#its not just frisson anymore

[dragonmaiden39point5]

No Escape (2)

Probably one or two more parts for this? Idk if I can get up five parts just yet. Appreciate the amazing response! Thank you so much to everyone who read, y'all are the best❤️💕🥰

All characters depicted are over the age of 18

Summary: You grow tired of Bakugo's bad behavior and after 4 years as a couple, you make a run for it.

Katsuki Bakugo x Black!Reader

Darkfic. Stalking, humiliation, dub-con, mild Daddy!kink. Potentially some untagged triggers.

For a few months, you plotted and played your role. If you wanted to go somewhere, you asked him to bring you. You wore overly revealing clothes and climbed all over him in public. You stopped using his name, referring to him exclusively as Daddy no matter who was around. You would initiate sex, begging him to fuck you; beg to fuck him. You even took to sending him video and pictures of you playing with yourself when he left you at home, sometimes in his oversized clothes, other times nothing at all-- (which would make him come back much faster, if he could help it). You really made him feel his victory; it was the only way to disarm him.

Kats was too busy loving that you didn't resist him anymore and was all too eager to have you all to himself; You, he, and the dog had been to 5 countries in the three months since. It was easy to get swept up in the gifts and vacations (and mind-blowing orgasms) and forget he was something that you needed to get away from, since he had been absolutely perfect since you started acting the way he wanted. You almost felt bad about your brewing plot to leave.

Well, it actually wasn't much of a plot, you were you going to take a few thousand out of his home safe, get the dog, and ghost. He was just too unstable and insecure, and at this point it was clear that he could only behave properly when you were 'obedient'.

💥💥💥💥💥

The sole opportunity to leave came with the passing of another month. When he wasn't traveling, Bakugo habitually visited his parents' headstones on the Saturday of every third weekend, at sunset. It was the absolute only time that he left you devoid of incessant phone calls, messages, and his suffocating presence. A cloud of guilt shrouded the decision to leave at such a time... But you'd never know peace if you didn't. What other choice did you have? You had learned from the last several times you attempted to break up with him that it would only intensify his crazy.

When he left that evening, you waited until receiving the text that he was there to make your move. You left absolutely everything behind other than Thunder with his dogfood and cash from Bakugo's safe-- On foot, hence lurking through the woods that started on the edge of the property instead of taking a main road. The location of motion cameras on the edge of the acreage that surrounded the house were something that you had carefully mapped out the boundaries of-- And after almost 4 years, you knew where they were by heart.

There was also a small plan that was put into play as a distraction; He always took the smaller, more low key of the cars when visiting the cemetery. In turn, you sent his chef to a store over an hour in the opposite direction of where you were going, in his easy to spot orange car.

It would be hours before he knew you were gone.

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Bakugo entered the house, flopping down on a couch in the den. Immediately a frisson ran through his body and he looked around as anxiety sunk its icy claws into his stomach . Something was *off*. The pitter-patter of Thunder's feet as he ran through the house to greet him was completely absent. He rose from the couch and called your name in confusion.

No answer.

"This again?" He huffed, going upstairs.

A pit formed in his stomach as blood and adrenaline began to course through his veins when he didn't see you or the dog in any of the rooms.

He tried to calm himself, shuffling through his pants pockets with shaking hands to check the surveillance. Other than seeing you go in through the front door and out through the back, they barely caught you and Thunder in range, before going completely out of view. Running sweaty palms through his hair he fumbled through his contacts until he found Midoriya and Iida's names name in the group chat.

He couldn't think straight, barely able to get his words out, typing with fidgeting hands, "She's gone!"

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A few months went by and you were living it up. You had moved 3 times since ghosting Bakugo and never looked back. The night you left, you walked through the woods until you reached a back road, and then continued until you reached a bus stop. Because you couldn't risk using a phone or GPS, you went off of memory to figure out how to get there.

You rode the bus to its farthest stop, and then another to Central Downtown, where you were able to catch the Megabus out of town. Of course you expected to be seen on the cameras on the streets and at intersections, but you did not care. It certainly helped that no one made an issue of Thunder joining you on each bus. Perhaps it was his service vest, or maybe there just weren't enough people around to care, either way it made your escape much easier.

Your life, now 8 hours and hundreds of miles away, consisted of a job doing live-in care for an elderly man named Torino. He still had his mobility, but no longer had the energy to stay on his feet long enough complete tasks such as cleaning or cooking and the person who usually took care of him was currently traveling for work.

