messed with his memory.

Lucky for him, his mom was a total sweetheart, her cheery countenance managing to fizzle out your irritation as she pulled out these huge photo albums from one of the bags. You giggled at his baby photos, his bum stark naked in half of them, the other half spotlighting the endearing eye smile he’s had since childhood. She was in the middle of another backstory, the one behind a photo of Jeno crying in what was apparently the set for a TV commercial, when her phone rang and interrupted her spirited narration.

“Your dad needs me for urgent business,” she explained after hanging up, flashing the whites of her eyes in jest at the last two words. Jeno was already walking to the door, about to grab the car keys off the hook.

“I’ll drive you—”

“Oh, don’t bother! He’s already parked out front.” She tipped her head towards you, giving you a knowing smile. “The men in this family are no good with giving advanced notices.” You grinned at her, shaking your head in solidarity.

Jeno’s gaze flitted to anywhere but on your person once you were alone again, but you didn’t do much damage other than playfully biting him on the arm. The encounter ended up giving you a fuzzy feeling inside, and you felt like you were able to bond with his mom on a deeper level. Relaxed. Comfortable. “Familiar,” you thought, mind lingering on how the word was rooted in “family.”

You began collecting the photobooks, stacking them on top of each other and placing them on the shelves in the living room. You looked into the bag they came from, checking if there was any more left inside, and you were greeted by a thin, rectangular box wrapped in dark emerald velvet. You picked it up, squinting at it before calling Jeno over. 

“Babe? I think your mom left this by mistake.” He looked over to you from the kitchen island where he was preparing two bowls of cereal, his half moons growing into wide circles as he registered what you were holding up in the air. “I think we should call her and—”

He ran over to you, taking the box in your hand and bolting away.

“Where the hell are you going!” You had no idea what was going on, but you quickly ran after him, realizing he was headed to the guest room. He was a good few steps ahead, but before he could close and lock the door on you, you stretched your arm out, wedging your hand through the gap. Your lapse in judgment swiftly cracked down on you, the pain shooting through your fingers as the door slammed just beneath your knuckles, tearing a pained cry from you as you clutched the hand to your chest, squatting on the floor.

“Shitshitshitshit! I’m so sorry baby, shit, I’m sorry.” Jeno flung the door back open when he heard you yelp, immediately rushing to your side, prying softly at your arm so he could take a look at your hurt. There was a linear mark that ran across your fingers, colored in a red that was gradually deepening in shade, the digits shaking as you felt the blood throb in that area. He winced at the sight, and he felt even worse knowing for certain it was going to leave tender bruises for days. He murmured apologies in between the most gentle kisses to your knuckles, his hand wiping at the couple of tears that escaped you.

You stayed like that for a few minutes before he asked, “Does it still hurt?” You shook your head no. “I’m sorry.” You shook your head again.

“It was a stupid move, not your fault,” you assured him, sniffling a little. He helped you up, holding and guiding you inside the room, sitting you down on the bed so carefully as if the injury wasn’t just on your fingers.

“Wait here.” Your eyes landed on the emerald box now strewn on the floor near the door as he walked out, returning some minutes later with an ice cloth and lightly pressing it to your knuckles. “What was that about?” you asked, taking the cold pack from his hand to hold it on your own. He followed the trail of your sight to the box in question, taking a deep breath before retrieving it. He sat down next to you and opened the box. 

It was a necklace, its chain a thin delicate silver, the big teardrop pendant a deep emerald like its container. It was the most elegant piece of jewelry you’ve ever seen, and you had to tear your gaze away before you could fall in love with it. You had to return it, after all.

“You should really call your mom. She’d probably get upset if she finds out it’s lost.” 

“It’s not hers.” Your eyebrows scrunched in, confused at his reply. “I mean, it was hers. It was also my grandma’s, and my great grandma’s.” He took it out of the box, the stone glinting as it reflected the sunlight from the windows. “And now it’s yours.”

You were still busy staring at the pendant that turned gently from where it hung, scarcely registering his answer until it hit you like a truck.

“Mine?” you asked with wide eyes.

A hand sheepishly scratched at the back of his neck. “It was supposed to be your anniversary gift. I asked mom to send it over, I didn’t know she would go here to bring it herself. Must have missed her text.” 

You gawked at him, still in disbelief that he was seriously handing over not only what must be of hefty price but also a family heirloom. You shoved his hand away from you. “You’re insane. I can’t take this. We have to give it back to your mom.” 

He didn’t heed your words, unclasping the latch on the necklace. “She sounded even happier than I was when I called her about it. Trust me, if anything’s gonna break her heart, it’ll be if she finds this back in her drawer.” He gathered your hair to one side. You don’t miss the way he gulped, fingers lingering on the bunched strands. 

“I understand how you’re feeling,” he continued. “You probably think it’s all going too fast, that I didn’t think this through, right? My grams got this on her first date, my mom within four months. Dad and pops probably gave it as something to prove their feelings, but this is different. We’re already solid, baby. The three years we’ve been in love is all the proof we need. 

I’ve been serious about you for so long now, and each passing day I only grow more and more certain. Whenever my heart isn’t racing because of you, it rests easy and content knowing that you’re around. So I’m giving you this,” the chain was cold against your skin as he latched it around your neck, “because I want you to know that I’m sure about you—about us. And although it holds promises for our love in a future so far ahead of us, it also holds all the love I’ve bottled up for you in the last three years.” He cupped your face in both hands, lifting your gaze up to look him in the eyes, “So would you please, please indulge me and just drink it all up?”

By this point, your heart was squeezing almost painfully in your chest. You were no stranger to his sweet gestures, but unveiled declarations of love? It was rare for him to directly voice out his feelings longer than an ‘I love you.’ It made you feel like you were floating, your lips trembling as you spoke, “Fine, you smooth fucker.” The words were strong, joking, but the slight shake to your voice was otherwise. “I’ll take your bribe.”

“Thank god.” You were greeted by his eye smile before he ghosted a kiss to the corner of your lips, sparking a trail of light kisses that stretched down to where the emerald rested against the skin of your chest, goosebumps chasing after his touch as your breath hitched in your throat.

“I want to give your present early too,” you whispered, pulling his gaze back to your eyes as he hummed in question. You dropped the ice bag on the floor, your good hand thumbing on the thin strap of your top before pulling it down slowly past your shoulder.

“But you’re hurt…” 

“It’s barely a scratch,” you fibbed, raising your other hand and bending the fingers. It was a little tender, but nothing too bad. He didn’t look convinced though, about to reach for the ice again before you captured his wrist in your hand. “Jeno… I want to love you right now, baby. Please? Wanna make you feel loved…” 

You pulled on the other strap and dragged the thin fabric downwards to bunch at your waist, your breasts bouncing as they were freed from the tugging, your nipples hard and aching to be touched. You leaned in to draw him into a kiss, but his hands smoothed on your jaw, holding you in place as his eyes searched into yours.

“If you’re doing this because… because you feel like you’re obliged to repay me or something—”

You cut him off by clashing your lips together, starting out rough and gradually easing into each other like a sigh of relief. You broke off for air, the worry on his brows still present although toned down. “You’re really talkative today, I noticed. We’ve never had this problem before…” you said, and it was true to an extent. Apart from first times he wanted to make special and that one drunken incident, you couldn’t recall a moment where Jeno hesitated or turned down a chance to have you. “I’m doing this, like always, because I love you,” you clasped your hands behind his neck, thumbs rubbing over his skin soothingly. “I love you every single day, but right now I’m filled to the brim and about to spill over so…” You leaned your face closer, lips barely brushing against his as you whispered, “…can you drink me all in?”

His eyes fluttered shut at the feel of your warm breath, your soft lips, obliging with feather-like presses of his closed mouth, gradually parting it open after each peck until it was as if a dam of desire and emotions ruptured in him and he had to pull you in as close as possible to shield you from the deluge, kissing like you were drowning and needed to share the oxygen in each other’s lungs to survive.

You were both a mess of gasps and pants when you broke apart. He pulled you to stand along with him, and he kneeled down to undress you, his usual callousness for clothes missing as he gently tugged every piece off you until there was nothing left hidden from his eyes. He went back to his feet, dragging his fingertips upwards from your legs to your sides as he did, and lifted you off the floor to lay you down on the bed. 

His eyes soaked you in as you lied before him, fully exposed. He’s stunned, gaze trained to the teardrop gem in the valley of your breasts, rising and falling with the heave of your chest. 

“Jeno…” Your whine tore him from the daze, seeing your knees bent up, thighs squeezed and rubbing together to ease some of the tension from your glistening core. You watched him bend down to the foot of the bed, picking something up that was out of your sight, but he was empty handed as he climbed to the bed, crawling closer, fully clothed and hovering above you. 

He supported himself on one arm bent above your head as he bowed into you, your bare body pressing on him as he kissed you deep, tongue stroking against yours, coaxing the sweetest sounds out of you. It was rhythmic and dance-like each time he dived into you, exploring you, and then resurfaced for air, pressing wet kisses on your face, neck, and shoulders, not a single second wasted without the touch of his lips on your skin. The heat rising in you was becoming unbearable, you needed him to do more, to touch you even more. Like he heard your silent plea, his other hand caressed the skin of your waist, and you jolted from the bed, breaking away from his lips, shivering. 

His fingertips were cold as ice, a reminder of the ice bag you left below flickering through your mind, the thought crumbling just as fast when his cold touch dragged to the inside of your thighs, grazing the sensitive skin up and down, your breaths coming out like stutters as they stop and start in reaction to the chilly feeling on your skin.

“J-jen…” Your whimpers were small, desperate, transitioning to a strangled gasp when he tapped tentatively on your clit, the sensation like a spark of electricity on the sensitive bud. Your moans poured out, core growing wetter and wetter as he rubbed your nub and sucked bruises onto your chest, surrounding the gem that you wore. The aching heat on your clit was thawing his fingers back to their warmth, and you keened as he replaced them with his thumb, his fingers easing into your velvet walls instead.

He pushed and pulled at an agonizing pace, and you bucked your hips trying to get him to speed up. He relented, pumping into you faster, his thumb nudging at your clit every time. He swallowed your frantic moans into a kiss, not slowing down when he felt your walls fluttering around his digits, allowing your first orgasm to crash on you easily.

He landed butterfly kisses on your hairline as you descended from the high, and you opened your eyes to find his lust-filled gaze on you, his pupils blown wide with want. You tugged at the bottom of his shirt, and he took the hint, lifting it off his torso, your hands quick to find purchase on the exposed skin, caressing the hard muscles that adorned it.

Begrudgingly, he had to pull away from your touch, getting off the bed to shed his lower garments. While he busied himself for a few seconds, you quickly shifted your weight on the bed, moving onto your knees and elbows, chest down and ass up in the air.

Jeno gulped when his eyes met your figure, all prepped and ready for him, the desire to take you slow and easy evaporating into something more primal and animalistic. His eyes focused on your waiting, soaked heat. He could have exploded the moment your hand reached from underneath you, your index and middle finger spreading your folds apart, a gush of moisture trickling down as you stretched yourself open for him, a needy moan of his name slipping past your lips.

He couldn’t help but groan, the blood rushing straight to his desire, his fist pumping on his painfully hard cock, spreading the pre-cum down on his shaft as he got on his knees on the bed, his other hand gripping onto you by the hip. He rubbed his tip on your slit a few times, gathering your slick on the head of his cock before slipping to the hilt into your waiting need, pushing a moan out of you both. 

He started out slow, hips rolling sensually in and out of you, every ridge and vein of his cock so pronounced to your walls at his laggard tempo. It was clear he was having a hard time restraining himself, his fingertips digging into your hip telling you just as much, so you wiggled against him, sinking lower into the mattress and stretching your arms out straight in front of you so your upper body was flat against the bed, your ass going higher and pressing onto him.

He grunted at your eagerness, thrusting harder into you, rocking you forwards on the bed. Your body arched even higher when he drilled into you from a downwards angle, his tip massaging the sensitive spot inside you with every roll of his hips. You cried obscenities into the air, your gaze lifted upwards, and your eyes trailed up your tense outstretched arms, landing on the thin black elastic on your wrist

The reminder brought a wicked grin to your face, and you placed a hand on top of his that was gripping on your hips, propping yourself up with your other hand on the mattress. You shifted on your knees until you were kneeling upright, movements careful to not to slip his entire length out of you just to plunge back down on his cock. 

His legs folded back as you sat on him, your ass nestled snugly against his pelvis, the new position eliciting a deep groan from him. His chest was flush to your back, cock buried in you as deep as he can get. Soft, wet kisses littered your right shoulder as his hands traveled to your breasts, cupping the mounds from underneath and giving them a firm squeeze as he bucked his hips into yours harshly, jolting both your bodies up from the mattress before slowly descending and jutting into you again, hard. Like rushing ocean waves that crashed violently against rocks, over and over. Like his body was the unyielding storm and it was wreaking havoc on every inch of you. 

Your scattered moans were a mess in the air above you, scattered, breathy, erratic. Jeno trails a hand to the front of your heat, the pads of his fingers drawing messy circles on your swollen clit. Your eyes shut at the simultaneous stimulation all over: his open mouthed kisses on your shoulder, his fingers rolling your nipple and rubbing at your clit, his rigid cock against your walls, slamming in fast and dragging out slow in repeated motion. 

It was so, so fucking good that you considered just letting him have his way with you, almost forgetting what you intended to do. Almost. You placed both hands on top of his and settled them on your hips. Wasting no time, Jeno used the leverage to lift your body up and down on his length. His pace only grew faster as he kept using you, fucking your body down on him.

“Jeno! Ah, babe, oh fuck, slow down.” He eased his grip on you, gradually playing down the tempo until he was just barely dragging you on his cock. He watched you from the back as your hands gathered your hair up into a loose ponytail, the motion smooth and delicate like a subdued kind of wonder in his eyes, and then you began bouncing on his length fast, clamping your walls around him on purpose.

“Fucking hell baby, you feel so good around me” he grunted, his fingertips jabbing into your skin but not interrupting your flow, letting you lead the pace. He bit his lip as he watched you sink onto his length, swallowing him and then pushing yourself back up, revealing your lips stretched and gripping his cock so tight. His eyes trailed up the skin of your bare back as you rode him faster, gaze going higher and higher until it landed on the loose tie on your hair, staring at the way it began slipping down from your feverish motions until it eventually landed on your back.

You stopped abruptly, whining “Put it back on me,” but Jeno didn’t answer. He was confused by your lack of motion, trying to lift you up in his grip until you slapped at his hands. “Tie my hair up for me.” He could practically hear the pout in your voice as he snatched the elastic from your back, groaning as you wiggled your hips on him.

You could feel his inexperience by how soft and wary his touch was, fumbling to gather your hair back. He’s probably never done it before, but he should know the motions by now from how often he’s seen you do it. He twisted the elastic twice, loose and sloppy, but it did the job. You smiled when his hands went back to your hips, and you resumed as if you never stopped, your pace relentless until you felt the hair tie slip down and you halted all action once more, whining for him to put it back on you again.

It was a loop of the same damned thing over and over, and you could feel his frustration by how quicker, how more careless he handled your hair each time. You were both getting edged by your stubbornness, and while it brought you amusement, it only gave him mirth that grew bigger and bigger until he couldn’t take it any longer. The next time the elastic fell, he tossed the wretched thing to the floor and bunched your hair up in his hand instead. You felt how hard he was gripping at your strands, stretching at your scalp as he angled your bodies higher off the mattress, kneeling you both up as he began thrusting into you himself.

Your body jostled forward at every lurch of his hips, the momentum stunted by his snug grip on your hair and an arm around your stomach. He used the constraint to pull your head back, exposing your neck to him, forcing a keen out of you as he bit and sucked on the delicate skin, leaving his marks on you.

Broken cries left you as his other hand fondled with your breast, gently tugging your nipple upwards in time with his thrusts. Your walls were beginning to contract around his cock, and before you could completely lose yourself on him, he slowed down and shifted you both on your sides. He embraced you tight against him, spooning as he resumed fucking into you, his tongue lapping at the bite marks he left on your neck, whispering sweet nothings against your skin.

“Babe… oh god, I‘m gonna cum,” you gasped.

“That’s my good girl,” He slipped his hand in front of you, massaging your clit to take you there faster, moans slipping out of you continuously. “Let go for me baby. I’m right here, I got you.”

“Fuck, Jeno—I love you baby, fuck!” you cried through your orgasm. Jeno didn’t stop thrusting, his fingers didn’t stop rubbing on your clit, making your whole body seize up with each contraction of your walls around him, milking around him until you felt his warmth spill into you, his grunts littering the air and his motions stilling save for his cock twitching as he painted your walls in white.

“I love you,” he whispered against your hair after releasing his hold on the strands. “Love my baby so much, always so good for me.” He showered you in praise and affection as he soothed a palm on your arm, rubbing softly on your skin, pressing innocent kisses to your neck.

Once you’ve filled your lungs back with air, you tapped on his hip behind you, signaling for him to pull out. You turned to face him on the bed, careful to clamp your thighs together so you don’t make a mess on the sheets.

He smiled contentedly at your tired and fucked out expression, his hand moving the hair away from your chest, revealing the necklace still clinging to your sweaty skin.

“I still think this is too much,” you rasped, holding the pendant between your fingers.

“Are you still thinking of giving it back after I fucked you in it?” You punched his arm, weak from all the effort exerted from your lovemaking. “Guess you’ll freak when I give you the matching earrings for our fourth anniversary, then.”

“Jen!” Your eyes widened at his off-handed comment.

“Be glad it isn’t the ring,” he smirked. “I’m saving that for the biggest occasion.”

You blinked, lips parted as you surveyed his expression, trying to figure out if he was being serious. You gathered your bearings quick enough, shaking your head at him and showing him the red marks still visible and a little darker on your hand.

“You did give me four other rings, though.”

He frowned at the reminder, taking your hand by the wrist and holding it above your head, concerned and a little annoyed that he almost forgot. “Keep these elevated,” he said, tone strict. You chuckled and left it at that, staring at his eyes that flitted over each of your features, licking his lips before he looked you in the eyes again.

“What if I told you we’re getting married after we graduate?” 

You were stunned for a second. You’ve never seriously talked about the possibility of that before. That was definitely too soon, and you were both too young, so you dodged the question with another of your own. “You’re that confident I’ll marry you?” You replaced your shocked expression for a teasing smirk, one which he returned easily.

“I’m really confident in my arms,” he began, making you squint at what seemed like a remark of vanity, “that I can just flip you over my shoulder and kidnap you to the altar if I must.” 

You giggled, lightly hitting his arm when the cute scene cropped up in your mind’s eye. When the laughter died down, your eyes gazed into his to find them swimming in sincerity and adoration. 

“Slow down there,” you whispered, the smile never leaving your lips. Every fiber in your being loved Lee Jeno, and it sent tingles through your skin and a pleasant kind of dizziness to think that he wanted to spend a lifetime loving you because you wanted it too, but you weren’t ready for wedding vows. You both had too much left to accomplish individually, and you wanted to chase those milestones together before settling down.

He didn’t push it, understanding that look in your eyes, pressing a kiss to your nose instead. “Our internships are starting soon,” he offered. “I’m gonna miss you when I’m back to spending my days with Jaemin in the lab.”

You rolled your eyes, but you were relieved at the shift in topic. “Babe, we literally live together now. We’ll still see each other everyday.” You pinched his ear between your fingers, making him scrunch his nose at you. “And I know you miss your friends, don’t even deny it. You sure you don’t want to invite them over for an anniversary party?”

