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beyondspaceandstars · 3 years ago

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Fireworks

Relationship: Bucky Barnes x Reader Warnings: mentions of anxiety, mental health, angst, worry (but happy ending!) Summary: The sound of fireworks in the middle of the night shakes Bucky awake so you try your best to comfort him. A/N: a little fourth of july fic inspired by my own dislike for fireworks but it works well here i think!

Masterlist

You awoke suddenly when you realized something was off. You were alone in the normally shared bed.

You had just barely registered this when you went to cuddle into Bucky but ended up finding, well, nothing. Nothing except for his half of the comforter that smelled like him. You frowned, forcing your tired eyes open in worry.

Frantically, in the dark, you sat up and searched for any sign of Bucky. You were really hoping he went to use the bathroom and you were just a paranoid girlfriend but then you heard a sniffle. It was so faint but you knew you had heard it. And it was coming from the…floor?

You peaked over on Bucky’s side and sure enough, there was your boyfriend shaking in fear on the floor. Heart-wrenching tears filled his eyes. A cheap blanket covered his lap. He barely looked up at you for a second before turning away, shoulders drooping in shame.

“Bucky?” You asked, worried beyond belief. “Is everything okay?”

He kept his eyes trained on the wall adjacent to the bed. “Yeah,” Bucky answered, weakly, “I’m fine. Go back to bed, sweetheart. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

You ignored his dismissal and raced off the bed. You knelt in front of him but Bucky still wouldn’t look at you. “What happened?”

But then that’s where you heard it. The unmistakable boom of fireworks.

Brows furrowed in confusion, you looked over at the clock which was reading just a few minutes past midnight. On July 4th. Your heart sank. You had completely forgotten what day was upon you.

“The fireworks…” you sighed. “Bucky, I’m sorry, I forgot-,”

Bucky shook his head. “There’s nothing you could do, honey.”

“I-I could’ve stayed up with you or-or-,”

He cut off your panicked rambling by placing his hand in yours. Bucky finally looked at you - really looked at you - and your heart shattered. He looked so exhausted yet panicked. Sad but angry. And as if on some super cruel cue, another firework exploded in the sky, lighting up your shared bedroom in a flash. Bucky winced.

You sighed. “I really can’t do anything for you?”

“Just…” Bucky took a deep breath. “Just stay with me. Please.”

Wordlessly, you nodded and sat on the floor next to Bucky. He had a blanket situated on his lap which he offered half of it to you. You accepted and snuggled into him as another explosive pop rang from outside.

After a moment, Bucky surprised you and spoke again. “You know, I used to love fireworks.”

You hummed, curling your arm around his bicep, hugging him. “Yeah?”

Bucky nodded, now staring towards the window which was suddenly lit up by another display. "I and Steve liked to go watch fireworks," he explained. "We’d go for his birthday and, wow, how they would light up the night. I thought it was the coolest thing ever when we were kids. The city put on some crazy shows."

"I’m sorry they’re not so fun anymore," you mumbled, completely unsure of what to actually say. Glimpses into Bucky’s life before the incident were so rare but you tried to treasure every one of them. It probably didn’t help in the slightest that his brain correlated Steve with fireworks. When was your boyfriend going to catch a break?

But Bucky just shrugged, shaking his head slightly. "What about you?" He changed the subject. Natural deflection. "Do you like fireworks?"

"I never really hated them but they did use to annoy me," you admitted. "Mainly because they’d scare my dog and that always made me upset."

Bucky let out a light chuckle which caught you by surprise. You held his gaze for a moment, shooting him a small smile before the moment was crushed by another firework exploding in the sky. You groaned.

"Why do people do this?" You huffed. "I get it, it’s the fourth of July, but it just hit midnight. Is it even legal around here?"

"You going to rat them out if it’s not?" Bucky teased.

You playfully rolled your eyes. "Maybe," you shrugged. "If that’s what it takes."

Another boom rang out and Bucky shifted towards you. "I’m sure they’ll be done soon," he said to you but it sounded more like he was trying to convince himself. "They can’t go all night, right?"

"You might be underestimating the American spirit."

Boom! Pop!

Bucky sighed in annoyance with each electrifying sound. "Yeah, you may be right."

That was enough for you. Just sitting here with him wasn’t really cutting it. You needed to do more.

"Maybe we should get out of here," you suggested. Bucky looked at you, confused, so you explained, "I read somewhere once that it may help to be farther away from the firework displays. Off in nature or something like that."

"I’ll take any suggestions you have at this point," Bucky admitted something shined in through the windows of the room. You were quite relieved he was willing to do more than sit on the floor. Not to mention he was actually letting you help him. You gripped Bucky’s hand tightly and you two stood up.

Foregoing any proper attire besides your everyday pajamas, you two packed some water and snacks before heading to your car. Bucky let you take the reins with driving which you didn’t mind. You only had a vague idea of a place on the outskirts of town that would work but, at this point, driving anywhere away from the chaos of the neighborhood was totally fine with both of you.

You drove about thirty minutes out of town until you hit an open woodland area. It seemed like some normal forest grounds filled with hiking trails but the specifics didn’t really matter. What it really offered was a lack of fireworks. Sure, some could be heard in muffled fashion and even seen way off in the distance, just above the tree line, but they were no longer right next door. You looked over at Bucky who was taking in the area. He already looked much more relaxed.

"This is nice," he commented.

You smiled and turned off the car. You two grabbed water from your packed bag. "I’m glad you like you," you said. "I was kind of worried there’d be campgrounds of tourists lighting more displays but it seems like we’re in the clear."

Bucky nodded slowly as he took a sip of water. His eyes were looking around lovingly at the trees. He even watched a few fireworks lighting up the sky back towards town. The sound was reduced greatly making it just a pretty mirage of colors. Even you were getting into it.

"Thank you," Bucky whispered.

You frowned. "Of course, Bucky. I just wanted to help."

"Y-You shouldn’t have to, though-,"

You shook your head insistently. "Don’t. I wanted to help. I’m so glad you’re feeling better out here."

"God," Bucky sighed, "what would I do without you?"

You let out a light laugh. "You wouldn’t know this cool forest existed."

Bucky agreed, "I guess that’s true." A beat. "But in all seriousness, sweetheart, thank you. I’m actually beginning to enjoy this Fourth of July."

"We could come back here later," you thought out loud, "and bring food for a picnic or something. That could be both fun. And certainly, keep us out of the action."

"I think that could be perfect," Bucky mumbled and looked over at you. When your eyes met, your boyfriend didn’t hesitate to lean in, stealing a kiss from you. You smiled, pulling him in for just one more.

This could even be a make-out spot, you thought. Picnics. Make-out. Lack of colorful explosions. Maybe a new Fourth of July tradition was in the making for you two.

#bucky barnes #the winter soldier #bucky barnes x you #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes one shot #bucky barnes imagine #bucky barnes fanfiction #bucky barnes fluff #bucky barnes angst #avengers #mcu fic #mcu #marvel one shot #marvel fanfiction #marvel #angst #one shot #bucky x reader

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ellitx · 4 years ago

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Twig | Albedo x Reader

the final act of TWMA part 1 part 2

can be stand-alone

disclaimer: this is written before v1.2 so my interpretation of albedo’s story and lore is not accurate. these are just my assumptions and understanding that i based on each characters’ voicelines about him

word count: 3.4k

Something felt odd. What in the world happened…?

The male awoke from an unfamiliar scent that drifted through his nose. Likewise, he has woken up from a restless sleep due to the rough waves, to glimpse at the glowing and radiant sun peaking above the horizon out of the window. It extended its vivid light across the deep blue sky.

Its dazzling and inviting rays flowed through the window providing warmth to his body. Slowly the fatigue of the endless dreams was seeped out of him as the warm light trickled into replacing his unrest— it eased his body.

His mind meandered aimlessly into nothingness, continuously staring at the beige wall painted around the room.

He is aware when he is forgetting when there is something close yet hidden, yet he cannot at that moment fathom what it could be. It’s as if he was following a bread crumb trail and it ends, so he stopped.

It gives him ideas as to what is missing from his brain because if one always got stopped when traveling, you would know that there are blocks in your way preventing you from continuing any further— even if he has no clue to as what they are.

A peal of melodic laughter that is mirthful and playful then reached his ears, stopping him from his dreaming. Albedo turned his head to the source of the voice and saw a girl— that was around his age— chuckling as she held a tray in her hands.

“You’re finally awake.” She brought down the platter on the table next to him and poured a cup of tea. His visage frowned and tightly gripped the blanket that was tucked to him.

Why did he felt that she was mocking him? He doesn’t know why but for some reason it did irk him. He forgot about his memories. He doesn’t have the slightest clue as to where he was and why he was here.

“Here.” She gave him the cup and patiently waited for him to take it. So this is where the foreign scent was coming from. He thought to himself.

The smell was fragrant but had a tinge of spiciness in it. It made his nose crinkled but accepted it nonetheless— quite hesitant, as the girl observed. Taking a small sip of the tea, it surprised him that it tasted sweet. It was quite unexpected because of the tangy fragrance it gave off.

“You look so lost.”

The laugh came from her like a newly sprung leak— sheepish at first, stopping and starting. She wasn’t done yet though, he could tell from the way she turned her head and half-bit her lip. From deep inside her chest came a great shaking motion and her muscle face grew tight.

His eyebrows arched as he put down the cup on the tray, waiting. In moments this female’s laugh was more like a burst water main arching into the brilliant summer sky, soaking everyone around her with unrestrained gales that deliberated her to nonstop giggles and picked face picture of glee.

Albedo wanted to stay straight-faced and walk out the room— she was, after all, laughing “at him”, not “with him”. But before he could stop himself, his poker mouth twitched upwards, and was smiling despite himself.

Nevertheless, he didn’t hate it.

—

On the next day, she was already bombarding him with questions.

“Hey, hey, what was that thing you just did? That was my sister’s research she’s been working hard for and you’ve already solved it?!” [Eye color] optics sparkled in awe and admiration as [Name] gazed at him from her side.

He peered into her eyes and nonchalantly shrugged his shoulders, continuing to read the texts of the book she gave him. “It was a minor mistake she had done. I’ve read some pieces of information about that topic and was not expecting I would stumble upon it.”

She puckered her lips and pouted as she snatched the codex from his hands. His answer was so vague! It didn’t really satisfy her curiosity about this outlander. “Hey!”

The female raised her arms, preventing him from reaching it. “I won’t give this back to you until you tell me the whole story!” Albedo’s brows folded in confusion and struggled to grab it. “That is the whole story.”

Her cheeks puffed and watched him yanked the book from her. It was disappointing, to say the least how he easily took it.

Sighing countless times already made him question himself why this girl still insists on staying by his side. It’s not like he didn’t like it nor does he like it, it just raised him so many questions about what happened yesterday.

Why would the Knights took him in considering how [Name] just effortlessly helped him out of nowhere. Not to mention how he barely knows a single thing about Mondstadt. It made him indignant how he can’t remember even the slightest thing.

He doesn’t blame anyone for it. It’s no one’s fault that he lost his memories.

Just thinking about this bizarre occurrence that just magically appeared out of nowhere made his head ached. Though the tug on his arm caught his attention and looked at the young teen in puzzlement as they started to march off to archon knows where.

“Maybe I should tell Grandmaster Varka about this…” She softly muttered to herself. He caught her words perfectly and so further press a question to pique his interest. “Tell about what?”

Both of them slowed down and paused in their tracks, stopping midway near the fountain area. [Name] chuckled and winked at him playfully.

“You’ll see.”

Albedo hummed and looked fixedly on the back of her head as they continued to walk silently.

There was a delicious moment where his face washed blank with confusion, like his brain cogs couldn’t turn fast enough to take in the information from his wide eyes. It made [Name] stifle a laugh at the expression he was currently showing to all the members of Ordo Favonius.

Every muscle of the male’s body just froze before he looked away from them to the girl who stood beside him. A grin crept up onto her face, it soon stretched out from one side to the other showing every single tooth.

Surprise isn’t an emotion he’d ever taken well. He could tell himself he was at loss for words. He guessed he found himself dumb, in a sense that made his lexeme stopped flowing. Stopped because she has shown him a new direction he never anticipated for a moment.

Every member knows she had saved him— saved him from what though? That he did not know, he never asked her about it nor did she even tell him what happened to him. He just let it be.

Receiving the news that he’ll be a member of the Knights, to have the position as the Chief Alchemist, really made him bewildered and surprised.

“Isn’t this happening too fast?” He questioned whilst quirking a brow.

“Hm? What do you mean?” [Name] tipped her head as her eyes stared at his own turquoise ones.

“Why is everyone easily agreeing to it? I’ve only been here for a day and just assisted your sister in translating. I appreciate the thought that the Grandmaster here is giving me the position of Chief Alchemist but I can't help but question why.”

She glanced at him, her mouth pursed but slightly open and loose. Her eyes are fixed as if she’s looking at something a yard behind his head. He called her name to garner her attention.

She blinks, refocused. “Albedo, it’s actually been five days. Lisa talked to everyone about how genius you are.”

Now it was his turn to owlishly blink. Five days? Does time really move that fast?

Well, he did hear the saying that time flies fast when you’re having fun. He never noticed about it and now that the idea battered him, it continued to linger inside his head.

What happened yesterday, what happened today, everything still feels the same. Even if the fragment of memories within him seemed to etiolate. His hands clawed his chest, feeling the unusual warmth from it and throughout his body.

Everything has been important to him and will be important to him.

He knows that these distant memories seem so far and vague but are significant to him.

He doesn’t understand the reason why, but he shouldn’t forget.

At least that’s how he thinks things should be.

—

The sound of the ticking grandfather clock echoed throughout the silent room. It sounded so monotonous and lifeless inside. The tall and antiquated object stood there as the gateway for old-man time, the golden pendulum making its steady way back and forth.

The silence was so eerie, though none minded at all as two teenagers were fast asleep, still remaining inside their dreams.

An aroma Albedo has gotten used to woke him up. It’s the smell of the herbs and various flowers that have mixed together giving off a sweet and minty scent. He opened his eyes and stayed like that for a few minutes.

The alchemist tiredly glanced down to see the papers are now messed and scattered all over the table. Heaving a sigh as he raked his fingers through his hair, his aqua optics went on to the female’s sleeping body that rested on his lab’s bed.

She still hasn't woken up.

He stood up from his seat and quietly approached her unconscious form to check on her condition. [Name]’s features were much softer in sleep, the lines that usually creased her brow replaced by youthful appearance giving off a child-like look.

She looked peaceful, he thought to himself.

He pulled up the blanket over her shoulders and turned around to continue making remedies for her once she’s awake.

The Knights of Favonius were worried sick about her, especially her sister, Lisa. They were hoping and praying to the Seven she’ll wake up from her coma. They all miss her presence, days of not seeing her wandering around also worried the townsfolk of Mond.

She has been cooped up inside his room while Sucrose and Noelle assisted him in taking care of her.

The morning dusk is about to arrive and Albedo has to continue doing his research nonstop. He does so wished to see her [eye color] orbs finally open after the incident. It hurt him to know [Name] has been like this that he did not even realize until the Acting Grandmaster and her sister told him about it.

He stared at the small plant that was placed on the windowsill. Its leaves started to fall off from its branches as it slowly started to wilt in the darkness. He grabbed the small twig and observed the faintest of light it gives off.

Would it hurt to say that it reminded him of her?

[Name] is someone that has to be taken care of carefully. After all, when she saw what he had written about her condition, she didn’t want to believe it. He wanted to say that her “friend” was just a fragment of her imagination without affecting her mental state.

He hovered his hand over the small branch, watching it bloom before his eyes with ease. He placed it back in the vase and returned to the table. If only he could easily return her back just like how he did with the plant.

Return her from his arms again instead of that bard.

He let out a bitter laugh at that thought. This was his fault. Why would she come back running to him if he did not even once give her his time? When they’ve finally met again for so long, she was avoiding his eyes.

It hurt him, he won’t lie about that. Her welcome to him was just a simple nod and that’s it. No hugs, no welcomes, not even a small smile was given to him.

If he did stop his research and at least spend time with her, will everything change?

Albedo shook his head as the answer to himself. Even if it is, why would he still continue hoping and thinking about these things? Sometimes his formulation of the rationale of real-life situations irked him.

This isn’t alchemy, genius.

His self-feud stopped when he saw her fingers moved the slightest from his peripheral vision. His heart fluttered and gave him a bit of hope if the archons had finally heard their wishes.

When her eyelids flickered open, the sight was not what he was expecting.

A lone tear trickled down her cheek. Her lips quivered and continued to look at the distance. Out of complete silence, her soft cries arose. He’d never seen [Name] sat like that, so deflated. Her loose shoulders shook, her hands hanging low, making no attempt to conceal or even wipe her own tears.

All of these emotions coming to him at once hurt him.

His head throbbed and let the feeling of guilt crush him.

—

The giggle rolled around the room like a child’s spinning top, vibrant and heartwarming as it moved around the people in its chaotic ways. It came in its fits and bursts— loud to soft to nothing at all and back to loud again.

It was as if there was an invisible feather at [Name]’s nape brushing softly; she squirmed and raised her shoulders to block Barbara from tickling her neck. The laughter built up inside her like so much water behind a dam, making her shoulders and her belly hurt.

She cried when Klee jumped onto her body and joined in with the deaconess. Their carefree and playful tittering reached Albedo’s ears when he entered the room. Their eyes darted towards him as their laughs died down.

The Spark Knight ran towards him and hugged his legs, overjoyed in seeing the alchemist here. He knelt down to her height and patted her head as a smile slowly crept up to his face.

[Name]’s laugh caught his attention again, though he did not dare to look at the two females. As much as he tried to focus on listening to Klee’s words, he cannot help but listen to the former’s gentle hilarity.

For some reason, it made his chest wrenched every time he listens to it. He wondered why that is when it’s something he remembers all the time.

He recalled the day he got his Vision. It appeared out of thin air on his desk and she was the first one to point it out. It surprised [Name] why he had gotten Geo instead of Dendro. She watched him fiddle the trinket in his hands as he continued to analyze it.

He didn’t really mind whichever Vision he got. As long as he can continue doing his research then it’s fine with him.

He didn’t know why he found himself laughing so hard, but all of a sudden, he couldn’t stop. His breath came in quick gasps between his unstoppable tittering. Tears gathered in the corner of his eyes, threatening to spill over.

She was confused about why he was laughing all of a sudden worrying her. He waved his hand dismissively and pointed out the expression that was currently painted on her face. Her face reddened and slapped his back jokingly.

After their short playful bickering, the Chief Alchemist plucked a small branch from a plant and hand it over to her.

“Visions are gifts given to us by the Gods. Think of it like this sprig, there are many possibilities which among the elements they’ll receive yet no one knows what they’ll end up with until they’ve received it.”

She furrowed her brows as her brain cogs continue to process what he meant. It finally dawned on her what he meant and hummed. “But not everyone can receive Visions, though.” She remarked.

“Exactly. They may not bear fruits or maybe yet, one day it’ll come to them.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what is it?”

[Name] sighed and rested her chin on her palm. “Not everyone is blessed by the Seven.” The male was still and quiet.

“Well, I’m no god. I may not know how they give out Visions but it sure is something remarkable, isn’t it?” Her eyes lightened up and nodded vigorously.

“Right?! Wouldn’t it be better if they just give it to everyone?” Albedo laughed and admired her own exclamation.

“Perhaps.”

It surprised the female teen that he just suddenly grabbed her hand unnoticed. He observed how small her hands are compared to his. He placed the twig on her palm and with a simple motion of his wrist, the branches started to grow as small leaves then sprouted from it.

It occurred to her just how amazing Albedo is. She raised the small branch in the air and examine the faintest glow of the leaves it emitted. She gasped and stared with wide eyes as isotoma flowers started to bloom from the ends.

“W-was that suppose to happen?” She turned her head to him and pushed her arms forward to show the herb to him.

He bobbed his head and took out a pot filled with soil. He used his elemental skill on it and a cecilia shaped flower appeared. Instead of the usual vibrant white, it almost looked too rigid and rocky.

[Name] poked it and it really was sturdy. He asked her if she can use her own elemental skill, to which she responded with a yes. She twirled her hand and he can feel the air starting to get cold.

Small snowflakes started to form and dropped down on the pot. Once the snow made contact with the rocky flower, it formed into a crystal and bloomed into a refreshing and spirited cecilia.

It felt like a real flower instead of the stony one they just saw. The alchemist plucked it and carefully tucked it to her ear, adoring how well it donned her appearance and perfectly captured her delicacy.

Cecilias really does suit her.

That day, the day he only showed it to her. It’s the memoir he cherished the most. It’s the only special memory he couldn’t forget.

He understood why. He keeps thinking of her.

All these mnemonics with [Name] are important to him and are everything to him.

And on that day, he believed she wouldn’t leave.

—

A smell of a nostalgic sweet breeze wafted in him. The winds kissed his skin making him wish to go back to sleep, yet the sound of familiar laughter was what made him want to open his eyes.

He recognized those sweet mirths. It’s so close to him that he can feel the figure’s shakiness. The tree’s shadow helped him not to be blinded by the rays of the sun and the gales that caressed his skin were so calming, but his focus was purely glued to a smile.

Her smile.

He still waited for the day when he can show the small beauties of life to someone, but there are no fools like him in this vast world. Perhaps they exist, yet they must be distant, enjoying the same sky with other eyes yet the same thought.

The whistling of the birds that awaken their sleep in the trees, letting his perception be painted with white, yellow, and blue. It battered him that he was currently laying on her lap.

So shall it stay put, a smile eternally stained upon her lips. Her joy, her love, her laughter, her cheer. All will reach the ears of those who have forgotten the warmth of such harmonies.

Emotions came to his mind like the waves meeting the land. They come to him, soaking his entire being and helped him to understand his entire self better. He felt wet hot tears filled up his eyes.

But this was no tears of grief.

It was tears of joy that he has finally heard her laugh once again. Much closer than before. The distance with them has now shortened. Is this the archons saying they’ll give him another chance?

If it is, he’s very thankful to the Celestia and to the Seven. He was so happy that all he can do is cry and let the tears continuously fall down his cheeks. The tears stained his face but he didn’t care if it did.

Albedo was just so ecstatic he finally got to reunite with her. He can finally hold her in his arms and apologize for the mistake he has done to her. He missed her so much that he can’t bear the pain anymore of how distant they are.

And so he promised himself he won’t ever forget her.

this oneshot is based on this song

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meltwonu · 4 years ago

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| 🍒 CH-CH-CHERRY BOMB! 🍒 | [CHAPTER 4]

pairing; dom!seungcheol x camgirl!reader

this chapter’s notes; masturbation, usage of toys, dirty talkin’, a bit of a filler chapter after last weeks hehe🍒 as always, thank you again for your continued support for cherry bomb 🥺💕 I'm actually not sure if next week’s chapter will go up on time due to my work schedule for next week but I'll be sure to keep y’all updated! if anything it’ll probably go up on saturday instead of friday... 😭😭 But anyway, have a good weekend yall! 💕💕💕 stay hydrated!!

chapters; 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - ?

The weekend ends quicker than Seungcheol even notices and while he wakes up Monday morning already thinking about you and your show later in the evening; his face falters when he reads the message on your cam homepage.