In the meantime, you were able to live in the massive basement of the home rent free. It was basically a 'modern' renovated studio apartment, while the first and second floor of the house remained mostly in its outdated state.

When you weren't at home, you worked part time for a juice truck that drove around town. Thunder had to stay at the house for that, but he was a good boy and even knew how to get things for Torino.

Life had become so peaceful..

💥💥

Per your new routine, you cooked for Torino early on the weekends and then headed out by bike to your job on the juice truck. This day in particular, he asked if you could cook a bit more than usual because his former caretaker would be stopping over for a visit since he was back in town. You were more than happy to do so, proceeding as normal without a second thought.

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When Toshinori arrived at his former teacher's home, he was stunned to say the least. The trimmed front yard's garden beds were in bloom and the porch was clear of all debris and trash, instead having cute decorative tables and chairs. There were also a few hanging plants that there was certainly no way that Torino could've put up, let alone water every few days.

The inside of the house was now immaculately kept, with scented candles, incense, and more plants. All of the clutter had been thrown out, the dishes cleaned, and the floor shined. "I am Here!!" He called out to Torino and was pleasantly surprised to be greeted with the sound of paws clattering on the polished floors. "Hello there, Thunder!"

"I'm back here!" Torino called out from the kitchen.

Toshinori was beyond impressed. Everything was clean and smelled nice; You'd certainly exceeded expectations. He hired you on Torino's behalf since Midoriya had moved to open his second gym location and would not be able to make the journey regularly to care for the old man.

"Where's the boy?" Torino asked as soon as Toshinori entered the kitchen.

"Way to get to the point." He chuckled in response. "He's running a few minutes behind; I think he stopped by his dad's house first. But, wow everything sure looks nice in here!"

"Yes, indeed! That girl that you hired is very sweet. I asked her to cook some extra food so that you and Midoriya could have some when you got here. She even made tea." He said with a smile.

"It's great to see you in good spirits." Toshinori replied, "It seems like you're feeling better too."

"Yes. Remember that garden I mentioned her planting in the backyard? Turns out it's fruits and veggies instead of flowers! I've actually been feeling well enough to walk down the street and back."

"Wonderful!" Said Toshinori, "Here, let me help you with that." He carefully grabbed 2 of the covered plates from the counter and followed Torino to the living room couch, where folding table stands were waiting. Just as they sat down, Thunder took off towards the front door.

The lock clicked and Midoriya stepped inside, greeted by a perfectly seated gray pooch wagging his tail in the entryway. He stared in confusion for a moment. The dog had blue eyes and only the front paws were white, 'Thunder? I thought Kacchan's girlfriend ran off with him?', he thought to himself.

Of course other dogs could look like that, but a sharp shiver hit him and his heart skipped as alarm bells went off in his head.

"Midoriya, my boy? Is that you?" Toshinori called out.

"It is! Here I come!" He answered back, rushing to the living room to properly greet them.

"Did you get lost on the way in?" Torino joked.

"Oh, no. Sorry about that. This place looks so different than it did a few months ago." Midoriya remarked, sitting on the loveseat, "And the dog surprised me. When did you get it?"

"Oh, he came with the new caretaker." Toshinori interjected.

Midoriya hummed in response, as the cute animal came and placed its muzzle on his knee, looking into his eyes. Thunder would always do exactly this when he went to Kacchan's house and didn't give out pets as soon as he walked in. 'Yeah, this is definitely Kacchan's dog.' he thought to himself, as he finally reached down to give the dog the attention he was asking for. He gave the dog scratches under the chin as it panted happily, now putting both white paws on his leg-- the gesture that he used to beg for treats. Midoriya licked his lips as he thought of all the possibilities. 'She could've sold the dog to hurt Kacchan. Or maybe he got away from her when she was somewhere nearby. Because if he got lost or abandoned before they left town, Thunder probably would've just wandered back home. Or maybe--"

"Young man! Did you hear me?" Torino asked sharply, somewhat annoyed.

"S-Sorry Torino. No, I didn't hear you."

"I asked if you could put the dog bowl out. It's in the kitchen." Torino huffed.

"Sure." Midoriya got up, chuckling to himself. A perfect opportunity to be nosey.

"Where's it at?" He called out, after getting to the kitchen.

"You'd know if you'd been listening!" He heard Torino shout, followed by Toshinori's voice saying; "Bottom cabinet by the fridge!"

He went to the cabinet, pulling out the food bowl and removing the lid, revealing portions of lightly cooked steak (amongst other meats), fish, eggs, and fruit, in some sort of broth, all cold as if it had just finished defrosting.