He was quick to shake his head. “Nope, no way. I want you all to myself on that day.” He put an arm around you, pulling you in even closer as you giggled.

“Isn’t that how it is for you everyday?” He didn’t bother answering, nosing affectionately at the crown of your head instead. You interrupted his sappy mood when you felt a pang in your tummy, realizing neither of you have eaten anything yet. “What’s for breakfast?”

“Shit,” his touch retracted from you as he sat up abruptly.

“That doesn’t sound too appetizing…” you trailed off, raising an eyebrow at his strange actions.

“The cereal! It must be all soggy now,” he frowned, standing from the bed and abandoning you without a second thought.

“I want eggs, sunny side up!” You shouted at his retreating figure. He raised a thumbs up into the air and you smiled, contented at the thought of a future that held the same sight for all of your mornings.

“You’ve failed.” You rolled your eyes at Donghyuck’s dramatic line from the phone. 

It was D-1 before your anniversary, and your best friend was annoyed that you’ve never called him back for updates since your betting game commenced. You had just told him about the method you had chosen, of Pavlov and ponytails.

“On the contrary, I’m quite sure I’ve succeeded,” you noted with a self-assured smile, recalling all the times you’ve successfully been riling Jeno up the past few days with just a swish of your wrist on your hair, leaving him baffled as to why his sex drive has gone through the roof lately.

“But you have no evidence of that.” Donghyuck was right, but you scrunched your eyebrows at the unlikely feasibility of this requirement.

“How the hell am I supposed to provide evidence of that! You want my boyfriend’s dick pics?”

“Hell no!” You sneered at his high pitched denial. “If you actually stuck with our agreement and gave me regular progress reports, then we wouldn’t be having this problem.”

“You’re sick.”

“I’m a strict observer of the scientific method.”

You shook your head, just about done with his stubborn insistence. “You know what? You want proof? Fine.” You stood from the bed, walking off with the vigor of someone who’s about to win a horrific amount of marbits. “The codeword is orange.”

“The fuck are you on about?”

You smiled at his confusion. “When I say ‘orange,’ that means I just tied my hair up.” You stopped before the bedroom door, hand on the knob.

“Okay, and? Does Jeno shout back ‘lemon’ whenever he gets a stiffy?”

You rolled your eyes. “Just shut up and listen carefully, bitch.” You didn’t wait for his response, stuffing your phone in your pocket before opening the door and calling out, “Babe?”

“Yes baby?” You followed Jeno’s voice that rang from the kitchen, finding him pouring out a glass of water for himself before leaning against the counters, smiling at you. You gave him a bright smile of your own, silent as you neared him. He was probably expecting a hug and laid his cup down on the counter behind him, but he was surprised to see you sink down to your knees before him.

In three hard tugs, you’ve pulled his sweats and underwear down to set his soft cock free. Before anything else, you gathered your hair with both hands to one side of your neck, twisting it around but not tying it up just yet. Sure enough, his length twitched shortly after the action, but things weren’t going fast enough for you. You were motivated, sick as it may sound, by the thought of your best friend who was about to listen in on the filthy sounds of your victory.

“Babe, ah shit, what’s gotten into you?” You kept one hand wrapped around your hair as you began pumping him tight and fast in one hand, placing kitten licks on his tip, taking him into your mouth every now and then to get him nice and wet. There was no technique to it, no thought behind your actions as you just wanted him hard and ready fast. Once he was, you grinned up at his pleasured expression.

“Fuck my face.”

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, hopefully loud enough to conceal the squeak that came from your phone. He didn’t seem to notice, his hands moving to the sides of your face. “You sure baby?”

“As ever.” You gave him one last smile before dropping your jaw as wide as you can, sticking your tongue out. He drove into you slowly, and you had to do the work yourself to get around his hesitation, pushing forward until your nose was pressing against his skin. 

“Fucking shit. What did I do to deserve you?” He drew out and thrusted into you carefully, and you closed your eyes momentarily in frustration. “Just go hard on me damn it,” you thought, digging your nails into his ass cheeks to drive in your silent point. As if there was a telepathic line between you two, he did just that, picking up speed until he was fucking your mouth at a steady pace, the gargling sounds of your throat getting abused drifting into the atmosphere. 

Your eyes were stinging with tears but you powered through it until you ran out of breath, tapping rapidly against his thigh to let him know you needed a break. He withdrew from you, and your hands immediately flew to your hair. 

“Orange,” you rasped out. If he noticed your little codeword, it was all swept into the wind, forgotten as an even bigger surprise came out. You expected him to drill into you harder, absolutely lose himself and go berserk like he usually did when you tied your hair up, but you didn’t expect him to cum on sight as you put your hair into a ponytail. 

You were lucky when it came to reflexes, closing your eyes by instinct before he shot the first load onto your face. “Shit, baby, holy fuck, god fuck.” He was rambling, not making any sense as he kept pumping himself in his hand, no regard for you as he painted himself on your eyelids, cheeks, your mouth that was opened in shock. You stayed still, breath heaving as you took it like a champ, thick lines of his cum dripping on your skin, your tongue darting out to lick whatever it could reach.

“Baby, oh my god, sorry.” You couldn’t check to see if the apology looked sincere, waiting as he helped you clear the cum from your eyelids using his thumb, a surprised squeak coming out of you when you felt him push the digit into your mouth, making you suck it clean before he collected the rest of his cum and fed it all to you repeatedly.

He didn’t hesitate to bring you into a grateful kiss once he had most of your face cleaned, alternating between his ‘thank you’s’ and ‘sorry’s’ while his breathing was still recovering. You assured him it was alright and that you liked it, watching his ears tinge red from your admission before excusing yourself to the bathroom for a proper clean up.

You fished your phone out once you’ve locked the door behind you, checking the screen and smirking to find that the call was still active. “Better bring me my marbits in two days, sucker.” You laughed at the irony and dropped the call, not waiting to hear his reaction. Not like it mattered, your best friend made sure to blow up your phone just seconds apart.

Hyuck: FVCK YPU!!!!!
Hyuck: Did he CUM from you tying your hair up? That’s fifty shades of FUCKED UP
Hyuck: You actually done did it
Hyuck: That was DISGUSTING
Hyuck: But also kinda hot
Hyuck: But disgusting!
Hyuck: How the fuck am I supposed to eat oranges now
Hyuck: Never do that to me again
Hyuck: Unless…

You laughed to yourself, leaving everything on read.

Hyuck: Cocksucker. Enjoy your chalk bits. 
Hyuck: And your anniversary tomorrow too, I guess.

It was D-day. Three whole years of being Jeno’s girlfriend, and the thought still gave you whiplash whenever you realized how much time that actually was. 156 pages from your weekly calendar. 1,095 sunrises, times two for the sunsets. 26,280 hours, and you couldn’t be bothered with the math for minutes and seconds. There were countless ways to express how time has passed since you first said yes to each other, and all of that just went by in a blur.

Today seemed to have the same theme, a blur of kisses and sex from the moment you woke up and promises of an event-filled day. You were coaxed out of sleep by wet kisses to the inside of your thigh, the strands of your boyfriend’s hair rough against your skin as his hands kept you spread open, greeting you a “Good morning” and a “happy anniversary” from between your legs. He made quick work of you with his tongue and had you cumming twice before you tapped out. You wanted to take him inside you, but he was stubborn to deny your request, saying he didn’t want you sore so soon because he planned on fucking the daylights out of you tonight. You didn’t hate the idea, so you came to a compromise and had him fuck your tightly closed thighs instead, letting him cum all over your belly.

You managed to sweet talk him into divulging his plans for the day during your innocent absolutely-no-funny-business shower together, and now you were out on the main road in his car, on the way to the mall to buy you an evening dress on the spot for the fancy dinner he had on reservation for 9:00 p.m. The ride was quiet as you held hands, watching the stretch of road ahead of you. You looked over to your boyfriend, biting the nail of your other hand as you felt that he looked a little too peaceful for your tastes, an impish idea crossing your mind.

Though you already won the bet yesterday, the effects of your secret experiment were far from wearing off. You disentangled your hand from his, exaggerating your motions as you put your hair up to make sure he noticed from the corner of his eye. You smiled at his way when you heard an awkward clear of his throat, and from this setting there was no way he could have hidden the hard on tenting in his jeans. 

You pursed your lips to keep you from laughing, leaning over a little to have your hand palming at his jeans, his exhale coming out slow from the contact. The car went a little out of lane when you squeezed him and rubbed the outline of his length, making him hiss before quickly correcting the wheel.

“You want us to crash? Because that’s how you get a crash,” he warned, right hand holding your guilty wrist captive. You huffed but sat back to your seat in favor of road safety. It didn’t mean you couldn’t have your own fun, though. You sneaked a hand under your skirt, moaning softly as you rubbed yourself through the fabric of your panties.

“Babe.” His tone of voice was an order despite not actually saying anything. You decided to push his limits though, moaning a high pitched “Baby?” back at him. You smirked to find his jaw clenched hard, but your heart almost dropped when you saw the mall nearing, not expecting the trip to feel so short. You held your breath as he parked the car, wordlessly clicking your seatbelt off. You were surprised at how aggressively he pulled the handbrake up and pushed his seat as far back as he could, staring at him with wide eyes as he tapped his fingers on his lap.

“Come here,” he said in a low voice, the sound shooting straight to your core. You obeyed easily, struggling to straddle him in the cramped space.

“What happened to not wanting me sore?” you accused with a raised eyebrow.

“Fuck that, I’ll just kiss your pussy better tomorrow.” You giggled as he caught your lips in a rushed, frantic kiss, humping your clothed desires against each other.

“Does this count as ‘against the windows?’” you breathed out the question when the kiss broke off. He only gave you a confused look before he sneaked his hand underneath your blouse, kneading at your breasts from the cups of your bra. “He must have forgotten already,” you thought as you mewled from his rough touch. It was his checklist of promises: the bedroom, couch, showers, guest room, kitchen, and even against the windows. 

Your breath hitched when you felt his fingers shadowing on your clothed heat, aching to have him push your underwear to the side and take you then and there. Instead, he pressed a thumb to your clit quite harshly, taking you by surprise and making you retreat from the stimulation, and you both jumped as you accidentally backed into the steering wheel and a prolonged honk left the car.

“Shit,” he whispered, eyes widening to find a security guard in the vicinity walking towards your direction. The windows were tinted, but someone could still see what’s going on through the windshield if they came close enough. He helped lift you back up to your seat, and you fixed yourself up for any possible encounter. You both breathed a sigh of relief when he walked past you, but there was no way you were finishing what you started in there, so he turned off the engine and practically pulled you by the hand into the mall, muttering about “having you in the nearest shop with a changing room.”

Lady Luck was on his side as you found the perfect black dress with a sweetheart neckline in the second shop you entered. You gushed about how great it would look with the necklace he gave you, but Jeno was barely responsive as his one track mind had him pulling you to the back of the store, entering the section with a row of changing cubicles and rushing you into the nearest one to have his way with you, unsuccessfully muffling your sounds with his hand.

Three timid knocks rapped on the door once you finished the deed, accompanied by an equally timid voice. “Um, ma’am? You left it on the hanger… that dress you wanted for fitting?” You felt the blood drain from your face as you stared at your equally shocked boyfriend. 

You will never be able to show face in that dress shop again.

Those were the series of events that led you to right now: your moment of truth.

You put your hair down after the dress shop incident, electing to play it safe throughout the remainder of your time in public. Once you got home, however, you tied it back up again. It was unconscious, as the sun outside was glaring bright and the AC in the house hadn’t been turned on yet. You walked into the kitchen for a cold glass of water, but you were lifted onto one of the counters by a whiny, very apologetic looking boyfriend. 

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me today, baby… I think I’ve gotten too addicted to you,” he nosed at the crook of your neck, pressing his body on yours to let you know of the returned presence of his stiff need. You chuckled at his naivety, but the guilt crept up on you until you let everything spill out.

You, him, chocolates, scrunchies, and classical conditioning. 

Conveniently, you left out the part about the bet and your best friend being privy to all of it, and it was probably for the best because Jeno’s gaze was now hard and serious, his features stoic as his eyes bore into yours. Your heart was knocking hard on your ribcage, not because you were scared he might hurt you, but because you knew this look. You’ve only seen it a few times before, but the events that followed left you covered in bites, scratches, and bruises, his name seared into your throat and memory.

“You remember your colors?” You nodded slowly. He was talking about the safe word system you had agreed on for the rare moments this side of him slid out, the side of him you hadn’t seen in a while but still managed to make your heart race and your desire swell.

“Bedroom,” he muttered, head cocking to its direction, “and be undressed when I get there.”

You were swiftly on your feet, half-excited and half-nervous steps in beat with the thumping in your chest. Entering the room, you didn’t bother to close the door behind you, shedding off your clothes and folding them into a neat stack by the foot of the bed. You climbed up the mattress, sitting in the middle with your legs bent up to cover your chest, your chin resting on your knees as you stared at the open doorway, waiting.

Your punishment came walking in, and your breathing was stunted to find that he was already naked as you were. He had placed something on the bedside table, but you paid little attention as your eyes placed all focus on his angry, stiff cock jutted out in front of him. He stood back a few feet away from the bed before beckoning you over, and you slid down from the mattress onto your knees in front of him. He clutched your chin softly in one hand, stroking at your skin as he looked deep into your eyes.

“Sneaky little whore,” he spit out the words in a sneer, and his hand shoved his hold on you to the right only to clutch you right back. “And here I was thinking it was me who turned into some dirty freak, but it was you all along, hmm?” He stepped closer to your space, his hardness right in front of you. “My pretty slut always wants a hard cock ready to shove into her whenever she needs, hmm? Is that why you went this far?” You were stuck in a daze, staring at the rivulet of clear liquid that was beading at his tip until a slap to your cheek brought you back to your senses. “Answer me!” 

“Yes!” you cried, your eyes glistening along with your core, the stinging sensation bringing you more pleasure than you’d care to admit. 

He pouted teasingly at your pitiful expression, closing in the distance between your face and his tip. “Aww, poor baby. Do you want my hard cock now, too?” He slid it on the plane of your soft skin, smearing a line of precum on your cheek, your mouth opening by instinct to receive him. Instead, he pulled his cock back and slapped you with it before kneeling down to your level.

“You’re not getting it,” he whispered. “Not until you’re crying and begging me to slow down because your sweet little pussy can’t take any more, and once the sheets are soaked and you can’t feel your legs, that’s when I’ll finally fuck you dumb on my cock.” He said everything with a sweet smile on his eyes and lips, your mind collapsing in on itself as it battled between his innocent look and his filthy promises. “You’re gonna take all of it, aren’t you? You greedy fucking nympho.” You nodded, and his fingers carded into your hair before pulling on it hard. “That’s not a fucking answer.”

“Yes! G-give it to me, please.”

He released his hold on you, walking over to the bedside to pick up what he brought in earlier. Soon, he was back in front of you, holding a white device in his hands. “Do you know what this is?” You almost nodded before catching yourself, answering with a meek “yes.” It was a hitachi wand. “This was supposed to be a gift, but you decided to act like the cockslut you are, so now it’s your punishment.” 

You only managed to look up at him with wide eyes, the urge to rub your thighs together so strong but you didn’t dare, not while he was in this mood.

He was gentle with you again as he helped you up and walked you over to the bed. “Face down, ass up.” You did as you were told, climbing near the foot of the mattress, with only your rear raised up. “Spread your legs.” You heard the wand hum alive as you obliged, and you had to bite on your tongue to keep a moan from escaping. 

You lurched forward when he pressed the bulbous head of the toy onto your clit, but you were stopped by his arm hooking to your thigh. Moans and swears burst from you immediately, the vibrations strong and steady and pressed so hard against you. “I want you to count.” You barely registered Jeno’s voice in the midst of your pleasure. 

“Ahh!” you screamed out as his palm landed sharply on your ass. 

“I said count, you dumb slut.” His reprimand came with another stinging hit.

“T-two!” He began rubbing the wand into your folds, sloppy with your slick all over, and then another smack. “Three!” He pushed it back up to your engorged clit, setting the speed higher. “Fuckfuckfuck!” Your curses spilled in time with the spanking, and you received it three times over for missing count, crying fat tears as the spot grew red and throbbed with heat. 

He rubbed soothingly on the pained spot before detaching the toy from you and flipping you over to your back. He pushed you upwards on the bed, lying down on his chest before your wet core, spreading your thigh open with one hand and pressing the vibrator back on your clit with the other. You began rolling your hips, splitting your pussy lips apart on the head of the toy, your screams of pleasure filling the air.

“Is my whore about to cum?”

“Yes! Fuck yes! Gonna cum,” you dragged on the last word, your orgasm hitting you just then. Your thighs clamped shut around his arm that held the toy between them, and your lower body shook and lurched off the mattress, Jeno grazing the nails of his other hand around the skin of your abdomen. You’ve hardly come down from the high before your whole body was surging upwards again, the vibrations never ceasing in your heightened sensitivity.

“Fuck, shit, no! Stop!” His hand pressed down on your tummy as you tried to squirm away from him.

“Do I have to tie you down?” 

“Ahh, fuck, please! No!”

Your second orgasm washed over you, still riding on the coattails of your previous one, and your bent legs started bouncing involuntarily on your heels, your toes curling in at the added sensation of Jeno’s nails drawing lines on your skin.

You gasped for air when the vibrations ceased and Jeno threw the toy on the space beside you. He pulled your thighs in closer to him, and your break is short lived as he shoved three fingers into you at once, splitting your walls open.

“Gonna fuck you up, gonna absolutely fucking ruin you,” he promised, kicking off with a cruel speed, met with resistance from your tightness. “How are you supposed to take my cock like this? Your pathetic little pussy can’t even handle my fingers.”

You felt him slow down, and you mewled in protest. “N-no! Hah, ah, please! My pussy loves your fingers. Love it when your fingers fuck me loose. Don’t stop, please! Don’t stop.” He curled the digits upwards and wiggled them inside you, scratching at your sweet spot. 

“Fuck! Fuck! It’s here! Oh my god.” Your legs wrapped around his neck as you felt your third orgasm physically leave your body, the head you trapped between the crown of your thighs grunting below you, his nails lightly tracing on your skin again.

“You little cockslut,” he growled, “covering me in your dirty cum.” You yelped when he took his fingers out from you to land a firm slap on your clit, and your hips bucked into him as he began lapping up your juices. His tongue swirled around your oversensitive clit, and you couldn’t stop your hand from reaching down and pulling at his hair. Just for that, he let his teeth graze on your sensitive bud and you quickly retracted your touch at the warning.

His tongue is joined by his fingers again, fucking into you at a ruthless speed, the squelching sounds of your heat so loud in the mix of your moans and screams. Your hands pulled at your own scalp as your fourth orgasm knocked over, trying to focus on any sensation other than the uncontrollable, deliciously painful contractions of your pussy, the pain on your scalp not nearly enough for the task, Jeno’s fingernails on the inside of your thigh only making you tremble even more.

He allowed you a sliver of mercy, letting you catch your breath on the bed as he sat back, jerking himself to your body looking spent and ruined. After some minutes he picked you up in his arms and walked over to the far side of the room. He set you down on your feet as he yanked the curtains to one side, revealing the tall glass doors that led to the veranda on one side of the house, the side adjacent to the neighbors.