‘Sorry everyone :( I think I caught a cold so I won’t be doing a show tonight… I promise I’ll make it up to you on Friday! In the meantime, I’ve uploaded some new pics in our members only room~ I hope it’ll tide you all over ‘til then! xx Cherry 🍒 ’

His first reaction is to immediately panic; reaching for his phone and texting you to get as much rest and sleep as possible. He makes a mental note to check in with you again later, finding that he’s already running late to get to work when he gets out of bed.

“Hey! Seungcheol-hyung!”

The said male turns around, placing the set of roller skates on the ground. “Yeah, what’s up?”

Jeongguk sits next to him on the wooden bench, legs stretched out as he passes Seungcheol an energy drink. “Nothin’, just wanted to say thanks for coming over on Saturday! We should try to do that again, except maybe we can go out for drinks or something? We can give it the good ‘ol college try, maybe bring home a girl, if you know what I mean~” Jeongguk wiggles his eyebrows at Seungcheol who rolls his eyes.

“Uh, I’m down for the drinking part but I think I’ll have to pass on the hookups.”

“Really? Why? Are you dating someone and you haven’t told me?”

Seungcheol thanks the gods that the roller rink is dimmed; neon lights and disco balls the only things keeping the entire place dimly lit when he blushes a deep crimson, face hot as he avoids the younger male’s gaze. “Nah, it’s just, I--I don’t think that’s really for me. I’m more of a, uh, relationship type of guy, y’know?” Also, I’m devoting my time and energy to someone already who isn’t really my girlfriend.

“Mm, makes sense!”

Jeongguk keeps Seungcheol company even on his break, the two chatting about various topics before he lets Seungcheol know his break is almost over.

“Hey, wait! Before you go…” Seungcheol is nervous for some reason, fingers gripping the suede of the rollerskate’s boot as he avoids eye contact again. “Um, this is gonna sound really weird but… Who’s ‘j__min’? I feel like I’ve seen that username before and it’s, uh, I’m just curious how you know them? Sorry if that’s weird, I just--I’ve been seeing them around pretty often.”

“Oh, that’s Jimin-hyung. He’s a friend of mine that games with me sometimes! I’ve never really met the dude in person before, but he seems nice.” Jeongguk nods, staring off into space. “He seems really busy all the time too. And he’s super active on social media, that’s probably where you’ve seen him.”

Seungcheol nods; the guy didn’t seem like any sort of immediate threat so he logs the information mentally for now. He’d just have to do some internet sleuthing himself when he got home.

“Oh, cool, okay! Thanks ‘Guk!”

Seungcheol groans after the seventh pair of skates he’s cleaned, standing up to stretch and reach for his phone in his pocket. He checks the notifications, noting that you hadn’t texted back or read his messages yet.

A frown paints his features knowing that you were sick, but he makes another mental note to finally buy you that sybian now that his most recent paycheck had come in with it’s overtime bonuses. There were only a few more days until Namjoon came back which meant his extra pays would be over, a sad sigh escaping his lips at the thought.

The day gruels on; Mondays were always the slowest days for the roller rink which meant Seungcheol spent most of the time cleaning skates and bumming snacks from the concession stand usually. He tries to not pry deeper into Jeongguk’s friends but the curiosity eats him alive so he makes an effort to stay away from the younger male for the rest of the day, this time.

Instead, he spends the day hiding in the employee break room any time he gets; only leaving when Yoongi decides to hide in there himself.

Your head feels like it’s going to spin off of your shoulders once you sit up in bed. The sun sits low in the horizon from what you can see through your bedroom window; noting that it must’ve been the late afternoon already.

You’d woken up with chills, head fuzzy when you’d sat up earlier in the morning. Knowing that you were at least somewhat sick, you quickly wrote up a little memo on your homepage letting your viewers know that there wouldn’t be a show later in the evening. Afterwards, you had quickly downed medicine before curling up under your sheets and going back to sleep. You’d vaguely been aware of your phone ringing on the nightstand next to your bed, but you prioritized sleeping instead, knowing that you had to get better before the weekend came.

You groan once you ease yourself off of your bed, dragging your feet as you make your way to the bathroom in hopes of a warm bath to make yourself feel better.

It’s almost 5PM which means it’s almost time for Seungcheol to finally go home. He checks his phone one more time before he pockets the device, putting away the last few pairs of rollerskates before he starts making his way towards the backroom.

“Hey! ‘Cheol-hyung, can you come over here!?” Jeongguk yells over the music, arms waving him down frantically before he clocks out.

Seungcheol walks over, noting an unknown male standing with him. “Yes? Did you need help?”

“This guy, sorry I forgot your name?” The male laughs, eyes forming crescents when he smiles brightly at Jeongguk. “It’s Seokmin.”

“Right, right. Seokmin is asking if we’re hiring?” Jeongguk ends with a head tilt, unsure of the answer himself.

Seungcheol bites the inside of his cheek. Technically yes, they were understaffed even with Namjoon around. But Namjoon was also technically the one in charge of overseeing hiring positions. And while they technically should’ve hired more staff, that also meant Seungcheol’s overtime bonuses would be cut anytime they actually had the appropriate amount of staff.

“Uhhhh… I--I don’t think so? I’m not the one in charge. Our manager that decides staff and hiring positions is out of town indefinitely so…” Seungcheol trails off, hoping Seokmin gets the hint.

“Ahh… Should I come back another time then?” Seungcheol nods, frowning slightly. “Sorry ‘bout that man. But hey, why don’t you leave your contact info so we can call you? So you don’t have to keep coming back.”

Seokmin nods, beaming at the older male.

“Sure, that’d be great! Thanks!”

Seungcheol only feels slightly bad when he gets home that night, praying karma doesn’t kick his ass later for lying.

On days when you cancel your show are the days Seungcheol realizes he needs more hobbies than watching your cam shows and gaming all night.

Not that it’s a bad thing, he thinks, just that he could supplement his life with more.

He places an order for a few cookbooks alongside the order for the sybian, soft chuckles spilling from his lips when he realizes what an odd array of things he’s ordered.

Seungcheol manages to fill his night with meaningless tasks; finally cleaning his PC and settling in to watch a movie while he polishes off an entire pizza. He checks his phone a few more times, noting no new messages and he wonders if you’re really okay. A lightbulb goes off in his head, power walking back to his PC as he opens a new browser.

He bites his lip, typing in ‘j__min’ in the search bar to see what comes up. By nature, the username is unfortunately a lot more common than he anticipates and he ends up rifling through a lot of dead ends before he comes upon the profile on the same camming website you used and an instagram that seemed to be updated fairly regularly.

“Let’s see…”

Your body feels hot all over. Pin pricks on your fingertips as a bead of sweat trickles down your temple.

Now, you didn’t feel sick, you just felt incredibly insatiable. Again.

You weren’t sure if it was because your body had adjusted to a certain schedule, but you can’t help the way you toss and turn in bed; thighs rubbing together in hopes of alleviating the growing wetness between them.

Checking the clock, you note it’s already 10PM, close to when you’d normally be doing your show. You sigh, pushing your sweaty hair out of your face as you reach for your phone on the nightstand. You immediately notice a few text messages from Seungcheol; frowning when you notice the text messages were from the morning.

cheollie ✨: hey, baby :( saw your note, i hope you’re okay.

cheollie ✨: make sure to drink a lot of water and take medicine!

cheollie ✨: don’t push yourself too hard either okay?

The messages end there and you pout, unsure what to even say now that it had been hours since he’d texted.

babygirl 🍒 : cheollie… i only saw ur msgs now 🥺

babygirl 🍒 : im sorryyyyy i was sleeping so long but i feel better now!!

Seungcheol closes all his browser tabs before he realizes it, a smile on his face when he sees you’ve responded.

‘That’s okay, I’m just glad you’re okay and feeling better. Promise me you drank tons of water?’

He feels giddy, palms sweaty as he grips his phone.

babygirl: mmhmm! i did… i don’t even feel sick anymore 🥺 but…

babygirl: dunno… i’m feeling needy again… i think my body is used to my usual schedule...

Seungcheol’s body thrums with newfound energy and arousal at your leading comments. He’s unsure of what to say next, fearing he was going to say too much. But his phone pings again, eyes quickly flitting over your messages.

babygirl 🍒 : if ur busy its okay but

babygirl 🍒 : do u think we could cam? just u and me?

babygirl 🍒 : only if ur free tho!!

His fingers are tingling when he sends his reply, making it short and sweet before he places his phone down and makes sure his PC is running smoothly.

‘Of course, you know I’m always here when you need me. :)’

It takes a few minutes for you and Seungcheol to set up your respective spaces and in the meantime, you grab your laptop, propping it open on the bed next to you as you lay in front of it. You had debated on using your better camera which you used for camming, but you didn’t want it to be set up like a cam show.

Instead, you wanted a more intimate and casual video call with Seungcheol, so you made sure your webcam worked fine as you placed it on the sheets.

‘Video Call Incoming…’

You can’t help the blush that coats your skin nor the lust that fills your body as soon as you accept his call; his somewhat blurry figure coming into view.

“Hey, sweetheart!” Seungcheol beams at you through the grainy camera and you already feel yourself clenching around emptiness, words caught in your throat at how handsome he was and how truly enticing his voice was. “H-hi!” Rubbing your thighs together, you peer at the camera shyly. “I--wow, the pictures really… You’re so much more handsome on v-video.” You giggle slightly, leaning in closer to your laptop to get a better view of the silvery-blue haired male.

Seungcheol’s deep laugh filters through the speakers and your toes curl against the sheets.

“You should see me in person, maybe I’ll look even better then.”

You don’t deny that one bit; your own hands already itching to touch yourself. “Oh? Is that an invitation~?”

Seungcheol’s eyes pierce the camera, licking his own lips as you watch him snake a hand down into his sweats.

“If you want it to be, sweetheart. But tell me about you, how are you feeling? Have you eaten already?”

Gulping, you watch as his hand seems to work slowly and out of view. “I--um, I feel b-better just… Dunno, guess my body’s just used to, um, y’know… A-and I haven’t really had much of an appetite...” You trail off, head still fuzzy from the cold medicines and now, Seungcheol.

In a roundabout way, it almost feels like you’re watching him do a show for you as you watch him slowly get off.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better, baby. But you know you should try to eat, okay? I don’t want you to get even sicker.” You nod, fingertips already at the edge of your sleep shorts.

“I--c-can I touch myself too?” Seungcheol laughs lightly, nodding as he tilts his head back. “Of course, you don’t need to ask me for permission, baby.”

You grin at him, sitting up as you reposition the laptop. Your hand slides underneath a pillow, grabbing the small bullet vibrator you kept there. “Do you always keep a toy handy?” His voice is airy, teasing in the way he asks.

“Mmhmm~ You never know when you’ll need it~” You sing-song, shimmying your sleep shorts and panties off before you spread your legs in front of the camera.

The air gets knocked out of Seungcheol the second you spread your legs for him and him alone and he can’t help but imagine all the things he wanted to do with you. He watches as you tease yourself, fingertips only grazing across the areas he knew you wanted to be touched the most.

“I can’t wait for us to finally fuckin’ meet.” He grits out.

A moan floats through the speakers of Seungcheol’s gaming PC, your saccharine voice music to his ears. “M-me too, wanna know what you’d do to me~” You giggle afterwards, pressing the vibrator to your clit as you spread your legs wider for him to see. Seungcheol’s hand around his cock tightens as he watches, an appreciative smirk on his face.

“Oh sweetheart, what wouldn’t I do to you.” You can’t help but slide your fingers through your wet folds listening to Seungcheol’s voice, whimpering when you finally slide a finger in. “Yeah? What would be the first thing? Tell me, ‘Cheollie~”

Even through the webcam quality, you can see the way Seungcheol’s eyes glaze over in complete pleasure. He licks his lips once, leaning in close so that you can hear him clearly.

“I know you probably think I’d get straight to the filthy shit, huh? Pin you to your bed and fuck you until you forget your own name or tie you up to the bedposts and make you beg for me to fuck you. But I wouldn’t. Because I wanna worship your fuckin’ body. I’d take it nice and slow with you, give you as many orgasms as you want.”

“F-fuck, Seungcheol, I–”

“You could use me for your pleasure, y’know? You deserve it. You’re such a good girl. I’d give you anything you fuckin’ want if you’d let me.”

Your choked moans have Seungcheol working his cock faster; nothing on his mind except for you and his impending orgasm. “Oh g-god, Seungcheol, I--fuck, yes, I want that~ I want you to--to make me cum as many times as I w-want!” You mewl, easily working in another finger as you pump the digits inside your pussy.

He smirks when he sees your grip on the vibrator loosening, knowing that you were already too lost in the pleasure to keep the toy on. “And I’d let you. Maybe I’d make you cum on my tongue first. Or would you want my fingers?”

“B-both! Puh--please…” You whine, legs threatening to clamp shut. You curl and scissor your fingers, thrusting them knuckle deep inside yourself as you chase the pleasure that overtakes your senses. “Please, ‘Cheol, tell me more~”

You watch through the camera as Seungcheol pushes his sweats down enough to get his cock into view; mouth watering as you watch it curve up to his lower abdomen.

“I know how much you love being doted on and being taken care of… So after I make you cum all fuckin’ night, you know I’d take care of you. Make sure you’re comfortable and cuddle with you when you’re tired.” His hips cant up into his closed palm, a soft groan on his lips. “And then when we wake up, I’ll eat you out. Nice and slow so you know it’d be worth it.”

Seungcheol smirks, smearing the precum all over his shaft. “But I also know you like it rough and you like being punished like a bad girl. You like the idea of being tied up and teased and being fucked nice and hard too. I could take it nice and slow, build up the pleasure for you. Or I can take it nice and slow and tease you, I’d make you sit on my cock ‘n make you wait for it ‘til you’re begging me. Or maybe you would want an audience? Let them see you fall apart on my cock when you’re desperate to cum.”

You press the vibrator against your clit again, Seungcheol’s name falling out of your mouth in a blubbering mess. “Oh--I--!!”

Your legs clamp shut, fingers halting their movements as you cum hard around your fingers. Seungcheol watches as your legs shake, his own hand running up and down his cock in quick motions as he chases his high too. You vaguely hear him groaning your name; the ringing in your ears overbearing as your orgasm continues to wash over you.

The sound of your quick and shallow breaths mix with Seungcheol’s over the speakers as the two of you catch your breath. You slip your fingers from inside of you, wincing when you turn off the toy and toss it to the side.

“Fuck, baby, I--”

“Y-yeah…” You quietly lick your fingers clean, knowing that Seungcheol’s watching. “I… that was the first time I… did that with s-someone…” You giggle tiredly, wiping the rest of your sticky fingers on your shirt.

“Really? Never?” Seungcheol’s surprised expression makes you giggle; his eyes round and mouth wide open as he leans closer to his webcam.

“Mmhmm! Just, y’know, it’s--it’s hard to get close to people sometimes…”

You had mentioned it off-handedly once while the two of you had been texting, that most of the dates you’d been on hated the fact that you cammed. There was always a possessive aura that was present and while Seungcheol would sometimes get a little jealous himself, he also knew it was your livelihood and how you supported yourself.

“Ah, yeah, I can understand.”

The two of you sit in a content silence, Seungcheol reaching for a few tissues to clean off the drying cum on his abdomen.

“Hey, ‘Cheol?”

“Yeah?” He peers up at the camera through his lashes, blinking rapidly as he watches you lay back down in front of your laptop.

“About what you said… earlier…” You pause, shyness overtaking once again. “I--Would you want to meet up? Like, for real? I mean--not--not like tomorrow or something but... Y’know, we can start planning?”

Any words that come after that turn into radio static in Seungcheol’s head and he can feel his pupils shaking, nervousness already bubbling up inside of him at the prospect of actually finally maybe getting to meet you.

“Seungcheol? ‘Cheollie? You okay?”

Fuck.

“Huh? Yeah, yeah! I’m cool, I’m good, sorry, that--that caught me off guard.”

He watches as you talk animatedly, mind already going a mile a minute as he thinks over everything that needed to be done before then.

“I’m really excited to meet you, ‘Cheollie!”

#cherrybomb!cheol #seungcheol smut #scoups smut #seventeen smut #svt smut #svt scenarios #svt imagines #seventeen imagines #seventeen scenarios #scoups imagines #seungcheol imagines #scoups scenarios #seungcheol scenarios #scoups #seungcheol

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maybedefinitely404 · 4 years ago

Text

Day 22: Dukexiety

@tsshipmonth2020

Day 22: When you close your eyes, you can see what your soulmate sees.

Content warnings: Sleep deprivation/what could be considered insomnia, food mentions, energy drinks, parental abuse, drunk abuse, mentioned anxiety attack, physical altercation, dissociating, school security, maybe PTSD?

Word count: 3.5k

For as long as Remus could remember, he’d hated sleeping.

At some points it got so bad he couldn’t function. Falling asleep at the breakfast table before violently jolting awake, asking his mother or teacher to repeat things four or five times until it finally clicked that they were asking if he was okay, staring off into space for what felt like a couple minutes, only to learn that it was several hours later and he’d missed dinner. Roman had gotten used to his twin’s habit of losing sleep, and although it never ceased to worry him, it became more of a given thing that if Remus forgot to do his chores, it was (most of the time) an accident. He’d walk into their shared room and snap his fingers in his face a few times, ask if he wanted dinner until Remus finally understood, and then help him stumble downstairs.

It was also a given in their family that if Remus ever did fall asleep, whether in his own bed, or on the couch, or outside in the backyard, never wake him up. He so rarely got any rest whatsoever that the seldom times he was able to conk out, it wasn’t uncommon for him to be down for over twenty hours. In those cases, their parents would silently close all the curtains and shut off the lights if he was indoors, or cover him with their deck umbrella and lay a blanket on him if he was outside, and make it law to not disturb him. He’d miss school, it was fine, just let him sleep.

And it was all because of his soulmate.

Because it wasn’t so much the act of sleeping in itself that he hated. No, the times he actually got deeper than the REM phase, when he was actually out, it was amazing. Blissful and relaxing and made him so hyper aware when he finally woke up. Like the colors were no longer dim and words made sense the first time they were uttered. It was the actual act of falling asleep, when he had to close his eyes but was still fully conscious, that he hated.

He didn’t have a proper idea who his soulmate actually was. Every time he closed his eyes and their vision fused, when he saw everything his soulmate saw from their perspective, they never seemed to be around a mirror. That would have made life a whole lot easier, if he only knew what it was. Then at least he’d have a chance to save them.

It started when he was little, when their soulbond was just forming. Back then, it was still shaky and glitchy, sometimes showing what his soulmate was seeing, and sometimes just showing the blackness of his eyelid. He saw grassy fields of a park that he couldn’t identify, a dimly lit bedroom with toys scattered on the floor, the night sky from a window that wasn’t his. But then it morphed; playgrounds becoming littered liquor bottles on the floor of an unkempt living room, dark lego-covered carpet evolving from something once played upon to something his soulmate was thrown harshly onto, the view of the stars suddenly filled with the face of a screaming man. The man.

Remus had no idea who the man was, but he knew his face well. He knew every fury filled expression on his drunken face, the way his nose wrinkled in disgust, how his mouth twisted and contorted as he screamed. Their ears weren’t connected, so he couldn’t tell what the man was saying, but it was punctuated with flying fists and hands gripping collars, thrown beer bottles and pushes to the ground. It didn’t happen every time he closed his eyes, but it had happened enough for Remus to suddenly jerk awake the moment their vision was shared out of pure panic. It happened enough that if his mother reached up to adjust his hoodie strings, he’d flinch violently, or when Roman snuck up on him just a little too quietly, his hands would fly over his face to protect himself. He wouldn’t develop bruises, or take the undoubtedly cruel things the man said to heart, but he was still affected. If he tried to sleep, and the man appeared in his sight, he’d bury his face in his arms, eyes wide and staring at his pajama pants, knowing what was happening to his soulmate however far away they were and he was unable to do anything to help. At least he could open his eyes and be free of the horrors. It was only in the rare instances when he’d close his eyes and his soulmate was already asleep, revealing nothing but the black void behind his eyelids, that he could actually sleep.

When Roman awoke that morning, he blinked his bleary eyes and turned to the other bed in the room, sighing when Remus’ bloodshot eyes met his from where he was curled against the wall, blanket wrapped around his shoulders. The bags under his eyes had worsened more than they had before. If he was counting right, this was the third night in a row that Remus hadn’t slept at all. The last time he’d slept had been days ago, and only been for a couple hours before he awoke with a sob.

“Are you okay?”

In a move unlike Remus, he shook his head no. He rarely admitted that he wasn’t fine, but it was getting to that point of almost mania where his eyes glazed over every couple minutes, hands constantly shaking, unaware of anything around him.

“You probably shouldn’t go to school today.”

“It’s f’ne,” Remus mumbled, hitting his head into his arms, “T’st in Engl’sh. Gotta go.”

“It’s not like you to care about school.” Roman threw his blankets off, noticing the way Remus flinched at the sudden movement, and began to change out of his pajamas.

“S’nior year. Failing Engl’sh. Ac’demic probation.”

“Ah,” Roman hummed, gingerly placing a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie in front of Remus. “Is English your first class?”

“Mmhm.”

“How about I drive you back home after your test?”

Remus had zoned out, staring blankly at the clothes in front of him, so Roman took that as a yes. As much as he hated letting Remus go to school when he was like this, he knew that if he didn’t drive him, Remus would find a way to go by himself and probably accidentally walk into the highway or something.

By the time Remus zoned back into the real world, Roman had left the room. Lethargically, he changed into the lazy outfit Roman had placed in front of him and pushed himself off the bed, debating if he had the energy to brush his teeth or not. Just as he was considering just pouring the toothpaste into his mouth and gurgling it, Roman walked into the bathroom with an open can of Monster.

“I have a stash in the basement so Mom doesn’t find them. Keep it down low and don’t take them, or I’ll cut you off.”

Remus didn’t even realize he’d grabbed the energy drink until he had half finished chugging the can, almost sighing at the immediate burst of adrenaline.

“Hell yeah.”

“Get ready and be downstairs in twenty minutes or I’m leaving without you.”

It was an empty threat, they both knew it, but Remus rolled his eyes anyways and set about to brushing his teeth, pulling out his phone to check the time. There was a barrage of missed messages and notifications that he hadn’t been able to care about after sleepless night number two, so he sent back explanations to the people who’d questioned his disappearance and gotten up to date on what he’d missed on social media.

He stumbled downstairs as Roman was opening the front door, offering him a bagel silently. Their parents were both at work already, so they locked the door and got into Roman’s car. Remus wasn’t allowed to get his license, not when there was a solid chance that he’d fall asleep behind the wheel.

“I’m driving you home after English, capiche?”

“I’d probably skip after the test either way.” His hands twitched against his bouncing legs, still unbearably exhausted but now with his heart beating at a rabbit’s pace.

“You are not walking.”

“Yes, mom.”

Roman let out a tired sigh, leaving the drive quiet except for the soft sounds of the radio hosts. When they pulled into the school lot, minutes before the bell, Remus was getting out of the car before it had stopped all the way.

“Meet me in the main office after first period, dipshit!” Roman yelled as Remus disappeared into the building, flipping him off and letting the doors close behind him just as Roman shouted something else. Whatever.