"Goodness." He remarked, rolling his eyes. There wasn't even a need to snoop around-- this was too obviously Bakugo's dog, and based off of its diet being maintained most certainly you were here...

"Hey Torino, what's the dog's name?" Midoriya yelled to the next room.

"Thunder!" Came the reply

"Come here, Thunder!" Midoriya said, with a smug smile barely able to contain his glee. He sat the bowl down and washed his hands, quickly drying them on his pants to take out his phone and snap a picture of the dog eating. Then, he headed to a hallway in the back of the house where a lone door awaited him. Toshinori had mentioned a renovation overhaul for the basement so that a caretaker could move in right away and he wanted to see the space now that it was yours.

Kacchan had bragged on you for years, promising to share you with him and Iida as they had done all the girls before, but talked about how difficult you were being and how you weren't ready, or wouldn't go for it. He sighed as he walked down the stairs into the massive area of the basement. He'd had the biggest crush on you and was now presented with an incredible opportunity, if he was impetuous enough to take it.

Eyes scanning the room, he spotted a quaint full sized bed that was perfectly made, save for a set of pajamas that was tossed onto it. You were only using maybe 1/4 of the oversized basement, with a few colorful rugs, dog bed in the sleeping area, miscellaneous books and trinkets filling 2 sets of built-in shelves and 3 armoires full of clothes. There was also a couch and a loveseat around a large area rug facing a T.V. mounted on the wall. The kitchen was clean but mostly untouched, likely due to you doing most of your cooking upstairs. Aside from the one room on the opposite side of the basement that was fully closed off with its own door (the bathroom), you hadn't filled any of the other space.

Midoriya skulked over to your bed, flopping down backwards and covering his face with your pillow. He took a deep breath, inhaling the light shea butter and argan oil scent that lingered there from your hair products. "Mmmm..." He hummed, undoing his belt. He was already half hard rubbing the outside of his jeans when he got an idea. Sitting up, he smoothed your sheets over, putting the pillows back in place. He looked straight to the opposite wall of the basement where the washing machine and dryer were, heading over with a spring in his step.

The laundry bin beside it was less than half full, but he rummaged anyway. Amongst the handful of T-shirts and shorts he dug out a pair of your underwear, burying his nose into the crotch area. There was only the faintest hint of pussy, yet his mouth still watered to taste it.

Finally, he undid and dropped his pants with haste, groaning as his erection sprung free. His hand wrapped around it, stroking as he took deep whiffs to inhale the scent of your cunt. There was so much he wanted to do to you and now you were right here in his reach, a sitting duck who didn't know that a she was about to be pounced on. "Oooh, shit..." He moaned, fucking his hand, precum beginning to dribble from the tip. You only got away because Bakugo didn't know what he was doing; Midoriya would've never would've let you escape. He put your panties in the hand that he was stroking himself with, loving the feeling of thrusting his dick across the soft fabric, before tightening his grip. His now free hand went to caress his balls, as his eyes shut tight so that he could picture you. The last time he saw you, you were in a slingshot bikini and playing with yourself on that beach vacation with Bakugo. He'd longed to fuck you so bad then, stuff your pussy while Kacchan fucked your drooling mouth. Aside from Thunder, you two had gone alone that time, but Kacchan certainly took plenty of pics and videos; He was ready to burst just thinking about it. "Such a slut.." growled to himself as he stroked as fast as he could. He wished he could cuff your wrists to the headboard and tie your ankles to them, so that he could devour your pussy until you were overstimulated and incoherent, while Bakugo stroked himself over your tits.

A shiver ran through his body and he moaned as he came hard, shooting his warm load into your panties. He braced himself against the washing machine panting as the last waves of orgasm rolled through his body.

He looked into his palm to see the underwear completely ruined. Taking a deep breath, he buried them back in the dirty clothes hamper and collected himself, stepping into the bathroom to wash his hands and splash cool water over his face.

When he was done cleaning himself up, he went back upstairs to find Toshinori and Torino out in the backyard amidst the flourishing garden that you'd planted.

"...What were you doing?" Toshinori asked suspiciously.

Midoriya cleared his throat, hoping his eyes weren't too glazed over from his massive release. "Well--"

"There you are!" Torino's voice cut through the air from across the yard, "Come! Make yourself useful." He said, gesturing to the wagon he was pulling full of harvested vegetables and fruit.

"Oh--I just,,, used the bathroom." He chuckled nervously in response, quickly shuffling away to help the old man.

Toshinori wasn't buying it, but he would let it got. For now.