“This counts as ‘against the windows.’” He propped your arms up on the glass, your hard nipples rubbing against the cold surface, ragged breaths making a pulsing puff of white steam before your face and blocking the scene outside from your view, your skin tingling at the possibility of a stranger seeing you so fucked out and still about to get fucked some more.

You shuddered when Jeno rubbed his tip between your swollen lips. “Think you deserve my cock now, hmm?” Your body was screaming at you for a breather, but you wanted to please your man, wanted him to cum from the feeling of your abused wet pussy, so you answered by bucking your hips back into him.

He slipped inside you without any resistance now, your walls slick, velvety, and warm around him. He’s been roaring to go since you tied your damn hair up, and he wasn’t planning on taking it slow now, fucking into you hard and fast.

Your moans were weak and broken as he chased his own high from within you, and you didn’t have the strength left for any more screams when his hand reached to your clit to rub you near the edge once more. Your legs buckled repeatedly that if it weren’t for the glass, you wouldn’t have been able to take this fucking while standing.

You felt Jeno’s warm panting breaths against your ear, a moan slipping out of him every now and then. His hard dominating persona was slipping off as the pleasure caught up with him, kissing and licking at your neck. “Just one more baby. Cum one more time with me, can you do that?” You didn’t answer, your vision swimming before you. “Baby? What’s the color?”

You struggled to keep your eyes open as you rasped out, “Green.” With that, he flipped you around to face him, lifting you up with your back against the glass and wrapping your legs around him as he slotted himself back into you, going fast trying to drive you both off the edge.

“My baby’s gonna cum, right? My good girl’s gonna cum for me?” You felt his cock begin to twitch inside of you, and you pressed kisses on the tip of his nose.

“Wanna cum,” you whimpered, “gonna cum on daddy.”

His eyes squeezed shut at the slip of that word. He’s never heard you use it on him before, and fuck did it have an effect on him, his orgasm crashing down on him strong, the feeling of his hot cum shooting into you pushing you off the edge as well.

His legs grew weaker as he emptied his load in you, slowly sinking to his knees with you still wrapped around him. You stayed like that for god knows how long, your arms and legs around him, body exhausted and molded onto his like putty, his softening cock nestled in the mess he made between your thighs.

Once he felt strong enough, Jeno carried you back to the bed, just sitting on the edge as he cradled you in his arms, bouncing you softly on his lap as he waited for you to shift back to your senses, your head resting on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” was the first thing that came out of your lips once you found your breath. 

“Baby…” He shifted your bodies around, laying you down side by side facing each other. “It’s okay. I’m not angry at you.” He stroked your hair, smiling. “Well, just a little miffed. Now I finally understand why I’ve been having such a hard time recently.” You had to crack your own smile at the pun, breathing little laughs of appreciation. “Seriously! I thought something was wrong with me. I was considering a doctor’s appointment.”

“I’m sorry,” you mumbled again, although this time with the smile still painted on your face.

“There’s no need to apologize,” he insisted. “It’s actually kinda funny now that I know what’s been going on.” You only hummed in response, your eyes fluttering closed.

“Hey. Baby. You sleepy? It’s only four o’clock.” Jeno nudged gently at your cheek.

Your eyes remained closed as you answered, “You just fucked me boneless. I think I deserve a nap.”

“We have,” he peeked at the digital clock on the table behind you, “three hours and then I’m waking you up. It’s still our anniversary and I’m still taking you to dinner.”

“I said you just fucked me boneless. I don’t have the legs to go for dinner,” you whined.

“Don’t worry, I can always carry you on my back like a sack of potatoes.”

“Romantic.”

“Of course, it’s what you deserve.” He chuckled as he watched your lips part slightly, your breathing evening out as you drifted to sleep. “Happy three years, baby.”

You did, in fact, end up missing dinner. Jeno overestimated his own ability to overpower his love for sleep, and you ended up cuddling deep into the night, waking up in the dead silence of 1:00 a.m. and just going for another two rounds as there was nothing else to do. No one complained, though.

Hair up or hair down, Jeno was whipped either way when he woke up before you, the sunlight piercing through the curtains he forgot to draw back and landing on your face, making you look even more ethereal to him as you slept.

Seeing you first thing in the morning stirred a familiar riot in his chest, solidifying his dream, his ambition to have each day start out like this: with your peaceful, beautiful face before him. He had to tear his gaze away from you before his desires could escalate and stir a different kind of riot. He didn’t take it easy with you yesterday-last-night-this-morning, and he knew you were probably still aching and sore all over, so he was trying to think of all the unsexy thoughts to kill his oncoming boner. 

“Cute puppies. My little pony. Lee Donghyuck. Apoptosis or the death of the cell is characterized by its shrinkage, nuclear condensation, membrane—”

The mechanical chant in his head was disrupted by the feeling of your fingers smoothing his scrunched eyebrows. “You’re gonna give yourself wrinkles,” you greeted him, eyes only half open, smile beginning from one corner of your lip and slowly stretching out to the other.

Yeah. Jeno was completely, utterly whipped.

“Good morning,” he whispered, although the blinking digits told him it was already half past noon. “Come on, let’s eat.” He shook your shoulders gently just as your eyes began to close again, and you whined.

“Don’t wanna get up yet,” you complained. He chuckled, pressing a kiss to your forehead before he got up, deciding to cook something up and just bring it to you in bed. He was contemplating whether he needed to put clothes back on his nude self, and his answer came in the form of the doorbell buzzing.

He went out once fully dressed and opened the door to the guy who was just below My Little Pony on his boner killer scale.

“Donghyuck.”

“Jeno.”

The blonde stepped aside, allowing Donghyuck to come in with his hands full of… stuff.

“I see you’re still sporting the Chester McBadbat do,” Donghyuck commented, eyeing Jeno’s hair.

“I’ve no idea who that is, but I see you’re still unhinged as ever,” Jeno answered, gaze flitting between an impossible bag of marshmallows and a bouquet of assorted flowers.

“Babe?” Your voice floated through the hallway.

“Yeah?” Jeno replied.

“Yes, baby!” Donghyuck replied as well, but in a voice louder and more alive than Jeno’s, making the latter roll his eyes to the back of his head.

“Oh my god, Hyuckie!” Your footsteps tip-tapped on the wooden floor as you ran out to the receiving area and enveloped your best friend in a tight hug, making him drop the marshmallows but cling tight to the flowers.

“‘Don’t wanna get up’ my ass,” Jeno thought.

Donghyuck gave you a once over before saying, “Smells like orchids today.” Jeno looked at his bunch of flowers. Not a single orchid there, but he didn’t comment. He never did understand Donghyuck’s thing with flowers.

You snatched the flowers and marshmallows from him, giddy as you hopped away to the kitchen, both boys in tow behind you.

Three bowls of marbits, three glasses of orange juice, and the flowers watered in a new vase lay on the table you sat around.

“So, I’ve been thinking of growing my hair out. Whatchu think?” Hyuck asked. You were about to answer, but noticed he was looking at Jeno. Your boyfriend just shrugged in answer. “I think I will,” he continued as Jeno drank his orange juice. “Renjun said I’d look good with my hair tied up.” 

It was a few seconds of sputtering orange liquid and hacking coughs that ended with you rubbing soothingly on Jeno’s back while he stared blankly at an empty wall, your eyes glaring at Donghyuck’s direction.

“What! What’d I say?” He protested, a smirk on his lips. “Wait, I just noticed. Orange juice?”

[useless-englandfacts]

remembrance day seems like a good day to remember that in 1937 churchill rejected the arab wish to stop zionist jewish migration to palestine by saying:

I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, though he may have lain there for a very long time I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race or at any rate a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, 'American continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here'. They had not the right, nor had they the power.

[still-searching-for-something]

Today was Yom HaShoah, the day that Jews remember the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the industrialized genocide of the European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators from 1941-1945.

This is a really simple opening statement, but bear with me--I think it gets a lot more... 'yeah, buts' than most people may realize. And I think a good way of illuminating that is to break down the difference between how gentiles and Jews commemorate and remember it.

In my experience, gentiles seem to view the Holocaust as the ultimate example of mankind's barbarity to mankind. Like, the distillation of evil, the most obvious example of dehumanization and bigotry brought to its horrifying and extreme conclusion. They emphasize Nazi Germany's responsibility, elevate the instances of non-Jewish Frenchmen and Poles and Germans who made efforts to save Jewish lives, and generally view Nazi oppression as a catastrophe of whom Jews were one of many victims. And they emphasize the Allied Powers' role in ending it by liberating the camps and invading Germany. Hence why International Holocaust Remembrance Day falls on January 27th, the day Auschwitz was liberated.

But Jews have a different perspective.

We view the Holocaust as the most extreme manifestation of--but far from the conclusion to--mankind's barbarity to Jews. Not to his fellow man, per se, not to some universalized insert minority here slot, but to Jews, particularly and deliberately. The Nazis could never have accomplished their genocide were it not for the two millennia of anti-Jewish hatreds and dehumanization embedded deep in the institutions and political structures of European society. They didn't have to persuade Europe that the Jews were incurably evil, the Europeans already believed that. The Nazis had 99% of their work done before they'd even come to power, work that was done by the the Russian Empire, the Romans, Martin Luther, Christian Passion Plays, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the centuries of blood libels, the Fourth Lateran Council, the New Testament, the Spanish Empire, and on and on and on and on. It's as if some people think Hitler just woke up one day, out of the blue, with a total hatred of Jews and managed to use propaganda to convince the previously 100% tolerant Germans to hate Jews, too. Antisemitism did not begin or end with the Holocaust.

The sole responsibility of Nazi Germany in the Holocaust is also just... not true. Vichy France rounded up 13,152 Jews in the Vel' d'Hiv roundup, with not a single German participant, and sent them off to be murdered in Auschwitz. Vichy passed antisemitic legislation without any outside coercion--French Jews were hiding as much from the French police as they were from the Gestapo. France, of course, was the home of the Dreyfus Affair--antisemitism was and is a deep part of French society. And it isn't just France. Ukrainian nationalists participated in the Lviv pogroms, killing maybe around 8,000 Jews, Poles perpetrated the Jedwabne pogrom, and that doesn't even bring in that countries like the US, Switzerland and Ireland and Britain blocked Jewish emigrants, and I could just keep going on, but I think you get the point. Quite simply, six million Jews interspersed throughout Europe don't get murdered if it isn't without the collaboration of--or at minimum, silent assent and indifference--of all of their neighbors. The Nazis were the primary perpetrators of the Holocaust, of course, but almost all of Europe collaborated on some level, too. And this is a history that gets wiped away in favor of the comforting narrative of the Allied Powers bursting into Auschwitz, killing Nazis, and being horrified by what they've found, and then the poor people in the surrounding towns having NO IDEA about what had been going on. I think this narrative is why gentiles have International Holocaust Remembrance Day when Auschwitz was liberated--when they 'came to the rescue'--and why we have Yom HaShoah on the day in the Jewish calendar that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began--when we died on our own terms in spite of our murderers.

Think of the tiny, unwritten, centuries old minhagim of small Jewish shetls and towns like Trochenbrod, which were entirely annihilated. The end of the burgeoning Yiddish cinema. Yiddish going from 13 million speakers to 600,000 today. See how many entries in this list of shetls end with "town/city survived, but all/most Jews exterminated." Imagine for a moment, the potential rabbis and scholars and actors and scientists and artists who could have lived, had they survived or been born of Jews did. Three and a half million Polish Jews, to around 15,000 to 20,000 Polish Jews today. Imagine if Thessaloniki were still a majority Jewish city. How many Jews worldwide would be alive today had the Holocaust never happened? I've heard estimations of 32 million, compared to the real life 16 million. To kill such a massive number of people from an already tiny minority group--that has real consequences. The cultural loss for the Jewish people is staggering and beyond human comprehension.

And yet, the Nazis deliberate targeting of us is, in many ways, being pushed aside. Magnus Hirschfeld was gay, yes, and advanced the Institute of Sexology way ahead of its time and yeah, the Nazis were homophobic. But they were homophobic for antisemitic reasons. They viewed his work as Jewish perversions BECAUSE Dr. Hirschfeld was Jewish. In fact, they viewed homosexuality as a creation of the Jews. But so many progressive queer people, especially those who run in antizionist circles, seem to be trying to co-opt the Holocaust as being their trauma, downplaying Hirschfeld's Jewishness and holding the Institute up as proof that queer people were the 'real' victims of the Holocaust, entirely shutting out the millions of Jews, Sinti, Roma, and Slavs who were murdered. You can also see this in anti-mask conservatives comparing masking mandates during the pandemic to anti-Jewish legislation in the Holocaust, or the comparisons of the ongoing war against Hamas as being a 'modern day Holocaust.'

This phenomenon, Holocaust universalization, gets so much pushback from Jews for a reason--it downplays the anti-Jewish character of the Holocaust. It's softcore Holocaust denial. And it's so ridiculous we even have to say that, as the whole point of the Holocaust was to be anti-Jewish, to be the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question." It's 'All Lives Mattering' the Holocaust. Holocaust universalization, and Holocaust inversion--the phenomenon of talking about Jews, Zionists, or Israelis as perpetrating a 'new Holocaust'--minimizes and trivializes the astounding damage and traumas and death and destruction wrought by the Holocaust. It's a polemical lie, so incendiary and so insulting--imagine telling a sexual assault survivor that they're morally no better than their rapist--that the only thing it can be is antisemitic. It is beyond reprehensible to talk like that, but it's so mainstream and acceptable to do it. Activists who say these things need to examine their own rhetoric, because it's dangerous, antisemitic, and adjacent to Holocaust denial. Not a place I think anyone should want to be.

The Holocaust is not a lesson Jews should have learned, an educational seminar, a 'card' Jews play, a choose your own adventure novel, a philosophical meditation on the nature of mankind's evils, or an empty slate upon which to project modern politics, warfare, or your ideology onto.

The Holocaust is, quite simply, the industrialized genocide of the European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators from 1941-1945. And today was Yom HaShoah, the day we remember that.

[wordy-little-witch]

Okay but One Piece being in the pirate era and the lack of a frankly inordinate amount of sea shanties hurts me. Like you know DAMN well Roger was a partier, Buggy and Shanks undoubtedly know an incredible amount of shanties, from their first crews, from the new crews, from exploring and seeing and experiencing the world so thoroughly from such a young age.

Shanks would be the type to belt them, top of his lungs, but always adhere to the Codes, though he does think on it for a moment. People think he'd be a pirate head to toe, through and through, and he is! Truly, he is. He just doesn't really live by the Code and die by the Code the way some of the older generation does.

Buggy, despite popular belief, is the one to cling to those Codes with all he has. It's subtle, in the way he hums certain songs to himself but never sings the full lyrics without Meaning. He will sing and dance and party with his crew, they will make merry but they will do so properly. He's avant garde and nouveau expressionism but he's also old fashioned.

When he finds out Shanks taught this scrawny rubber twink everything the kid knows about piracy through sporadic meetings over a year, nearing a decade ago, he is absolutely livid. The swordsman is stupid but has a decent head on his shoulders for behavior. The redhead, from what he sees, knows more than most. He decides to put class in session.

He's surprised to be beaten so thoroughly and then furthermore to be removed succinctly. He's not gonna let it slide, obviously, but he'll play along. Sure. Could be fun. He was getting bored anyway.

Shit just so happens to hit the fan with this decision and all that follow. Shanks, knowing the truth of things, is simply VERY amused and Buggy is debating fratricide.

He's been playing this role for so long, it feels unnatural to drop it. It feels wrong. It makes him panic, makes him Itch.

It only comes to a head years later as he's humming to himself late in the evening on a certain day in September, having spent a good chunk of the day on his own, away from company and to the surprise of very few. Crocodile and Mihawk are among those who do not know why, but they alone are the ones to look for him.

Finding Buggy, singing softly to an animal as he gently brushes out their fur, surrounded by calm animals who seem to nearly build a wall with their bodies between himself and the world, was not anticipated to either men. Nor was hearing Buggy's voice, usually so shrill and rasped, flow gently over a melody with a grief filled expression. Ritchie, among the ones closest, gently head butted the clown with soulful eyes. Mihawk and Crocodile simply watch, seeing Buggy groom and pamper the creatures within the stables this far from town as he sings a specific sequence of songs.

Mihawk realizes first just what they're witnessing, and he grips the logia user's arm, guiding them both back. Crocodile, startled, goes to ask, and Hawkeyes simply shakes his head sharply. It is only once they are far enough that Mihawk breaths a stunned, "He's performing Rites."

"What?"

"Rites," the swordsman reiterates, sending the other a suspicious look. "The Rites of the Code."

The mafioso takes a drag from his cigar, gesturing for the other to go on.

Mihawk sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I forget," he remarks dryly, "how uneducated in ours ways you are."

"Excuse me-?!"

"Rites," the other interrupts, "are a form of mourning. Frequency varies, and the honoring actions can be altered as well. The constant component are the shanties sung in remembrance and the flags flown. For some, a single instance can be sufficient..." Golden eyes drift to the side, unfocused, as he continues. "For others, there is a need to continue doing so. Often, it is a crew mourning a commanding officer. Unlike Marines, Pirates all share an unspoken connection. Though paths may vary and goals may differ, we all care Her in our veins."

Violet eyes love to the expanse of blue, the horizon bleeding across the world. He knew. He may lack some of the nuance of the Code from his priorities laying further inland, but he knew this. How could he not when his own blood sang salted sprays? He knew this much at the very least.

"So the clown is in mourning."

"Yes."

".... why?"

"...... ....... it is September."

"And?"

"The 28th."

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"You were there, too, 25 years ago. Loguetown."

Silence falls.

The wind rustles branches overhead. It carries the faintest wisps of a voice. The two men pointedly ignore it and the choked quality it had.

".... I see."

"..... yes. That is my theory, at any rate."

"............. Hawkeye."

"What?"

"He was on the King's crew."

"Yes, this has been established."

"Why?"

"Whatever do you mean?"

"Why him? Why the clown? He's not even 40 yet, so that day... he'd have been, what, 15, at the most? He'd have been on the crew for years by that point. He was there before the man was crowned, after all."

"Shanks was, as well. I believe the earliest mention was when he mentioned an incident from their childhood. He'd said they were... oh, what was it? Seven? Thereabouts. To be on a crew so young..."

"To be there so long, Hawkeye. The brat would have been with them since childhood. That crew was infamous for the things they did - the clown does not fit the pattern."

"He does not boast anything nearing the decorum expected of a fledgling of a King..."

"He knows the Codes, something never mentioned to us nor taught explicitly to his crew that we know of. He served under the King and kept it hidden from the world government for decades. He escaped the Grandline and settled as an East Blue nuisance for years. He was imprisoned in Impel Down with no sea stone."

Golden eyes widen. "You believe he has been hiding more than simply his heritage."

"What makes more sense? This, or what we have thought so far."

"How would we confirm it?"

"Just ask me, maybe?"

Neither man will admit to being startled when a new voice chimes in, soft and hoarse, drowsy. Buggy leans into Ritchie's side as the lion purrs loudly, the clown rubbing his eye.

He continues. "Tomorrow, though. It's late, I'm not feeling well, and Ritch and I have a date with my blanket nest."

"The lion?" / "Blanket nest?"

Buggy giggles softly. "Weighted blankets are expensive. Weighted Ritchies only cost snacks and chin scritches," he remarks softly. "As for the blankets, nests are the way to go. Good night."

Two dark haired men are left by a drowsy clown and lion in the woods on the edge of town with much to thing on and a list to compile for the next day.

The first question? How Mihawk had not sensed him whatsoever on approach.