While caffeine was perhaps his most helpful crutch in this nightmare that was living, it had side effects. As soon as his test paper was down before him, his mind completely blanked of every word he’d ever heard in his entire life. Though, in all fairness, that also probably would have happened without the energy drink. He was so used to barely sleeping that it had become a norm to him, but it wasn’t a healthy way to live, so even if he’d learned how to function on twelve hours of sleep a week (on good weeks), his brain hadn’t quite caught on.

The instructions for the test wavered and throbbed before him as he blinked his eyes rapidly, trying to banish the blurriness from his sight. He could barely hold a pencil in his shaking hands, his thoughts somehow flying at the speed of light and equally as stuck and lethargic. Pretty much how he felt.

“Remus?”

His head flew up, his unruly bangs flopping into his eye. Since when did he need a haircut?

“I’ve been calling you for a few minutes now,” His teacher said quietly. Although they were trying to hide it, he could see his classmates glancing at him from the corners of their eyes, “Are you alright?”

As if perfectly on cue, he could feel his mind zoning out again, vision going blurry as his thoughts disappeared. Vaguely, he could feel a gentle hand on his arm slowly lifting him to his feet, a voice giving a foggy command to the class, and then he was led out of the room, the painfully bright hallway lights blinding him. It also brought him back to the present, ever so slightly, as he was taken down the hall to the main office. In the back of his mind, he was grateful for it, because this was where Roman would pick him up. Did this mean he was going home now? Was the test over?

“-last time he slept. He keeps zoning out. I think it would be best if he went home and retook the test another time.”

Hm? He blinked hard, until his eyeballs hurt, to try and get the gears in his brain to start working again. The teacher was talking to one of the secretaries, and they both kept looking to him in concern.

“Can I call someone to come pick you up, Remus?” The secretary asked, already flipping through her contacts book.

“His brother also goes here, and can probably take him home. Would be easiest,” The teacher cut in before the question had even fully settled in Remus’ mind, and he internally cheered. At least that was settled. And by the sounds of it, he could do his test another time, which was a huge weight off his shoulders. He didn’t have, nor desire, Roman’s perfect grades, but he at least wanted to graduate.

“I’ll get him excused from class. Thanks for bringing him by.”

Remus blinked again and realized the teacher had left, leaving him wavering in the middle of the office in front of a very worried secretary. She was saying something, her mouth was moving, but the words didn’t compute. However when she gestured to a dimly lit backroom, he got the message and stumbled in, nearly collapsing on the small cot in relief. The door was closed nearly all the way, leaving just a crack of light shining through.

As much as a nice break the darkness was, it just made his eyes want to close farther, and took twice as much effort to keep them open. Pulling at the skin in the corners of his eyes, he reluctantly sat up and focused his stares on the miscellaneous anatomy posters on the wall.

That was when his gaze fell to the hunched form in the corner, staring at him with dark glistening eyes, and he nearly fell off the cot.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” He yelped. The figure flinched back, curling more into the chair they were perched on.

“Sorry. She told you I was here when she brought you in. Didn’t you hear her?”

“In all honesty, no. I didn’t.” The two kept at their staring contest for longer than necessary, before Remus decided to break the silence, “So, what are you in for?”

For a good minute, he didn’t think he would get a response. The guy kept staring back at him, like he was trying to size him up, before he muttered, “Anxiety attack in class. Teacher forbade me from staying here.”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

“Yeah, well…” He finally broke the eye contact, staring down the nails he was picking at. “What about you?”

“Haven’t slept in three days, I think. Maybe four? I was all zone-y during a test so the teacher said I had to go home.”

“Damn teachers and their sudden respect for mental health.”

Remus snorted, resting his head against the wall. “Why’d you have a panic attack?”

“None of your business. Why haven’t you been sleeping?”

“Soulmate stuff,” Remus answered easily, not put off by the other’s suddenly annoyed tone. It wasn’t common to be unable to sleep due to a soulmate issue, whether it was trauma or another issue entirely, but it wasn’t unheard of either.

“Oh.”

“Yeah, it sucks. Still don’t wanna tell me why yo-?”

“No.”

“I accept your rejection and will now take my leave to cry in the bathroom stall.”

The other boy actually snickered, a reaction Remus had been wishing for but hadn’t dreamed to expect. He waved a hand dismissively. “I hope you have a good cry.”

“Aw, thanks,” Remus cooed, leaning forward on his hands. “I haven’t seen you around. What’s your name?”

“Virgil. Only moved here recently.”

“How recent is recent?”

“Couple months.”

“Ah. I’m Remus. School disgrace, nice to meet you.”

“Oh boy, befriending the wrong crowd already.”

“I would be offended if you weren’t correct,” Remus grinned, hitting his baggy eyes a couple times with his fists.

“Virgil?” The nurse poked her head through the door, squinting in the low light, “Your dad’s here.”

Virgil stiffened immediately, casting Remus a look he didn’t quite understand before getting to his feet, pulling his bag onto his shoulder. She smiled at him and opened the door wider, gesturing for him to exit.

That’s when Remus saw him.

Him.

It took him a moment to understand that yes, his eyes were open, and yes, this was the man from his shared vision with his soulmate. 100% him, the same dark eyes and half grimace, except now wearing a pristine three piece suit that very much didn’t match his memories of him. He was signing a sheet, presumably to ensure that he’d picked Virgil up, and didn’t notice as his son stood frozen in the doorway, watching him with fear filled eyes.

Remus jumped to his feet, stepping next to Virgil.

“That’s your dad?”

Virgil let out a choked hum, one that was probably meant to be an affirmation, before gripping the strap of his backpack. “Why?”

“I’m your soulmate,” He said with absolutely zero tact, and the way Virgil’s face paled was enough indication that he’d understood. He gently laid a hand on the shorter’s shoulder, a silent indication to ‘stay here’, and marched towards the man at the desk.

“Can I just say one thing?”

He looked up, surprised, and gave Remus a once over. His stomach twisted, being under the man’s gaze, the person who had made it impossible for him to sleep, now in front of him. Eye to eye, he appreciated, because in all the times he’d seen him second hand, he’d towered over him. Now they were the same height, and that brought a sick joy to him.

“I suppose?” The man asked, voice as calm and professional as his suit, looking to the secretary with an almost laugh.

“With all due respect,” Remus snarled, hand curling into a fist, “Fuck you.”

And then he hit him. Hard. All his pent up anger, years of watching his soulmate get beaten to a pulp, losing sleep until he was a zombie of himself, panic attacks of pure worry and fear, flew out in one punch, hitting him square in the nose and sending him stumbling back.

The secretary yelled something he didn’t hear over the blood pounding in his ears, and suddenly two arms were wrapped around his waist.

“Let me the fuck at him!” Remus screamed, fighting against the grip with everything he had. The man was on the ground, staring up at him with equal parts horror and pure rage, dabbing at his bleeding nose.

“Remus, breathe. Just calm down, you’re okay. Just breathe,” A shockingly calm voice whispered in his ear, and he immediately sagged against his brother, the restraining arms becoming supporting.

“That’s him,” He said weakly, pulling away so he could turn to Roman, “That’s him.”

Roman furrowed his brow for a moment, looking between his twin and the man on the floor, before his eyes widened. He knew all of Remus’ stories, being the one a young Remus would come to when the visions got so bad he’d break down, listening to his rants about the abusive guardian of his soulmate.

“Call the police,” He deadpanned, turning his glare to the secretary.

“I don’t think Remus-”

“Not for Remus, for him!”

A gasping breath caught everyone’s attention and the focus shifted to the boy still standing on the doorway, his expression one of absolute terror, staring at his father. Remus broke completely away from his brother to cross to him just as the office door slammed open, two security guards-- the secretary had probably called them at the first punch-- taking in the scene before them. He could vaguely hear Roman explaining the situation, glad that he didn’t have to justify anything because he would most likely just end up throwing hands again.

Virgil watched him approach, almost cowering in on himself, as Remus extended a hand.

“Let’s get out of here. You’re not going back with him.”

It took the shorter boy a second, a nervous glance between his earnest eyes and the outstretched hand, before he took it in his own. Remus let a relieved smile take over, interlocking their fingers and leading him past the scene. As he passed a still talking Roman, he swiped the car keys from his pocket with no one any wiser.

“He’ll notice eventually,” He stage-whispered as they exited the large double doors, making their way through the parking lot. “I can’t drive, but we might as well sit in the car until Roman’s done.”

Virgil was quiet, allowing himself to be led through the rows of parked cars before Remus stopped, unlocking the doors and sliding into the backseat, pulling his soulmate in after him. There was a blanket tucked under the front seat and he yanked it out, unfolding it as well he could in the cramped space.

The shorter boy was shaking violently, trying to hide his hands and now bleeding fingernails in his hoodie sleeves. Remus, for maybe the first time in his life, opened his arms for a hug, and was genuinely shocked by how fast Virgil lunged into his grip. He didn’t have many soft spots, but he could make one for his soulmate.

“You’re not going back to him. Over my dead body. We’ll figure everything out later, but for now-” He shuffled backwards, leaning his head on the window so Virgil was basically laying on top of him, “I don’t know about you, but I have about a million hours of sleep to catch up on, so I’m going to catch a cat nap before Roman’s done.”

“It’s been a long day.”

“And it’s not even noon,” Remus snickered, maneuvering the blanket so it covered them both.

He closed his eyes, and for a split second, all he saw was himself, from a lower angle. It was disorienting to say the least, but before he could comment, the world was engulfed in black as Virgil closed his eyes as well.

And for the first time in… who knows how long, Remus wasn’t afraid to sleep.

#lywrites #tsshipmonth2020 #dukexiety #creativitwins #remus sanders #virgil sanders #roman sanders #sanders sides fanfiction #sanders sides #sanderssides #sanderssidesfanfiction #ts soulmate au

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bibliocratic · 4 years ago

Text

tread softly

S4 Canon Divergence + Mythological Creatures AU Mermaid!Sasha, Pheonix!Tim, Selkie!Martin

cws apply - see tags

Peter Lukas has always prided himself on the timing of his entrances.

He is not there, then he is. The ward slips colder, down into single digits. Martin gives a jerking shoulder-hunch motion when he notices his unexpected arrival, coupled with an intake of breath. No noise this time, no jumping, no explications of suddenness or surprise. Martin Blackwood takes well to both shock and silence with a delightful sufferance, and Peter is indulgently proud.

The lad is, as expected, by the Archivist’s bedside. Crone-backed, ringed with an satisfying corona of misery. It’s after visiting hours, but Martin likely hasn’t even realised that the gaze of the ward staff and orderlies has simply grazed past him when he came up, when he took his traditional post, when they do their rounds. Martin has not wanted to be noticed, so he won’t be.

Peter idly watches the machinery and tubes threaded though the Archivist like mechanical embroidery. This one seems eminently more worse for wear than Gertrude ever was. Stronger, though. Peter watches Elias’ chosen as he lies still and sedate for all he stalks the landscape of dreamers, and wonders if he might see the Eye’s favoured come to fruition in a way Gertrude never did.

All the more reason to talk to Martin, it appears.

“What do you want?” Martin says. Dulled, thick-throated. He’s wiping his face free from damp with his baggy jacket sleeves, glowering at Peter with a delayed annoyance, as if he’s interrupted some no doubt tender petition for waking. The antiseptic stench of the hospital worsens the tension in his bones.

He is perfect for their God. Peter’s so pleased the Archivist wasn’t so careless to have lost this assistant like he nearly lost both of the others. Elias told him that the Corruption had already sought to burrow into the debris of this lost soul, that Martin has taken the mantle of archivist well, while Beholding’s chosen was indisposed. And it is true that Martin’s gaze is more assessing than he would like. But Peter knows that Forsaken has long laced Martin’s lining with mist and dew-damp cold, filled his stomach with fog far longer than those petty chancers have tried to have him in their maw. That his God’s touch has been settling like thronging, subdued snow in place of Martin’s sealskin.

“I wanted to see if you’d thought about my offer,” Peter replies genially. Pushing his hands in his pockets, ignoring Martin’s radiating desire to be left alone.

Martin has. Peter doesn’t need Elias’ pretty little parlour tricks to know that Martin has likely thought about little else.

“I’ve been a bit busy.”

“Oh right!” Peter says after a moment’s pause. It visibly annoys Martin that it didn’t come to mind faster. “That spot of bother with the Flesh. All sorted now, I’m sure!”

“Why didn’t you do something to stop them?”

Peter crinkles his face in a deliberate confusion. Casting out his line.

“Why, what should I have done?”

Martin takes the bait with ease.

“It’s your job, isn’t it?” His voice pitches with accusation. His hands ball into fists, and he moves to standing, the chair complaining as it’s pushed back. “It’s your responsibility! You’re in charge now Elias is gone.”

“Thanks to you,” Peter replies smoothly. “And your companions seemed to do a good enough job. A few bruises here and there, a few near misses. Nothing they won’t heal from.”

Peter slides closer. Just a step. It makes his skin sing discordant at the proximity, but Martin stiffens, an anxious intake of air despite himself, and Peter knows he’s paying attention.

“I could ask you the same question,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“Why didn’t you do something to stop them?” Peter doesn’t sound judgemental. He doesn’t have to, Martin will paint on layers of meaning without overdoing this particular nuance of his game. “It was very impressive, watching you all. They all held their own very well. Except you. You could argue I suppose, that it’s not the same. That you’re not like the mer or the firebird or the sphinx, no added little genetic extras, and you don’t get any boost from any old helpful Power like that police officer, or the angry one touched by the Slaughter. You’re just Martin. And that’s… that’s the problem, isn’t it? Just Martin. Nothing to offer in the fight, no way to protect them. Holding them back. They could have been hurt, and you wouldn’t have been able to do, well, anything at all.”

“I…” Martin says, and Peter takes another step.

“The Extinction is a pressing threat. There isn’t time for me to wait while you finish your grave-side widow routine. I need you to help me, and it would be only fair, in return, for me to help you.”

“Oh, what, you can fix me then?” Martin snaps.

“Not at all,” Peter says. Smiling, because he is so funny, with his rage sputtering in a fog that seeks to tamp it flameless, stumbling headlong and blinded into the conversational pitfalls Peter’s dug behind him. “No, no, I’m afraid you’re broken, Martin. I speak from experience when I say you’ll never grow your skin back.”

Martin freezes. He looks Peter up and down like he’s expecting to see something different, the scales fallen from his eyes, but this is the only skin Peter has worn for so long now, and he endures the slightly prickling gaze of Martin’s Eye-touched observation.

“You… You were – ?”

“A long time ago. Before the Lonely granted me a better shroud to cloak myself in. It is not a selfish God, Martin. It offers gifts, or payment, if you prefer that way of understanding it, to those who work in aid of its ends. Benefits that could protect your friends, should something as unfortunate as the Flesh’s assault occur again.”

“And what about Jon?”

“He’ll wake up. Or he won’t.” Peter replies cheerily. “Either way, you can’t do anything for any of them like this.”

Martin gives him a scowl. Peter lets it pass over him. He knows, before Martin even opens his mouth, that he’s won.

Sasha avoids the sea.

She does not know why. Its pull is no lesser through her absence. She has dreams of sinking and never coming up for air, and she does not know if it is serenity in the ceaseless drop or despairing surrender. She marks the high days and festivals of her people alone and unremarked upon, speaks to her landward kin infrequently and vaguely. She needs to be here, she tells herself harshly. She can’t go off when there’s so much to do, when she’s in the process of losing so much. One of her family cold and vanishing, one breathing through a machine, and one… he died, died properly, and although he came back purged of something poisonous, the shrapnel scarring of collapsed masonry on his skin and the reddest, warmest wings sprung from his back, this does not settle her terrors.

She cannot leave. Not when she could lose sight of her splintering shoal so easily. Not when she’s unsure the temptation to dive down and out, deeper, further away, wouldn’t ensnare her to cowardice.

She finds the first scales in the shower. It’s a myth that any water will have the skin of her legs go slick, then bumpy, fusing into one muscled tail with her scales folding outwards. She can have showers and baths without impact. It’s the sea, that is the essential component. The same for most deepwater kin. Not the sea, maybe, or exactly, but what it represents in the change. It’s something about floating out into endless space clad only in human skin and human lungs and trusting not to drown. The letting go of one form with the tide and permitting the waves to bring forth another.

Her scales are dimmed, like they’ve smudged. Their colour diminished.

It’s not a molt. Her people don’t. Tim does, normally annually. Before they travelled to Yarmouth, he’d been dropping feathers around the office almost continually with stress. Nesting, and growing in new and painful sections of wing, snapping with a yo-yoing temper.

Tim notices. Maybe because he’s the only one left. Basira is holed up somewhere of course, as is Melanie, but it’s not the same. They weren’t here before, they don’t have the context for how much their group is diminished, falling to pieces slowly like her own skin is.

They’ll be visiting Jon later. She hasn’t seen Martin in weeks.

Tim approaches slowly. Looks at the flakes of blue in her hand. Understand flowers gently in his eyes, and he reaches out and touches her arm, and she forgot the world could manifest in ways other than hurtful.

“You OK there, Sash?” Tim asks.

“I don’t know,” she replies. “I don’t… I just… When did it all go so wrong?”

“I dunno,” Tim repeats, and he doesn’t move away and she doesn’t want him to. “God, I – I don’t know, Sash.”

Jon’s clothes are dirt-clotted, ripped up by the grind of rock, and holding him tarnishes Tim’s feathers grey, smudges the pattern on his t-shirt into obscurity. His teeth are chattering, goosebumps bobbling up his arms and making the dark hairs up his arms stand on end. Tim suspects it’s more shock than cold.

Sasha brought him a glass of water, holding her palm under it because Jon’s long-fingered grip is so shaky it’s sloshing the water up the sides.

“Told you the rib was a shit idea, huh?” Tim says. Played as a joke and deliberately shorn of any accusation. He breathes in-and-out and Jon follows the rise and fall, and it benefits both of them. Tim’s getting better at control. He’s had to. His anger grows in like pinfeathers but so does his grief these days, a full plumage of emotions he is learning to deal with.

Jon coughs up something that could be agreement, but is mostly dirt and grave soil over Tim’s shirt.

You should have waited for us, Tim thinks but does not say because there would be too much teeth in it, and Jon’s skin is already whittling down to skeletal. We asked you not to go, we wanted a better plan, why didn’t you wait.

You could have died, down there in the dark, and we wouldn’t have even had a body to mourn, he does not say.

We love you, you idiot. We love you and even that wasn’t enough to stop you leaving, he does not say.

We’re already losing Martin, he does not say.

A room full of looping, chattering, overlapping tape recorders. Neither Tim nor Sasha stacked them, and Jon would not have thought to.

It should be a reassurance, that Martin’s been here.

God, Tim hopes he knows what he’s doing.

Sasha rubs at Jon’s back, helps him sip another small trickle. Tim’s wings, voluminous and unwieldy, knock over recorders in a clattering collapse as he scoops them around to shield them both. Against the balmy heat Tim’s throwing out, Jon’s shivers gradually subside.

“Daisy?” Jon murmurs. His teeth are grimy with soil.

“She’s with Basira,” Tim replies.

Sasha’s picked up the rib that’s dropped out of Jon’s clenched palm. Wiping the grime off it and staring at it without clear expression.

“Why, Jon?” she asks.

“I wanted to help,” Jon says. His words small, like he’s embarrassed that he even thought of it. “Even if it was one person. I wanted to be able to do something good for a change.”

“You could have died,” Tim says.

Jon’s horrible flat chuckle scrapes over his lips.

“I’m not sure I can anymore.”

“Yeah…” Tim replies subdued. He glances at the red daggers of his feathers and thinks he understands that.

“I wonder what it would take,” Jon says idly, slurring with exhaustion, and Tim grips him closer and hopes he never finds out.

Martin doesn’t react when Sasha sits down near him. The breeze, a vicious snagging chill tussles his hair, some wisps twisting into nothingness like smoke from an extinguished candle. She is still getting used to this Martin, or perhaps the Martin he never let others see. The toned-down stillness of him, the undisturbed waters of his expression. His skin not quite solid, the patches that have returned pale, sickly-pallored in the softening dim of moonlight. The rest of him is a coalition of fog, a hazy motion to his image like he’s wave-rocked, smoked out.

Long minutes pass. Sasha sits down cross-legged. The waves ripple up the stones that make up the strip of beach surrounding the loch, and they’re hard and uncomfortable under her.

“I can’t swim, you know,” Martin says finally. The sea is louder than he is, and he can make himself so quiet these days.

“No?”

Sasha keeps her tone light, inquisitive without intensity. Martin shakes his head, and his image lags, skipping disjointed, like his connection is poor.

More silence. Sasha doesn’t know what she should say, where Martin’s thoughts are at. She scratches behind the base of her gills, rubs at the dorsal fins sitting mostly flat under her sleep shirt.

“I didn’t live too far from the sea,” Martin continues. Looking at the wavering mirage of his hands without comment. She doesn’t even know if he recognises her presence. “We had Liverpool about an hour away. Even Blackpool, I guess. My primary school had a swimming club, where they’d pack them off to the big leisure centre on a coach afterschool. Kids’d get these little medals for managing like five metres, or ten, fifteen. But there was a small fee, and Mum said…” He snorts out a dismissive breath and his face twists, and neither of these actions suit him. “Doesn’t matter. I never went, and I never learnt, and that was that.”

“You could always come swimming with me?” Sasha proposes slowly. Lost in the swell of this conversation, why Martin’s talking about the sea, what this has to do with anything. She wishes he’d look at her.

Martin doesn’t answer immediately. He might not have even heard her.

“I told Peter, and he said that made it even better. That it was a such a – ” he says the word with a sneer, the words sharp-toothed in his mouth “ – gift, that I’d never even had the opportunity to know what I would miss, not even a memory to embellish or to sour. That there was so much that could root in absence. He said I should be grateful.”

“Peter Lukas said a lot of shit,” Sasha says.

She shuffles closer to him. Puts her hand on his knee.

“Whatever he told you was bollocks, you know that right?”

Martin blinks. After a moment, his hand joins over hers. His image grows denser, less likely to be stolen by the midnight air.

His eyes, fixed out on a horizon point in the slick dark of the loch, are still distant.

“I just wish I understood why she did it,” Martin murmurs.

“Who?”

“I did some research. After Elias… after I found out. I couldn’t have been the only person, and it’s rare enough but there are – help groups… you know, therapists that specialise in that kind of stuff. But I didn’t… I couldn’t face going to one. I thought that… knowing what was so wrong with me would make it easier, but it didn’t. All my life, I…. I was stupid enough to think it might be something I could fix. If – if I changed myself enough, if I said the right things, loved the right people, then I might… that someone could fix me. But it can't be fixed. That’s what all the leaflets said. That it was best to think of it like a permanent injury. Like having a stroke, or some sort of brain damage or something like that. Something irreparable.”

“Martin, sweetheart…” Sasha starts. She doesn’t understand. The flotsam of Martin’s speech grows erratic and he’s started shivering, and it’s no wonder, dressed in a t-shirt, pyjama trousers and some thick socks.