💥💥💥💥💥

[kendrene]

22 Beatrice/Lilith 😘

22. You don’t have to be alone (dead space au)

***

The Ishimura groans and creaks around them. It tilts, then settles. 

“Not good, not good, not good.” Cam mutters nearby, fingers flying across the terminal’s keyboard. “Bea? I’m not sure but I think the centrifuge is shot. Can you come take a look?” 

“Give me a moment.” Bea spares a distracted glance for the nearest screen, where the ship’s diagnostics are displayed - a solid wall of red, all systems failing - before her eyes return to Lilith’s wound. “I just need to stabilize her.” 

Lilith’s hand, blood-slicked, covers her own. “If you don’t stabilize the ship we’re all fucked.” Weakened by blood loss, but still with enough strength to push Beatrice’s hands away. Black ichor drips from the gaping hole in her abdomen, and Beatrice has the impression that something’s wriggling, hatching within. Lilith presses down with both hands, hissing, and nods towards Camila. “Go. Help her. I’ll be fine.” She’s never been good at lying.

It is the centrifuge, as it turns out. And it’s worse than Beatrice imagined. 

“It needs a manual restart.” Lines of code appear on the screen. She tries a different bypass. Nothing. “There’s something… blocking it, I think? I can’t tell. The sensors are picking up a foreign mass, but without cameras…” She trails off and raises a questioning eyebrow at Camila, who just shakes her head. 

“No cameras. That entire level may as well be a black hole. If everything wasn’t going to shit around us, I’d say it was intentional, but-”

“Bodies.” Lilith calls. voice down to a strained whisper. “The mass the diagnostics are picking up. It could be bodies.”

“No personnel is allowed into the centrifuge when it’s engaged. G-force would suck you into the machinery.”

“But if it were sabotage.” Lilith plants a heel against the wall and leverages until she’s not slumping anymore. “If someone shut the centrifuge off, they could have shoved bodies into it. It’d mess up the hydraulics, wouldn’t it?” 

“You’d need a lot of bodies.” Beatrice counters. A frisson of fear electrifies her spine as the scale of what Lilith is implying fully sinks in. “We’re talking mass murder.”

“Or mass suicide.” Lilith doesn’t have to remind them there was actual crew members attacking them among the monsters. You’ve got to-” 

The vent closest to them explodes outwards, scattering bits of metal all around. Beatrice has the time to register something twisted buzzing past her face before Camila barrels into her, flattening her to the ground.

What must have once been personnel lands on all four in front of them. Tattered fabric clings to its misshapen shoulders and its spine is fully exposed, an ivory coast emerging from a frothing sea of white-red muscle.

“Lilith!”

Any second now it’ll see her. Unless she and Cam do something, Lilith is dead.

“Run!” 

An elongated shape skids across the plasteel floor plating. Lilith’s rifle. Beatrice’s hand closes around it. She feels numb.

“LILITH!”

“I said: run!”

She does, haltingly at first, and Cam has to push-pull her.

She does, faster after, Lilith’s weapon dragging in her hands, and never in her life has she felt so lonely.

[yeyinde]

ooo tell me about sew wings on tailored suits; i never thought of you as a kendall girl but i see it now

I didn't expect it either and I hate how much I love Kendall 😭

This is your basic, cliché story of why it's always a terrible idea to hook up with an employee in the bathroom at an office party. Especially when said employee always leaves your DISGUSTING luxury apartment in Billionaires' Row with the silverware and all of the cash in your wallet. And who is also selling your dick pics to TMZ for a profit (to which your insanely vile lawyers have to keep buying them back).

Fucking Kendall Roy was not a mistake you expected to make at an office party, but like most terrible choices in life—you can't take it back. But maybe there's something here that you can use. What's that magical word he and his passel of corporate millionaires like to say? Right. Leveraging. 

Featuring such highbrow lines such as:

"We're, uh, really good at this," he breathes, tracing indecipherable patterns against your skin. "We’re the Bonnie and Clyde of fucking—"

this is basically self-indulgence taken seriously (and by seriously I'm mostly referring to the fact that Kendall is a MESS—an infectious one who spreads like a plague and contaminates anything he touches).