[yuellii]

FLOWERS, ONE TO MY REMEMBRANCE.

scaramouche / gn reader, merry christmas @adiluv :)

“I’m called the Wanderer.”

He speaks these words with a lightened, innocent charm. A sparkling crinkle in his eyes so unadulterated and wholehearted. The Wanderer’s voice is like a new baby’s breath to this old, torn world.

And you—there’s electric in your heart, and a strum of curiosity stemming from your heartstrings to your brain. A smile so unknowing and hypnotic in the way it sends butterflies to his stomach in mere instances. In all the years he’s spent wandering the seven regions and the seven elements, he truly believe he has not felt love until this moment.

With your eyes so new and so kind upon him, oh, he might’ve truly found the purpose of the heavens within you.

“I’m called the Wanderer.”

He speaks these words with a curious type of stunned silence. He’s enchanted in a way, a feeling wherein he can feel his knees begin to crumble at the mere sight of the details of your face. The Wanderer feels weak, as if he’s falling in love at first sight.

“The Wanderer…” you ponder quietly.

He feels his cheeks flare up at your voice. His lips feel glued together once he hears you speak for the first time, completely taken aback from the hypnotic aura you radiate. By laws of nature, he feels like a moth to your flame in which he, as a wandering soul of old, feels he can truly find you in every universe.

“I’m called the Wanderer.”

A bitter taste resides on his tongue.

You turn to look at him, and he feels this uncanny sense of familiarity within the depths of your eyes. The soul in them: he suddenly feels as if he’s stared at it a million times before.

He’s thinking of crumbling away about now.

“The Wanderer…” The taste of his title on your tongue, the sound of your voice—all of it falls unbearably recognizable. He can feel his breath catch short within the cages of his lungs, however it is not one he desired. Somehow, he feels as if this improper breathing should’ve been soul-crushing in a way that was loving, and not the blatant fear that suddenly settles in the taut tightropes of his beating heart. “Have we…” you voice out, the sound of each word stealing more of his airflow away from his lifeline. “Have we met before?”

The rising intonation at the end of your sentence sends a shiver to his spine when he processes your words. He feels clammy, sweaty; but he’s made of wood—he shouldn’t sweat? He shouldn’t be feeling like this? But you were no evil, no… So he should not be filled with this sense of hesitant alarm.

“No…” says he, reluctantly so. “Not that I know of.” He attempts to say this gulping with confidence, however he fails in this aspect—in fact, he sounds as if he is nervous, speaking with shaky breaths. It was clear that even he himself did not believe his own words. No, not that I know of; and yet he felt like he’s known you for every previous life.

“That’s so odd,” you miss, finger quite innocently falling upon your bottom lip in ponderance. “I can swear I’ve seen you somewhere before, but I cannot currently recall…”

He coughed. “You must be mistaken.”

What originally drew him to you like a moth to a flame now killed him. And he felt near-death in this moment; a sensation in which he feels he should run far away from you, no matter how clueless you seem right now. All that mattered was that he recognized you in a way that felt dangerous, like it should not be happening.

He excuses him, and runs off at your confusion.

“I knew I’d find you here. Luckily so soon, too.”

Kunikuzushi, or Scaramouche—not that he could bother to care much right now—whipped his head around in horrific shock. The Dendro Archon stood there right at his tail, looking up at his disgruntled eyes in disappointment.

“Do you know who you are right now?” she continues, approaching so calmly. His startled fingers ball to fists in frustration, glaring at her from the side of his face with his back turned in what seemed like anger. But only Nahida knew, truly: he was more than ashamed now. “Am I speaking to the Wanderer, or who you really are?”

He scoffs. “Has anyone ever told you how annoying your questions are?” he insults, much unlike the Wanderer.

“Oh, so it sounds like you remember everything,” the Archon states. Her tone is almost one of giggling, yet she does not make much haste when approaching him. There is no ridicule or spite in her words, her voice instead much sounding like a caring older sister getting ready to scold him. “That’s good. Makes my job easier.”

“What do you want from me,” he commands from her.

She walks without a hop or skip in her step; there no playfulness in her approach, just a slow resolve. He isn’t sure how much longer he can eye her as she comes forth—his heart is racing right now, and he needs to stop it desperately so. He is but a puppet: he is not familiar nor is he fond of this suspenseful feeling.

“Well,” she started, finally standing still next to him, “we both know why you’re here, standing right in front of Irminsul.” He flinches at her words. “How many times has it been now, Wanderer? Five? Forty? Hundreds?”

“That’s none of your business,” he snarls at her, turning his face away. But still, he stands ashamed, balling his fists constantly as if he hoped his nails would break his inhuman palms until they impossibly bled. “It isn’t my fault, you know.”

She hummed. He wanted to punch her from this sound alone—she should not assume she knows his reasonings as well as he himself does. “But as a man who is a new human”—he feels himself almost hurl from the lecture—“you need to learn how to handle human issues in a human way.”

“But no matter what, I am not human,” he tells her. “This is all I know to do.”

“Erasing yourself over and over again is not the answer, I fear, Wanderer.” And this is where she almost giggles at him, and he feels more embarrassed, converted to anger. But he could not deny this. He could not deny that he was stupidly resetting the world and it’s memory of him.

Stupidity, unfortunately, was his opinionated best shot.

“Just one more.” It was like a beg. “Just one more, because I was seen.”

“I’m called the Wanderer.”

You looked at him surprised, and he hid his face under his hat in embarrassment. You immediately notice how his stance is completely changed from before, demeanor like shifted to a different person.

“Oh!” you notice surely. “You’re back—you left so abruptly earlier…”

He somehow feels more ashamed than before. This was his millionth first-meeting with you by now, and somehow the most humiliating one. There was something about meeting you like this every time—being erased of his own memories by himself, slowly remembering his own memories, and crying out because he’s entangled himself with you once more. And that’s when he breaks down, and resets the world all before the Dendro Archon catches him.

And now, here he was, standing here like a middle schooler forced by his mother to apologize to a girl he liked.

“Sorry…” he seethe through gritted teeth. He really isn’t sure how to continue this conversation with you. In his own head, he has all these memories of your first relationship, and of all these first meetings, and you… You were just meeting him like a stranger.

But when you look at him all the same, a different sense of familiarity in your eyes… He feels it may be different this time.

And, he might just allow himself to love you now.

MERRY CHRISTMAS I LOVE YEWWW

[seneon]

SENATION LORE PART 4: THE ACCUSED WITCHES.

📍 set in salem witch trials au ( year 1600s )

A LONG LOONNNGNGGG TIME AGO in the 16th century, there lived a society of women. all intelligent and beautiful. it was led by sen, the mastermind of the secret underground society which nobody knew of. lady sen and her girl club is always trying to fight for themselves. for freedom of women.

however one day... lady sen met a handsome young nobleman named @luvlyycy. they fell in love and my, oh my! did intimate and affectionate things together 😳😳 what a beautiful couple they are... sir luvlyycy even promised to buy lady sen a whole land as a promise to marry her!

little did the lady knew... he's an evil man... the nobleman only wanted lady sen's attention because she is simply soooo wonderful and beautiful and amazingful. until one day he found she led a society of intelligent women in secret.

golly gee, do you know what sir luvlyycy did? well, he reported it to the officials! so many women who are gathered together is simply impossible. there was no way women are smarter than he is. he couldn't take it. so then he took lady sen court.

"she is a witch for summoning smart women together!" @o-sachi exclaimed, sir luvlyycy's lawyer, trying to get the judges to set a final decision that lady sen is a witch. "she speaks of the devil, sir!!"

"i am NAWT a witch! that damn nobleman accused me of being one!!" sen exclaimed in protest to prove herself innocent.

"cease talking this instance! we will discuss about this matter and judge her accordingly." judge @bbluefllame claimed.

"we have concluded that women with brains are incomprehensible and unobtainable. therefore, this woman here is in fact... a witch!" judge @haunted4kent concluded.

"for her to gather so many intelligent women in a secret women society is a crime. her punishment will be burning at a stake!" finalised @bbluefllame as lady sen fell on the ground and began her wailing, the crowd wreaking havoc.

soon, before lady sen was taken to the site of execution, a local priest @hyoismbbg had offered a time of repentance for the accused witch. "but i have nothing to repent! i am not a witch!" sen exclaimed as the priest proceeded with the confession anyways... he just didn't want to lose his job and leave a criminal hanging lol. what a nice priest.

soon, lady sen along with her two other most loyal ladies of the society, @saewako, @rueclfer, and a random burnt baby which we will call dabi, all joined together to burn at the stake for a crime they did not commit.

at lady sen's last breath, she cursed the nobleman for accusing her. and with that, she and her ladies all melted, along with burnt baby dabi. and they ceased to exist, another collection of victims added to the salem witch trials.

will lady sen be reincarnated for revenge? we will find out in three months.

STARRING. @saewako @hyoismbbg @raeson @piichuu @sweetheartsaku @elssero @marushoto @choccorin @loveriotss @luvlyycy @sunolls @haunted4kent @bbluefllame @ryescapades @o-sachi @sepptember @cindol @kasiers @kazuhaiku @lunatiqez @laughingfcx @rueclfer @azlumire

part one. part two. part three.

note. omg part four is out!! made in remembrance of halloween and my love for the salem witch trials. also first part of the sensation lore where sen is a female. it's crazy..

[girlactionfigure]

by design

INTRODUCTION

Since the October 7 massacre, antisemitism worldwide has skyrocketed to levels reminiscent of the eve of the rise of the Nazis. Dozens of synagogues around the world have been firebombed or set on fire. A 12-year-old Jewish girl was raped in France on account of her Jewishness; another French Jewish woman was allegedly kidnapped and raped “to avenge Palestine.” A pro-Palestinian protestor killed a 69-year-old Jewish man in Los Angeles. An ISIS-supporting teenager stabbed a 50-year-old Jewish man in Zurich, leaving him in critical condition. A San Diego Jewish dentist was murdered under suspicious circumstances. Protestors have defaced Holocaust memorials, nearly lynched Israel’s 20-year-old Eurovision participant, the mother of an Israeli female hostage had to be rescued from a pro-Palestine mob in New York City, protestors disrupted a memorial walk at Auschwitz on the Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the list goes on and on…

In 2017, the white supremacist Unite the Right Rally, during which participants exclaimed “Jews will not replace us,” drew widespread condemnation from the left. Yet today, day after day, thousands march in main western cities, including New York City, proudly displaying the flags of Hamas, Hezbollah, and even the Houthis, whose banner proclaims “a curse upon the Jews,” and the left hardly bats an eye. Worse, we are gaslit. We are told that these are merely “ceasefire” or “anti-war” protests. We are told “a few bad apples” don’t represent the movement. We are told we are blowing things out of proportion, or that their hateful actions are valid because of X, Y, and Z. 

But these are not a few bad apples or fringe extremists. I don’t doubt that the vast majority of people worldwide who feel solidarity with Palestinians are not genocidal Jew-haters. But the antisemitism that we see coming from the pro-Palestine crowd is not a fluke. It’s not a coincidence. It’s not an exaggeration, a distortion, or a lie. 

It’s by design. It’s, unfortunately, what this movement was designed to do from its inception, to the detriment of Jews, Palestinians, and Israelis alike. 

THE LONG LEGACY OF DHIMMITUDE 

To really understand what’s going on, we have to go back in time to 637 CE. Following Muhammad’s death in 632, the Arab Islamic empires conquered lands exponentially quickly. As a result of this rapid colonization, the Muslim authorities were faced with the “problem” of how to handle the conquered Indigenous peoples that resisted conversion to Islam.

This “problem” was solved with a treaty known as the Pact of Umar. This so-called treaty allowed select religious and cultural minorities, known as dhimmis, or “People of the Book,” to practice their beliefs so long as they paid the “jizya” tax and abided by a set of restrictive, second-class citizenship laws. 

In other words, to survive, Jews had two choices: pay a tax or convert to Islam. But the system of dhimmitude didn’t end there. Jews faced a myriad of second-class restrictions. For instance, Jews could not govern, lead, or employ Muslims. Jews could not join the military or work for the government. When harmed by a Muslim, Jews had to purchase Muslim witnesses, which left Jews with virtually no legal recourse. 

You may think that dhimmitude, which was only abolished in 1856, is too long ago, too far removed from the conflict and the Palestinians of today. But it isn’t. That’s not how history works. Fast forward to the beginnings of the twentieth century and political Zionism. Palestinian Arabs, the majority of whom were Muslim, might not have held any ill will toward Jews. But they were accustomed to a certain social structure, in which Muslims dominated and Jews and other religious minorities were second-class citizens. The “threat” of Zionism challenged this structure. Jews were fine, so long as they knew their place. Once Jews started asking for more, well, that became a problem. 

THE FORMER DHIMMIS

In 1916, the British promised the Arabs a unified Arab state in Greater Syria, which included Palestine. A year later, the British issued the Balfour Declaration, which stated that “His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

It’s worth noting that the British did not yet occupy Palestine at the time either of these promises were made. To the Arabs, the Balfour Declaration reneged the earlier promise made to them, whereas the British argued that it, in fact, did not. After all, the Balfour Declaration never specified the exact nature of this Jewish homeland. 

Up until 1917, the vast majority of Arabs in Palestine, save for the higher classes, had never heard of Zionism. To prevent any sort of Jewish homeland from ever coming to fruition, the Palestinian Arab leadership, led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, had to mobilize the masses. So what did he do? He incited antisemitic violence, by disseminating the conspiracy that the Jews intended to take over Temple Mount. This incitement resulted in a series of antisemitic massacres, most notably, the 1929 Hebron Massacre. 

A couple of things are telling about these massacres. First, the language that was used. At the 1920 Nebi Musa riots, Muslim Arabs ravaged the Jewish community in Jerusalem, chanting “Palestine is ours!” and “the Jews are our dogs!” Second, if al-Husseini’s problem truly was Zionism, he could’ve incited violence against the new Zionist communities that had been established over the previous decades. Instead, however, this violence almost exclusively targeted the oldest continuous Jewish communities in Palestine, in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and more. The threat of autonomous Jews prompted Palestinian Arabs to attack their very own neighbors, the former dhimmis.

SEEDS OF CONFLICT 

Today, Palestinians certainly have many legitimate human rights grievances against Israel. But up until the 1930s, when the Zionist paramilitary Irgun carried the first Zionist retaliatory attacks against Arabs, this just wasn’t the case. The Zionist movement purchased lands legally. As a matter of official policy, the Zionists avoided purchasing lands occupied by Palestinian farmers. 

The 1937 Peel Commission corroborated this, stating: “Much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamp and uncultivated when it was purchased.” In 1931, the British created a register for landless Arabs; only 664 Arabs out of a total of nearly 900,000 met the criteria. 

It’s worth noting that the Ottoman Empire had restricted Jewish land purchases. Once again, Zionist land purchases upset the previously existing social order, in which Jews were tolerated so long as they stayed in line. 

In fact, Haj Muhammad Said al-Husseini, the Mufti of Gaza, admitted as much in 1948, when he issued a fatwa stating that “Zionism has created a reality in which Jews have forgotten they are dhimmis.” A similar fatwa had been issued in 1935. 

What’s happening today is not at all shocking considering the earliest Palestinian violent “resistance” to Zionism was, to put it plainly, resistance to Jews. In 1937, when Haj Amin al-Husseini was asked whether he would be willing to absorb the 400,000 Jews already residing in Palestine into a future singular Palestinian Arab state, he plainly said, “No,” and implied that they would be expelled. Of course, he also rejected any partition of the land between Arabs and Jews. In other words, Haj Amin al-Husseini rejected the very existence of Jews in Palestine regardless of the political arrangement. 

Their problem wasn’t just with Zionism. From day one, their problem was with Jews. So is it any surprise Jews today are being terrorized around the world in the name of Palestine?

ionist land purchases did not displace Palestinians. As a matter of policy, the Zionist movement avoided purchasing lands occupied by fellahin, or Palestinian farmers. This is corroborated by the 1937 Peel Commission, which noted, “Much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamp and uncultivated when it was purchased.”

But up until 1936, when the Irgun, the right-wing Zionist paramilitary group, carried the first Zionist retaliatory attacks against Arabs, this wasn’t the case. Land purchases 

"His Majesty's government has been faced with an irreconcilable conflict of principles. For the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine." 

British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, 1947

SKEWED PRIORITIES

Time and time again from its inception, the Palestinian “resistance” has prioritized the murder of Jews over their own national aspirations. Between 1939-1947, the Palestinian Arab leadership rejected a number of iterations of a “one state solution” with an Arab majority on account of the fact that said state would have too many Jews or afford Jews too much autonomy. 

The original 1964 charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization is telling. In 1964, the charter explicitly stated, “This Organization [the PLO] does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, in the Gaza Strip, or the Himmah area.” In other words, the PLO’s main aim was the destruction of Israel, as opposed to self-determination for the Palestinian people living under the occupation of two different Arab nations. It was only in 1968, shortly after Israel captured those territories during the Six Day War, that their charter was amended to include Gaza and the West Bank.

The pattern has continued. In the early 1990s, when Israel and the PLO pursued a peace process known as the Oslo Accords, Yasser Arafat, al-Husseini’s protege and chairman of the PLO, gave an address at a Johannesburg mosque where he assured the worshippers that this peace agreement was merely a “tactical step” in the ultimate goal to annihilate Israel. 

Among the most heard chants at pro-Palestine protests today are a number of variations of “globalize the intifada,” but the intifadas drastically deteriorated the quality of life of Palestinians. The checkpoints and the West Bank wall, for example, were erected in response to the intifadas.There is absolutely no strategic reason in calling for an intifada if the concern is truly Palestinian human rights. The only reason to call for an intifada is if what you wish to prioritize is the murder of Jews. 

In the 1960s, Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giáp advised Arafat to "…stop talking about annihilating Israel and instead turn your [Arafat's] terror war into a struggle for human rights." But the fact remains: Arafat, and his successors, continued to prioritize Israel’s destruction over Palestinian human rights. 

rootsmetals

[burningvelvet]

moby dick analysis on ahab & starbuck

thinking about how starbuck's father and brother died at sea (chap 26) from whaling and it's mentioned that his brother's limbs were torn apart and it's easily inferrable that he has post-grief PTSD/depression but as a poor nantucketer probably has no other way of earning a living for his wife and young son. so he has to cope with his job despite the traumatic, triggering nature of it. he copss by being the best at his job, by being extraordinarily cautious and careful in all tasks while not compromising his natural strength, and he's adamant at protecting everyone — even those, like ahab, who do not want it.

From the first description of Starbuck, chapter 26:

"Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all mortally practical occasions. Besides, he thought, perhaps, that in this business of whaling, courage was one of the great staple outfits of the ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly wasted. Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales after sun-down; nor for persisting in fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting him. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill whales for my living, and not to be killed by them for theirs; and that hundreds of men had been so killed Starbuck well knew. What doom was his own father’s? Where, in the bottomless deeps, could he find the torn limbs of his brother?

With memories like these in him, and, moreover, given to a certain superstitiousness, as has been said; the courage of this Starbuck which could, nevertheless, still flourish, must indeed have been extreme. But it was not in reasonable nature that a man so organized, and with such terrible experiences and remembrances as he had; it was not in nature that these things should fail in latently engendering an element in him, which, under suitable circumstances, would break out from its confinement, and burn all his courage up. And brave as he might be, it was that sort of bravery chiefly, visible in some intrepid men, which, while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man.