“Do you know much about selkies, Sash?” Martin powers on. Chattering teeth and goosebumps and it’s like he’s drawing something out of himself, some infection long done its damage. “Not many of them left, and they don’t usually venture landward like some of the other deepwater species. They mate for life apparently. Staunchly social communities, and some of them can’t… can’t cope, if they lose their group, or their partner. They take off their pelt, and just swim off to drown. A-and those help groups and therapists, those people who had theirs stolen, or destroyed… they’re, god, they’re all terminal. They last six months, maximum. Because it kills them, losing it. They waste away and they die. And here’s me…” Martin’s face twists again, and it’s bitter and angry and despairing all at once, “and I just get to keep going.”

“Selkies…?” Sasha says. “Why are you….”

She trails off in a gradually dawning horror.

“Martin?”

“She burnt it,” Martin says, his tone stringing higher now, distress sweeping in like a squall to break up the unnatural apathy in his voice. “I don’t think she knew what it would… I mean, I don’t know, maybe she did, maybe she wanted me gone just like dad, I don’t know, and I’ll never know because I can’t ask her why. I didn’t even… it was so long ago. I was sick and then I got worse and it was awful and I didn’t understand why I was so ill, why everything hurt just so much… and after, when I was better, Mum said it was appendicitis. I believed her. Course I did, why wouldn’t I. I didn’t know… not until Elias, and I’ll never know what I’ve lost, or why it didn’t kill me, maybe it was because I was so young, or because it’s only from one side of the family, I don’t – I don’t know! I’ll never know! It’s a whole part of me that she just… she just took a-a-and…”

Martin’s back bows like whalebone. He takes long shuddering breaths like his words are keelhauling across his lungs.

Sasha’s never heard of a selkie with only half their soul. She can’t imagine, what it would do to someone.

She moves in front of Martin and he moves forward against her like a wave crash. He’s taller and heavier than her, and the impact pushes her back momentarily before her arms catch him.

“Breathe, sweetheart,” she says, “You can do it, breathe.” She holds him so surely, and she always will. And he starts crying then, the first time since Jon was in hospital, and he won’t or can’t stop shivering, and it is horrible to hear every emotion inside him claw itself back from the brink.

She keeps telling him to breathe, and he keeps following that instruction through sniffling and sobbing and broken-voiced confusion, and she counts it as a small victory nonetheless.

Jon’s mouth cannot scream.

Tim’s in the next room, the kitchen, drying plates and bowls and cutlery, within shouting distance, and he’d be here in a moment – he’d help if only Jon could speak a word other than his unbidden, unwanted recitation.

Jon’s mouth doles out its terrible missive, and he doesn’t not feel like a person as Elias rolls out the triumphant red carpet of his plotting and scheming, the self-satisfied weave of his grand finale. And no, he’s not a person, not for a long time now; he’s a catalogue, a testimony, an archive, and he would never have chosen this.

His hands scrabble at his throat, and his eyes are blurred with tears, his vision obscured, but it does not seem to matter, for his skin ripples and sloshes like an inkwell and a hundred eyes swell and pop and inflate again like bubbles against his skin.

Someone else screams. And the multitude of Jon’s eyes are newborn, fractal-imaged, gummed up with a feast of far-reaching horror all witnessed by him, overseen and devoured in his sight, and it is hard to translate what his original set of open, weeping eyes see. There is motion. Commotion. There are apologies being spoken in his ears, fervent, petitionary, but he is hearing the rising insistent thrum of the summoning and it is as sickening as it is beautiful. Someone is holding a hand hard over his mouth, the grip painful and punishing but even then the words burble out through the cracks. Another hand clamps over his eyes, and he shrieks and thrashes as his words gather to a crescendo.

A hand tears the paper from his grip. There is an acrid whoosh of smoke. Jon drops like the rigging of a ship being torn down. The hands at his mouth and eyes lower quickly to loop around his waist, catch him and hold him up.

Jon sees Tim, wide-eyed and shimmering with terror even as his skin burns gold and his feathers shine and there are only sooty flakes left of Jonah’s statement, scattering down from his palms.

He thinks it’s Martin behind him. Jon folds further, all his weight pitching forward and Martin’s forced to come down with him as he retches the leftover words in his mouth; king of a ruined world, he vomits up with bile and ink, and it splashes with a disgusting slop over the living room floor.

Sasha’s partially webbed hands are holding back his hair as he hacks and gags, his lips stained black, his stomach heaving as he chokes on everything that comes up, his stomach roiling with an overwhelming nausea. Conduit of fear, he brings up, dribbling from his lips like paper pulp.

After a long while, it’s over. Sasha carries him to the bathroom, and helps him clean up, although Jon has little memory of it.

He wakes, feeling like a shipwreck, and Tim is there. Sat nearby, his head in his hands. His fingertips stained with ink and soot. He can hear Martin and Sasha talking in low tones nearby.

They're still here. Even now, he’s surprised that they haven’t left him.

And Jon has no words remaining, so his body betrays him with airless, silent tears, at all he could have wrought upon this world, at all the suffering he could have brought to their door to still be granted forgiveness for.

It is not the end. It is an interlude, a reprieve. In some ways a kindness, and in others, waiting is its own cruelty.

They’ve bought blankets to the beach in order to cushion the hardness of the stones rounded by tide and time. It’s the first time they’ve gotten Jon to come outside for more than a few minutes. The scratches up the column of his throat healing. His voice still damaged, scratchy and scraped from misuse.

They’ll have to be moving on soon. To make plans for whatever future they need to avoid.

She sits up, and stretches out from where she’s been lying against Tim’s thigh. Glances at Jon, barely four metres away on a separate towel. Grey-haired and tired-eyed. Martin’s holding his hand, the left one crinkled by burns, as they talk about something treasured for its meaningless. Despite everything, Jon’s face practises relearning its smiles, even as he touches tentative at the marks around his neck, the bruising at the edges of his mouth.

The tension has not faded from Tim’s shoulders. His plumage sharp and strange even now. Her own scales patchy and bare, whole sections that have not grown back.

She considers her battered but striving shoal, and wants to show them that their past is not all there will ever be. That there will be an after-this, whatever that looks like. She wishes they spoke her tongue, so she could gift them names, new names, for the things they have become, this things that they have survived, and all that has survived them.

“Martin!” she shouts over, a sudden inspiration seizing her. “Want to come in the water with me?”

Martin’s expression barrels through at least three iterations before it hovers between wary and uncomfortable.

“I – er… I might just be better off here, actually.”

“No pressure,” she tells him, and she means it, for all she remembers that he has never had the chance to know the sea as she has, to feel his whole weight held up by the water. “But I am a pretty spectacular swimming teacher. I promise I won’t let go.”

Martin, to his credit, thinks about it. Gnaws on his lip, stares away from her and at his knees. Next to her, she can feel Tim bite back an enthusiastic declaration of encouragement for fear of spooking him.

Martin stands gingerly, and she is so proud of him.

“I haven’t got a costume,” he says.

“Your boxers will be fine.”

“We want something pretty to look at, show us those legs, Martin!” Tim says. He times the tone playful, the perfect balance of joking and complementing, and it works, with Martin’s blushing and ‘shut it Tim’ distracting him from the enormity of his decision as he neatly folds up his jeans, and takes off his shoes and socks. Sasha peels off her long skirt, rolls down her tights. She dislikes shoes on principle, and rarely wears them.

The rocks dig into the soles of Martin’s feet as they waddle down to the shore, slow going and interspersed with wincing.

She takes his hand as they stop, stand a foot from the border between land and sea.

“We’ll just go a little way out,” she promises. “The water’s fairly calm but for your first time…”

“I don’t think I can do this,” Martin whispers. He hesitates, and she waits for his decision. And then, he creeps forward, and she follows. He swears vehement as the water hits his toes, and he almost balks to feel the frigid temperature, but he pushes forward, his swearing getting more and more creative the further he walks out against the tide.

From the headland, someone cheers, likely Tim.

“Don’t look at them,” Sasha says. “Come on, this is all you, ok?”

Her legs unfuse into her tail, and she shivers out a feeling like cramp, luxuriating in the sensation against her skin.

Martin tentatively wades out. He’s tall, but there’s a point where he stops, knowing to move forward means his feet won’t touch the ground.

“A little further, yeah?” Sasha encourages, and he nods jerkily, a frantic up-and-down, his expression petrified. “You can do this. Don’t look at the water. Look at me.”

Keeping her eyes fixed on his, she pulls him slowly into deeper waters. His fingers are pressing rounded marks into her forearms. His leg gestures are sloppy, thrashing, and at one point he dips below the surface with the disturbance he’s making, and he splutters as he resurfaces, surging up, eyes bulging in a betrayed panic. She continues to reassure him and doesn’t let go as they stop and simply float, the shoreline easily in sight.

“How does it feel?” she asks.

“Wet,” he grumbles. Clearly concentrating, he treads, kicking out in a motion that gradually finds rhythm.

For a long while, it is them and the sea. The waves rub up against the bare patches in her scales, but the reminder is not painful.

Martin’s breathing calms. His terror recedes, and he looks down at the obscured water under them.

“Can we go out a bit further?”

She’s not doing as much pulling now. She shows him how to use his arms to push himself through water, and stopping and starting, correcting his gestures and posture and breathing as they go, they drift further out before stopping again, hanging suspended above the depths.

Martin smiles at his own unexpected success. He lets out a long, satisfied sound like something’s loosened in him for the first time.

His eyes, completely black, reflect the dour and overcast midday sun.

“Martin, your eyes.”

“What’s wrong with them?” Martin says, but no – he doesn’t say, he barks, and then gasps, and then barks again, stunned, unsettled. He doesn’t look upset. He’s bitten his lip with his too-sharp teeth that now line his gums, and he touches the sharp pain it has caused with incredulity, his still human fingers marking out the sensation of the new.

“What’s happening?” he asks and Sasha grins, and says “I don’t know, Martin, I don’t know” and he’s splashing, a seal without skin, something entirely himself, shivering minutely in the cold shock even as his smile shows off his pointed teeth. He barks again, the sound almost jolted out of him as he figures out how it works, and she trills in delight, and it sets him off grinning and kicking. And for the moment, for this moment, the Lonely is banished entirely landbound, and there is only them treading water, surrounded by the endless sea and trusting they will not drown.

They have to go back to land eventually. The waves around them start to wash choppy, the sky colours grey with the surety of rain. They swim back, and sometimes Sasha lets go, bobbing near his elbow as he swims slowly but steadily on his own.

Martin’s teeth flatten when they crawl onto the shore, panting and burbling out the dregs of their laughter. Tim and Jon have come over to greet them, Jon holding the towels and garments like an overladen clothes tree. Tim chucks Sasha a towel to fold around herself into a makeshift skirt before her tail bisects back into legs.

“Tim, Tim, Tim!” Sasha says excitedly, waving her hands and gesticulating. “Did you see, did you see?”

“See what…?” Tim starts, but he glances at Martin, whose eyes are slow to fade from black to blue, and Tim might not realise what exactly has happened, but he senses the tenor of the mood because he’s barrelling in, knocking into Martin, wrapping him in a hug and nearly smothering him with his wings. Once released, Jon approaches slowly, putting his burdens down. Martin glances up at him, almost anxious now that the initial buzz is wearing down, but Jon goes softly to his knees, and his smile spreads across his face like paint in water.

The grey of the sky feels far off as they allow themselves the momentarily uncomplicated gift of being happy.

#the magnus archives #tma #cw emotional manipulation #cw ableism #cw potential suicidal ideation #cw emetophobia #cw being sick #ask to tag #jonmartin #sasha james #tim stoker #jonathan sims #martin blackwood

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emachinescat · 4 years ago

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The Day that Camelot Forgot

A Merlin Fan-Fiction

by @emachinescat

@febuwhump day 24 - memory loss

Summary: A vengeful Morgana casts a powerful curse on Camelot on the day Merlin is named Court Sorcerer, making everyone in the citadel forget that Merlin – and his impact on their lives – exists. She can only maintain the spell for one day, but twenty-four hours is more than enough time for the warlock to get himself into some serious trouble.

Characters: Merlin, Arthur, the knights, Gaius, Morgana is mentioned

Words: 6,444

TW: anxiety attacks, burning at the stake, main character near-death

Note: This story is a bit late, as it was meant to be published on day 24 of Febuwhump, but I got sick, and missed a few days. I did post the first half of it on Tumblr on the 24th, but this is the finished product. I am seriously considering writing a sequel, because there are definitely a lot of ramifications that I gloss over here, a lot of angsty, whumpy stuff that I could (and most likely will) expand upon in another story. But I'll let you read the story for yourself, and see if you're interested in a sequel!

Keep reading here, or on AO3!

If you enjoy, please consider liking, commenting, and re-blogging, and you can follow me for more content like this! :)

Merlin woke up to a broom head hitting him in the face, which was not how he expected his first day as Court Sorcerer to start.

An indignant squawk escaped him as he rolled off of his bed in an effort to escape the assault. He already had an insult for Arthur on his lips when his bleary eyes cleared and he realized that it had not been the king at all who had woken him in such a manner. It was Gaius, and he was poised to strike again.

"Gaius!" Merlin stammered, scrambling to his feet and dodging another blow from the broom. "What the hell are you doing that for?"

Gaius didn't answer. Instead, looking as mean and ornery as Merlin had ever seen him, the old physician demanded, "How did you get in here?"

Merlin cocked his head to one side, completely nonplussed. "I… live here? I remember turning Arthur's offer for new chambers down so I could stay and care for you – OW!"

Gaius had hit him again. "Who are you?" he all but growled.

Merlin blinked. "Gaius, you know me," he insisted, his heart hammering out his uncertainty at the pulse point in his neck. Something was wrong; Gaius might be cantankerous for his old age, and he might have enjoyed the odd joke at Merlin's expense, but never something like this.

Merlin tried again. "Gaius, it's me… Merlin." When Gaius only glared at him distrustfully from beneath two gnarled eyebrows, he added hopefully, "You know… Hunith's son?"

To his relief, recognition lit in his mentor's eyes at the mention of Merlin's mother, but distrust immediately replaced it. "I have known Hunith all of her life," Gaius said, voice low and measured, broom still held at the ready. "But she has no son."

Real fear exploded in Merlin's chest – fear for Gaius, not for himself. There was only so much Gaius could do with a broom, but if he was forgetting Merlin so suddenly and so completely…

"Ah, I'm sorry," Merlin said as calmly as possible, raising his hands in front of him to show he meant no harm. "My mistake. I'll … get out of your hair."

He darted out of his room, across the physician's main chamber, and out the door, leaving a confused and agitated Gaius in his wake. Merlin prayed that the old physician wouldn't get himself into too much trouble while he was gone, and then darted for Arthur's chambers.

***

He ran into Gwaine on the way – literally, he ran headfirst into the knight, so distracted by Gaius's sudden and dramatic loss of memory. At first he wasn't sure whose ridiculously muscular torso he'd bumped into, and despite his worry, he couldn't help but grin when he saw the bearded face glaring down at him in surprise.

Wait…

Glaring?

Merlin stumbled back.

"Watch where you're going, friend," Gwaine said in response. The way he spoke sent a wave of wrongness down Merlin's spine. He had called Merlin friend, but it was a vague, generalized term. When Gwaine normally called Merlin his friend, the word was saturated with warmth and shone with the light of a dozen charming grins. Now, it meant nothing. And when Merlin looked up into his friend's dark eyes, there was no recognition there. No smile that Merlin had come to understand as reserved especially for the knight's closest friends. Gwaine's eyes landed on him, flashed in brief annoyance, and then skirted off of him almost nearly as quickly.

"Gwaine?" Merlin asked, irritated at the uncertainty in his own voice.

Gwaine, who had already started sauntering away, turned back with a puzzled expression. For just a moment, Merlin was sure that kind, mischievous face was going to open up in an eyes-to-mouth smile like it always did upon seeing him, but then the brow furrowed, and Gwaine asked, "Do I know you?"

Merlin opened his mouth to respond, but nothing came out. He stood there, gaping like a fool, his whole body coiled as if ready to spring into action, limbs numb, fingers trembling, fear wrapping its constricting tendrils around his chest.

Gwaine gave Merlin an odd look, then shrugged. "Maybe we drank together once."

Merlin nodded weakly, remembering not just once, but many times he and the man before him had gone to the tavern together, often with the rest of the knights, sometimes even the king, in tow. He thought of laughter, and promises of friendship and loyalty, and tavern songs and Gwaine standing on top of a table doing a clumsy jig. He thought of the first time they'd gone to the tavern after learning of Merlin's magic, how Gwaine had asked him a million questions that had gotten more idiotic with every drink. ("No, Gwaine, I have never tried to transplant my nose into the center of a rose to see if flowers can smell themselves.")

By the time he had resurfaced from the barrage of memories that Gwaine had forgotten and that Merlin now clung to with a new ferocity, the knight had gone.

Feeling distinctly sick, Merlin resumed his trek to Arthur's chambers, noticing with fresh terror that every person he passed either didn't acknowledge him at all, or gave him a second, bewildered glance like they'd never seen him before, like he had no right being where he was – being in his home.

***

Arthur didn't remember him, either.

Merlin was so near panic when he got to the king and queen's chambers that he almost forgot to knock. Knocking was never something Merlin had been particularly adept at remembering to do, especially when it came to his duties to Arthur, but since the king had married Gwen, Merlin had made sure to amend his habits. There were some things that Merlin absolutely did not want to walk in on, and besides, he respected Gwen too much to risk barging in on her unannounced.

It was Arthur who answered the door, and Merlin was so flustered that he didn't wait for an invitation to enter (when did he ever, though?), and he squeezed his way into the room past the king. Gwen was nowhere to be seen.

"Thank the gods you're here, Arthur," Merlin huffed as he bustled in. "Something very weird is going on. Gaius and Gwaine are acting like they don't know me, like they've never seen me in their lives!"

He turned around to face his friend. To his surprise, Arthur's hand was on the hilt of his sword at his hip, and suspicion rolled off of him in waves. "Who the hell are you?" he asked flatly, blue eyes flashing with an intensity reserved for those who wished to do him, his kingdom, or his loved ones harm.

Merlin had been expecting a joke like this. Arthur was never one to pass up an opportunity to tease his former servant, soon-to-be Court Sorcerer. The dry retort, "Very funny, Sire," died before it could escape his mouth, though, because when he looked at his king, his best friend, he saw no glimmer of recognition. No familiarity. No kindness or warmth or irritated indulgence. Arthur's face was that of a man who had just had a complete stranger barge into his room and started talking to him like they were old acquaintances – which, Merlin was beginning to realize, was exactly what had happened from the king's point of view.

Merlin swallowed heavily and entreated, "Arthur … King Arthur. Please tell me that you know me." Desperation clawed at his throat and infected his next plea. "Please."

Arthur didn't speak, didn't relax his grip on his sword hilt, but he didn't draw the weapon either, which Merlin thought had to be a good sign. Finally, after several long, tense moments, Arthur responded in a slow, cautious tone, "I'm sorry. I have never seen you before in my life. What business do you have with me?"

Merlin's world, everything he knew and understood and loved, crumbled around him in that moment. He staggered back, managed to stay upright by pure strength of will alone. What the hell was going on? The familiar sting of tears pressed against the back of his eyes, and he only managed to keep himself from crying by sheer stubbornness. He took a deep, steadying breath, made a conscious effort to look as non-threatening as possible, and tried very hard not to panic.

"Okay," he said, and his voice shook, so he tried again. "Okay." This time, his voice was steadier. Arthur's glare pounded into him from across the room, and knew that the king's already thin patience was running out. "Something very wrong is happening in Camelot," the sorcerer began.

Arthur interrupted him. "I agree," he said pedantically. "There's a strange man in my chambers."

"I'm not – I am, or I was, your servant."

"My servant's name is George."

Merlin couldn't help it. He groaned. "George? The one who makes jokes about brass? He's your servant in this hellish version of Camelot?"

Arthur sent Merlin a look that was almost pitying. "You are obviously very confused," he said in a surprisingly gentle tone. "But I am king of Camelot, and you have no right to be in my personal chambers. Go now, and I will think nothing more of this intrusion. If you do not, then I will have to treat you as a threat, and call the guards."

Merlin shook his head, unwilling to let this go. In the span of a single morning, his entire reality, the world he and Arthur had worked so hard to build and the future that they were about to step into, his new position as Court Sorcerer, his friendship with Arthur, everything, had been ripped away from him. He had to figure out what could have caused this to happen. He didn't have to think long – who was out there with enough power to make what seemed like the entire citadel forget he existed? Who was angry and envious and vindictive enough to take away everyone he loved on the very day that the culmination of his and Arthur's dreams were finally taking shape?

Even as Arthur stepped forward, hand tightening on the hilt of his sword, preparing to draw it, Merlin blurted, "It has to be Morgana!"

All the color drained out of Arthur's face in an instant. He stood there, frozen, a horrible expression of pain manifesting in his eyes. "How dare you speak of my sister," the king growled, and Merlin actually backed up a few steps, bumping into the end table that he'd polished more times than he could count.

"I know she's a difficult subject to talk about," Merlin managed, striving to keep his voice steady as the grief in Arthur's eyes turned to fury. "But it's the only explanation. Morgana must have cast a curse on the citadel – you have to let me go find her, please, and I can stop this, and the world can go back to normal."

Arthur drew his sword now, and Merlin had no more room to retreat. He stood before his king, his closest friend, his muscles aching from the tension gripping his body, his heart pumping so fast and hard he could feel the flutter in his chest. "Arthur, please–"

"I am your king!" the man who had Arthur's face but spoke like his father spat. "You will address me as such! And how dare you insinuate that the Lady Morgana was a sorceress! What vile game are you playing?"

Merlin's head spun; he had no idea what was going on, how Arthur was currently seeing the world, but he did know for certain now that Morgana was behind it. The reverence and love with which the king said his half-sister's name could only come from a delusion the sorceress in question had placed there. Then something Arthur had said hit home. "What do you mean 'was'?"

The expression on the king's face was faintly nauseated, as if he were being forced to remember something that he had hidden away deep inside, or as if he were actively fighting the urge to cut Merlin down on the spot. Either scenario felt entirely wrong and filled Merlin with a sense of dread. "My sister is dead," Arthur said flatly. "She who would have been queen – should have been queen." Oh, yes, Morgana was definitely behind this, Merlin thought wryly. It was bad enough she had these sick delusions in the first place, but to force everyone in Camelot to play a part in them was equally terrifying and sad. "Struck down by a sorcerer in cold blood."

Merlin flinched at the way Arthur spat the word sorcerer. It had been years since he had heard the title said with such hatred and derision, and never had he heard this level of malevolence for magic-users come from Arthur's mouth. After everything they had been through together, after the joy of watching their prophesied destiny unfold before his very eyes, after hearing Arthur accept his magic and plan to officially declare him Court Sorcerer, hearing the title that Arthur had so often spoken of with pride slide out of that same mouth slicked with hatred hurt. But Merlin reminded himself of the truth – this wasn't Arthur, not really; somehow he was being fed false memories – and he squared his shoulders and looked his king right in the eyes.

"I'm sorry for your loss," he said solemnly. Arthur's eyebrows shot up in surprise. Merlin hoped it was a good sign. "But Arthur – your highness – I need you to listen to me, please. I can explain everything. I can try, at least. But your memories aren't what you think they are. Morgana is alive and… very well, considering the power of this enchantment."