"Look, I really didn't mean anything by it—" you start, but you can't quite muster up the remorse in your voice, the regret, and it sounds more like a plaintive mother beseeching a wayward child. Exasperated, she sits and pleads with him to just be good and listen, sweetheart— You catch the buoy of his Adams apple, and then a frisson that shudders over his archaic features; soft, barely discernible. There's a shift, muted and uncertain, that seems to overtake him. Seconds, maybe. Milliseconds. Gone before you can place it. Folded back into the lapels of his expensive suit, and wiped away from the corners of his mouth with a monogrammed handkerchief.  "Uh, yeah, no—" The almost stutter is unexpected, but it doesn't seem to throw him off as much as it does you. A little quirk, maybe. The idiosyncrasy makes him feel more human than you'd like. "Uh, it's fine. I shouldn't have—I wasn't trying to—accuse you—" except he was. He did. "—I, uh, you seemed—bored. At a party. That's a little unusual." "And you came all the way over here to tell me that?" The query seems to shake him from whatever lingering stupor he was under, and much like flipping a switch, it's suddenly all business. He squares his shoulders, eyes lidded now, heavy with something that sits low in your belly. Desire brims. Intrigue, too. A strange admixture that doesn't belong on his face—not when he's looking at you.  Kendall smiles, then, and it's an odd thing. A little machiavellian in its Grinch-like angles, a likeness you're sure would actually get you fired (murdered, too, maybe) if you voiced it aloud, so you don't. You're smarter than that.  "No," he says with a small shake of his head, another sweep of his gaze down the length of your body—one he doesn't even bother hiding. Not anymore. Not when you can see the desire pooling, thick and heavy, in the sloe-eyes that bore into you. "I came over here to, uh, get your number."

[cappadocius]

Why most liminal things on the Internet aren't actually liminal

Something that is 'liminal' is neither here nor there, it exists between one distinct quantum state and another. In cultures with distinct "adulthood" rituals, a youth that has matured but has not undergone that ritual is in a liminal state; they are clearly not a child anymore, but they are also not yet an adult, they exist in a strange non-place that is neither, or maybe it's both. A road can be liminal, it exists merely to connect Point A to Point B, but once it acquires an identity as its own entity, it stops being liminal, it's a place in and of itself. The famous American highway Route 66 is not, in any way, liminal - people go TO Route 66, it's no longer just the space between (capital-S) Spaces. Crossroads are traditional liminal spaces, given magical qualities, right up until you get a permanent market or settlement or some other distinguishing feature there - when it becomes a place.

The popular internet phenomenon "The Backrooms" starts as liminal, yes. It's an endless series of identical hallways and corridors, of multi-use spaces not currently in use. But it's not *compelling* because it's liminal. There are hallways and no-places everywhere in our lives and we don't think anything of them - we're not supposed to think anything of them because they're just the space between.

The reason people make videos and wikis and stories about The Backrooms is because they're eerie. Mark Fisher tells us that The Eerie is when we encounter something that lacks what we (usually subconsciously) consider integral to that thing. A playground at night, creaking with the sound of rusty swings moving in the breeze, is eerie because it lacks the children who should be making the swings move; it lacks the children that make a playground a playground. An unrecognizable sound in the dark is eerie because we know sounds come from things, but we cannot perceive the thing!

The Backrooms would be a little eerie just because we expect something that looks like it to be filled with people and activity. The multiuse spaces should show evidence of previous or upcoming use. The hallways would see people going somewhere, and The Backrooms are almost entirely empty. But again, we encounter empty hallways all the time and we don't typically make endless Internet content about them. The BIG eeriness about The Backrooms is that they lack the reference points that define liminality. Within the space, you have neither a here to go back to, nor a there to go towards; it is definitely and defiantly "between" but it's between nothing. That's the lack that made The Backrooms eerie, and that eeriness is what gave us the little frisson that made them compelling.

As the Internet added more and more lore, more and more things, more and more monsters, as The Backrooms became a THING, it actually lost a good deal of its liminality, and therefore its big source of eeriness. The Backrooms was now a place to go, a location to do things in, a point in our mental landscape. As it lost its eeriness, people began adding monsters as a jolt of the Weird (another Mark Fisher term, this time referring to something that is incongruously present when it should not be) but they quickly became another identifying feature of The Backrooms, another nail keeping it a place with an identity.

Lacking the frisson, people began looking for other things that made them feel like The Backrooms did. And because they knew The Backrooms was 'liminal', they began calling anything that made them feel this way liminal as well, when the feature that made them feel this way was the eeriness. And so, empty preschools or abandoned malls (places that are innately places and therefore not at all liminal but are eerie because they lack the noise and presence of humanity that we strongly associate with those places) started getting called 'liminal' despite a complete lack of liminality.