But were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance, the complete abasement of poor Starbuck's fortitude, scarce might I have the heart to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose the fall of valour in the soul."

but then starbuck gets stuck as the second-in-command to captain ahab who already nearly died after losing a limb to a whale and also has a wife and young son on nantucket and also has PTSD/depression due to sea/whaling related grief and they have a connection and starbuck is the only person who ahab actually obeys. arguably he empathizes most via his relationship with pip, the only other person he really connects with, but for all his inability to trust or respect anyone, starbuck is the only one he remotely allows to contradict him or comes close to seeing as a worthy of his regard (chaps 109, 130).

but whereas we're told starbuck's trauma makes him more careful & reasonable (chap 26) ahab's trauma makes him more reckless & vengeful (chap 41). but they're both given to superstition because they've both been wracked by fear and tragedy. they both have common sentiments even though they also butt heads not unfrequently.

and we don't get to see starbucks reaction or opinions on ahab denying to help the captain of rachel — a father looking for his two missing sons lost at sea (chap 128) — but it's very interesting that starbuck's own father lost his two sons on the sea, and that starbuck and ahab both note that between the two of them they have two sons which they bond over.

the tragedy of how in chap 132 starbuck seeks to comfort a crying ahab but then has to walk away because ahab clearly won't listen to him — and then how in chap 135 it's starbuck who is crying before ahab and ahab toss starbuck away from him as he leaves him!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ahab crying, chap 132:

"From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop. Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side; and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing that stole out of the centre of the serenity around. Careful not to touch him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there."

Starbuck walking away from Ahab when he realizes Ahab refuses to take responsibility for his actions and instead blames fate for his own destructive behavior (or, that Ahab is really being driven by fate, depending on your interpretation & personal beliefs, & whether you think his is a matter of self-fulfilling prophecy or real prophecy), chap 132:

"'What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. [..] —Starbuck!'

But blanched to a corpse’s hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away."

Starbuck crying & pleading toward the very end, chap 135:

"Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck’s tears the glue.

“Oh, my captain, my captain!—noble heart—go not—go not!—see, it’s a brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!”

“Lower away!”—cried Ahab, tossing the mate’s arm from him. “Stand by the crew!”

In an instant the boat was pulling round close under the stern.

“The sharks! the sharks!” cried a voice from the low cabin-window there; “O master, my master, come back!”

But Ahab heard nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then; and the boat leaped on."

From the first description of Starbuck, chapter 26:

"Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds."

Starbuck's last words as he tries to save the ship which Ahab left him in charge of, chapter 135:

“The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye sweet powers of air, now hug me close! Let not Starbuck die, if die he must, in a woman’s fainting fit. Up helm, I say—ye fools, the jaw! the jaw! Is this the end of all my bursting prayers? all my life-long fidelities? Oh, Ahab, Ahab, lo, thy work. Steady! helmsman, steady. Nay, nay! Up helm again! He turns to meet us! Oh, his unappeasable brow drives on towards one, whose duty tells him he cannot depart. My God, stand by me now!”

He instructs the men to be steady as he is defined by his own steadfastness, a synonym of loyalty; in other words he is bound by duty, but he nevertheless blames Ahab for making this end his duty. His feelings are strong and he's on the verge of "a woman's fainting fit" but he nevertheless instructs himself to be calm and stoic. He detaches from himself, referring to himself in the third-person, and is resolved to die "if he must." He hates his job, but he does it to the best of his abilities anyway. He hates what his life has become, but he lives it anyway.

And to come back to that one paragraph in chapter 26 wherein we have the first description of Starbuck:

"But were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance, the complete abasement of poor Starbuck's fortitude, scarce might I have the heart to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose the fall of valour in the soul."

This seems to leave it ambiguous (but so intentional ambiguous that it admits to a certain level of probability) as to whether or not, as we learn from Starbucks own fears, he actually lost his calm in the end and died in "a woman's fainting fit." Aside from Fedallah and Ahab, the specifics of the sailors deaths aren't really alluded to. The dead crew mates are given a certain level of privacy and respect because Ishmael consciously protects them. To requote his words on Starbuck and show how they may apply to all of the Pequod's crew (but most especially Starbuck, one of the most stoic characters, who thus begged this description):

"But were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance, the complete abasement of [the men of the Pequod's collective] fortitude, scarce might I have the heart to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose the fall of valour in the soul."

As an aside, Queequeg isn't given a lot of focus in the end. He isn't given a lot of focus in the middle either, because he and Ishmael sort of grew apart, but I think it's maybe telling of how Queequeg's death may have upset Ishmael too much to even mention it (same with Pip perhaps).

[girls--complex]

Do you have any advice on how someone should pray, individually or otherwise? I’ve been to Quaker meetings in the past but they make me so anxious for one reason or another. Should I just suck it up and keep trying?

Hai Anon, held U in the light today

Recurring anxiety during Contemplation is a pretty common experience furst of all, so ur not alone...

I would encourage you to find some spiritual guidance IRL. Either an actual meditation teacher or clergy or something or just a kindly elder to confide in. It's good to have a longitudinal conversation about this because different things will likely come up and different pointsin the journey. If you are very inhibited your nervous system needs social permission to access new consciousness. It's also good if they can get a multi sensory read on you. It's even better if they can consciously respond to your embodiment because fear lives in the body. Actually Buddhists tend to be really good at that if you're comfortable going there.

Compassionate and accessible resources can be found via the Center for Action and Contemplation (ecumenical, Franciscan theology) as well as Buddhist meditation teacher Pema Chodron ("getting unstuck")

My prayer life = clinging to remote fellowship with God constantly against being dragged into lifeless caenality. Remembrance of God's bottomless delight in creation. Openness 2 the channel... openness 2 myself in the world.. the defenseleness of incarnation. Youre always permeated or penetrated or saturated in this way. Discomfort doesn't always mean something is wrong. It *can* mean that something is wrong or it can mean that something is very right.

"Sucking it up," because there is a grit to holding, for instance and especially fear and not engaging in the usual shutdown or mythologies (fear is also very strongly impressed in my body), but more actually yielding, bending in the wind, untangling knots of resistance (impiety), letting the energy move thru U and pass. It is like passing a bladder stone or something. Actually it's crucifixion lol... c v c x v .... receptive and yielding grit, the toughness, actually the almightiness of divine Vulnerability

We have an animal instinct for how to allow physical pain through the body, by pacing, breath, shaking off, whatever, emotional pain functions similarly (arguably a class of physical pain). You may need help with this embodiment in some way? Even though a contemplative may sit still there is usually an intentional and structured embodied technique... as in zazen, they breathe and sit with intention at every step. But there is also pacing, dancing,intoning, quaking 🫨 tantra... and you can find a teacher in these things or discover them yourself. There's advantages and disadvantages to self direction.

Guidance to what to look for maybe or maybe not because I have so little information from you and so little of my own experience..........

best of luck friend

[eretzyisrael]

Dion J. Pierre

The lawsuit dismisses concerns about rising antisemitism at Penn, describing efforts to eradicate it as a conspiracy by “billionaire donors, pro-Israel groups, other litigants, and segments of the media” to squelch criticism of Israel and harm Arab students and academics. It also castigates the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, calling it a tool of a “militant minority which believes that Israel can do no wrong.” The IHRA definition and its use by the House Education and Workforce Committee in its investigation into antisemitism at Penn, the lawsuit continues, is “unconstitutional” and part of a larger plan of a “‘social engineering movement to repeal the First Amendment.”

If successful in disrupting Congress’s investigation into Penn, the lawsuit could conceal from lawmakers, and thereby the public, evidence indicating that Fakhreddine — who has praised Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel as a “new way of life” — and other Penn officials involved in organizing “Palestine Writes” intentionally invited antisemitic speakers to campus.

Held in September, the “Palestine Writes Literature Festival” outraged Jewish community members, as well as non-Jewish leaders and lawmakers, for its inclusion of anti-Zionists who have weaponized classic antisemitic tropes to undermine support for Israel. Speakers listed on the event’s initial itinerary included University of Gaza professor Refaat Alareer, who said in 2018, “Are most Jews evil? Of course they are,” and Salman Abu Sitta, who once said in an interview that “Jews were hated in Europe because they played a role in the destruction of the economy in some of the countries, so they would hate them.”

Roger Waters, the former Pink Floyd frontman, was also a scheduled speaker. Last year, a documentary revealed fellow musicians detailing Waters’ long record of anti-Jewish barbs. In one instance, a former colleague recalled Waters at a restaurant yelling at the wait staff to “take away the Jew food.”

By the time former Penn president Elizabeth M. Magill — who resigned in December — appeared before the House Education and Workforce Committee on Dec. 5 to testify about her handling of the event — which included refusing to cancel it — anti-Zionist protests at the university amid the Israel-Hamas war had descended into demagoguery and intimidation of Jewish students, as activists berated pro-Israel counter-protesters for condemning Hamas’ Oct. 7 onslaught.

[jackgoodfellow]

"Grace" here is being used not in the Christian sense, but rather to broadly refer to the incredible power of human kindness, patience, and love. ❤

High-res closeups:

high-res full image (Google Drive link)

Flower language (or at least the flower language I am using):

Forget-me-nots: these little blue flowers are symbols of memory and remembrance, as well as true love, devotion, and, occasionally, senility

Baby's breath: these tiny white flowers symbolize new beginnings, everlasting love, freedom from corruption, happiness, and thankfulness

Dandelions: A cursory google search says these flowers represent "hope, healing, and resilience," which is apt. But I've included them here as a reference to their symbolism in Fionna & Cake. In this illustration, the field of dandelion puffs that Simon wakes up in at the end of the show has become a field of yellow dandelion flowers.

More analysis, if you're into that kind of thing:

1. I'm never going to get over the fact that Simon saved Marceline for no other reason than to save a child who needed his help, and in doing so - in showing up for his adopted daughter not just once but constantly and for YEARS - he basically saved the world. I think it was a brilliant move to use the narrative to further validate his actions in "The Star" episode of Fionna & Cake.

Marceline is the narrative opposite of Dean and Sam Supernatural.

2. Kindness has a way of spreading and coming back to us in ways we could never predict, which is one reason why I'm ALSO never going to get over how Simon saving Marceline eventually led to Marceline convincing Finn and Jake (and BMO and even Bubblegum) to be more empathetic to the Ice King, who becomes way safer and happier once he is not isolated in his madness.

Finn's kindness towards Simon, both before and after being cured, is a huge deal to me. It's a vital part of his character growth, and I like that Fionna had a parallel moment of growth with the Candy Queen.

Like, yes, it is big and important that Betty saved Simon. But what she couldn't do is love him in his madness. She was unable to love him if it didn't also cure him, and this destroyed her.

And so it is beautiful to me that because of Marcy and her friends, Simon was not left to suffer alone in the darkest depths of his senility. And I really love all the ways the show demonstrates how this deeply affected him even if it didn't make him remember who he was.

I believe this kindness shown to Ice King led to him having the confidence to stand up for himself and accidentally save the world AGAIN when Betty tries to kill everyone to "save" Simon in the Elementals finale because GOD FORBID WOMEN DO ANYTHING.

(Betty is our problematic Queen, and I absolutely love how she's written. The CW could NEVER. The MCU would sooner DIE. 90% of all prestige dramas can only DREAM of having such a complex and dynamic female character.)

3. And finally, there is that most recent and possibly most vital instance of grace of all in Simon's story: the kindness, patience, and forgiveness that he finally learns to start showing to himself.

Simon's is a tale of people being kinder than they have to be and the way that changes everything. I am extremely grateful that his story culminates in him learning that kindness and self-sacrifice are NOT the same thing, and that he deserves his own kindness as much as if not more than everyone else.

[trancylovecraft]

(KNY) YANDERE PLATONIC! KOKUSHIBO x SISTER READER: You, Shibou. I, Kokoro (CHAPTER SIX)

Previous Chapter ☆♡☆ Masterlist ☆♡☆ Next Chapter

AO3 link

CHAPTER SIX: "Loathe the way they light candles in Rome But love the sweet air of the votives"

The response to fear or threats has several reactions, Often being called the Fight-Flight-Freeze-Fawn response.

Fight means to confront the threat. Flight means to run away from the threat Freeze means to shut down and block out the threat Fawn means to appease the threat.

Slow and cautious footsteps walked carefully down the hallway as if something was going to jump out at her any second. Shoulders tense, Her eyes travelled around the space in front of her.

It was the shrine hallway. Dimly lit. Hues of marine tinting the walls, ceilings and floorboards as she stalked along them, Okobo sandals clacking against the hardwood as she did.

[F/N]'s hand trailed along the wall beside her, Keeping close towards it.

She had woken up about half an hour ago, Tucked into the futon she had woken up from before with a throbbing migraine and aching legs.

[F/N] had lain there on the mattress, The memories of what happened some unknown time ago still fresh in her mind. She had tried to escape, She had gotten far too. Running for ages yet despite all her efforts it didn't matter in the end.

[F/N] had just wound up right back where she started. Her burning lungs, Beating heart and exhaustion. It was obsolete. She had just gone in a loop with all her effort gone to waste.

And him. Her captor and his insane ramblings, She didn't want to think about him.

She didn't get up for a while after that. Finding little to no motivation to do so coupled with her mind barely processing the information in her mind, Feeling as if she had been shackled to the frame. Like the bedding was trying to keep her down, To not let go. Feeding her false promises of ignorant bliss, Like it was just any other day back at the Kakushi base.

But [F/N] knew that was not the case.

She knew she had to get up eventually, It was an awful remembrance. Even worse when she eventually hauled her aching body off the futon, Swinging her tired legs over the frame and dragging herself out of the room.

[F/N] just wanted to go back to her bed, To crawl under the covers and never get out again. But to spite everything she so desired. [F/N] pulled herself out anyways, Not really knowing why.. Maybe to get a proper look at her birdcage, Perhaps.

The shrine was nigh identical to the one she had resided in before. From the hallway layouts, The group kitchens and to the library it was kept the almost the same to the one back in the real world. The keyword here being almost.

Everything was the same. Everything except a few key differences.

For one, The shrine didn't have any of the expansions the corps had built when they came. There wasn't any of the newer passages, There wasn't an aviary and the library was much smaller than it was.

Even then, [F/N] recognised this place. It was the older version of the shrine, The same once she had stumbled across when she was much younger. How it was here in this nightmare dimension was a mystery to her, It just added to the dogpile of questions she had spinning around in her head. One's she'd need to find the answer to later.

Two, While it was basically identical to the older version of the shrine, There was also a few changes of layout.

Some of it was small, Like a misplaced support beam or tapestries being of different patterns and shapes. On the other hand however, The differences were more.. Large.

For instance the wall she was trailing her fingers across wasn't like any the shrine had harboured. It was like wooden jacktop fencing, A criss-cross structure with diamond shapes as gaps letting spits of light through, An unknown source but one that wasn't aquamarine. A welcome change

Another was the shrine walls, The large stone fortress and the big mahogany gates separating the main building from the outside world were completely gone. Disappeared as if they were never there.

Lastly was the courtyard. Instead of compacted and smooth dirt as flooring it was replaced with a wide open port, Like something large ships would anchor down at but rather one that connected all the docks outside to it like the base of the tree and it's roots.

With both the courtyard and the walls gone it left just the shrine on its own, All by itself in this infinite sea.

But the one thing that ate away at her, The one thing that made the entire shrine feel so wrong in the first place. It was the emptiness.

There were no Kakushi or shrine maidens passing through the hallways, Their conversations and laughter ringing down the passage.

It was instead being replaced by cobwebs and their spiders, Scuttling quietly in the dark corners.

The libraries? Cold and dust-ridden. The kitchens were barren, Dirty and uncared for. Everything was old and seemed to fall apart. It was disgusting and [F/N] couldn't deny the pang it sent straight towards her heart.

[F/N] felt like her situation still hadn't registered in her mind, The entire thing scrambled in pieces. It was so overwhelming, This wasn't real. This can't be.

[F/N] stopped in the middle of the passage. Leaning up against the jacktop walls as her hand gripped the side of her jinbei, Hand over her heart as she tried to steady her breathing. Telling her everything would be alright.

Head leaned back as she calmed the rhythm of her lungs, She clenched her hands tight to feel the soft feeling of fibre in-between her palm.

Oh right.. That's why she got up.

Opening her hand she revealed a scrunched up note, One she had found beside her futon with a small serving of lukewarm soba. It was a note from him, The demon.

To [F/N].

When you receive this note, You should have already awoken from your slumber.

Once you finish reading this note, I expect you to eat the bowl of soba I have provided to you on the vanity desk. Once you have consumed it, Make your way towards the main dining room. I know you know your way there.

Wait patiently. And do not keep me waiting.

-黒死牟

[F/N] crumpled the paper into a tiny ball within her palms. She tossed it aside and let out a breath of air she didn't know she was holding as she mellowed out against the wall.

He wanted to see her. She wasn't completely sure of the reason but [F/N] had a creeping suspicion crawling up her spine. It was the same reason she dragged herself out of bed, Why she was going in the first place.

She wanted answers.

[F/N] placed her hands either side of her on the wall, Pushing herself up she dusted off her jinbei.

She had already spent what little time she had mapping out the fake-shrine. Don't keep him waiting, He said. Being on time wasn't exactly her strong suit but the vision of those amber eyes stalking her, Appearing in her peripherals yet disappeared when she looked that way.

It felt like cold water was being poured down her back. [F/N] felt helpless, More so than usual. She had no mask nor sword, What Kokushibo had done with them she didn't know. But [F/N] felt naked without them, Without it [F/N] was just herself..

And that didn't sit right with her at all.

☆♡☆

The tiny flame was brought up to the tip of the incense stick, The tiny fire starting to catch onto the wood, The flicker of an ember sparking up at the end.

Mitsuri set the incense down onto the platter. The aroma of cherry lotus started the dance in the air as it burned, A scent she breathed in deeply.

The smoke was sweet, It smelt like crushed cherries and freshwater rivers. A cool breeze on a summer day, A sacchariferous taste lacing it as the wind danced across the valley. It was calming, It was nostalgic. Anemoia, Yet Mitsuri knew it all too well.

She turned around towards the bath, Steam rising up from the water within. Mitsuri rested her hands on the cedarwood sides and slowly got in. Watching as the water parted for her as she sunk inside, Rising up until it was at her neck.

Mitsuri stared up at the ceiling above her, She felt.. fine.

She didn't feel good, Not by any stretch of the word but she didn't feel that bad, Not right now anyways. She just felt fine, For how long she didn't know. But right now was okay.

The smell of the incense kept the bad thoughts at bay, Keeping them away out of mind. Along with the bath that was hot against her skin, Most of the thoughts were burned away along with the sticks. Though, Only one still lingered in her mind.

Shinobu. Mitsuri knitted her eyebrows.

What she said to her the other day bubbled up in her mind like the foam rising up from the bottom of the bath. Mitsuri regretted it, She shouldn't of said something like that and it had been eating away at her for a good few days now.

"G-Get out.. Y-You did this, We both did.. But.. Y-You don't even care at all…"

Mitsuri sunk a little lower in the bath. It was wrong, She knew as soon as Shinobu closed the door that it was wrong. But everything felt just so wrong in that moment. Looking back on it, Mitsuri wanted someone to blame and Shinobu was just an easy target.

Mitsuri grabbed the oil from the side of the bath. Popping open the cap she poured some onto her hands as she started to massage it into her hair, Washing out all of the grease built up over weeks.

Mitsuri would need to apologise. It was nasty what she said, She'll need to see Shinobu later and apologise for their entire meeting.