"My sister was murdered by magic, and yet you still insist that she is the evil enchantress!" Arthur fumed, and Merlin felt like he was talking to a stone wall, or even more deaf and unyielding, Uther Pendragon. He very seriously considered knocking Arthur out with magic and tucking him away safely in a wardrobe somewhere while he himself went to deal with the sorceress who had caused all this trouble. But Merlin could sense Arthur, the real Arthur, somewhere beneath the surface of those familiar-but-foreign eyes, and he was sure he could break the spell without having to go to the source. Merlin was Arthur's dearest friend, the king had said this himself (and yes, it still counted even if Arthur had been incredibly drunk after a night in the tavern with Gwaine when he said it). And Merlin knew Arthur better than anyone else, save the queen.

I can reach him, he reassured himself. Arthur is still in there, somewhere. I just have to find him. And once he's back to himself, I can deal with Morgana.

"Please, sire," Merlin said, putting every bit of sincerity he could muster into his words. "Just… let me tell you my side of the story. Let me remind you of who I am, and who you truly are. I am your friend, Arthur, and you have said yourself that I am the most stupidly loyal man you have ever had the displeasure to meet." A desperate chuckle lilted his last few words.

"You have two minutes."

"Um, there's a lot to cover, actually," Merlin responded. "Can I have a bit longer, because I don't think–"

"One and half minutes."

"Okay, okay, I'll stick to the basics!" And so Merlin gave Arthur the quickest and most condensed version of their friendship and history he could cobble together in less time than it usually took to exchange greetings with his king in the morning.

He ended with, "And so you see, it makes sense that Morgana would want to sabotage this occasion, because it marks the beginning of a new era that she desperately wants to be a part of but is too bitter and proud to humble herself and change for. She wants to tear us apart, wants you to do something that you'll later regret. But I know you're stronger than this, Arthur. I know that you remember me, deep down. The life you're living isn't yours. Your memories aren't yours. They belong to Morgana, but your mind does not." A strange, almost trance-like mask had descended over Arthur's face while Merlin spoke, and hope started budding in the warlock's chest – he was so close to breaking through, he could feel it.

"So," Merlin prompted, when Arthur did not immediately respond. "Do you remember? Have you realized the truth, sire?"

Slowly, Arthur nodded, and the dazed quality to his eyes cleared up in an instant. "Yes," he murmured. Merlin allowed his eyes to close momentarily in relief; his body sagged against the table at his back. Thank the gods, the nightmare was over. Now all that was left was to find Morgana and make sure nothing like this ever happened again.

But Arthur wasn't finished speaking, and the hardness had steeled his gaze once more, his lips set in a straight line and his jaw clenched and held high. "I have realized that I was a fool to think that you were a harmless vagrant with delusions of grandeur who wandered into the wrong part of the castle. I should never have opened the door for you."

"Arthur–"

"I am your KING!" Merlin snapped his mouth shut, tears once again prickling at the corner of his eyes. The injustice of the situation weighed as heavily on him as his destiny once had. "You are a sorcerer, an enemy of Camelot, here in an attempt to take down Camelot from the inside. But your spells and tricks and poisoned words will not work on me."

"But–"

"Guards!"

"You don't understand, I–"

"Guards!"

***

Elyan and Percival were the knights who dragged Merlin to the dungeons and threw him roughly into a cell. Then Percival clasped his wrists in shackles, which were chained to the floor. The door slammed shut with a metallic clang.

"Percival – Elyan!" Merlin called out as the knights that had only a week ago pledged their acceptance and loyalty to him as the soon-to-be Court Sorcerer and chief advisor to the king. "Please, you know me!"

"You'll die for your treachery, sorcerer," Elyan spat.

The left, and Merlin sank to the cold, damp stone floor, chains clinking. He drew his knees up to his chest, rested his aching head on them, and did his best to remember how to breathe.

***

Merlin wasn't sure how long he had been in the dungeon, but it had to have been a couple of hours at least. He hadn't eaten breakfast because the old man who usually prepared it for him had instead attacked him with a broom. Now, he was certain he had missed lunch too. His stomach growled at him in protest, but the hunger pangs meant nothing to Merlin. Even if the guards dropped off a meal fit for a king, he wouldn't be able to eat a bite. Everything had gone so wrong.

And now Merlin was at a loss of what to do. He could escape the dungeons easily, he knew, and go searching for Morgana. But there were so many uncertainties, a litany of what ifs that railed against him whenever he thought about breaking out of his chains and sending the cell door crashing into the guards holding a silent but hostile vigil on the other side. If indeed he could find Morgana and discover a way to reverse the curse, then it would, of course, be an easy fix. Merlin's failure to connect with Arthur and break the spell himself had planted a seed of self-doubt deeply within the soil of his mind, however, and now what he had been so sure of before he'd tried to fix things himself – that he would be able to hunt down Morgana and stop this madness with magic – seemed like a distant, unrealistic goal.

And if he did fail? If he could not find Morgana, or if she had managed to employ a magic far more powerful or strange than he currently knew how to counter? If he was unable to break the curse? Then Arthur would go on believing Merlin was the enemy, and Merlin would have forfeited any chance of reaching his friend by flouting the king's edict, attacking the guards, and breaking out of the castle.

Merlin had only been able to get through to Arthur in his other life, his real life, by showing the king over a period of years that magic was not something to be inherently feared, not something evil in and of itself. He had had to show the king through his own life and actions the truth about magic, so that when Arthur had at last learned of his secret, it was from Merlin's own lips and with nearly a decade of loyalty and friendship to back up Merlin's assurances that he had only ever used his gifts to protect Arthur and Camelot. Sure, Arthur had been angry at first, and hurt that Merlin hadn't trusted him, but he had come to an acceptance of Merlin's magic much more quickly than the warlock had imagined. King and servant had grown even closer in the wake of the truth, and soon after, Arthur had started drafting plans for making magic legal and had proposed the idea of Melin's being officially named Court Sorcerer.

But if Merlin was forced to start from scratch, to rebuild his relationship with the king – a possibility that pained him deeply but that he was more than willing to do, if it was the only way to get Arthur back and get their destiny on track – then it would not be wise to start that relationship off with a jailbreak. Then again, he argued against himself, neither was blurting out his secret to an Arthur who had already shown great disdain for magic and who held no memory of or loyalty toward Merlin at all. At this rate, maybe it was better to just take the risk and escape, because how in the name of the Triple Goddess was he supposed to convince Arthur of his loyalty if the king most likely planned to execute him for treason?

He almost made his escape then, but something stopped him. At first, he couldn't identity exactly what it was, just a feeling, an uncomfortable squirming in his gut that could have been the voice of destiny, or instinct, or, quite possibly, hunger. But either way, it bothered him enough that he held off on his plans to break out and examined the feeling more closely. Eventually, he realized – if he left Arthur now, especially in the state he was in, alone and unprotected and with Morgana out there somewhere with her eyes feasting hungrily on the citadel she so earnestly believed should be hers, he could be putting the king in more danger. If Merlin wasn't able to find Morgana in time, and she used his absence to ease her way into the citadel and onto the throne, which Arthur would readily give up to her in his current state.. With him under her influence, she could do whatever she wanted to him – kill him, imprison him, break his mind forever… and Merlin wouldn't be there to stop her.

With this thought, he decided to wait it out, and to see how events would unfold. He would not use his magic to defy Arthur or make his escape unless absolutely necessary. After all, he tried to assure himself, there was the very real possibility that Morgana would not be able to hold this powerful of a spell for long. She might be a priestess of the Old Religion, but even she had her limits. Perhaps her plan was to lure Merlin out to find her and then to use his absence to take Camelot for herself, but it was entirely possible that she only had a limited window of time to achieve her goal and that she was counting on Merlin to act on his emotions and search her out immediately.

Or maybe her plan was just to simply wreak havoc in Merlin's life for as long as she could. Either way, Merlin reasoned, her hold over the entirety of Camelot could not last forever. Sooner or later, her grip would weaken and Arthur and the rest of the citadel would wrest their way out of her control.

Merlin just had to survive until then.

***

He was unsure of how much time had passed when they came for him again. No one had brought him food, or water, and no one had come to visit him during his imprisonment, either. Merlin thought it was highly likely that Arthur had ordered any curious parties to stay away; the king had made it abundantly clear that he considered Merlin a dangerous threat. The fact that he had not been given even a hunk of stale bread or a flagon of water sent warning bells off in Merlin's mind – if this strange Arthur was anything like Uther had been, then he knew that he would be executed swiftly and without trial, and there was no need to feed a dead man.

Gwaine and Leon came to collect him. Leon unlocked the shackles and shoved him at Gwaine, who spat at his feet. "And to think I was kind to you this morning," he growled, and Merlin fought the urge to remind him that he hadn't exactly been kind, more indifferent. Gwaine roughly spun Merlin around, wrenched his hands behind his back so hard that pain sliced through his shoulder blades. Merlin felt his hands being bound tightly, expertly behind his back with course, thick rope. He reached into himself and felt his magic, alive, pulsing, ready to rise to his defense, and he took solace in it, but kept it at bay.

Not yet, he told himself.

But he was getting scared, and he was running out of options.

***

They shoved him to his knees before Arthur, who sat unyielding and terrible on his throne, a mirror image of his father. Merlin realized with a start that there was only one throne.

"Where's Gwen?" he asked. Now that he thought about it, the servant-turned-queen hadn't come up when Merlin had told his story to Arthur earlier, and the king had made no mention of his wife. In fact, he recalled with a start, none of Gwen's more domestic touches had been in Arthur's chamber.

Arthur stood, striding forward and looming over his prisoner. "You should have gagged him," he groused. "He doesn't know how to shut up." For a split second, Merlin thought that maybe the real Arthur was beginning to resurface – that was exactly something that he would say! Then he crossed his arms over his chest and asked irritably, "Who is Gwen? Your accomplice?"

"No, no," Merlin quickly assured him, not wanting to cause any trouble for Gwen, wherever she was. It was odd, he thought: Most elements of Camelot had stayed the same in Morgana's living nightmare, like the knights – even the non-noble ones, even Elyan, Gwen's brother, had remained as they were. But Arthur, in this version of reality, had never married Gwen. It made sense if he thought about it, though. Gwen had occupied the role that Morgana had believed was hers, had, in the witch's eyes, betrayed her trust and left her for the man that represented everything Morgana hated. Of course, Gwen wouldn't have her happy ending, her marriage to Arthur, with Morgana in charge. She was being punished as well. Merlin wondered if Gwen had been left with her memories of the real world like he had been, or if she was somewhere in Camelot, living and thinking as a maid when she really was a queen.

To Merlin's relief, Arthur didn't pursue the line of questioning any further. "I have talked this matter over with my council and advisors," he said in a measured voice. A burst of bitterness howled inside of Merlin – he had been named Arthur's chief advisor! He had been a part of the original council, the Knights of the Round Table, when Arthur had first brought them together! And now this illusion of Morgana's had stolen that away from him, too.

Not yet, he reminded his magic, as it raged and boiled and frothed inside of him. Be patient.

He might have been able to control his magic, but he could not keep his sarcasm completely in check: "And I am sure that in your discussion with the council, you all came to a completely fair and totally unbiased decision based on facts and not the unfounded prejudices of your father's rule."

He didn't know what he had been expecting, but it certainly was not Arthur's face flushing an angry red, nor the back of his hand smashing full-force into Merlin's cheek, snapping his head to the side violently. He felt one of the king's rings split the skin on his cheekbone, and thought for a breathless moment that the entire left side of his face had caved in.

He couldn't keep back the lone tear that crawled from the corner of his eye. It didn't come from pain or even shock – but a sense of gut-wrenching betrayal that he could not reason his way out of, even knowing that Arthur was not himself. Even in the state that Arthur was in, even knowing that the king would make plans to execute him, Merlin never anticipated Arthur himself becoming physically violent with him. Somehow, Arthur's hitting him was so much more of a betrayal than a death sentence.

Just. Wait. He didn't know how much longer he would be able to keep his magic from rising to his defense.

"You will learn your place, sorcerer," Arthur hissed. "When you burn. Take him; we light the pyre at first dawn."

***

Fear screamed through Merlin's body like a whirlwind, and coherent thought fled in the wake of his worst nightmares manifesting before him. He had been sure that Arthur would have chosen hanging or even the chopping block, but a pyre –

Merlin had grown up terrified of fires, horrified at the possibility of dying a brutal, torturous death, swallowed and ravaged by flames, all because he was born with magic. Because of who he was.

No one had been burnt at the stake in years in Camelot. Certainly not after Arthur became king. It was a barbaric practice, and even the worst war criminals and traitors were given a swift, merciful death. He had assumed that Arthur would continue that tradition.

But no, when he was dragged out into the courtyard – the sky was dark, but the air chilly and damp, heralding the approaching dawn – a great pyre had been constructed, and the rest of the knights – his friends – had gathered around, their faces lit eerily by the flickering flames of the torches they held at the ready. At least Gaius wasn't there.

You're not actually going to die, Merlin tried to remind himself, dragging desperately for air through his nose, his mouth blocked by his neckerchief that they'd dragged over his mouth in a bid to keep him from talking, or screaming, or just out of pure spite, Merlin didn't know. You can escape. You will escape, and find Morgana, and stop this. You can't delay any longer.

He drew himself up as tall as he could between Leon and Gwaine, calling his magic to his aid and –

He wasn't sure what happened, or how his friends-turned-enemies had guessed that he was about to try something – maybe he had given himself away somehow, maybe they had noticed the change in his stance or a shift in his energy, or maybe Morgana was interfering even now, ensuring that he would not escape his fate so easily. Whatever the reason, just as Merlin drew upon his magic, something blunt – a sword hilt? – crashed into the back of his skull, and everything was pain.

Agony ripped through his head, his neck, and crackled down his spine. Any grip Merlin had on his magic slipped through his fingers, and he fell forward, held semi-upright only by the knights escorting him to his death. He didn't lose consciousness, but he did lose all sense of control over his body and his magic, and the only thing that existed was pain. His stomach churned in time with the throbbing of his head, and his eyes were driven shut instinctively by the light of the torches before him.

The next few minutes passed in a state of distanced terror and pain. Merlin was acutely aware of the heaviness and agony of his head and the nausea in his gut. He also felt every spike of fear, every bit of helplessness, every scream that wanted to rise up from the most primal part of his being. And yet, at the same time, it was as if it was happening to someone else, and he could do nothing about it. Everything hurt and he was going to die and Arthur was going to burn him alive, his friends were going to light the pyre, and he would die in agony, and not even his magic could stop it, because he couldn't feel it, couldn't find it – he was magic itself, and yet it eluded his grasp, all that existed was pain and confusion and his head swam –

He felt, as if from a great distance, himself be hoisted onto the pyre. He felt the rough wood of the stake rub blisters into his tied hands as he was shoved against it, head lolling uselessly as if it belonged to someone else. He felt rope wrap around his torso, his legs, securing him to the pyre, and he tried to lift his head, which rested on his chest, tried to find his magic, but all he uncovered was fear and despair and pain.

He vaguely heard Arthur speaking from somewhere close by – or maybe it was from miles away. He did not understand the words but knew them to be a list of the supposed crimes Merlin had committed – being born with magic the chief of those. And then, far too soon, Arthur stopped talking, and Merlin sensed through his partially closed eyes the knights approaching with their torches, and he felt the warmth of the fire as those torches were lowered to the wood.

Merlin forced his eyes open, thrust his head up and looked at his friends, then beyond them, at Arthur. He maintained eye contact with his king, his brother, his best friend, even as the knights lit the pyre and he felt the heat begin to spread. Merlin didn't know if Arthur could hear him from this distance, if his words would be loud enough, strong enough, or if they would be caught up and consumed in the rising flames. It took every ounce of strength and concentration to push past the pain and call out, as loudly as he could, "I forgive you, Arthur."

And then, as the flames began licking at his feet, his boots, his clothes, something popped. I was as if the world itself had been out of joint, like a dislocated shoulder, and in that moment, the painful but satisfying second of release, it had snapped back into place. The air shifted, the world stopped spinning for the briefest of moments, and then, it clicked back into its rightful place.

The spell had been broken; Merlin could feel it in every fiber of his being – his magic cried out in relief, and it was only then that he realized that it hadn't been his head injury that had prevented him from fighting back, from escaping – it had been a last, desperate attempt by Morgana to get her revenge, to hide his magic away from him just long enough for him to die.

But she had failed. Her power, her hold and control, had finally given out on her, and Merlin felt his magic bubble back to the surface, and despite the pain and the fear, he summoned rain from a cloudless sky as the sun continued its golden ascent and put out the flames.

Around him, he heard yells, and cries, and his name was shouted from all directions, from the mouths of those he loved and trusted and who had very nearly killed him. But his head pounded, and he was so weak, and the fire was out. He slumped in his bonds, eyes fluttering shut, head dropping to his chest.

He didn't even feel the hands untie him. He didn't feel the knights gently lift his too-warm body from the pyre, didn't feel himself being carried into the castle and placed on a bed, didn't feel Arthur's tears of mingled guilt and relief splash onto his face.

He did, however, somehow, amidst the quiet and dark of unconsciousness, hear Arthur's voice cut through the silence, strong and familiar and real. "Gods, I – I'm so sorry, Merlin. My dearest friend, I–"

When he woke, Merlin would embrace his king, reassure him that no lasting harm had been done. He would smile at his friends, clasp hands with the knights and hug Gaius, find Gwen and make sure she hadn't suffered the same disorienting day that he had. He would answer all questions asked of him, and he would assure Arthur and the knights as many times as it took that he did not blame them, would explain Morgana's dark role in everything. He would find Morgana, and make sure that nothing like this would happen again.

When he woke, the world would be right. It wouldn't be normal – after everything that had been done to him, after all the betrayals, even though he didn't blame his friends, it would take a while for normal to come back around. But Merlin would persist, and he would have his friends – his real friends, with their real memories – to help him through it. As he would help them through the ramifications of their own pain, guilt, and regret.

And when he woke, he would be named the official Court Sorcerer of Camelot. He would be given a robe fine enough for a king, but he wouldn't care about that. All that would matter would be him, at Arthur's side, protecting him and fulfilling their destiny. That was how it had always been, and Merlin, when he woke, would look forward to a bright future of peace and hope.

But for now, he gratefully, peacefully slept, knowing that when he next opened his eyes, Camelot would remember.

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speuradair · 4 years ago

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Breathless | B.T.

A Byakuya x reader mini fic based on prompt 47 from this list ♡

“A kiss paired with a tight hug, knocking the breath out of the person being hugged”

Word Count: 2k

Contains: vague Trigger Happy Havoc spoilers (?), Tw Anxiety description, mild swearing

Ding dong

The out of place, far too cheery jingle of the morning announcement rang out of the TV, pulling you from your restless, fitful sleep.

It was seven already? You were sure that Byakuya had said he’d come to meet you at 6:45 before this morning’s meeting.

Last night you'd had a particularly nasty anxiety attack, and he'd assured you that he'd stay with you today to make sure you were faring as well as possible.

Yet you’d been left to wake up to the sound of Monokuma’s morning announcement, with your boyfriend running at least fifteen minutes late. That couldn't be right, Byakuya Togami was never late. And there, as if right on cue, that incessant worry tugged at you, choking the air out of your lungs.

You squeezed your eyes shut again, taking three deep breaths and trying to calm yourself down a bit like he would always tell you to. There had to be a rational, non-fatal reason that he hadn't come to wake you up.

Everything at this school had you completely on edge, and it didn't take much anymore to send you right into a panic attack. Your stomach was in a consistent state of nauseating uneasiness, and your chest often burned in relentless anticipation. You were well aware that you had gone into full paranoia at that point, and while that wasn't unprecedented in this killing game, you also knew that being skittish and distracted wasn't doing you any favors. If you had any intention of defending yourself and doing your part in this investigation, it was necessary to stay as rational and level headed as possible.

Taking another deep breath, you tried to think of all the other possible reasons he wasn't here. Maybe he had gotten distracted by a sudden lead on the mastermind, or maybe he'd been held up by Toko or her equally-as-obsessive counterpart. While you weren't fond of her being so infatuated with your boyfriend, that idea was still much more pleasant than your initial assumption.

One thing you were sure of was that waiting timidly in your room wasn't going to solve anything. He'd probably just gone directly to the cafeteria to meet you, and you'd misunderstood what he'd said last night. That was entirely possible, it was hard to focus when the anxiety took over.

That's what he did, right? It had to be. He wasn't hurt, you'd just gotten confused.

After taking a moment to convince yourself of that, you stood to your feet and headed to the cafeteria yourself.

Though, he wasn't there either. Granted, he hadn’t shown up to a few of the meetings recently, but it was odd that he hadn’t come today after specifically promising you he would. While he usually did whatever he wanted, he was always a man of his word. Subconsciously, your fingers restlessly toyed with the hem of your shirt as the sick feeling in your stomach slowly made itself more prominent.

“Ugh! This is why it’s a pain having such flaky friends!” Aoi groaned, sounding more annoyed than concerned. For once, you hoped he had just flaked out on you.

“We have no choice but to wait for everyone else to arrive.” Sakura was right. It was only fifteen after seven; the others were probably just late. With the general bloody-minded attitude around lately, it wasn’t unreasonable to think that they just weren’t being rigid with timing anymore. Maybe you'd gotten more confused than you'd thought, and he said he'd meet you after the meeting. Right. That had to be it, right? There was no need to panic yet. So you hesitantly sat down next to Makoto at the table and attempted to quell the increasing tightness in your chest.

“Hey, it’s already eight.. They’re over an hour late…” Aoi finally pointed out, cutting into the silence to say what everyone else was thinking. The hollow small talk had died off fairly quickly, leaving the five of you in an uncomfortable quiet as you all tried not to think about what had actually stopped the five others from coming.

“Why has nobody else come?” Sakura’s voice was softer than usual.

“Something’s happened.”

“What?” Makoto sounded shocked as he processed what Kirigiri had said, but surprise was the last thing you were experiencing.

“We let our guard down. We were so focused on Alter Ego that we forgot about Monokuma’s ‘incentive.’ There’s no way it just ended there.”

A tense silence fell upon the room. Nobody had wanted to be the one to say it, but you’d all pretty much come to a unanimous conclusion.

“We should go looking for them, the ones who didn’t show up.” With nobody objecting, Kirigiri continued. “It’s probably best if we split up and search. (Name), you take the dormitory. Check everyone’s bedrooms. Naegi, you search the first floor. I’ll handle the second floor.”

“Alright, then Sakura and I’ve got the third floor!” Even in a situation like this, Asahina maintained her bright demeanor. It would’ve been reassuring if you hadn’t been so preoccupied with the knot of dread tightening in your chest.

“Don’t take any unnecessary risks. If anything happens, call for someone immediately.”