[maracujatangerine]

62. A celebration of light

CW: institutionalised slavery, dehumanisation, box boy universe

Cory looked out the window of the bus, at the Christmas lights strung up in the gardens and in the windows that they passed. It was blue twilight already and a light dusting of snow covered the lawns. Passersby were warmly dressed in coats, scarves and hats against the chilly wind, but inside the bus it was comfortably warm and quite dark. The driver had turned down the lights as they were passing between towns and the stops were farther apart.

Miss Lydia was sitting next to the pet. Glancing at her, Coriander saw that she also was looking out through the window. She seemed a bit sleepy, but was smiling, humming ‘Christmas Time’ quietly to herself. The pet enjoyed the view, but a nagging nervousness kept it from relaxing in its seat.

“Do you remember Annika?” Miss Lydia had asked it, earlier during the week. “That girl that Indira has been dating?” The pet had nodded. Miss Indira had been talking about her and even showed them a photo the last time she visited.

“Apparently she works at the Swedish embassy,” Miss Lydia had continued, ”and they are having a special Christmas celebration on Monday night. Annika has invited Indira and told her to bring some friends, and she asked if you and I would like to go.”

Before Coriander could assent, Miss Lydia bit her lip and looked over at the pet in her familiar, slightly concerned, way. “But there’s something you need to know first.”

Instinctively, Coriander had tensed, cold knots tightening in its stomach.

“Owning pets isn’t allowed in Sweden. So apparently, when you step inside the embassy, you aren’t a pet, anymore.”

“N-not a pet, but then, what am I?” Coriander had heard the fearful trembling in its own voice.

“A human, I guess, just a person.” Miss Lydia had sounded thoughtful, “You could probably ask for asylum, if you wanted to.” She gave Cory a considering look that chilled the pet to the core.

The pet had shaken its head vehemently. Even now, sitting in the warm bus, it could feel a frisson of the cold fear that had enveloped it.

“P-please, Miss Lydia. This pet knows better, it is not a person. It is not a person!”

Coriander had felt its heart speed up, its breath quicken uncontrollably. Miss Lydia had seen the pet’s distress and had sat down on the floor next to it. With careful movements, she had wrapped her arms around it and pulled it into a hug. “Don’t be afraid, Cory.” she had said, “We are just talking. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” She had held the pet in a warm embrace, gently petting its back and not letting go until she could feel its violent shivering subside.

“It’s okay if you don’t want to come.” She had told the pet. Then, she had paused and looked into its eyes with a new seriousness. “But you should know that you are always a person to me.”

Later that evening, Coriander had gathered all its courage and told Miss Lydia that it did want to come. It was flattering that Miss Indira had invited the pet specifically, and Miss Lydia obviously wanted it to join. It’s owner had rewarded it with a surprised, but joyful smile. “That’s great, Cory!”

And now, they were on their way. Miss Lydia had told the pet that it needed to sit on a chair. She had even got it, very reluctantly, to practice with the chairs in the kitchen. Doing something so… human… felt immensely disconcerting, but the lavish praise that Lydia heaped on it helped a little. It felt nervous now. Pretending to be a human, would it be able to do it?

The second issue had been its collar. Lydia had suggested that Coriander just shouldn’t wear it. The pet had clutched at the leather around its neck, desperately shaking its head. Unable to directly tell its mistress ‘No’, but pleading with tear-filled eyes to get to keep it.

“All right.” Lydia had said, finally. “You can wear your collar, but we’ll hide it. Okay?”

So now the pet was wearing a fuzzy, pine green jumper. Its collar was safely hidden underneath the high polo neck. It wore no leash and that in itself made it feel unbalanced and nervous.

When they got off the bus, the sky was dark, but the streetlights and neon signs around them lit up the night. Indira waved them over and gave them each a hug. “So good to see you! I’m happy you wanted to join! Let’s go, it isn’t far from here.”

The pet took a deep breath at the threshold. Inside, Miss Lydia, had said, it wouldn’t be a pet anymore. It braced itself, but when they entered a large, vaulted wooden door and walked up marble steps to enter a cloakroom, the pet felt no different than before. They left their coats hanging among a long row of other peoples’ winter garments. A woman in a red blouse welcomed them and ticked off Indira’s name on a list. People milled back and fort, chatting to each other in foreign languages and English.

Indira looked radiant in gold and red salwar kameez, with a long row of thin bangles in matching colours. She wore eye shadow that caught the gold accents from her clothes and beautifully framed her dark brown eyes. The doctor had put up her long, black hair in a way which showed off her gold filigree earrings. Lydia wore a simple, dark red dress with pearl and silver earrings, the pet itself had black slacks with its green jumper.