Though that wasn't to say nothing good came out of it at all, This was the first time in weeks Mitsuri had bothered to leave her room. Not to go outside, Get food or bathe. She didn't want to leave either, The outside world feeling so foreign, So terrifying that she barely left the safety of her covers.

It felt like she was trapped under them at times. The weight of her heavy heart keeping her stuck down on the mattress. [F/N], Mitsuri never really knew how fast a loved ones face can melt away into an abstract masterpiece after they died.

But now as she watched [F/N]'s face appear inside her head, A faded blur of what it once was she understood perfectly now. The features on her face slipping away from her, Only the general splotches of colour and shape left now.

It was terrifying, But her meeting with Shinobu and Obanai seemed to make her shift. Pull her out from under the covers only slightly. The state of the room helped snap her out of her trance too. The rotten food, Piles of clothing and the gathering of dust.

It all helped, If only a little bit.

The promise Shinobu had given told her, The promise of revenge on the demon who did this. It was the one thing that got her moving, The last working cog. Vengeance, She desired it so bad her chest started to throb.

Mitsuri felt a small tear roll down her cheek, Letting it mix in with the bathwater. Even if she was able to get out of her bed, Pull herself and try to wash away the stains. How could she go on now, How could she get vengeance for her?

She could wash off the dirt all she wanted, Scrub and scrub until your skin is spotless but the filth she felt stayed on her like a cancer. How could she ever go on? [F/N], The person she grew up with, The person who stayed with her through thick and thin and the person who loved her despite all of her flaws.

It was hard enough when Rengoku died, Her master who she looked up to like a big brother and taught her everything he knew. When the crow delivered the news she was distraught, But then she at least had [F/N] there to hold her hand, Pull her into a hug and tell her everything would be fine.

But now [F/N] was gone there was no one to do that for her. Comfort her and tell her everything would be fine, Because the truth is it wasn't. Everyone around her that she loved and cared for were dying left and right and soon enough there would be no one left.

[F/N].. Mitsuri could lose everything in the world. She could lose her job, Her friends and her limbs. Even then she could smile and say it was okay, But [F/N].. She just couldn't lose her, Anyone but her.

Mitsuri can't go on, She just can't.

"I want you to know I did it I did on my on voilition. I chose this, You have nothing to feel bad over."

"How could I not feel bad over you, [F/N]?" Mitsuri whispered, Running her fingers through the strands. "You're my best friend.. My first friend. We were suppose to do this together yet I let you down.. I-I deserve this.."

"You deserved a better friend than me."

"That's not true.. You're the one who deserved a better friend.. I was stupid and did nothing at all to help you at all, I did this to you.. How could you say I deserved better..?" Mitsuri mumbled.

"The truth is its you. You were the only thing that made me feel like I had a family, Like I had my childhood, Like I was a normal person for once in my stupid little life. I adore you, Tsuri. I really do."

Mitsuri's tears started to pick up.

"I-It's funny.. You were always able to see the good in others, Even if they were horrible and mean-spirited you were able to find their worth. In everyone.. Everyone except yourself.." Mitsuri sniffled.

"I'm living a lie, Everyday I go to work as someone I'm not because of myself. It's pathetic. There isn't any meaning, I'm sorry for saying this but as these are my last words I feel like it's necessary."

"D-Don't ever say that about yourself.. Don't apologise.. Y-You have nothing to be sorry for. Just because you were someone else doesn't mean your true self has no value.. I-It's not pathetic.. Never say it is.." Mitsuri felt the oncoming tears flow out of her slowly.

The voices stayed silent for a moment. Mitsuri watched the ripples in the water as her vision blurred up.

"I love you, And I wish I said it sooner"

Mitsuri sunk just a little further into the water, She tilted her head up towards the ceiling. Staring far-off somewhere else. The cherry lotus incense still burned bright as ever, Smoke dancing in the air.

"Me too.."

☆♡☆

The ticking of a clock, An earworm that wouldn't stop ticking. Over and over, It repeated without any sign of stop.

There was no clock within the room however, The sound a hallucination to accompany the beads of sweat building up in the humidity of her palms. Ones that rested uncomfortably on her knees as [F/N] sat on the tatami mat.

The dining room, It had barely changed from the real one. Ignoring the dust and cobwebs scattered here and there things like cabinets filled with old china, Several talisman statues and empty incense platters were still lying about.

All of this of course was settled within the long layout of the room supported only by rickety wood support beams. [F/N] bit her tongue, The high ceilings and wide structure made her feel small within the confines.

She couldn't help but scan her eyes left from right, Trying to spot any sign of Kokushibo.

[F/N] had been sitting here for over fifteen minutes now just waiting for him to arrive. She had no idea how he would know she was here and waiting, How he predicted when she would be awake but figured he had some sort of way. However disturbing that way might be..

She rubbed the back of her neck, Trying to massage the ache out of it. [F/N] barely could recognise that same familiar sensation of eyes watching her, It only registering in her mind once she felt the cold breath hit her neck.

[F/N] froze, Body stilling like a lake.

"Good.. You are here." Kokushibo mumbled, Only a foot behind her as his eyes dug into her skin. His stare, It felt like it reached deep into her soul and was looking straight at her very being. Scrutinizing her, Judging her every inch.

[F/N] quickly exhaled, A shaky breath escaping her. She didn't dare to turn around, Gathering her bearings as she spoke.

"What do you want." [F/N] asked, Eyes dead set on the wall opposite of her. She didn't even need to turn around to feel his frown etched deep onto his face.

"When you speak to me.. I expect you to show some respect in your tone.." Kokushibo said. His voice was stoic and unwavering yet held such weight to it that [F/N] couldn't help but swallow down her nerves.

When she didn't make the move to speak, Kokushibo took the chance for her.

He placed down something in front of her with a clank, One that was so quiet yet sounded like sirens within the silence of the dining room.

It snapped [F/N] out of her nervous stupor and brought her eyes down to the object in front of her, Revealing it to be a cooked and cut unagi and rice. Grilled river eel that seemed to be sprinkled with chopped leek and black pepper.

[F/N] stared down at it, Seemingly surprised at what it turned out to be as Kokushibo sat down at the other end of the table.

She looked up at him. Even though he was sitting down on his knees, Hands on his shins he still stood towering over her. The darkness of the room cast a deep shadow over his face, One that was staring right back at her, Not saying a word.

They stayed like that for a few moments. [F/N] couldn't help but feel the growing sense of awkwardness under all the tension as she looked over at him. It was quiet, Unsettlingly so.

Compared to how he acted earlier, This was more.. Hands off than before.

When she had first awoken in her caricature of a bedroom he had been there, Watching her from within the murkiness. Once she raised herself from the bed he hadn't taken any time on approaching her, Grabbing her by the cheek and trying to display some kind of faux affection.

It sent shivers down her spine just thinking about it. He had gotten so close like it was a regular occurrence. He didn't want to let go either, Keeping her in place backed up into the corner in fear. He had absolutely no qualms about invading her space.

Though it must of changed once she had gotten out of there, Ran away down the shrine hallways and came face to face with the void outside. Maybe it was what she said to him or the fact that she had tried running away.

"Tire yourself out all you want.. Run as long and as far as you like but you will never be able to leave me.. Not again. When you come back.. Do not expect to be treated with such affection that I have offered you thus far.. Not until you stop with this stupid rebellious phase of yours.."

[F/N] supposed he had kept to his word. He wouldn't be treating her with any kind of 'warmth' or 'affection' as he so put it, Not until she stopped her 'stupid little rebellious phase.'

Her lip quirked. The way he phrased it sounded so wrong. So infantilizing like she was just a rowdy teenager with a lack of basic manners when in truth she was a wounded hostage, Desperately aching for escape, Salvation.

[F/N] hated him, The way he looked and the deepness of his voice. She hated it all. She feared him too, Right now she was helpless. Without the mask or her sword she was useless, Completely at his mercy.

The dressing around her mid-section was the reminder of that, He could kill her anytime he wanted and the fact that he didn't pissed her off.

Somehow, someway. [F/N] needed to find a way out of here, Away from this nightmare, Away from her captor.

"[F/N].. Eat.. I took time in preparing you that meal.. And I expect you to accept and consume it gratefully.." Kokushibo rumbled. His voice sharp and cold like the edge of his sword, Like he was pointing it right at her, Ordering her to do as he says.

[F/N]'s lip thinned before nodding slowly.

"Use your words.." Kokushibo interrupted, Not accepting her non-verbal communication. [F/N] itched, The words seemingly lost at the edges of thought before she spoke.

"Yes.. Thank you.." [F/N] muttered, Eyes locked onto his middle pair as she waited for his response on baited breath.

Kokushibo stared back at her, A blank unfeeling gaze seeming to weigh her words on a scale. He didn't speak, Just hummed lightly.

"Acceptable.." Was all he said.

He continued looking upon her as [F/N] shakily picked up her pair of chopsticks. The thin wood hovering over the unagi, Trying to determine whether the meat was laced or not.

[F/N] gulped. Was she willing to take the risk?

"What..? It's perfectly good eel, I should know.. I caught it myself." Kokushibo asked lightly. His head cocked to the side, Eyes unblinking as he stared her down. "..Why aren't you eating..?"

[F/N] bit her lip, Thoughts scrambling to find a good reason to present to him.

"I-It's just.. The bowl of soba earlier was enough.. It.. It kind of made me lose my appetite is all.." [F/N] said. It was a lie, The bowl of soba that came along with the note wasn't even touched. She didn't feel hungry, She hadn't for a while now.

Kokushibo's eyes narrowed.

"Impossible.. You have been asleep for weeks, One single bowl of soba is not enough.. You must eat.." Kokushibo argued, An accusatory tone lacing him like a prosecutor as he examined her form.

[F/N] gulped. Weeks. Right, Apparently she had been asleep for weeks? It didn't quite register inside her mind, Her sense of time seemed muddled. Minutes and hours mixed together and became one, Measurement wasn't reliable.

[F/N] exhaled.

"R-Right.." She mumbled. The pair of chopsticks still shaking in her hands she slowly lowered them down towards the unagi. Kokushibo watched as she picked up a piece of eel in-between the sticks before raising it towards her mouth.

Nerves irrationally racing under his gaze, [F/N] parted her lips and placed the eel in her mouth as she stared back at him.

She chewed, A sudden sweet taste started to flood onto her tongue as she did. It was soft, Similar to squid in its texture and was unlike her expectation of a bitter, salty and greasy taste.

"..How is it?" Kokushibo asked.

[F/N] swallowed the chunk in her mouth.

"Good.." She answered and this time it wasn't a lie. It did taste good, It was perfectly cooked and seasoned, Made with care and wasn't laced, At least she thinks so anyways. It was good, But it didn't take away the way it felt strange in her mouth. Not from the taste or personal preference but instead in the way you'd try to eat more on a full stomach.

Kokushibo nodded.

"Continue then.." He said, And [F/N] complied under his command. She continued to eat the unagi however awkwardly it felt, Trying her best to focus on the bowl instead of his face. It was quiet, Neither [F/N] or Kokushibo spoke.

"..How was your sleep?" Kokushibo questioned, Breaking the silence between them.

[F/N] looked up at him, The grasp on her chopsticks grew slightly tighter at his attempt to start a conversation. For whatever reason he wasn't going directly in with the questions, It unsettled her stomach and quite frankly annoyed her.

"Fine.. Could of been better.." [F/N] grumbled, Alluding to the bloody dressing and the room walls surrounding her. She said it with a sarcastic tone and a bead of cold sweat running down her brow as she took another bite of the eel.

Kokushibo paused.

[F/N] kept her eyes down, Hoping she didn't go too far.

"You are still opposed to your new living arrangements.. I suppose.. It's understandable. This is a big change for you.." Kokushibo drawled. [F/N] felt another spike in her annoyance, It was that same infantilizing tone.

[F/N] decided to push her limits.

"Why am I here? Like.. H-How is this place even here.. I want you to give me the truth.." She asked, Raising her head up to meet his and lowering down her chopsticks. Her brows were furrowed.

Even though he had "explained" some of it earlier [F/N] had rejected it entirely. She wanted a truthful answer not hidden behind delusion or manipulation.

Kokushibo was quiet for a moment.

"I have told you over and over.. What I say isn't false nor do I intend to trick you.. What do I need to do to convince you of that?" Kokushibo's voice stated to grow colder, It started to sound irritated at her denial. It seemed like [F/N] was near the limits she could push with him.

"You are my younger sister.. I am your older brother. You are here because I want you to be.. This place is your new home now.. You will not be leaving anytime soon so I suggest you start to accept that.." Kokushibo said in a near deriding tone, Making sure to annunciate every word as clear as day to her.

[F/N] shook her head, She opened her mouth ready to speak but was cut off by Kokushibo's own speech.

"I suppose you already know why you're here.. Except for trying to spend some time with my little sister.. Which you ungratefully don't want to do.. It is also because I have questions of my own.. So.. Here is how this is going to go.." Kokushibo started.

"I will ask a question.. And you must answer truthfully. After you have answered.. You may also ask a question of your own.. And I will answer honestly in return.. We will take turns asking until we are both satisfied." Kokushibo suggested.

[F/N] bit her lip. The proposition he had offered to her was appealing to say the least. She would be able to get her answers while he would be able to get his, What kind of questions he had she had no idea.

It didn't matter though. [F/N] wanted to give in to the temptation, Whatever he could ask her couldn't hurt. She'd get her answers and have some kind of basis on this place.

[F/N] nodded.

"Alright."

☆♡☆

The strong smell of chemicals singed at the tip of her nose, It was the only thing she could sense with her entire sight being a dark nothing. She couldn't hear anything either, Nothing except from a high-pitched ringing that is.

The girl groaned, She writhed around tossing back and forth. It felt like every inch of her was in pain, All of her nerves flared up like bottle rockets and exploding in agony. It was barely bearable.

Where was she?

She had no idea. All of her senses were muddled by the pain in her body, It was hard to tell. A metallic bitterness in her mouth, It was really the only thing that she could taste and the only little thing she could sense.

What even happened, Why was she in so much pain? Everything was in pieces, Parts of her mind scrambled into thousands. It felt like something was just out of her grasp, A lost memory, Something she felt was.. Important.

She stretched out a hand, Reaching out into the abyss. Her fingers tried to grab down on something, Anything that she could touch within the shadows.

As her arm extended forward she could feel a sort of.. Light.

It was hard to explain to her, It wasn't visible nor was she sure it was really there. It was strange like a ghostly apparition reaching back out to her, Their spectral hand grazing the tips of her fingers with a cold touch, Sending shivers down the girls spine.

The girl reached out further, A sudden determination to fight through the agony as she tried to grasp the phantom hand.

Tears prickled at her eyes, The pain was excruciating but she fought through it anyways. The palms of her hands starting to graze the hands of the apparition.

The girl grappled onto them, The freezing touch of their grasp embraced hers like a mother holding their child's hand. It was comforting, Even though it chilled her to the bone it was nice, One that felt familiar.

The hand moved, Bringing the girl forward. The pain had completely dissipated now as she was guided upwards, Gently brought forth into the void.

Though as she felt herself rising upwards the darkness enveloping her started to shift too, The shadow parting for her as she went. A new light started to become visible, One independent from the hand as it started to shine.

The girls lips parted, She felt air rushing into her lungs and escaping out through her mouth. Was she not breathing before? The rhythm of her heart started to beat as the light started to grow larger and larger.

It was so blinding that she had to close her eyes. A sudden resonance echoed from within her mind, Lost memories starting to rise.

The girls obsidian eyes opened wide, The light fading out into the clarity of a room. A sharp gasp came from her, Hands gripping the bedsheets she lay on.

She remembered now.

☆♡☆

[F/N]'s brows knitted together, Her lip bit as she waited on baited breath for his question. The tension built up seemed near visible in the air, Almost suffocating so within the darkness of the room.

Kokushibo sighed, Stoic in face, Completely blank making it near impossible to tell what he was thinking. It was uncomfortable to say the least, [F/N] squirmed around under his gaze.

Though she quickly stilled, Keeping her composure. This was her time to get answers. She couldn't falter here, Not now. She needed to stand her ground, Raise her shoulders and look him straight in the eyes, No matter how herculean of a task staring at them was.

"So.. For my first question.. I'll start easy.. " Kokushibo started, Silence broken as his voice echoed lightly in the room.

"..What is your full name?"

[F/N]'s mouth turned into a frown. A rather anti-climactic question from what she was expecting, Though to be fair she didn't know what she was expecting. [F/N]'s shoulders drop only slightly.

"[F/N] Fujimori." She answered quickly.

Kokushibo stayed silent once more. A bead of sweat rolled down [F/N]'s brow, Though she tried not to show it from her hardened expression. What was he thinking..?

"Alright then.. As per our rules you may now ask me a question.. And I will answer honestly." Kokushibo said, Nodding slightly to urge her on.

A question. It was her time to ask.. But what? Where should she start, Which one out of a thousand should she ask? She could only ask one but that was nowhere near enough.

Another bead of sweat dripped down her side.

[F/N] bit her lip. Start easy. Take a deep breath, You'll be fine.

"Okay.. Where am I.. What is this place?" The first question that came to mind. [F/N] steadied her breathing, Good. It was probably one of the better questions she could of asked. She should get a basis of where she is first, Use it as the foundation to base her next few questions off of.

Kokushibo hummed lowly.

"You are in a replica of your shrine.. I ordered this place to be built a few centuries ago after your.. Accident.." Kokushibo paused. "Though it is not exact.. You may have noticed a few modifications.. They are rather recent and have been made for your comfort here.."

Comfort? Like hell this place could be of any comfort to her. It was a mockery of her home, Her sanctuary. Whatever modifications he could have made would never be able to provide any kind of solace to her.

But it was another part of his sentence that drew her attention.

"Accident?" [F/N] queried, Curiosity building on her tongue.

"It is my turn to ask questions.." Kokushibo cut in, Sharp tone cutting through her with a drop in temperature fastly following it.

[F/N] froze, But nodded along quickly not wanting to push her limits any further.

"Second question.." He started "When I found you once more.. You were injured by me in the rubble of your shrine. You appeared as a man, A Hashira.. Not just any but the one who killed a thousand of my kind.. So my question is to you, Why are you a slayer.. How did you do it..?"

Kokushibo's voice was calm yet [F/N] could sense a new undercurrent of bafflement mixed with.. Disdain. It was confusement, One of the only feelings he had shown throughout their conversation.

And if [F/N] was being honest, She shared the sentiment.

"Well.. I.." [F/N] stuttered. Answer honestly, Those were the rules of the game. But [F/N] barely knew what the truth was.

"..I became a slayer because I.. Because.. My friend was going to become a slayer and I just came along for the ride.. How I killed a thousand, I didn't really intend on doing so.. It just kind of happened.. " It was the truth, [F/N] didn't lie when she answered. But it wasn't exactly the full truth either.

Kokushibo's eyes narrowed.

"You became a slayer because.. You followed a friend?" Kokushibo asked. The disdain in his voice more prominent now as he stared her down. [F/N] swallowed.

"My turn." She answered, Expression turning to stone.

Kokushibo's nose twitched.

"Touché.." Was all he said.

"About the accident you mentioned.. What are you referring to?" [F/N] asked. Accident, The way he said it earlier was like the word was stuck on his tongue. [F/N] could tell it was hard subject, Both from the way he said it and how his face seemed to fall once she asked it.

Kokushibo took a moment before responding.