You barely waited for Kirigiri to finish before taking off towards the dorms. Automatically you made a beeline to Byakuya’s room, pressing his doorbell button urgently. Each second that passed without a response felt like an hour. Why wasn’t he answering? It wasn’t like him to sleep in and it wasn’t like him to just snub you like this. Would he snub the others? All the time. But he’d never been dismissive of you, and right now you felt all too aware of that. For the first time, you hoped that he was just being his typical egotistical self. This would be the only time that you would be glad to find out he’d chosen to go to the library instead of choosing to come see you. If he had gone to the library, that meant he was probably still there, oblivious to the concern of his classmates. If he hadn’t, though, and he hadn’t made it to your room this morning…

Refusing to let yourself finish that thought, you took a deep breath in an attempt to calm down. You’d just ring his doorbell again and check the others’ rooms, then go upstairs to find him in the library yourself.

You reached out to do so with a trembling hand, but a sudden piercing scream made you freeze. Suddenly you couldn’t feel your hands. It was definitely one of the girls, but in your sudden peaked panic, you couldn’t identify the voice completely. You wanted to say that it had been Aoi, but the more you thought about it the less sure you were. Someone had found something upstairs, and you hadn’t gotten the chance to check the library yet.

Someone could’ve found something in the library.

Your neck burned and your legs had joined your hands in that cold, buzzing numbness.

No, you didn’t have the time to think about it; you didn’t have time to give into the anxiety attack clawing at your chest. You just had to get upstairs. After convincing your body to move again, you began to run. If you focused on moving, you wouldn’t have to think about what your mind insisted on thinking about. Just get upstairs.

Though you tried to keep yourself from assuming the worst, intrusive thoughts of what could be awaiting you filled your mind. What if it had been Kirigiri who screamed, and not Aoi? What if she'd checked the library and found the next victim, your boyfriend, dead and cold?

You could see it play out all too well in your mind- you'd be the last to get to the library, and everyone else would be standing around the crime scene in remorseful silence. He'd been too cocky and given the wrong person the perfect opportunity. You'd been too complaisant and now he was gone.

Your legs had gone completely numb as you mindlessly raced up the stairs and down the hallway, but you barely noticed at that point. Your mind was too preoccupied with just getting to the library.

Bracing yourself for the worst, you swung open the heavy wooden door.

But the gut-wrenching shock never came. A warm wave of relief rushed over you as you looked into the room. Contrary to what you'd been expecting, the room was empty save for the familiar blond at one of the bookshelves. There Byakuya stood with a book, completely safe and entirely unphased. You could feel your face again, only now noticing that it was hot and damp with tears. Before you even realized it, you had rushed to him, impulsively pressing your trembling lips to his and throwing your still tingling arms around him as tightly as you could. You gasped as you practically collapsed against him. Finally you could breathe again.

He coughed out a bit from your tight grip and dropped his book, startled. "What exactly do you think you're doing?!"

"Togami, you asshole! I thought it was you!" Your uncharacteristically harsh words made it clear that you were mad at him, but you didn't let go. You didn’t care about adhering to his general rule against public affection, you were just glad he was still alive. Clinging to him like this helped you to solidify that he was okay.

"What are you talking about?" Normally he would’ve immediately condemned your use of profanity, but your clearly shaken-up state had him picking his words a bit more carefully. You were already crying, he didn't need you sobbing because he'd scolded you.

"You bailed on me this morning, you didn't come to the meeting, you weren't in your room when we went to find everyone else, and then someone upstairs screamed that someone had been hurt-"

"Tch," his scoff cut you off your rambling, "You really thought I would be dumb enough to let any of those idiots hurt me? Don't be so stupid."

He kept up his air of superiority and arrogance, but his body language betrayed him. Instead of pushing you off of him, he sighed reluctantly against your hair before returning the tight embrace. It was tight enough that you almost couldn't breathe, but it didn't matter. You were in his arms again. You hadn't lost him. Suffocating from his embrace was so much better than choking from an anxiety attack.

Feeling you relax into his chest after a moment, he waited for your shaking to fully subside before he spoke again. “Compose yourself before Toko makes her inevitable return. From what you said, there’s enough of a scene right now as it is. I don’t have the time to deal with the fit she’d throw if she found you hanging off of me.”

You nodded meekly and wiped at your face with your sleeve. He stopped you though, gently grabbing your wrist with one hand before using the other to dry your tears with a tissue from his pocket. "Don't do that, you'll just get your sleeve covered in your own tears and snot. That's disgusting."

The heat on your cheeks only intensified under his close gaze. His eyes met yours as he studied your expression, though he only held your gaze for a moment before turning away with an entirely superficial eye roll. “Look at you, making me wipe your tears like some kind of lovesick idiot.”

This was your turn to give him an almost entirely superficial eye roll of your own. “It’s only fair, you’re the one who made me cry.”

He scoffed in return, but his sly smile didn’t hold the same condescending scorn it did when he used it against others. This one held genuine amusement and, dare you say, affinity?

Tossing the now folded up tissue in the dusty library trash can, he placed his hand at the small of your back, coaxing you towards the door. “Come on, apparently we have an investigation to attend to.”

#Byakuya Togami #danganronpa #x reader #imagine #danganronpa imagine #trigger happy havoc #kiss prompts #mini fic #fic #fanfic #request #anime #anxious!reader #anxious reader

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pips-fics · 4 years ago

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ask: Hi, may I request a Lucy fic where Yechan gets a stomach bug but Sangyeop and Wonsang are out so there's just Gwangil to look after him? Literally I don't mind what other details you add 😊

as he slumped heavily onto the couch, yechan assumed the tiredness that had overcome him so suddenly was just a consequence of how much energy he’d spent during the day. he’d surprised himself by waking up early, around 7, and had been going non-stop since, full of even more energy than normal - so by the time 7 at night rolled around, he figured it made sense for him to be feeling a bit worn down.

that’s the thing, though - it wasn’t just a bit. it was complete, overwhelming exhaustion, so much so that he felt vaguely nauseous.

after just a few minutes of watching some mindless show on tv, he forced himself back to his feet in search of headache medicine. normally, yechan wasn’t a forgetful person, but somewhere along the way to his destination, he found himself confused and wondering what he’d been doing. the exhaustion weighed more heavily on him than ever, but his head felt too light. for a moment, he couldn’t tell if he was going to pass out or throw up. his legs gave out and he sunk to the ground with black spots intruding on his vision.

he blinked quickly, straightening his back against the wall behind him, and took three slow, cautious, deep breaths. moderately alarmed, he pulled out his phone to text the other members, just to check if any of them were home. before he got the chance, a sharp pain shot through his head and he gasped, curling in on himself and squeezing his eyes shut. the pain left him winded and feeling quite sick again. yechan figured he’d give his eyes a short rest, and then try texting again in a few minutes.

probably he should’ve known better, all things considered, but who could blame him when the only thing his brain cared about was getting some sleep?

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when gwangil returned home at around 8:30, he initially thought that the apartment was empty. he knew sangyeop and wonsang were out, as they’d stayed at the studio to continue recording after gwangil had left, and he assumed that it was too quiet for yechan to be around. the oldest member of lucy had an unmatched aptitude for making noise, even - and sometimes especially - when left alone. he was constantly whistling his favorite songs, humming melodies he’d made up on the spot, or fidgeting in some or another loud way. even while sleeping, yechan was loud - and that’s what ended up giving him away.

gwangil didn’t hear the snoring until he’d walked through the kitchen and further into the apartment, and even then he doubted his ears. he checked the couch and upon finding it empty, hurriedly made his way toward the bedroom.

“what the–“ gwangil just barely managed to avoid tripping over the violinist. he was sitting in the hallway, chin to his chest like a child, very much asleep. gwangil clicked his tongue upon seeing yechan’s phone in his hand. he shook the older man’s shoulder gently.

“hyung, you shouldn’t fall asleep playing phone games.”

as yechan blearily blinked his eyes open, gwangil wanted to take his words back. it was immediately clear that yechan was sick. his eyes were glassy, and as he slowly lifted his head, his cheeks were bright red. gwangil quickly confirmed his suspicions by placing the back of his head on yechan’s sweaty forehead.

“gwangil?” yechan grabbed onto gwangil’s arm, but his grip was weak.

“you can’t sleep here, hyung, especially not when you’ve got a fever like that.”

yechan seemed to take that as a challenge, responding with an adamant tone and a pout. “i can sleep here - i was sleeping here, but you woke me up!”

gwangil couldn’t quite resist the urge to roll his eyes. “you shouldn’t sleep here - you’re going to be all achy when you get up.”

yechan glared. “i already am achy!”

“great, hyung, good for you,” gwangil said dryly as he helped the older man to his feet. “how about you eat something and we can get some fever reducers in you?”

complaints aside, yechan was fairly compliant as he allowed gwangil guide him to one of the kitchen stools. “i was going to get headache meds before,” yechan said, his mouth barely forming the words clearly enough to make them out.

“oh yeah? why didn’t you?”

“forgot.”

just another indication of how bad the older man must’ve been feeling. from the way he held his head so gingerly in his hands, it was safe to assume the headache hadn’t magically gone away during yechan’s nap. ultimately, gwangil didn’t need to assume.

“it huuuuuurts,” yechan whined, slumping further in his seat as gwangil offered him some soup. yechan’s frown deepened. “it smells bland.”

“what, did you expect me to give you some sort of spicy soup when you’re sick?”

“i- it’s just so boring,” yechan went on.

gwangil pointedly released an audible and long-suffering sigh. “well, if you’ll just eat half of it or so, you can have something to help your headache.”

at that, yechan brought the spoon to his lips, still sulking. “everything hurts and my nose is so stuffed up i can’t breathe,” he grumbled in between spoonfuls of soup. as he brought some more to his lips, gwangil could see that he was shaking. “i just wanna sleep.”

“so you don’t want your head to stop hurting?”

yechan shoved more soup in his mouth angrily, quickly consuming the rest of the bowl before dropping the spoon back in with a clink and a goofy fake gag. “of course i do. otherwise i wouldn’t have bothered eating that. blech. give me the meds.”

“you’re welcome,” gwangil said dryly, handing the medication over and taking yechan’s dishes to the sink. “go to bed already.”

“you mean ‘go to couch?’” the bitterness in yechan’s voice was so lacking in subtlety that gwangil almost laughed.

“oh, stop being such a baby. of course you can sleep in the bedroom, you’re sick! no one else is trying to sleep there right now, anyway, and it doesn’t bother me, so your snoring won’t be an issue.”

yechan’s mouth dropped open. “really?” the total awe in his voice made gwangil do a double take, and he couldn’t help the surprised snort that slipped out of him as he realized yechan had really assumed he wouldn’t be allowed to sleep in the bedroom.

“yes!” yechan still looked like he thought he might be getting pranked, so gwangil joked, “the other two might be that cruel, but they’re not here right now, so let’s break the rules while they’re out!”

that seemed to do the trick. yechan looked about as excited as gwangil had ever seen him as they headed to the bedroom.

by the time yechan was all settled in, it was late enough for gwangil to get in his own bed, but not quite late enough for him to sleep. he texted sangyeop and wonsang to update them on yechan’s fever, and to warn them to perhaps stay at the studio and finish recording if they didn’t want to risk catching the bug. gwangil continued messing around on his phone until he drifted off.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

it was all very cliche. yechan’s nightmare. this was typical.

his nightmares tended to take the shape of people leaving him, walking away, one by one. it would start out as an attack on his need for attention, just random strangers walking past him without sparing a second glance - and he could handle that. for a while he couldn’t, and he would wake up in a cold sweat, but after countless repetitions, he got past it.

unfortunately, getting past it meant entering phase two of the dream, which targeted his more vulnerable fears. 1. fear of being left alone, 2. fear of being helpless to stop it. this, too, he had overcome - or so he’d thought. for a while, he’d been able to remind himself it wasn’t real, and to just give up. but, as he stopped chasing his loved ones as they walked away from him, a new fear began to grow - a fear that he wouldn’t even put in the effort to stop them, that the helplessness he learned through nightmares might someday carry through to reality. that fear was something he didn’t think he’d ever be able to combat.

still, this was all typical. it was decidedly less typical for him to wake up sobbing, let alone to wake up one of his members with said sobbing even before yechan himself was fully awake. but then, there was a first time for everything.

so when gwangil’s voice broke through the watery haze of yechan’s crying, he couldn’t help himself from grabbing at the drummer’s hands, couldn’t stop sniffling right away. it was the first time. he’d do better next time. he’d learn to handle it on his own, like he always did. but for now, gwangil’s hands were kind of helping him breathe.

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“hyung!” gwangil thought he was probably too emotionally clumsy to be dealing with this, actually. it was pretty unusual to see yechan upset, but when he was, it was always sangyeop who worked his magic and got their oldest member back to his typical cheerful self. but sangyeop wasn’t here, and yechan wasn’t just upset, he was sobbing. so gwangil would do his best, and he figured waking yechan was the first step of that.

apparently letting yechan grab him with sweaty hands was the second. he let the almost instinctual teasing comment die in the back of his throat and tried to ignore the urge to shudder.

“are you…” okay? that didn’t seem like a question that needed to be asked. should he ask what was wrong, or was that prying? did yechan have nightmares a lot, or was this because of the fever? gwangil definitely wasn’t going to ask that. not now. he shook his head and stroked yechan’s hand until his grip eased up, then moved to support the older man’s back as he gasped for air. “here, hyung, sit up. you’ll be able to breathe better. i’ll get you some water.”

for an instant, yechan looked like he was going to protest, his grip on gwangil’s left hand tightening. then he ducked his head away, towards the shoulder that was further from gwangil, and nodded. his grip loosened, too, but not completely, his hand dropping back to the bed only when gwangil pulled away.

by the time gwangil got back, the tears had stopped. something about that felt very wrong. maybe it was the contrast between the shy smile on his face and the puffy redness of his eyes.

yeah, that was probably it.

handing over the water, gwangil put his hand to yechan’s head - he definitely still had a fever, and it had gotten worse. a second too late, gwangil realized he shouldn’t have let go of the cup of water, remembering how shaky yechan was. sure enough, yechan’s whole pajama shirt got drenched.

yechan laughed. “well, i needed a shower, anyway, with how much i’ve been sweating.” gwangil frowned at him and yechan’s eyes darted down, away. “hah, sorry, that’s gross.”

gwangil’s frown deepened. “it’s fine.” he quickly grabbed another shirt and pulled it over yechan’s head as soon as he’d dried himself off. “how are you feeling?”

yechan shrugged, still avoiding eye contact.

“hyung, please talk to me. i’m trying to help.”

“i’m fine.” gwangil didn’t think he’d ever heard anyone sound less fine. but it wasn’t just that yechan sounded miserable - he did, he sounded small and ill - more than that, he sounded far away, and closed off, and maybe… scared. his posture backed it all up, curled away from gwangil, hunched over.

“nuh uh,” gwangil said, before he’d really had a chance to figure out the words he was going to say. he was definitely not equipped to handle this. yechan’s eyes snapped to gwangil and he sighed. “i’m just worried about you, hyung. if you can go back to sleep, you should. i’ll get you more water and anything else you need before you do.”

much to gwangil’s surprise, yechan’s mouth opened, and then closed just as quickly. yechan’s adam’s apple bobbed up and down rapidly, and gwangil wondered if he would cry again.

“hyung?”

yechan’s lips curved downwards, as if the words themselves were bitter, but he finally spoke up, a whisper. “my stomach feels sick.”

for a second, gwangil was frozen - then he snapped into motion, helping yechan out of bed and to the bathroom. he wasn’t surprised when yechan shooed him out of the bathroom and didn’t mind obeying. that didn’t mean he was going far.

he sat outside the bathroom door and checked his messages. wonsang still hadn’t read what he’d sent earlier, so he suspected that recording wasn’t going particularly well even before he read sangyeop’s message:

oh no! is he really sick? are you okay? wonsang is holding me prisoner until i can hit the high notes but if you need me i can pull the hyung card on him

gwangil was grinning at this when he heard a retch. he flinched and resisted the urge to pull out his earbuds, trying to refocus on his phone rather than the painful noises coming from behind him.

no need, hyung! we’ll be okay. wonsang-hyung’s right, you should finish recording before you risk catching a bug, anyway. good luck!

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yechan’s head was spinning as he leaned over the toilet bowl. he didn’t know why gwangil had insisted on getting him a new shirt when it’d taken him all of about 10 minutes to sweat through it. he yanked it off, quick to return to his safe position above the toilet.

this was the part he hated. the waiting.

Five minutes later and his legs were shaking from supporting his odd posture, but yechan refused to move. the nausea was almost overwhelming. this was taking too long. he squeezed his eyes shut, and forced himself to gag. he hadn’t fully committed, initially, but suddenly he didn’t have a choice as a harsh retch tore at his throat. he blinked, surprised by the force of it, and then heaved again.

his stomach ached horribly. he massaged it, but the clamminess of his hands just reminded yechan how disgusting he felt and probably looked. he’d have to apologize to gwangil after all of this.

a shudder ran through him and yechan leaned forward into another long retch, managing to expel a small stream of liquid this time. he coughed and found his airways suddenly blocked by what was previously his stomach contents.

ah, he hated this part, too. the pain and weakness and lack of control. yechan couldn’t stop himself from breathing loudly as he draped himself over the toilet, desperate for air. the taste and the smell made him gag again almost immediately. he kept his mouth shut and swallowed back sick, only for it to come right back up.

yechan was worn out. it hit him suddenly, that he’d really fucked up. as a rule, he didn’t cry. more realistically, more accurately, he didn’t cry in front of people. not when he was sad, and definitely not when he was scared. sangyeop had been a room while he cried exactly once but even then, yechan had done an alright job of hiding it and moving on.

thinking about it was not helping his stomach situation. he barely made it over the toilet in time for a thin stream of vomit to splash into the water below. he flushed it down, and didn’t bother wiping his mouth, instead choosing to lay flat on his back on the cold floor, arms and lets splayed like a starfish. his stomach felt empty, but his bones still felt sick, and his head was frankly spinning a bit.

maybe if he stayed quiet, he wouldn’t have to deal with gwangil.

it wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate gwangil’s help - in fact, he was extremely grateful for his help earlier to avoid making a mess. it was just that yechan wasn’t up for explaining anything right now, or ever, and sooner or later, gwangil would want answers. if yechan stayed locked in a bathroom alone for the rest of his life, he wouldn’t have to answer them.

he yechan felt like a coward. but then, more than that, he felt exhaustion, so he let it overtake him and hoped he’d be a bit braver once he woke up.

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gwangil picked the lock to the bathroom after he’d heard nothing from yechan in 30 minutes, and was not surprised to find the older man solidly asleep on the hard floor. “yechan-hyung,” he said, softly jostling yechan’s shoulder. “let’s get you back in bed.”

“don’ wanna,” yechan whined, eyes still shut.

“not up for debate, come on. i can carry you?”

yechan immediately held out his arms, and gwangil smiled slightly. he was just glad yechan was letting him help.

——

feel free to send more asks!

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uwua3 · 4 years ago

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#1. more than a friend

♡ hyodo juza + happy ending ♡

for ☆: nids!!! (nidhi)

notes ♡: !!! this will focus on the morning transition to afternoon setting i pictured for this submission :D i love you, nidhi!!! i hope you enjoy this~ (i will be doing various game genres and this hogwarts–themed fantasy world stuck with me the most on this one!) + (i... i can’t put this under ‘read more’??? will try again later!)

game concept: best friends to lovers trope, fantasy, magic school

music ♪: crush – tessa violet

You woke up to the faint rustle of autumn leaves falling outside, the blurred hues of orange, red, and yellow passing by in the wind. It was nearing Halloween, must explain why your village felt like a ghost town. Cobwebs you swore you removed remained still in unexpected corners of your cottage, items floated around the bustling kitchen on their own accord, multiple sets of pots and potion ingredients were laid out from last night’s studying. Of course you forgot to clean up, you’d deal with it later. A witch in training didn’t have time for anything else besides passing your classes at Ouka Academy.

Speaking of, you had class this morning.

You were a student at Ouka Academy, one of the few prestigious witchcraft academies. As a third year, you had known the ins and outs of magic at this point, preparing for higher–level education to further your practice of healing spells. With your typical cloak and uniform to protect yourself from the bite of the chilly autumn wind, you fastened the collar and grabbed your wand since first year as you left. Too bad you couldn’t cast magic outside of the school, it would’ve been so easy to apparate by the chimney network once you were of age. You pushed the dried leaves off your transportation, hearing the crunch beneath your dress shoes as you hopped on.

At least, you had your trusty bicycle to go to school with.

No type of magic could’ve made your childhood bike any better, but you couldn’t get rid of it. Nostalgia, maybe. It squeaked as you pushed it onto the dirt path, thankful the rain had dried the night prior. Like clockwork, you avoided the holes as the grey clouds continued passing through the sky. It was going to rain again, but that didn’t stop you as you pedaled through the piles of leaves.

“Aish... causing mischief again?” You heard up ahead, not bothering to give your friends the time of the day as you made an inappropiate hand signal towards the mismatched group. You slowed down as you saw him staring blankly at you unintentionally, using the moment to flick Juza in the middle of his forehead with a grin. Juza blinked rapidly, nearly stumbling back as he returned back to earth. You were already laughing at him, hopping off your bike as you punch his arm.

“Didn’t expect me so soon?” You joked as Juza barely registered your voice, instead moving to walk alongside your bike as he began pulling it towards the school. He always did this, said something about how weak your arms were and you needed a break. You remained next to him as Juza shrugged, glancing down at you with a small smile. He tried to hide it by straightening his expression, but you knew better than anyone he was surprised by your presence.

“Don’t be so smug, I was about to make sure you weren’t asleep.” Juza didn’t react to you pushing him, used to your childish antics towards him. You stretched your arms above your head, closing your eyes for a second to take in the scenery. The low hum of the jack o’ lantern candles lining the streets made the air feel much warmer, the satisfying crunch of the autumn leaves beneath your feet made you aware of every step you took, the rustling above felt akin to waking up that morning. It was dewy, but refreshing as you took a deep breath in. Juza spared a look again, smiling once again when he saw how relaxed you were. The moment you opened your eyes, his head snapped forward as he coughed into his fist.

The chatter of your friends for life were ahead of you, it was a pattern. They always moved a little bit faster, or maybe you and Juza were the ones hanging back. Either way, they didn’t say a word about it even as you walked beside Juza in silence. You realized you didn’t respond as you pulled onto the strap of your bag, keeping your hands busy as you had a teasing grin on your face.

“Come on, you’d wait for me anytime of the day!” An extra sentence fell silent upon your tongue as you ignored it, trying not to reveal because you’d the same for him. A quiet, but comfortable, atmostphere hung between you two as you missed the way Juza nodded and his hands gripped the handle bars a bit tighter.

“I would, for you.” Juza muttered as you took your bicycle to lock it, standing at the entrance of the academy’s gates with his hands in fists. You didn’t hear him, he’d never let you anyways.

Each class was tiring, in a way. Exams were coming up to specifically designate students of each house their ranking. Passing meant higher level classes, you thought miserably as you hurried out of the history of magic classroom. Your hand ached from holding the quill for so long, taking notes was a chore. Passing by the student body, you quickly walked to your next class to avoid being late. You were about to enter your transfiguration room before you bumped into a familiar flash of purple, about to apologize before noticing Juza’s widened yellow eyes staring down at you.

“Hurry up, you’re gonna be late.” You teased as Juza rolled his eyes fondly, knocking his fist gently against your forehead. You knew he was intimidating, but he really had a heart of gold. He always stayed behind to help professors move back books and items used for the day even if it meant his tardy log was expansive.