They followed the flood of people and proceeded into a big, open hall with an open space like stage at the end.

“Hmm…” Indira said. “Annika has reserved us seats at table number four. But we should probably get some food before then.”

At a counter, they each took a tray.

“So, what are these things?” Lydia asked.

The doctor shrugged, which made her bangles jingle. “I have no idea. Let’s just do what the locals do.” She glanced over at the people in front of the line and filled her tray in the same way.

Lydia saw Coriander’s hesitation over grabbing something and filled his tray as well as hers with the unfamiliar food.

At a table near the stage was a large sign with the number four. In front of each seat were plates and glasses and glass bottles filled with a dark, sweet fizzy drink that looked like cola but proved to taste nothing like it. There were also little folded paper cards with the names of the guests.

“Indira Kumari” one said, “Lydia Winterthorpe”, the other. On the last sign, the black, curling handwriting said “Cory Winterthorpe”. Coriander looked up at Miss Lydia with startled surprise, but she just smiled. “My little brother,” she said, “do you remember?”

The pet nodded, it hadn’t forgotten. It sat gingerly perched on a chair, between Miss Lydia and Miss Indira. It couldn’t keep itself from fidgeting nervously, but it was still easier than it had thought. It was almost like playing a role. Inside the embassy, it was no longer a pet, so of course it could sit on a chair. It was like they were all engaged in a game.

“So” Miss Lydia said, “ Let’s see what we’ve got!”

There were smooth, fluffy, yellow buns shaped into curlicues, with two raisins like eyes in each end. When Cory bit into one, it was sweet and tasted of saffron and raisins.

There were gingerbreads in shapes of mooses and foxes, hearts and stars. There were chewy butterscotch sweets with pieces of almonds, there were fresh dates and satsumas.

They also had small cups of strongly spiced, sweet mulled wine. Cory sipped on the wine, and felt the warmth run through the pet’s whole body.

Suddenly, the lights were turned off. Only the flames from the tea lights on the tables and the candelabras next to the food were throwing a dim light into the hall. The audience fell quiet, the sounds of conversations in English or melodious foreign languages fading away. For a moment, Cory’s heart skipped a beat, but no one else seemed fearful. Lydia, sitting next to the pet, flickered a glance at the pet’s involuntarily gasp. She reached out to take its hand under the table and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

Then, the sound of singing came closer and closer. Through the open door into the corridor, flickering flames grew near.

A woman in a long, white gown glided into the room. She had long, light brown hair and she wore a crown with several white candles that flickered when she moved. She was followed by a row of other women.

“Look! There she is!” Indira whispered and pointed at a short, round woman with a blonde bobcut and blue eyes. She, like the others, was dressed in a long, white gown, like a nightgown, tied together with a red silk ribbon. She was walking next to a dark-skinned young woman with curly black hair. After them came several other pairs of white-clad women. All of them wore glitter in a circlet around their heads and held a lit candle in their outer hand. Behind them walked a number of men dressed in white shirts, marine trousers and dark red waistcoats.

The woman with the candle crown stood in the middle of the open space, the train of white-clad women holding candles fanning out on either side of her. The men forming a second line behind them. Annika smiled and waved quickly at their table, miming a kiss to Indira who excitedly waved back.

After the song finished, the woman with the crown stepped forward to recite a few lines in Swedish. Then, they started singing another song. The audience applauded each number.

One of the women stepped forward from the line and the music swelled in a way that tugged at Coriander’s heart. The pet didn’t consciously recognise the song, but when the woman started singing “Ave Maria”, the pet found itself swaying to the music.

A number of children in varying ages ran on to the stage, some dressed in red and white Santa outfits with faux white fur around their hats, others in brown and white gingerbread costumes. They danced around, singing while bouncing about. Then, they sat down in a semicircle in front of the white-clad choir and together, the children and the adults sang another song.

After the children had left the stage, the men sang. Then, the whole choir sang “Silent Night”. After a pause, the candle-crowned woman started up the song they all sang when they first entered. She started to walk towards the exit and, pair by pair, first the white-clad women and then the men followed her out, singing until the song faded away down the stairs.

Everyone was cheering and applauding and Cory felt very glad that they all came, after all.

*

Happy Lucia!

I admit that this is very self-indulgent, but this is one of my favourite holidays and I wanted to share it with you all.