"Your accident.. Yes. It was around five hundred years ago now in the Sengoku era.. It.. It's still fresh in my mind." Kokushibo's voice started to go down, Only in a single pitch as he spoke. Eyes wandering off somewhere else.

"A few months before it happened you had fallen ill.. A hereditary sickness passed down from our mother.. I had been searching months for a cure to no luck. I had came back to your shrine with.. A kind of cure per se but when I had arrived.. It was too late."

[F/N] listened on intently. This was manipulation, This just a lie. But.. Did he really need to create such a narrative? He had explained her falling ill, Going so far as to describe it as an illness from 'their' mother. Was he really going this far..?

"It wasn't the illness that killed you.. Instead it was a pair of slayers. When I had arrived it was in the middle of winter.. A blizzard had picked up and you had ran out into the snow to escape.. You were fatally wounded and by the time I found you.. You were dead, Curled up in the snow, Your body was already frozen over.." Kokushibo trailed off, His voice growing lower until it wasn't heard anymore.

Kokushibo looked up towards [F/N], Eyes looking upon her form. She was still, Unnaturally so.

Not a single muscle moved, Neither from [F/N] or the demon across the table from her. Her lips were parted, Eyes stuck dead open as she stared down at the table.

"I.. You.." She stuttered. Her voice was so quiet, Her jaw started to shake.

[F/N] looked up to him, Glazed over eyes staring at him with a horrified yet disbelieving expression. She stared as if he had three heads, Her head shook.

"A blizzard.. You said.. You said it was a blizzard?" [F/N] stammered. It sounded like she hadn't spoken in days, Like all water had been deprived from her throat. A blizzard, He said she died in a blizzard.

Kokushibo's frown deepened, A grimace starting to play on his face. He didn't even care that she asked another question, The terrified visage she wore distracting him from that fact.

"..Why? Does that mean something to you..?" Kokushibo queried.

It did. It meant everything to her, Her dreams. The original visions that have been haunting her like spectres for months, The blizzard she had trudged through night after night only to collapse time and time again.

He told her it was the way his sister died. She was killed off by a couple of slayers, One's that fatally wounded. It matched up to the unbearable pain in her chest whenever she was there, The way she felt so frantic in escape. It matched but.. How?

These dreams she barely told to anyone, While she had admitted she suffered from night terrors what happened in them wasn't explained to anyone. No one he would have in contact with should know about her nightmares.

But somehow he knew, It was exactly like how he described.

"Answer me.. And consider it my next question." Kokushibo broke her chain of thought, Yet she could barely hear his annoyed voice from the cold sweat building up on her palm.

"DON'T LET HIM CATCH US, [F/N]. DON'T LET HIM FIND US!"

A voice she hadn't heard in a good long while cried out inside her mind. It was her.. Her double. The start of deviation in her visions, She had came to her with a warning. One she couldn't decipher.

Neurons connected. The end of her dreams, When she had fallen into the snow and curled up into a ball she looked up. And every time she'd see a man rush towards her, Clothed in a lavender nagagi kimono and hakama trousers..

[F/N]'s bottom lip shook, She tried to verbalize her thoughts. Put them into words yet it seemed so difficult from under the weight of her raging mind.

This.. This couldn't be what she thought it meant. It couldn't. It can't..

Kokushibo's expression was unreadable, It wasn't like the annoyance before but instead it was like ice. He was stone, Whatever he was thinking didn't show. And it scared her even more.

"Explain. Now." He said just like his expression, Levelled and untraceable.

[F/N] tried to steady her breathing. A little voice in her head spoke out. Don't falter, Ask further.

"I.. I.." [F/N] stuttered, Setting her hands down onto the table and trying to organise her words. She swallowed back a lump in her throat, Making way for her explanation.

"I.. F-For a few months I've been having.. Nightmares." [F/N] started, Slowly pronouncing her words as if to test them on her tongue.

"Nightmares..?" Kokushibo mulled. He didn't make a change in his expression, Nor did his glare stray from her for a second.

[F/N] nodded.

"Y-Yes.. I've been having night terrors for a while now and in these nightmares.. I wake up in a blizzard." She confirmed.

Kokushibo's stare was blank, His eyes near draining the life out of her as his lips parted slightly.

"What occurs while you are having them?" He asks, But [F/N] only shook her head.

"..Isn't it my turn to ask a que-"

"Forget the questions." Kokushibo interrupted. "Tell me what happens.."

[F/N] froze. His sudden aura of authority was something she could feel in her bones. She was never one to obey any kind of Jurisdiction or higher human power, It wasn't in her nature or her nurture to do so.

But a natural instinct burst up inside her from the new atmosphere surrounding him, One that made her want to answer in fear of the consequences.

"I.. E-Every time I fall asleep I wake up in a blizzard.. I'm in the middle of a forest.. There's this pain in my back.. I.. I'm trying to get out of there but every time I get far I collapse into the snow.." [F/N] explained, Repeated almost exactly what he described back to him.

She decided against telling him the last part after seeing his expression.

Kokushibo at this point had a hand resting on his chin, A nail dug onto the pale moonlight shade of his flesh while another pulled gingerly at his lip. He wasn't readable before, But now [F/N] could feel a sense of.. Elation.

She noticed his face start to turn only slightly. The corners of his mouth starting to tug up subconsciously into a small smile.

It was disturbing, It looked so unnatural on his face like it was a cheap replica of an honest smile. But [F/N] could tell this was genuine enough, All from the way his arachnid eyes gleamed. Though despite the light in his eyes he radiated a darker aura. Something she recognised from the time he had sliced her abdomen.

[F/N] shuddered. He was happy.

"I see.. So you do remember something.." Kokushibo muttered. His eyes were off in thought, His grin was so small yet contained such a feeling of obsessive glee. It sickened her, It made her want to puke.

[F/N] tried to shuffle away slightly on the tatami mat she was sitting on, The bowl of unagi went abandoned as she felt her instincts kick up again.

This was impossible, This entire situation felt so wrong. When at any point in her life did she think she would be here? Staring down the unhinged monster opposite from her while he tried to convince her of blood relation. Through her dreams, No less.

"I-It's only a vision. It.. It means nothing." [F/N] blurted out. A thought that ran through her mind and one that she didn't mean to articulate out loud. Also one that she regretted immediately.

Kokushibo didn't seem wavered at all, His claw just continued pulling at his lip.

"No, No. Even if it is just subconciously.. There is still a part of you that remembers.. This.. This is great." He said just a little louder this time, Exasperated and maybe even a tiny bit excited.

If [F/N] thought his visage couldn't get any more hideous then she was proven very wrong. The way his smile stretched wider to reveal his canines, The way his cheeks made way for it and the way all six of his eyes sparkled under the pale light.

It was horrifying.

She barely registered him getting up from his knees, Standing at his full height within the shadow-infested room. He stalked over, One foot in front of the other barely made any sound as slowly made his way towards her.

[F/N] was only snapped out of her trance one he was now looming over her crouched form. She gasped, Shocked at the sudden closing of distance between them. She tried to move her body away, Try to gain some space but she felt fixed to the floorboards, Body unable to move.

Kokushibo went down onto a single knee, He hunched over with his middle eyes meeting her own in a locked stare down.

He seemed to examine her just for a moment, That smile smaller yet still stretched upon his face as he looked at her.

"..The chances of your dream matching up to my own tale is.. Improbable to say the least. You must agree that it's uncanny.. Do you agree, Little one?" He asked. It was almost as if he was taunting her as she tried desperately to think of an exit, Instincts on overdrive.

[F/N]'s jaw trembled. She was unable to pry her eyes away from his, Keeping her steady in place. She felt words grow on the tip of her tongue, Ready to spill.

"E-Even if what you're implying is right.. If your story has any truth to it.. Even if I am your sister.. Why did you kidnap me and take me here?" She squeaked, Shrill and high-pitched under the intense gaze of the Uppermoon.

It didn't make sense to her at all. It was one of the question she had been wanting to ask for a while now, His story didn't add up. Between both the ruthless nature of demons and their lack of sentimental attachment it just didn't make sense.

If she was his sister then that wouldn't constitute kidnapping her, It wouldn't change the fact that he should of killed her. Why he was so insistent on keeping her here, Why he had such an insane demeanour to him eluded her.

Kokushibo let out a breath of air, A shine in his eyes that could of been mistaken for fondness gleamed bright.

And his teeth glowed even lighter under the pale luminescence.

"Because.. Kidnapping you was a necessary evil.. The outside world is dangerous for someone like you.. If I let you out the chance of you getting injured or killed grows too high for my liking.. You need to stay here where it's safe, You need to stay here with me.." Kokushibo started.

[F/N] had no idea what to say, There was nothing to say. What words could she ever use to explain the overwhelming feelings rushing around inside her. Fear.. Anger.. Confusion and Hopelessness.

None of those words portray how she really felt. How much it felt like her heart was going to explode or how badly she wanted to run away.

"I'm your big brother, It's my job to protect you.. That's why you're here with me. I can't let you go back to those pathetic little slayers.. They are the reason I lost you for so long in the first place.."

He continued his rambling, Spoke about her colleagues and comrades with such acidity. The expression on his face was growing even more deluded and unhinged by every syllable spoken. [F/N] couldn't understand a single word, All mixing into a hazy mess.

"Besides.. If you just accept your new living situation then I'm sure you'll grow accustomed well enough.. If you would just stop with your little tantrum then you'll be much happier.. I can assure you of tha-"

Kokushibo paused mid-sentence

[F/N] watched in confusion as his smile fell and his face reverted back into his usual cold and serious expression in an instance.

He got up from the ground and tilted his head up towards the roof of the room, Seemingly engrossed in something [F/N] couldn't make out.

"Muzan-sama.." Kokushibo spoke lowly, His voice was filled with cordiality and stoicism similar to how a knight would speak to a king.

[F/N]'s eyebrows raised, Her lips pressed tightly together careful not to make a sound. Was he.. Was he speaking to Kibutsuji? The demon king, The progenitor of all demons and the bastard who had ordered her to be killed?

That's.. Not good.

[F/N] didn't speak a word though, It looked like they had some sort of telepathic link. Her sweat dropped more than it already doing, One after the other things got more and more insane. How much more can she handle?

The silence was louder than any sound, It felt suffocating yet she didn't dare to break it for a second. She didn't think she'd be intimidated by the progenitor, The passage of his name back at the corps meant nothing to her but now?

[F/N] was alarmed, On edge. Her fate was juggled in the hands of demons and death would be the better option in this scenario. She needed to wait on baited breath and see what the verdict was.

Kokushibo stood there, Nodding once or twice without ever saying a word. However whatever conversation they were having seemed important, She could tell by the sharpening of his eyes and the way his shoulders stiffened.

Was he going to tell him about her? What were they talking about? It was impossible to tell.

"Yes.. I will head over now." Kokushibo said at last. It was the final thing he said, A small nod before all movements went still.

They stood there, It was dead quiet.

Kokushibo looked down at her, That same cold expression on his face as he looked back at her.

"..I have been ordered to leave.. While I am gone I expect you to behave.. Do not try and run lest you wish to waste your energy.. Think over what we discussed here today and then maybe you'll start to see reason.."

That was all that he said to her. Kokushibo didn't wait for her answer before vanishing into thin air, Gone in an instant.

[F/N] exhaled, A breath she didn't know she was holding was released into the now empty room. It was colder now, The silence returned once again to invade every corner of the walls confines.

She came in for answers yet came out with more questions than she expected or wanted, The entire ordeal rewinding in her mind like a cassette.

This couldn't be real, She just wouldn't accept it.

☆♡☆

[F/N]'s feet dragged behind her out of the room, She didn't bother sliding the door shut. Too enraptured with the thoughts of her own mind to care.

She trudged down the hallways, Her head felt like a hurricane right now. Swirling and rushing around at high speeds, Thoughts coming in and out even faster. [F/N] felt like a weight was dropped in her chest, Doing the best of her ability to breathe in and out and not collapse onto the wall.

What were the chances that her dreams and his story matched up? It was impossible, He had described the exact sequence of events that occurred and had linked it to his sister's death.

[F/N] couldn't be related to him, She couldn't be related to Uppermoon one, A centuries old demon who has most definetly killed thousands at this point. But.. The coincidence was too big to be considered one.

She was conflicted to say the least, It felt like her brain and her heart were at war with each other. Her brain was telling her that there was no way that this could be possible, There was no feasible way.

Her heart on the other hand said otherwise, It told her that he was telling the truth. That there was some semblance of honesty to what he was saying yet it also told her that she should run. It resonated in her like nothing else.

It's words reminded her of that dream, Her double's warnings screaming into her ear like an air-raid siren. Crying and wailing out into the storm.

"WE CAN'T LET HIM CATCH US, HE'S NOT THE SAME. WE NEED TO RUN OR ELSE WE'LL NEVER GET AWAY, PLEASE [F/N] LISTEN TO US!"

Her double spoke as if they were one, Which they technically were but it felt different. It felt as if they were really the same person, Not split into two but just one single person.

[F/N] thought it was a prophetic dream from Inari, A warning about the shrine's future attack and to be prepared. At the time it felt like the most rational meaning. But now she didn't think that was the case anymore, It wasn't about the shrine at all.

It was about Kokushibo.

Her double spoke as she knew him all too well, She was scared of him. She told her he wasn't the same, Could that be referring to him being a demon? Maybe, [F/N] wasn't sure.

Or could it be referring to his behaviour. Back when he was towering over her, Leaning down to her level she could see the primal feeling behind his eyes, Like a feral animal. Not unlike a rabid wolf, It was a look she hadn't seen in anyone.

He was so sure that she was his little sister, And at this point? [F/N] had no idea what to think.

Everything was so complicated, It was all happening in such a short period of time that she just couldn't wrap her head around it. [F/N] didn't even want to think about it anymore, It made her head throb and even though she had only been up for an hour or two she just wanted to go to bed again.

[F/N] kept walking through the hallways, She had decided that it was exactly what she was going to do. She needed to sleep on it, Come back tomorrow and figure things out on a clean slate.

CREAK!

[F/N] raised her head from the ground. The old floorboards made a loud noise up ahead from behind the corner. [F/N] could tell it was from the lowering of a foot, Heavy and firm.

She groaned. Kokushibo was back already? That was quick. She didn't want to put up with him again, She just wanted sleep. One that actually made her feel like she was refreshed and rested once she woke.

Sighing, She called out to him.

"..I don't want to continue talking, I'm tired and-"

[F/N]'s speech was cut off, Her pace freezing like water in a single instant as she stared the man down.

That.. That isn't Kokushibo.

The man that turned the corner didn't look like him at all. Instead it was a young man of average height. He had a salmon shaded short-cut for hair and his skin was so pale that it was near sheet white, The only breaks from the artic colour were the thick navy blue streaks wrapping around his entire body.

His eyes widened at the sight of her, They were golden with his sclera like broken glass. It seemed he didn't expect her either.

[F/N] inhaled sharply. The kanji in his eyes catching her off guard. This is a demon, Not just any.. But Uppermoon three.

He opened his mouth to speak, Vampiric fangs glistening in the turquoise light.

"You.. What are you doing here?"

☆♡☆

The evening sun was lowering down on the horizon, The sky painted with hues of red, orange and purple made it look like a masterfully painted watercolour canvas. It was beautiful, Along with the cool breeze brushing into the valley it made a perfect landscape.

The butterfly mansion sat as tall as ever. Several Kakushi and slayers walked in and out about the building, They were sparse in numbers.

Most of the injured from a few weeks ago were already healed back to full health and were sent on their way. The ones that remained still lain on their hospital bed, Being treated by the residents here.

Shinobu wiped her brow, Beads of sweat brushing off onto the side of her wrist as she knelt down in front of the garden patch. Cabbage and turnip halfway grown within the fertile soil. She was currently picking weeds out from the stone lining around the vegetable patch, Gloves clad on her hands as she plucked another out.

Shinobu felt the cold breeze brush against her skin and flow through her hair. She inhaled, Taking it all in. It truly was a beautiful evening, It felt serene. Tranquil in the warm rays of the setting sun.

She listened to the birds chirp and the grasshoppers sing from the bushes. An amaranthine setting. So peaceful that she could pick up the soft footsteps approaching her from behind.

They were slow and Shinobu could hear them stop a metre or two away from her, She didn't need to look up from her work to know who it was.

Shinobu smiled quietly as she pulled out another weed.

"Mitsuri-chan.. It's nice to see you outside." Was all she said to her, Focused on her work.

Mitsuri stood a fair bit away from Shinobu. She was dressed in a white kimono decorated with vivid burst of colour, Blues and pinks morphing into a floral pattern. Both it and her dripping watermelon hair gently wove back and forth in the wind.

Mitsuri didn't smile, Only looked down at her sandals.

"Shinobu-chan.. I.. Are you busy? I can come back later if you are.." Mitsuri asked, Her voice was as quiet as the breeze around them as she fiddled with her fingers.

Shinobu shook her head and stood up from her crouching position.

"No, No! Just doing a bit of gardening is all.." She said, Turning around to meet Mitsuri with that same smile she always did.

Mitsuri looked better than she was last time Shinobu saw her. Her hair wasn't plagued by grease and her kimono looked fresh and recently washed. Though Shinobu could pick out a few outliers like the bags under her eyes and the way her braids weren't as carefully done as they usually were.

But overall, It was a good change.

"If you came here to apologise, It's fine." Shinobu spoke. Though her smile was taught her tone was genuine. Mitsuri shook her head.

"No.. No it's not. I said some really nasty things that I shouldn't of said. I'm really sorry Shinobu-chan, I-I hope you're doing fine.." Mitsuri sighed. She couldn't bring her eyes to meet Shinobu's, Too ashamed to see her face.

"Really, It's quite alright. You weren't thinking straight, I understand that.. And if it's any consolation I didn't take anything to heart." Shinobu assured, Taking a few steps towards the other girl.

Mitsuri didn't answer, Neither did she look up from the ground in shame.

Shinobu took a few more steps forward until they were only three feet apart, Approaching slowly her smile started to slightly decrease.

"Mitsuri-chan. [F/N] wouldn't of wanted you to be like this, I know this because it was in her last words.. I know it's hard but you need to stop blaming yourself." Shinobu assured, Her voice grew to a gentle whisper as she approached the other girl.

Mitsuri's expression didn't change.

"I-It was my fault though. And entirely mine.. I'm sorry about that by the way.. But the thing is if I had just tried a little harder or recognised the signs sooner I could of prevented this.. I could of done something.." Mitsuri lamented, A dull sorrow in her voice as she looked up at Shinobu.

"No, You couldn't of. Things like these are hard to recognise.. Some people can appear so happy and carefree but we never know what's going on down below. You couldn't of known.. I promise." Shinobu reassured her, Her hand reached out and grabbed Mitsuri's shoulder in a comforting manner.

Mitsuri's frown started to shake.

"N-No.. Shinobu. I could of, I did. I knew it was there yet I did nothing.. And now I need to live with what I've done.. What I could of done to stop her." Mitsuri whispered, Tears starting to prickle at her eyes.

Shinobu looked back into her shamrock eyes, Her glazed over violet a comfort to the girl.

"She really meant that much to you, Didn't she?" Shinobu asked lowly.

Mitsuri sniffled.

"She's half of my soul, As the poets may say." She replied.

Shinobu smiled.

"That's a quote from a book, Isn't it?" She asked, A lighter tone playing on her words.

Mitsuri's frown tried it's best to turn back into a smile.

"You've read that one too..?" She asked her.