“Yeah, yeah, bye.” Juza said, about to pass by you before he fumbled for a random scrap of paper from his scroll, passing it to you without a second glance. “Give this to the professor, something about ingredients list.” Juza vaguely reasoned before disappearing down the corridor, blending into the sea of black robes. You didn’t question a thing, entering the room and making your way towards the aged expert with an air of respect and reverance.

“Professor, Mr. Hyodo requested I give this to you. It’s for the ingredients.” You politely explained, holding out the paper with both your hands. The professor barely looked up from her position at the blackboard, taking the paper and opening it with one hand. She glanced at it before doing a doubletake, narrowing her eyes at you as she gave it back.

“Do not play tricks on me, there’s no reason for your boyfriend to write that to me.” The professor simply said, not giving you any more time out of her day as you returned to your seat, students bustling in in low murmurs as class began. Boyfriend?! Please... you took a moment to debate whether or not to read the paper before opening it anyways, scanning over the three words clearly written in Juza’s neat handwriting.

“See you later.”

You look around to see if anyone noticed, but you pocket the note while sinking in your seat. For some reason, you were nervous. What did that mean? You always saw Juza after school no matter what—what did he mean by “see you later”? You didn’t need a reminder, thank you very much! It’s no big deal, you were overthinking this. He just wanted to pull an impractical prank on you, that’s all. You tried to focus on the lesson, but you kept thinking over and over: “see you later”.

Maybe, this time, it would be different. But... what did you want, then?

You thought of how your hand brushed his this morning, and heard your name get called on. You answered quickly, yet embarrasingly so as your professor watched you disdainfully.

“You? Detention?”

Juza was at the classroom door, ready to pick you up as always but owlishly stares at your defeated frame. You nod, rubbing the back of your neck while gripping the detention slip in your other hand. Letting out a sigh, you rubbed your eyes tiredly.

“Got caught daydreaming in class, I don’t think I can go out today.” You apologize, about to retreat back into the classroom and let Juza leave the corridor before he grabbed your sleeve, looking around inside. Before you could ask what he was doing, Juza hurried inside when he confirmed the coast was clear and bumped his knuckles against your temple gently.

When you flinched and prepared yourself to complain, Juza did it again endearingly with a frown. “You know better than to get in trouble. I’ll help you.” Juza offered, but it seemed like he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Everything you were about to say escaped you as you blankly watched him stack books together like it was nothing. Huh... Juza could’ve done anything with his time this afternoon, but he stayed just to help you with your own punishment?

You guess the daydream was partially his fault, good on him for taking responsibility, even if he didn’t know that. You went across the table to sort papers, listening to the shuffling of parchment in the comfortable silence. It was quiet for a bit, before Juza cleared his throat, staring at the textbook covers.

“It’s not like you to daydream.” Juza commented, and you knew he was right. Especially in class, you made a conscious effort to remain present in class no matter what. You shrug it off, realizing you couldn’t actually tell him the true reason without exposing yourself. But as you ponder on it, you looked up at Juza and the evening sunlight made him glow. For once, you recognize that he was... handsome. Not just your older brother friend, but an actual guy. A guy who would make a great boyfriend—

Another knock to your forehead, although this one was a bit more forceful to snap you out of it. It was your turn to come back to earth, rubbing your forehead with a frown as you pushed his shoulder.

“You were doing it again.” Juza said monotonously, but you knew that was his way of teasing. You laugh awkwardly, and the quiet atmostphete came back. Juza just carried the books to the shelf to place them accurately. But, as he passed, Juza mumbled something that only you were meant to hear in the empty classroom.

“You can always talk to me.”

“What?”

You asked, distracted yet again by his presence alone. Juza started rearranging the shelf, his back towards you as he spoke a little louder.

“No matter what you say, I’ll listen.”

You notice Juza’s ears were reddening, his head ducked as he avoided your gaze. Your best friend was never one for heartfelt statements that made your head spin. You just nod and suddenly, the quiet atmostphere became unbearable.

It’s as if the question of what happened hung in the air, making both of you wonder endlessly. You were becoming restless, the words blurring together and you knew you couldn’t focus until you said something. You sigh, catching Juza’s attention as he turned towards you. Before Juza could reach out and comfort you, his hand froze mid–air as you responded,

“I like you.”

For a moment, Juza’s hand hovered over your shoulder as you refused to look at him.

“When you wrote, ‘see you later’, I realized... I wanted to see you like that but even more—”

“A date.” Juza cut you off, bringing his hand back to his side. You took it as a bad sign and tried to maintain your composure, nodding to confirm the inevitable. How cliché, realizing you had a crush on your best friend this entire time. Before you could tell him to forget about it, Juza spun on his heel to finish organizing with more urgency this time.

Juza realized you were looking at him and turned to fondly roll his eyes despite the blush on his face.

“The sooner we finish this, the sooner we can go on that date.”

You two had never cleaned a classroom so fast in your entire life. When you two got off campus grounds, Juza took your hand this time just like he wanted to do this morning and every time before that.

The next time the professor called Juza your boyfriend, you didn’t correct her and instead smiled.

#hyodo juza #juza hyodo #a3! act! addict! actors!#a3!#act! addict! actors!#a3! actor training game #a3! imagines #act! addict! actors! imagines #a3! x reader #a3 x reader #juza x reader #a3! juza #a3 juza #happy 300!!! endings

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sector-i-closed · 5 years ago

Note

*shyly* 👉🏽👈🏽 inexperienced and shy incubus Yeosang being gentle femdommed by the reader as she shows him how exactly to pleasure his partner?

Incubi!Yeosang. I hope you like it @atiny-piratequeen :3

Tagging: @yunderful @delicatewerewolfsoul @youneedapiratekink @mirror-juliet

Warning: smut

"I'm completely worn out!" You exhaled sharply as your head hit your pillow. The comfort of your bed was something that you were thankful for after having a long, grueling day at work and the birthday party that your closest friends had put on for you was exciting but tiring as well since mingling wasn't exactly your thing to do but you made an exception for your birthday.

A wide smile graced your face momentarily when you switched the bedside lamp off, shrouding the entire room in blackness that seemed a bit eerie to you on this particular night, especially when it felt as if something physical inhabited the blackness in the room.

There was nothing to be seen and you brushed the feeling off as merely your hyperactivity that was the result of your day. Weariness overwhelmed you as your eyes fluttered shut, sealing out the external darkness while your fatigue urged you to slip into a deep sleep.

You had not been asleep for very long when you sensed something hot to the touch press against your body, the 'something' feeling like a masculine body weighing you down against your mattress.

"This is quite an interesting dream..." You spoke mentally without uttering your voice out loud. It felt as if a dead weight was on top of you and you found it difficult to breathe.

Your mind's eye opened and what you saw stole your breath away. A male with an angel's face was looking down at you quizzically, appearing quite baffled as if he was confused as to what he was supposed to be doing with you? You gazed back into his brown eyes which were tinted with a reddish hue deep in their dark depths.

"What are you here f-for?" You blush, sensing that you were still sound asleep which made sense because this moment could only be explained as a strange dream.

The male's pale cheeks blossomed into a soft shade of pink, making him appear even more angelic and his hair was almost completely white, lending to his heavenly appearance as well.

"I'm here... I'm here to make you feel good..." The stranger's cheeks flushed an even deeper shade of red after he spoke, determination registering in his eyes in spite of the apprehension in his speech.

"Who are you?" You surprised yourself with your own voice, wondering to yourself as to why you didn't recoil after he said those words until you reminded yourself that you were still asleep and it would be a normal ocurrance to react uncharacteristically while in your sleep state.

"I'm Yeosang." He managed a weak smile that prompted your internal organs to feel as if they would melt away into nothing, let alone the intense heat that radiated off of his body that added to the warmth that circulated in your own body.

"Are you an angel, or an incubi?" You asked with piqued curiosity, the angelic appearance of this person was far from demonic to you but this dream felt unusual and your neediness was gnawing at you constantly as he watched you.

"Y-yes... Incubi" His voice trembled, his eyes lowering to avoid your analytic gaze.

"Why haven't you taken what you wanted from me? I could have sworn you were an angel." You quirked an eyebrow, feeling a smirk tug at the corner of your mouth.

"I- I don't know why." He bit out in frustration, glancing at your face briefly which didn't seem to help his condition since his eyes reddened even more. You watched the conflicted incubi with a look of compassion filling your eyes, more words that didn't make sense to you tumbled from your lips.

"I want you to kiss me, Yeosang." You smirked, watching the naked demon look down at you with shock flashing through his eyes.

"I don't know how..." He murmured, his voice nearly inaudible to your ears.

"I can teach you some things baby, if you want me to." You reassured him sweetly while instinctively reaching out to cup his cheek in your hand.

"Sure." Yeosang's voice appeared a slight bit more steady as you guided his face closer to yours, closing the distance between you and himself with a gentle brush of your lips planting themselves against his.

You took notice in the stiffness of his mouth but you maintained patience, placing soft, continuous pecks across his lips to coax him to relax.

The incubi shuddered vaguely when you snaked your arm around his bare waist, caressing his back softly in controlled motions that mimicked the movements of your kisses which began to aid in him in loosening up to being receptive of your oral ministrations.

A quiet taste of sweetness that lingered upon his lips beckoned to you to deepen the kiss, finding more of his alluring flavor the farther you sneaked your tongue into his hot mouth.

You moaned into his hot mouth, showing him that you were enjoying yourself and was delighted when his tongue began to sensually stroke yours, tantalizing the sensitive cells that were receptive to his magical touch.

A louder moan leaked from your lips and a lustful growl resonated in the incubi's throat, prompting your toes to curl as a sense of weightlessness enveloped your body.

You sighed softly, breaking the intense kiss that swept your senses from your mind. Kisses were ghosted along Yeosang's neck, the action suddenly making you aware of the hard length that was poking at your stomach, prompting an amused smile to spread across your features as you kissed the demon's skin fervently.

"You like this don't you, Sangie?" You purred, continuing to plant kisses across his chest, gradually scooting your body downwards until you were facing his torso.

"Mm I-?" Yeosang started, cutting off his response to his question when your tongue flicked out and caressed one of his nipples, massaging his hardened bud teasingly while your other hand busied itself with pinching his other nipple, alternating between rough movements of your fingers to slightly gentler pinches of his sensitive flesh.

A sharp curse slipped from the demon's mouth as your lips encircled his nipple, sucking in the most erotic way that could prompt him to moan even more. He looked as if he would collapse from the sexual energy of your enjoyment of what you were doing to him.

You watched his face closely as you directed your attention to his other nipple, sucking it and watching what you could see of his face contort into ecstatic expressions that you felt would have prompted the incubi to blush had he seen himself, though currently he seemed quite caught up in the moment to not care about anything except for what you were doing to him.

Your tongue flicked against his searing hot, sensitive flesh for several moments until you were satisfied that Yeosang had enough of a demonstration.

"Do you have an idea now of how foreplay goes?" You asked with a teasing smile, quietly chuckling at the slight flustered expression on his face that nearly disappeared as fast as it came.

"I do now, love." He stated, his body seeming to become even hotter than before or you imagined it.

"Now, I want you pull my sleep shorts off and use your tongue to make me come." You commanded, watching the incubi quickly move off of you and grip the waistband of your shorts, slipping them off of your hips, followed by your panties.

"Touch my thighs with your hands and kiss them as you get closer to my pussy. Take your time in getting to your partner's sex because it makes the experience better for your partner." You spoke as your legs shivered beneath the fiery touch of the incubi's hands rubbing your inner thighs, caressing the soft skin beneath his fingertips.

A soft gasp interrupted the silence after Yeosang pressed his lips against your skin, doing as you had told and pressing sinful kisses to your thighs that tantalized your senses thoroughly.

"You're doing really good, just keep it up." You smiled down at him, not fully registering that his mouth had just reached your heat and that he appeared to instinctively pick up on what you liked with each stripe that he licked up your clit, sending tingles and jolts of electricity resonating from where the intense heat of his tongue touched your velvety soft folds.

"So good for me..." You cooed, locking eyes with the demon who's own eyes was shifting into a beautiful red hot shade that made you imagine that you were staring into the pits of hell.

The thought encouraged a knot to tighten in your stomach, pulling taut with the friction of Yeosang's tongue efficiently running up and down your moist, sensitive folds.

"R-right there..." Your chest heaved, the overwhelming heat of his mouth was driving you crazy and the knot in your stomach was pulling even tighter, snapping almost immediately after he began to concentrate on your most receptive nerve endings, dragging you beneath the wave of the climax that overtook you.

"YEOSAAAANGGG!!!!" You screamed suddenly when you weren't expecting to, your hips bucking to remove yourself from the demon's hold on your body. Still he firmly held you in place with both hands, taking all of the arousal and sexual energy from you and satiating his own hunger.

Slowly you came down from the orgasm, unable to fathom your surroundings and you had even forgot that you were still dreaming.

"I think I practiced really well for you. Thanks for the lesson, I might come back and visit again to gain more lessons from you." Yeosang smirked, even though you could see a hint of a blush coloring his cheeks.

"Take your time and come back to practice again someday." You smiled lazily, watching his pointed tail swish behind him and black wings sprout from his shoulders, which contrasted greatly with his angelic features.

"I'll be back around." He promised, suddenly dissipating into a black cloud of smoke and leaving you to wake up from your slumber and process what happened on your own.

#au #ateez smut #kang yeosang scenarios #ateez scenarios #kang yeosang smut #kpop smut #kpop scenarios #ateez imagines #kpop imagines

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reidecorating · 4 years ago

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The Exquisite Pain of Love

Requested: Yes! I hope this isn’t too far from what you’d imagined, nonnie

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Female Reader

Word Count: A hefty 2.1k of heartbreak tbh

Summary: Sometimes, even when we love someone more that life itself, the universe just gets in the way.

Warnings: None, it’s just Spencer being soft and a tiny bit heartbroken :(

It had made a home in his wallet, the photograph. Its bottom edge slanted slightly, making it clear that skaking fingers had torn apart ground that scissors should have tread. JJ first pointed it out when Spencer offered to pay for lunch at an unfrequented diner on the outskirts of New Orleans after yet another apprehensive case.

“You keep a photo with you,” She’d observed.

“I do,”

“You do.”

Spencer’s lips formed a tight line across his face before his eyebrows furrowed in knitting together an excuse as to why he keeps the picture of the two of you, frozen in both time and a New York winter, in his wallet, when every monochromatic detail of the snapshot had already been whittled into his temporal lobe. JJ regretted bringing it up as she almost visibly saw barricades beginning to compile behind the already tenacious walls Spencer had built around himself. She tilted her head in hopes of meeting his eyes as he sat in the booth across from her, refusing to touch his meal. “Look, I didn’t mean to pry... it’s just that-”

“Everything exists to end in a photograph,” he cut her off, with the words of Susan Sontag, intuitively knowing what she was about to say. Still not meeting JJ’s gaze, his mind travelled coach, two hours north of the diner, to the day you two had parted.

Spencer remembered the Christmas trees and tangled scarves, falling for you in more ways than one, when his ice skates wouldn’t let him stand straight, and pumpkin spice breath. Memories of twinkling fairy lights and you exhaling against his neck made his heart writhe under the hands of nostalgia. Woollen volts of static electricity sparked as you grabbed him by the hand in the direction of the small booth sitting outside a festively grandiose café corner, ignoring the pain in his bruised knees - courtesy of the rink. “Do you ever get tired?” Spencer asked you. Leaning against a street sign belonging to Manhattan, he beamed a smile and simultaneously attempted to catch his breath. “Sorry about the rush, I just assumed that with all the time you spend in the field running from psychopaths you would be in decent shape,” you teased. “Yeah, well this time I was running after a psychopath. She actually told me that she wanted to get a photo with me,” he retorted, making you roll your eyes while you slipped through the curtain of the small box. Spencer followed suite, knocking his elbow on the side of its entrance making him grimace in pain. “Karma, for implying that I’m crazy,” you giggled, as he scrunched his nose at you, feigning hurt, before sitting beside you on the plush velvet seat. The interior was lavish, despite the corroding metal of its outside, and, naturally, you took advantage of the warmth provided by the enclosed space combined with Spencer’s body heat radiating towards your own. “A Siberian immigrant in the nineteen-twenties named Josepho Anatol, invented the modern photobooth and actually made his first million after it appeared on the streets of this very city,” Spencer rambled as you fumbled with your gloves and coins and the tiny slot they had to slip through. “Why in New York?” you asked softly, still wrestling with the coins. Spencer thought for a moment. Normally, when he prattled on with trivial information, it wasn’t long before someone told him to stop talking, or false heartedly smiled and nodded in hopes that maybe he would be quiet. It was for this reason he found you enamouring. You, who questioned almost every detail he’d paint, who took in every word from his mouth like it was the air you depended on.

The first time you had taken him stargazing atop a sequestered museum observatory years ago, he had talked for an unfathomable amount of time about how all the planets in the solar system were named after Roman gods, “Except for Earth of course - and Uranus. It was named after a Greek god. Herschel wanted to call it Georgium Sidus - meaning George’s Star - after King George the Third of England,” he’d explained to you, talking with his hands. His eyes shifted from the constellations above to your features, indecisive of which view could be deemed more breathtaking. The man who spoke multiple languages almost forgot all of them once he felt you laying your eyes on him in a way that no one else ever could. “Um… but… that didn’t really sit right with anyone who wasn’t from England so they derived its new name from that of the Greek god of the sky: Ouranos,” he had managed to keep his composure long enough to conclude his history lesson, as you looked up at your favourite person, thanking whichever planets that aligned to bring him into your life. “What a wild ride,” you had said to him. “Although, judging by the last name, Herschel must have been German, so the poor guy wouldn’t have had any idea what ‘Uranus’ would sound like in English,” you burst out laughing. His heart fluttered in his chest, almost trying to escape through his throat. As he joined you in appreciating the joke, he smiled down at you with a certain fondness only the poets would understand. He knew he loved JJ, but the love he had for you was something else. When he went home that night and his ceiling hid the stars from him, he thought about JJ. Washing his face as his reflection copied his actions, he thought about how easy it was with her, they were hardly ever apart. He thought about you. He thought about the job that demanded so much of his time and how difficult it would be to give love to someone millions of miles from Washington. Most importantly, however, he thought about how hopelessly, desperately, violently in love he was with everything about you. He looked himself in the eye through the glass. “Can we just make a decision? Please?” he let out a frustrated groan into his mirror, trying not to tear his hair out.

Now, huddled together in the tiny booth, as your hand innocently lay draped across his thigh, he was reminded that he loved you just as much as he did that night under the stars - if not even more. “Why New York..?” he repeated your question. “Because every second spent here is a second worth remembering.” You let your eyes roam over him as he spoke. A brown mop of hair lay tousled on his head after losing a battle with a beanie which had been discarded. You wished you could reach out and tuck each strand back into place, but you knew better. The coffee coloured light in his eyes poured into your own, and your heart melted, regardless of the now falling snow outside. “Everyone who has been here has a life that could be transcribed into volumes upon volumes of stories, but there just isn’t a library big enough to house every story belonging to every stranger. So I guess if they’re worth a thousand words, pictures will have to suffice,” Spencer said to her. He licked his lips, chapped and bright pink against his pale complexion which was iced with snow dust. You wanted nothing but to feel them against yours, to allow the warmth between the two of you to thaw away the harsh frostbite of undue love. “You’re spectacular, you know that right? I could spend the rest of my life wandering through your mind and never get tired,” your words flooded his ears, as he released a shaky breath through a fervent grin. A blush crept up the sides of his cheeks, meeting at the tip of his ski-slope nose at the sight of you beaming at him, when an unexpected and delayed flash interrupted your conversation, making up for the disruption by capturing the moment. You both laughed at the timing, while Spencer struggled to figure out whether his heart was racing because of the slight scare, or because of you. After presenting the camera with a multitude of poses, the two of you emigrated into the street, you gripping the fresh strip of film between gloved fingers.

By the time you and Spencer had caught a cab to the airport, heavy ropes of easterly winds had drawn closed the ebony drapes of night, leaving vague silhouettes of skeleton trees holding the stars in their raw-boned hands. You rest your head on his shoulder, him using the side of your head as a temporary pillow in turn. The two of you had gotten a scarce amount of shut-eye over the past few days since neither of you wanted to lose a second with each other to the villain of sleep. In the backseat of the taxi, which rumbled along its much too short route, Spencer lifted his head off yours, admiring the way you peacefully slept against him. He glanced down to see that your hands had found each other’s in the dark and now lay entwined on your lap. After a long sigh in an attempt to stop his heart from beating so fast, “I hope you know just how much I love you,” he mumbled to your sleeping figure. Unbeknownst to him you lay conscious, your heart stopping when his lips pressed a stamp of love onto your forehead as the driver parked the cab. “Hey, wake up my sweet buttercup,” You felt his hot breath carry the whisper into your neck. “We’re here.” Your heart sank as familiar sounds of the airport could be heard through the windows.

Goodbyes should never have to be this hard, you’d thought to yourself. The time was nearing to when Spencer’s flight number would be called, and in the crowded terminal, the two of you faced each other, but didn’t say a word. He took one of your hands between his, looking at you through glossy eyes. “I don’t want to go,” his quiet voice cracked. You took a step closer. He leaned into your touch once your palm cupped his jaw, chastely tracing your thumb over his cheek. “Spencer Reid, this past week has been unforgettable, you are unforgettable. Everyday of my life I’ll be mad at the world for making it so hard for us, but we can’t keep doing this to ourselves. Sometimes people have to drift apart for the better,” your words trembled before him as tears threatened to spill from the corners of your eyes. “I hope you know just how much I love you,” you recited his words back to him, causing him to squeeze your small hand between his own. “The world is a better place with you in it, Spencer, and I hope the people in your life never take you for granted. You have so much love for JJ, and I know she’ll give you the world. I want you to be happy… even if its not with me, so as selfish as I would like to be, and as much as I want to, I won’t beg you to stay,” you let yourself fall apart. He nodded, only sniffling in reply. You drew your hands away from him to reach into your coat pocket and pulled out the photostrip from earlier today, carefully tearing off the first one in the series and slipping it into his hand. Spencer pulled you into his chest as his arms tightened around you. Your face was buried between his collarbones, the faint scent of cinnamon and dry leaves surrounding you with warmth. His chin rested on your head, your hands tightening their grip around his waist in an attempt to be as close as humanly possible in the middle of an airport terminal. It was true, you were a fly stuck in spilt honey when it came to his embrace. When he pulled away, he realised that if he looked you in the eyes, he would immediately cancel his trip home, so Spencer gathered every ounce of strength in his body and turned towards the direction of his gate. You watched him walk away, his silhouette getting smaller and smaller as the distance between you did the opposite.

Spencer hated reliving his heartbreak, and he didn’t expect to do it so soon in a run down New Orleans eatery, but you were right, he realised. Like you were about most things, you were right about JJ giving him the world, but when you crossed his mind, he hoped and prayed that someone did the same for you. “I keep a photo with me, JJ, because what we do for a living, drags us to hell and back each day. So with that, I need to be reminded, sometimes, that even when I feel numb to the world around me, it’s still possible to feel as infinitely happy as I did that day in Manhattan,” He pulled out the photo and placed it in front of his partner in solving crime. She nodded understandingly, observing the two people caught off guard, candidly sharing smitten smiles. Spencer had the time of his life with you, and while he had the image forever in his mind, the only physical poof he had of it ever happening was the torn black and white film he kept in his pocket, of a girl smiling up at him like he was the only thing in this life worth looking at.

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chrysalispen · 4 years ago

Text

Prompt #4 - Clinch [NSFW]

AO3 Link HERE. Response under cut.

======

"Stop it, Garlond."

"Stop what?"

"Stop stealing the covers." A violent yank upon the insulated woolen blanket. "There's a blizzard out, in case you hadn't noticed."

The other boy sat up, squinted at him... and rolled his eyes.

"Go back to sleep, Scaeva," Cid grumbled.

Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he curled himself back into a roll of the coverlet until all that was visible in the near-blackness of this remote corner was a tuft of platinum-colored hair.

Nero bas Scaeva scowled at his rival -- what he could see of him, anyway.

It was the middle of the night; the lecture hall was dark and silent and the wind screamed around the eaves of the building. All that was visible in the fogged-over windowpanes was frost and sleet, tightly packed into the corners of each steel frame, and the waves of ice and snow carried in each bracing gust that rattled the glass.

The headmaster had deemed the inclement weather too dangerous to allow the students to leave, for one could not even see to the next building in the storm, and it would be as much as one's life was worth to make the attempt. This was the third night in a row they'd been snowed and/or iced in, and Nero had managed only a few hours of broken sleep for waking up freezing cold and exposed to the elements. Meanwhile Cid would be lying next to him, deeply and happily asleep and curled in a tight ball in all of the lined and insulated cover he'd rolled into over the night.

Also he whip-kicked regularly. And he had cold feet.

On top of all his other failings, Cid bas Garlond was also a dirty blanket thief stealing precious warmth and Nero was too tired to even make the barest attempt at civility.

He reached over with both hands and savagely yanked a corner of the blanket back.

"What-hey!"

"It's cold and you're hogging the blanket."

Cid fixed him with a murderous glare before he pulled on the blanket with all his might.

Nero, not expecting more than token resistance and refusing to yield his corner of the blanket, collapsed with a yelp. His weight rolled into the blanket until the pair were tangled and submerged in fabric, and it was then their fight began in earnest, scuffling and wrestling and spitting insults at each other as each tried to gain dominance and win the blanket tug-of-war.

"Insufferable prig!"

"Arrogant ass!"

The dull smack of a fist against a jaw.

"Is that all you have?" Nero sneered. "You punch like an asthmatic toddler, Cidolfus."

"Shut up," Cid spat. "If I liked I could beat you blindfolded."

"With those overcooked noodles for arms? I doubt it."

"You-"

"Oi! Garlond! Scaeva!"

The pair of students froze mid-clinch: Cid with his hands wrapped around Nero's throat, Nero with a handful of Cid's linen undershirt in one fist. They stared at each other, then squinted through the weave of the blanket.

"The rest of us are trying to sleep," continued the disgusted voice, one that belonged to a classmate. "Knock off your lovers' spat or I'm waking up the professor!"

Cid cleared his throat.

"Sorry," he said.

"Right, sorry," Nero echoed.

No response save a grunt, a rustle, and silence.

Suddenly the entire situation struck them both as absurdly trivial. Their scowls relaxed into grins, and Nero wasn't sure which of them started laughing first.

~*~

"If you'd just sit still for two seconds so I could get this bloody knot untangled-"

"Fuck's sake," it felt almost impossible to keep himself quiet with his breathing a harsh and erratic rasp, heartbeat muffled as though someone had shoved cotton bolls in his ears, "would you hurry up, Garlond-"

"Nineteen summers old and you haven't changed a bloody bit."

"What," Nero managed, “is that supposed to mean?”

"I mean you still run your mouth too much." Cid's knuckles brushed over his rigid length, confined as it was within a pair of breeches that at this moment felt tight enough to crush him, and Nero groaned between clenched teeth, careless of anything but the immediacy of his own need. His stomach was a solid wall of tension and his cock throbbed in time with his pulse, a slow trickle of slick warmth leaking against his belly and into his smalls. "Patience is a virtue, you know."

"Patronizing me with one of your daddy's lectures,” his hands gripped Cid’s wrists, slender hips rocking in slow thrusts to meet only empty air (much to his present frustration), “such a romantic gesture."

"You're the one who's gone and tied double knots in leather, somehow," came Cid's retort. His breaths, hot and trembling, came in ragged hefts of heat against Nero's shoulder. "If you want me in your pants so badly, maybe don't make getting into them a heroic challenge."

Nero laughed, a thin and trembling thing. The woolen blanket over their heads was paper-thin and anyone would be able to hear even though they'd dragged themselves into one of the maintenance closets. As much as he wanted to curse and cry out the risk was too much.

Another useless tug. He shoved Cid’s hands away and began to work the belt loose. "Give over, I'll do it myself-"

"If you rip your pants we're *both* going to have some explaining to do."

"We'll be wearing robes over our clothes for the graduation ceremony anyroad," he growled, yanking the belt back and forth. "I'd rather explain ripped breeches than-"

The overtaxed belt, a secondhand item already worn by years of use, snapped beneath his demanding fingers.

He scrabbled desperately at the buttons until they gave and he was able to tug his pants, smalls and all, down to mid-thigh in one graceless force of motion. Nero spared a quick and triumphant smirk, one interrupted by a soft and sibilant hiss when the cold air sent gooseflesh prickling down his legs.

"Told you I'd manage fine without help."

"I just loosened them for you," Cid said with a laugh, blue eyes alight with amusement before one of those arms (strong arms, Nero thought distantly, watching the smooth flex of muscle beneath pale flesh) pinned him to the cold ground. There was no space heater in the supply closet and he winced at the sensation of cold slate against his bare back-

-and forgot all about it in the next breath, his mind and soul a hot and perfect void of cogent thought when the wet and agile heat of Cid's tongue lapped with deliberate languor from base to tip and he was engulfed in his lover's mouth.

Limbs grappled in wool, body wrapped in warmth.

~*~

It's too quiet.

The Crystal Tower slept once again, and Nero tol Scaeva stood alone, gazing across the trench and up at the spires reaching for the heavens like fingers.

Such a beautiful sight, one not beheld by the eyes of man for thousands of years. The sheer scale of it was majestic and overwhelming and somehow so unnecessary, he thought. Xande's little thumb of the nose, perhaps. A tangible symbol of his defiance of his own nature. Just part and parcel of his attempt to become as a god-king, timeless and eternal. No such thing existed for the children of man, finite and ephemeral as life was - not that this had stopped the last Allagan Emperor from making the attempt.

Memory, black and ominous, fluttered errant at the fringes of his perception. Resolutely he pushed it down, carefully compartmentalized like crumbling files in an old drawer.

G’raha Tia would have shut the doors on himself by now. Periwinkle-blue eyes, brittle and distant, watched the facets reflect the coral-tinged light of the sunrise, refracted light glittering with a diamond-like brilliance along each gleaming edge. Will the passing of time dull your power to remember us, I wonder, should anyone ever manage to open those doors and rouse you?

He couldn't countenance it, this strange sorrow and guilt he felt. All for a man he barely knew, and the fact he felt either of these things at all for a man who was, after all, little more than an acquaintance?

It annoyed him deeply.

Eyes still fixed upon the overly elaborate mausoleum - a fitting tomb for an emperor, he thought vaguely - he removed the aetherometer from his pocket.

Time was a funny sort of thing. Once there would have been a time in which the aftermath of his choices would have proven too much for him to bear alone, and Nero would have found himself standing in front of Garlond's tent, seeking entrance to that bedroll, pride clutched like an old blanket in arms that trembled with his own internal weakness.

Time was, he thought.

But time had passed for him and for Garlond, like ice-melt under the remnants of a broken bridge. And many of those old passions, he found, the old and violent desperate, had cooled alongside his rancor.

Against the glare of the rising sun his eyes fell shut.

His hand gripped the aetherometer in a tight clinch, cold metal and glass digging into his fingers - and then relaxed, balancing its weight in his palm before he flung it into the waiting maw of the trench.

The light of a new day awaited.

#ffxivwrite2020 #cidnero #minor spoilers for CT #nero tol scaeva

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notthatiwilleverwriteit · 5 years ago

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We know that jian yi will disappear for a couple of years and zhan welcomes him back sort of. but let's say if he tian disappears for 3 years then comes back what would mo reaction be? 🤔

Good evening, anon-san!

You posed an interesting question that made my Tianshan heart leap in joy. My answer will take a quick look at the canon chapters but also have headcanon-ish content based on them. You might also want to take a peek at my earlier answer in which I touched upon what I think their relationship is like in the Christmas specials.

We have already seen MGS’s reaction to HT coming back to him twice in canon. The first time was when HT had gone to his father’s place for a couple of days and suddenly showed up at MGS’s place dead on his feet (ch. 254):

The second time was in the Christmas specials when they were older (ch. 224 and 271):

In the Christmas chapters it wasn’t specified for how long HT had been gone, but since he had been abroad I guess it’s safe to assume MGS hadn’t seen him for quite a while.

Both of those times share some similarities. MGS doesn’t know where HT has been apart from getting hints it’s somewhere abroad or otherwise far away. If HT had kept in touch with him via texting or calling, I doubt he’s been more specific about his whereabouts. But MGS knows the kind of world HT is a part of, so he can probably guess what he’s up to.

HT also seems to show up out of the blue in both cases. Being this vague and unexpected about his comings and goings creates an effective barrier between MGS and HT’s world. MGS must remain a secret from the shady world, and HT is the gatekeeper and protector of his little haven. The similarity I love the most about these two occasions, however, is MGS’s comments about HT coming back. He sounds both surprised and also...dare I say, relieved? Again, he doesn’t know any specifics but he knows enough. And it’s also interesting how HT doesn’t reply to the “you’re back” comments but he doesn’t seem to ignore them either. Does it make him happy that MGS is showing some level of interest/concern/relief in him showing up instead of pushing him away? Does it make him feel like MGS has been thinking about him?

“if he tian disappears for 3 years then comes back what would mo reaction be?”

You didn’t specify if HT disappears without keeping in touch, but something tells me that’s how you meant this. So, I will go with the scenario of HT disappearing for three years without MGS hearing so much as a peep from him.

In the earlier canon cases mentioned above, MGS seems to regain his usual grumpy attitude towards HT quite soon after his initial surprise. The Christmas special especially suggests he’s somewhat used to HT popping up when he’s least expecting to see his face. Overall, it doesn’t seem like MGS minds it that much.

If HT was gone for three years, though, without any communication, I think he would cross MGS’s mind more and more frequently as time passed. When he’s taking a smoke break or before falling asleep, maybe thoughts pop into his head. Where is he? What is he doing? Is he safe? Is he hurt? Or dead? Will MGS ever hear from him again? But also, the more he thinks about it the more he doesn’t want to think about it. He wouldn’t want to admit it but maybe he’s checking his phone more often. Maybe there’s a growing uneasiness in the pit of his stomach that he’s trying hard to ignore by telling himself it’s none of his business and it’s just better if HT has stopped bugging him already.

At some point, he might even think HT stopped caring about him and forgot about him. And for reasons he doesn’t quite understand, the thought makes him angry, hurt, and disappointed. At least the bastard could be a man and tell him straight up he won’t come to bug MGS anymore.

Then, one late and cold autumn night, he’s coming home from a grueling double shift, ready to fall face first in bed, and suddenly HT is there, leaning on the railing at the top of the stairs and smoking a cigarette. Their eyes meet when HT hears heavy steps, and the bastard blows out the cigarette smoke and smirks at him like they hadn’t seen each for three goddamn years and MGS’s stupid brain hadn’t been worrying about him.

Given MGS’s tsundere nature and the way he reacted to HT coming back in ch. 224, I’d say he’s trying to mask his relief and worry behind anger and being annoyed. Well, it’s also true that worry and relief often come out as anger when it all unwinds. And he would probably want HT to explain himself even though he’s also telling himself his not HT’s damn girlfriend.

Anyway, a lot of different and conflicting feelings that had been buried deep for a long time suddenly rush to surface all at once. And he wants to admit none of them to HT or much less to himself.

MGS would probably try to angrily brush HT off and act nonchalant. As in: “Oh, you’re still alive? I guess nothing can kill bastards like you. Now, scram, I’m tired.” But at the same time, he’s scanning HT over but not being able to do so as discreetly as he would like to. I would bet money, he’s gripping something hard to keep from reaching out to physically check HT or just feel him to make sure he’s not dreaming.

A lot of MGS’s reaction would have to do with the shape HT was in. If he was visibly hurt or barely standing on his feet as he was in ch. 224, he would be more concerned and less angry/annoyed. He would just silently let him in and make a bed for him, even if it had been three years, and save the rant for the next morning. Either way, he would be silently relieved and worried.

As forever-trash for the hurt/comfort trope, though, I want to build it up a little. I’d imagine HT visibly tired but without any major physical injuries. Mainly just mentally and physically worn-out and weary. Laying his eyes on MGS gives him a momentary energy spike, but it’s also as if his mind is finally allowing itself to crash. MGS is saying something to him in an angry but not-quite-angry voice, but he can’t really catch up to the words. Leaning heavily against the wall he ignores MGS’s ranting and just asks if he can stay the night, slurring his words a bit. And that seems to shut him up.

In the end, it’s HT who ends up slumping face-first in MGS’s bed. Muttering something about rude bastards dirtying his home MGS takes off HT’s shoes and tugs and twists the limp body until he’s undressed the jacket and pants. HT’s bare skin feels cold when his hands occasionally brush it even though he tries really hard not to, and MGS wonders for how long the idiot had been waiting for him in the cold night. MGS ends up crashing on the couch that night.

The next morning, before MGS leaves for work, he leaves HT a note about eating the breakfast he prepared and getting the hell out. He’s half-expecting HT to be gone when he comes back home later that night, but the breakfast is untouched and HT is still sprawled in his bed. The first time he shows any signs of life is when MGS is reheating leftovers for dinner.

HT ends up staying for a few days, slowly charging his batteries and becoming increasingly annoying. MGS curses him for eating like a horse and takes full advantage of his thick wallet. This is the best he’s eaten for ages. Every night HT insists on sleeping in the same bed for warmth and each time MGS pushes him off him only to wake up a couple of hours later to HT’s arms wrapped around him. The whole time HT doesn’t leave the apartment nor does he speak a word about where’s been the past three years. And after a while, MGS stops asking about it.

One night HT is quieter than usual and doesn’t allow himself to be pushed away but stays glued to MGS the whole night. At some point, MGS falls asleep. The next morning HT is already up before MGS’s alarm goes off, and they have an unusually quiet and bicker-free breakfast together. Later that night when MGS comes back from work, the apartment is empty and there’s a stack of cash on the kitchen table. No note.

So, eh, yeah. That’s how I imagine MGS would react. Plus, half of a fic to go with it 😅

Thank you for your question, dear anon-san. I loved it!

#tianshan #19 days #he tian #mo guan shan #zhanyi #answered ask

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prettywordsyouleft · 5 years ago

Text

Spiritual Connection - Part 2

Summary: Ever since you were a child, you had known the five men who lived in your Grandmother’s house. What you weren’t expecting upon returning as an adult was that they would still be there - and look exactly the same.

Pairing: Brian Kang / DAY6 x reader

Genre: ghost au / fluff / romance

Warnings: none

Spiritual Connection will be posted daily at 10am NZST.

Preview | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

You felt as if you had returned home for the first time in years. Staring up at the proud home before you, nothing had changed. The flower beds and bushes were just as wildly maintained as usual, and you looked to the front of the house and smiled when you saw the porch swing you had sat out upon every morning watching as the world started to wake up for the day.

It was all just how you expected it to be and you were struck with a wave of grief. You missed her terribly. You wished you had come back sooner, not letting the throes of life and the bustle of the city overwhelm you and make you only consider of how to get through each day.

You should have sought out this enchanting place far sooner.

Getting out of your car after reaching for your bag, you moved onto the cobblestone pathway that wound through the flowers up to the front porch, fingering the keys within your jeans pocket. You had kept them close ever since they had been handed to you, much to your mother’s chagrin.

“But you have so much going for you in the city, Y/N! Don’t throw it away on that little seaside escape. You’ll find it’s not how you imagined it to be. As a kid, you could play all day. Now as an adult, you have to worry about how to survive. There’s not a lot going for work there.”

Taking a deep breath, you ignored your mother’s pessimism and slotted the key into the front door.

You stepped inside, closing the door behind you and began to explore. Some items triggered memories and others puzzled you. Why had you enjoyed hiding so much behind this big chair? You remembered the highs of your childhood here, full of laughter, excitement and happiness. Had your friends moved away now? The house was so silent, apart from the sounds of your footsteps, or the opening of doors as you peered into the rooms. Did you really imagine them all? You sure had been a creative child at one point.

The longer you wandered through the home, the more certain you became that it was just your grandmother living here after all. When your world was turned upside down with your parent’s divorce, you had needed some sense of comfort in that confusing period. You rationalised your friends to be projected as just that, the workings of needing friends during an upsetting time.

“So then, who do I need to clear out of here, Grandmother?” you murmured, turning around in a slow circle as you surveyed the living room. On your second spin, you saw a set of eyes that you hadn’t in many years. Blinking rapidly, as you spun, you caught the face that was attached to those warm brown eyes, wobbling to a halt.

“Y/N?” he tentatively asked and you stared back at Brian for a moment, before a loud scream erupted from within your chest, and you promptly passed out.

“Wave the bag of smelling salts closer to her nose, you idiot!”

“I am, can’t you see how close they are? These things still stink after all these years.”

“Do you think Y/N’s going to be okay? She hit her head pretty badly.”

“Wonpil, if she’s not, we’ll just blame Brian, okay? It was him who showed himself first.”

“Would you all shut up, I was surprised too, you know. I had expected that attorney to come back and keep snooping through Pearl’s belongings for signs of life here, not Y/N.”

There was a loud snort and you felt your heavy eyelids start to lighten off with the sound. “Only the dead walk here.”

“Look, guys, she’s stirring!”

With a groan, you finally fought through the endless dark world back to the light, where the voices above you all ceased. When you managed to open your eyes again, you stared up into the faces of five familiar men. It shocked you just as much as before, but since you were sprawled out on the ground, you merely jerked back, eyes growing wide again.

Jae shook his head adamantly. “No, don’t faint again! I’ve been shaking these salts for twenty minutes and I know it might not seem like much to do, but they are heavy.”

Silently, you eyed the bag above you, soon scrunching your nose up when you inhaled the strong scent attached to them. Reaching out to take the bag from Jae’s appreciative grip, you sat up slowly, vaguely aware of all the prepared arms shooting out to help you just in case.

Man, this was confusing.

Before, you had been hoping to see your childhood friends as soon as you entered the home. Even after all these years, you had believed you couldn’t make up five men. If you had wanted friends, shouldn’t they be closer in age to you? That would be the most logical choice for imaginary friends. And whenever you questioned why they were so old in the past, Sungjin would smile distantly and say that he couldn’t do as good of a job protecting you if he was too young. Dowoon had enthused he was stronger this way and Jae had always joked around with you asking why you were so young instead. It had never really bothered you that much, accepting them for what it was at the time. Regardless of appearance, they had played with you endlessly. And they had been your friends for many years.

How had they not aged since?

“She looks confused, are you okay, Y/N?” Wonpil asked, kneeling closer. He chuckled sheepishly. “Feels weird to think you’re Y/N, I remember when you were this tall.”

“Why? People grow up, Pil.”

“Not us,” Dowoon interjected and Brian reached to smack him around the head. “What? Being dead means we stopped aging a long time ago.”

“What… what did you just say?” you asked, and the conversation fell short. The men looked between one another for a moment.

And then Sungjin tentatively smiled. “Y/N, you really didn’t know?”

“I know you’re my childhood friends, and you’re still in my Grandmother’s house after what, eight years since I last saw you?”

“That’s kind of what happens when you’re a ghost,” Jae surmised and Wonpil hissed at him worriedly. “Don’t hiss at me. There’s no point sugar-coating it. We weren’t imaginary friends, Pearl knew we lived here. She used to play with us when she was young too.”

“I’m sorry,” you started, raising your hands and heaving in a deep breath, in hopes it would help you understand better. “Did you just say, you played with my Grandmother when she was younger?”

Five heads bobbed up and down and you slumped in your posture, unblinking.

“Do we need the smelling salts again?”

Taking in a shaky breath, you glanced up into the face you had first seen earlier today. Brian had always been the one you turned to the most. He was cautious, watching and waiting for your next reaction. You swallowed despite your throat feeling dry. “Just how long have you been here for?”

You paced your bedroom floor back and forth, trying to understand your discovery. Your grandmother’s house was haunted? Was that some kind of joke? Since when could you see the dead, anyway? If that was the case, shouldn’t you have seen many others before in your lifetime too?

You shivered, despite the warm spring evening, rubbing your hands against your skin to take the chill out of it.

The five of them had tried to give you the space you requested after getting up and removing yourself from their surrounding circle. You couldn’t just readily accept their words, even if things were slowly clicking into place.

However, Wonpil had knocked on your door before sticking his head around it, offering you a blanket in case you still felt unwell. Sungjin had reminded you that you hadn’t eaten and it was growing dark out. You knew it was Jae playing the guitar and singing loudly about your denial in the office down the hall, and Dowoon had come up to look through the window more than once until you closed the curtains.

Only one respected your wishes, but you knew Brian was close. He always had been.

Twisting the handle of the door when you felt ready enough to, you peered around the threshold and found him leaning against the wall, eyes perking at your appearance. He smiled and you couldn’t help but return the gesture. His smiles had always charmed you.

“You okay?”

“As okay as someone can be after all this,” you mentioned with a shrug, stepping out into the hallway and eying him with some interest. “You know, I never knew ghosts could change their outfits. Shouldn’t you be floating around in the same clothes you … you uh-”

“Died in?” he offered and you nodded softly. Brian smirked. “I think if I had to stay in that outfit for the rest of my existence, I would be pretty annoyed. I’ve been in this house since the late eighteen-hundreds; would you really want to see me in what was the norm for me back then?”

“I don’t know, I find the Victorian era pretty fascinating.”

“Do you just,” he murmured, staring back at you. It unnerved you and for a moment you almost forgot that he wasn’t, well alive. Blinking away from his gaze, you played with the hem of your t-shirt. “You’ll have to explain more about this to me as we go.”

“You’re not going to pack up and leave? I had you pegged for running away from all of us now that you know we’re not part of the living.” You shot him a warning look and he grinned happily. “You still do that same expression after all these years.”

“What expression?”

Brian attempted to mimic what you had done and you laughed, shaking your head at him. He laughed too and then stepped closer, growing concerned again. “Are you going to sell this house?”

“Will you leave if I do?”

“This has been our home for far too long,” he mused, glancing around at the picture-laden hallway. Your grandmother had always decorated with a cluttered, homey vibe. “Should we move on?”

You didn’t know how to answer Brian’s question, though you did know some changes would have to be made around this house now.

_________________

Part 3

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