"Of course, It's a romantic tragedy. One of my favourite genres.. I'm guessing it's one of yours too then." Shinobu questioned in turn. Mitsuri nodded.

"Yeah.. I was always into those kinds of romance books when I was younger and I don't know why but.. That quote kind of stayed with me, You know..? I always thought when I grew up that I'd find the person who I could say that about" Mitsuri's smile lowered.

"..I guess I just didn't realise I had her until she was gone.." She mumbled.

Shinobu rubbed Mitsuri's shoulder, A comforting action to try and soothe her nerves.

"I know.. I.. I'll miss [F/N] too. She really was one of a kind.. One day we'll avenge her though, We'll find the demon alright? We'll make sure her death meant something.." Shinobu admitted lowly, The smile on her face now gone as she looked down downwards her shoes.

Mitsuri thought over her words, Considering every vowel and consonant. All before bringing Shinobu into an awkward hug.

It was one that made Shinobu flinch on touch, But her figure relaxed before returning the gesture, Arms wrapping around Mitsuri's back.

"Alright.. We'll find them. We'll get revenge.." Mitsuri confirmed.

Shinobu was unable to see her face but she could feel the patter of tears fall onto her haori. Shinobu nodded, Staying silent.

They stayed like that for a good few seconds, Before a voice called out to them both.

"Lady Kanroji, Lady Kocho!" The voice yelled out.

They instantly retreated back into their previous positions away from each other. Shinobu recognised the voice as Aoi, One of the staff working at the estate.

She stood wide within the doorframe of the main entrance, Her face was alarmed as she looked at the both of them.

Shinobu and Mitsuri shared a look before running over to Aoi, Stumbling to a halt in front of her.

"Kanzaki-san, Is everything alright?" Shinobu asked, Her personality switched back into it's usual exercised type. A serious expression lain on her face as she looked at her staff.

A bead of sweat rolled down Aoi's forehead. She took a deep breath in, Unable to find the words.

"I shouldn't explain it, I think it's better if you hear it yourself.. Lady Kanroji, You especially." Aoi said. She took no time in turning around and speed walking down the hallway, Head motioning the two to follow her down the passage.

The two followed along with her down the butterfly mansions hallways, Their footsteps echoing out as it hit against the polished wood. Pristine white walls and mahogany doors passed them by as they went, But they were focused on following the girl in front of them.

Shinobu wondered what could've gotten into Aoi for her to act like this, All while Mitsuri was confused on why her especially needed to be there.

It wasn't long until they reached a certain door at the end of a hallway, It was cracked open only slightly letting the light from inside the room flood into the passage.

Aoi didn't hesitate to push the door open and step inside. Mitsuri and Shinobu following after as the room came into view.

It was a single bedroom, One usually used to care for patients in critical condition. It was decorated with a single bed in the middle, Two nightstands at the side and a closet. The source of light being a tall window to the side of the bedding, Letting a single warm ray shine down onto the patient on the bed.

Laying down under the covers was a small girl. She was wrapped in bandages and her unruly blonde hair was a mess, She looked tired when her dark eyes peered up to meet the three who just entered the room.

"H.. Hey.." She stuttered out, Her throat hoarse.

A neuron connected in Shinobu's mind. She remembered who this was. Her name was Maika Heihachiro, She was one of the shrine-maidens at the Kakushi base. A few weeks ago she was found passed out under a bunch of rubble, Right next to where [F/N]'s pool of blood was.

She wasn't able to be questioned on what happened however. Maika had suffered several injuries including severe blood loss, A deep cut on her back and bad frostbite. She had to be put into a medically induced coma to let her body heal.

Though she had awoken now, Conscious and sound of mind by the looks of it.

Shinobu quickly brushed past Aoi and Mitsuri, Speed walking over to the girls smile. Façade brought back on.

"Hello there! Are you doing alright? You've been asleep for quite some time!" Shinobu exclaimed, Looking down at her with a sugar sweet smile.

"I.. I'm fine.." Maika coughed. Shinobu quickly reached over to the wooden nightstand beside her and grabbed the pitcher of water.

She handed to the girl who gratefully accepted the refreshment. Mitsuri moved over to the other side of the bed to look down at the girl. Her expression still hurt by her mourning but curiosity danced along her features anyways as she looked at her.

"Mitsuri-chan.. This is Heihachiro-chan! She was one of the shrine-maidens back at the Kakushi base" Shinobu started.

"I.. I see." Mitsuri responded solemnly.

"That's not all, But you were also there when Fujimori was killed and eaten, Yes?" Shinobu asked, Turning back around to face Maika with an expectant look on her face.

Mitsuri's eyes widened in shock, Surprise coursing through her bloodstream as she looked down at Maika with wide eyes. A sudden hope rising inside her, Circling in her chest.

Maika paused, Then shook her head.

"N-No.."

Mitsuri's face fell, Her thou-

"T-That's not what happened..!" Maika exclaimed however instantly broke out into another coughing fit, Body spasming and her hand covering her mouth.

Mitsuri's brows knitted together, The words coming out of Maika didn't make sense. Not what happened.. What.. What does that mean.

Mitsuri came closer, Her hand reaching out going to grip Maika's free one with a reassuring hold. Mitsuri's fingers entwined with hers as she looked down on her.

"What do you mean..?" Mitsuri whispered. Eyes not taken off Maika for a second.

Maika's coughing fit died down, Her body laid peacefully on the bed.

"[F/N]-sama.. Fujimori-san.. T-They're the same person!" She explained.

Shinobu shook her head.

"Yes.. We're aware. But, Do you mind telling us what you mean by 'that's not what it happened'?" She asked softly.

Maika paused for a second, The sunlight from the window rested down on her face. Pale skin glowing in the luminescence as she spoke.

"[F/N]-sama.. She.. It's hard to remember, It's all fuzzy in my mind but.. She.. She wasn't eaten.." Maika explained, Eyes clenching shut. A headache forming in her frontal lobe as she spoke.

Both Mitsuri and Shinobu looked at each other. A shared stare that meant disbelief, Confusion and sheer bafflement. Maika didn't stop explaining as she squeezed Mitsuri's hand, Bringing her back into the conversation.

"What.. What do you mean [F/N] wasn't eaten?" Mitsuri asked, Levelling herself closer to Maika. Eyes wide as she looked at her, Confusion played all over her face.

"S-She wasn't eaten.. No.. S-She.. She was taken.. I.. The demon that tried to kill her just.. He just stopped.. Picked her up and.. and walked away.." Maika said. "It's all so fuzzy.. I.. I'm having a hard time remembering..

Mitsuri and Maika's eyes locked. Mitsuri looked at her, A sudden shine sparking up inside her like a lighter grew bright in her eyes. It was one she hadn't had in weeks, It was the glimmer of hope.

"I-It's fine.. But what.. What are you saying?" Mitsuri asked, Her voice was so small yet her face held such light to it.

"I-If I am right.. If I am remembering correctly.." Maika's eyes shared that same spark, That same light swirling around in her eyes.

"[F/N]-sama is alive."

Next Chapter

[tavolgisvist]

It was at Stoky Wood* (badge - black and yellow, with a picture of a Spitfire flying over the River Mersey) that Paul and I saw our first film. We were seated on long wooden benches watching Crime Buster Dick Barton**, a great radio hero of ours, when it became too much for Paul. In the flickering half light I watched with great amusement as Big Brother stumbled over me and his pals to exit screen left, scared out of his tiny mind. He wasn't scared when it came to smaller things such as bullies, however, and many's the time he came to my rescue in the school play yard. 'Big Brother have a use after all,' I thought.

*Stockton Wood Primary School, Speke, Liverpool **Dick Barton: Special Agent, was released in May 1948 Btw, Paul's 'I have another memory, of hiding from someone, then hitting them over the head with an iron bar' is the story about Stoky Wood too (Paul was at Stockton Wood Primary School from September 1947 until July 1951)

My memories of brother and I are of two independent little chaps, but Uncle and Auntie,s remembrances are of 'two right little swine', always up to mischief, or with their backs to the wall saying, 'We won't… WE WON'T!' I'm sure they're just a might confused. I do remember a few instances, however, which might give their memories some validity. Like the memory of Paul and me in 72 Western speeding up the growth of next door's apples by throwing stones at the apple tree, and then vigorously denying it. The stones on the other side let us down! Memories of being boss of my own gang in the later Stockton Wood years and charging against the 'enemy' across the school yard in full war cry (obviously why the headmistress Miss Margaret A. Thomas, who used to make the school toys herself, advised the world that one day I would be a 'Leader of men').*** And the came an older bully unto the yard who hit little girls and maketh them cry, and it behove me to teach unto him a lesson: Seeing that I was far too young and weedy to challenge him personally, I chose a friend to talk for me…(no, not Paul)…a housebrick! Being, as I've said, a holy lad it wasn't too difficult to levitate the brick up into the air…over the Bully's thick head…and cut (snip!) the invisible strings. After this bloody, awful incident, he didn't bully little girls, or anyone else for that matter, ever more.

(Mike McCartney, 1981, Thank U Very Much. Mike McCartney's Family Album)

***'I remember the headmistress saying how good the two boys were with younger children,' says Jim, 'always sticking up for them. She said Michael was going to be a leader of men. I think this was because he was always arguing. Paul did things much quieter. He had much more nous. Mike stuck his neck out. Paul always avoided trouble.'

(The Beatles: The Authorised Biography by Hunter Davies, 2010, Updated Edition)

Also:

They were four tough kids from Liverpool who’d learned their craft playing in hotel-cum-brothels in Hamburg. I mean, they were tough. They grew up in Liverpool, which was a tough city. It’s like growing up in Detroit or somewhere. Somewhere, that toughness always comes out. <…> This just goes back to where they came from. Liverpool is a tough town. I wouldn't particularly want to run into Paul McCartney in a dark alley, if he didn't like me.

(Michael Lindsay-Hogg, May 2024, interview with Rob Sheffield for Rolling Stones)

(I), (III)

[baroque-hashem]

What the anti-Israel student protestors in the US do not seem to understand is that, in the US, their actions and statements can absolutely be defined as, and are, antisemitic. The United States is a member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and since 2016, the federal government of the United States has adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which includes, and I quote: "Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor."

This is the attitude of the governing body of the country in which US Americans are citizens. Your country has adopted a progressive, internationally agreed upon definition of antisemitism, and its government and states will act accordingly to quell antisemitism in their jurisdictions. Over half of the States' governments have also specifically adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism. A great number of the States in which these protests are taking place have individually adopted the IHRA definition.

From a strict legal and ethical standpoint, the campus protestors do not have a leg to stand on in their desire to avoid accusations or prosecution of antisemitism. If anyone in the US wants to take a campus protestor to court and accuse them of antisemitism, they would have a solid case.

The State of New York, for instance, has had several campus protests against Israel; the state government has adopted the IHRA definition of Antisemitism. The state is fully within its rights to use its resources to quell antisemitism on its campuses, at the request or not of university administrators. If a university is within the borders and jurisdiction of the State of New York, then this university must abide by the laws of the State of New York. The IHRA definition of antisemitism is not a legal document, but a government's adoption of it signals a government's views toward antisemitism, and influences how that government and its entities will react to antisemitism. Also, New York does have a Human Rights Law, and this has undoubtedly also influenced the state's reactions to antisemitism in its borders.

No university should be expected to abide terrorists and their sympathizers on its property. And the campus protestors are supporting a legally recognized terrorist group, and engaging in definitionally antisemitic acts and speech.

From a definitional standpoint, at least in the US, the campus protests and their organizers and participants are definitionally antisemitic. They are not "on the right side of history". They are wrong.

Sources:

https://www.state.gov/foreign-terrorist-organizations/

https://www.state.gov/defining-antisemitism/

[pulsar-the-northstar]

Grief as concept in The Gazette's 'Dark Age' - Part 3

Part 1

Part 2

The last three songs from Dark Age represent the fifth stage of the Kübler-Ross and Wright model—acceptance, or as Wright puts it, “the upward turn". This is apparent in the pace and melody of the songs: they revisit previously introduced themes and keywords, but with altered emphasis and arrangement, sometimes changing their significance.

DEUX already starts with a very powerful opening line: 答えは絶望の淵で 不可逆 夢落ち願う, "the answer is irreversibly in the abyss of despair, I wish this were just a bad dream". Grief has entered the "consolidation" phase, and everything that seemed uncontrollable (death) slowly gives way to controlled remembrance. The intensity of physical and mental symptoms of grief decreases, yet an unforeseen circumstance or trigger can still draw the mourner back into emotions they thought they had already dealt with.

This is exactly what happens to the narrator of DEUX: although they would like to wake up from the dream of their life burdened with loss into a happy reality, the opposite happens: they dream of the deceased, then wake up from it (You're my enemy / 逆夢喰らい示す, "you're my enemy / as you tantalize with false dreams"). The lyrics here include the word 逆夢 (sakayume), translated as “reverse dream”, appears in our culture: it's a folk belief that dreaming of someone's death means they will live a long life.

Therefore, the person who appears living in the reversed dream is dead in reality and does not let the living person rest (寡黙と眠る夜が怖いのは誰の所為？, "whose fault is it that the silent night and sleep are frightening?"), the mourner endeavors to navigate through the altered circumstances (行き場断たれ迷い 自我境界破れて 心が壊れてしまった, "I've lost my way, the boundaries of my personality have been torn apart, my heart is broken"), and there is a faint, cautious desire for the shared past to continue in a transformed shared future (君と僕は 底無しの闇に朽ちる - "you and I rot in bottomless darkness", 後は踏み出すだけ/ もう迷わない – "there's nothing left, I have to take a step forward / I can't hesitate anymore").

The second to last song, the slow, the slow, nearly lullaby-esque OMINOUS, reintroduces the notion familiar from DEUX, the "reverse dream": the mourner seeks to drift back into slumber ("Sleep...Count me down...Again") to meet the person they lost (さぁ目を閉じて/ 向かおう – "and (as) I close my eyes / I turn towards you"). However, the deceased person in the dream is restless, struggling with nightmares (悪夢と舞う君を見る – "I see you dancing with nightmares"), and n this instance, it's the mourner attempting to soothe the deceased (忘れないで / 心は死なない / 忘れないで / そう 夢は逆夢, "don't forget / the heart is immortal / don't forget / dreams sometimes lie"), almost implying: don't worry about me, your nightmares about me are not real, I will be fine now, rest peacefully.

The conversation with the departed and their reassurance that life can evolve in a different manner isn't yet tangible reality; it's more of a self-encouragement. The pain and loneliness caused by grief are still part of the present, the constant change—the constant cycle of life and death (流転, ruten)—is conceivable to the mind but not to the heart. The last verse beautifully expresses the pain that, despite the realization, remains in the survivor's soul like a constant, dull presence: 形無き明日を奪う 踏み出す度 / 翳る空で何も見ない / 悲しみに自分を殺し叫ぶ声は / 何も救えない – "every time I take a step forward (to the constant change) it steals the formless tomorrow / I see nothing in the dark sky / I kill myself with loneliness and shout in sadness / but no one can save me".

The final song of Dark Age, also its magnum opus, UNDYING, begins with the same themes with which OMINOUS ended: loneliness, insomnia, and hopelessness ("Sleep, count me down, again / I won't arise from this", 残された唯一 禍いと廻る未来 – "the only thing left, spreading misfortune"). However, as much as it seems like grief has pushed the mourner back to square one, and everything starts anew, the use of the term "Undying" already show signs of a later stage of oscillation. The apparent setbacks or emotions re-emerging due to external influences, as painful as they may be, are just as natural. In the final moments of wakefulness, the mourner seeks the building blocks of their new identity ("不透明な事実指し 何を信じ 何願う – "pointing to uncertain facts, what can I believe, what can I hope for?"), when the dream weighs upon their eyes, and in the countdown, all essential conflicts of grief appear:

After confronting each of the thoughts that appear one after another or simultaneously in the grieving process, each reinforced by the other, in a continuous feedback loop, the mourner remembers the refrain of DOGMA ("I deny all of it"), then the refrain of OMINOUS, but in a new context: “Sleep, count me down 死と踊り” ("dancing with death") / “Count me down, again さぁ終われ” ("come on, let's finish this"), and poses the question: "Have I changed?" (俺は変われたか？)

Indeed, something has changed as the experience of loss has become part of the identity, and this consolidation is reflected in the final lines of the lyrics: 終わりを見ても / 許されぬ願いに夢を見た / この眼は今もまだ / 今もまだ, "even if I see the end / I dreamed of unforgivable hopes / and these eyes still see / even now." The unforgivable desires (wishes, prayers) peak in the two English lines of the song: "Life, don’t change my fate / God, entomb my hate", and despite how ominous these words may seem, they still inspire hope.

The concept of fate in regard of grief was introduced by INCUBUS. The desire for life not to overshadow our destiny —shaped by the life of the departed, their absence, and their continued existence within us —describes the state where the bond with the deceased is redefined. Their absence has become part of life, thus forming a kind of constant, eternal, unchangeable (undying?) presence.

Our second plea to God (with whom our relationship throughout Dark Age has been turbulent, as we've only clashed with him) is a prayer seeking the divine to lay to rest our "hate" (our anger), allowing us to bury all negative emotions aimed at others and ourselves, emotions that only tear down rather than construct. These lines express the yearning for rebuilding, hope, and ultimately, the acceptance of reality.

Final thoughts

It doesn't necessarily imply from the above that grief, as both an event in life and a personal encounter, has been fully dealt with, despite the melodies and lyrics of the subsequent albums, NINTH and MASS, signifying a more positive phase.

What I consider crucial to emphasize, not strictly tied to the examination of Dark Age, is directly linked to the positive phase of grief, known as the consolidation phase: while losses cannot be reversed, one can shape a self-image, a narrative that incorporates the loss into the mourner's identity.

There isn't a definitive "right" or "wrong" way to grieve – grief, as mentioned earlier, is a natural, almost instinctive reaction we have to loss. The mourner inherently understands their needs: whether it's solitude and seclusion, or perhaps companionship, community. Perhaps the only "incorrect" approach to grieving is when the oscillacion process is impeded: if the person who suffered the loss remains fixated solely on it’s negative effects (unable to let go of the deceased and the mourning state, becoming engulfed, unwilling to feel anything but sorrow), or exclusively focuses on restoration (organizing their life, forcefully moving forward, rejecting the memory of the deceased and their connection, merely striving to feel "fine" again).

The compositions of Dark Age can be aligned with both the phased, gradual grief theories and the dual-process model. As dark and distressing as they might seem, these songs actually demonstrate a healthy, evolving grief that eventually leads us out of the darkness.

I trust that those who listen to the melodies of Shikkoku discover solace within them and uncover the concealed, encrypted message: that before dawn, the darkest hour arrives, but from these bleak times (Dark Age), the hope we have lost returns (Blinding Hope, Last Song) and eventually guides us back to the light ("Come back to the light").

Disclaimer

I want to emphasize that I am not an expert in the field of grief, nor am I a therapist or a certified grief counselor (at least not yet). This analysis serves as an overview of how The Gazette's Dogma-era represents grief, and its purpose is to hopefully provide solace to readers by offering support and reassurance that whatever emotions they may be experiencing are entirely normal. It's important to note that the original essay was written in my native language, and while I've used machine translation and AI correction to translate it as close to the original as I can, my proficiency in English may not be perfect (far far away from perfect). If you're interested, I can provide a link to the original essay on my private blog.

Any suggestions, corrections, comments are welcome.