The Lucia festival in Sweden is held on the 13th of December and it is a festival of lights. It is celebrated with singing and candle-lit processions and ‘fika’ (cakes and sweets) in homes (where children usually dress up, sing and bring cakes to their parents), in schools, workplaces and all sorts of official institutions. There is also a special tv-program which is made every year for Lucia which is very popular. We make special kinds of buns and sweets for Lucia (and Christmas in general) which are delicious.

St Lucia was an Italian martyr in the year 304. In the Swedish tradition she is supposed to herald the turning of the year and the return of the light. The history of the tradition in Sweden is long and complicated and possibly have a lot to do with the fact that the winter is long and dark and cold here in the north, and we really need some extra light and warmth and hope this time of the year.

Perhaps you need some too? If so, Happy Lucia! ❤️

If you want to see what a Lucia celebration might look like: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wcCnso0PcAs&t=26s

If you want to try making saffron buns: https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/st_lucia_saffron_buns/

(Lucia celebrations are for real organised by the Swedish embassies around the world, and it is possible to visit.)

Tag list: @cupcakes-and-pain @whump-em @whumpzone @wh-wh-whu @neuro-whump @carnagecardinal @cowboy-anon @whump-me-all-night-long @redwingedwhump @myst-in-the-mirror @haro-whumps @eatyourdamnpears @bloodsweatandpotato @pinkraindropsfell @whumptywhumpdump @theydy-cringeworthy @whump-in-progress @whumpsy-daisy @nicolepascaline @whumpcreations @briars7 @shiningstarofwinter @whumppsychology @alex-ember @miss-kitty-whumptastic @whumpy-writings @in-patient-princess @youtube-fandoms-bands @goblinchildindabog @mazeish @distinctlywhumpthing @inpainandsuffering @canniboylism @icannotweave @incoherent-introspection @kim-poce @broken-typewriter @the-monarch-whumperfly @whumpers-inc @grizzlie70 @lil-whumper @writingbackwards @sunflower1000 @wingedwhump @thecitythatdoesntsleep @thingsthatgo-whump-inthenight @onlybadendings @rabass @wolfeyedwitch @melancholy-in-the-morning

[thefudge]

idk how to feel about most of the enemies-to-lovers couples on TV lately. for some reason they just don't do it for me! i love the trope but i don't see the spark in many of them? i was wondering if you had thoughts on this

i might have an inkling as to why you don't feel that spark. nowadays, most enemies-to-lovers don't start out as enemies. i don't mind a variation of "they used to be childhood besties and now hate each other", or "they have messy history"; that can be very well done, but the problem with a lot of these dynamics is that you can see from day one that they have no actual reason to fight/no conflict/no problem with each other. it's all surface-level. and so, there's no emotional progression. if person A and person B are already in love, but they're just a little more bantery and aggressive than your average couple, then what's the point? i mean, i enjoy that for its own sake, but it's not really enemies-to-lovers. so i think the problem with this trope nowadays is 1. bad pacing, and 2. no progression, 3. not enough meanness. and i wanna stress the third one: people aren't mean enough to each other anymore! i know that sounds weird, but i want my enemies-to-lovers to properly dislike each other at first! you can have, like, a frisson of attraction, but let them honest-to-god dislike each other.

anyway, idk if you resonate with all that, but those are my two cents!

[mehbzz]

Soft Whitney. Nothing in my head but soft Whitney. So a little Degrees of Lewdity fanfic drabble, no smut. abusive relationships, abusive parents and mc suffering from trauma and probably more than a little Stockholm syndrome. mentions previous sexual assault. I guess a more ooc Whitney.

not proofread just rambled.

You’re not sure why Whitney had wanted you along. He’d grabbed you as you were leaving school and dragged you into town with his friends but they’d all been pretty much ignoring you for the past half an hour as they smoked and joked and harassed the people passing by.

Not that you minded being ignored, you had been nervous and on edge around Whitney for the past week and you wondered if he’d finally noticed. Every movement and gesture he made towards you had been making you anxious. You were still not sure what you had done to deserve the punishment of being tied up and left to be gangraped by the sailors, but every since you’d been making yourself almost ill in effort to be as well behaved and as submissive as you could be. You didn’t want to go through that again. You didn’t think you could survive going through that again. You didn’t realise you’d zoned out completely until you notice Whitney in front of you, saying your name as he reaches for you, and you flinch violently backwards.

He pauses, surprise, anger and something else flicking across his face before he loops his arm around your shoulders and turns back to his friends.

“Got my slut to entertain me today, don't need you guys.” He leads you away, the mixed jeers and cheers from his friends fading as he walks you in silence towards to the beach. The panic reignites in your gut, the feeling of the rope around your wrists and the jeers of the sailors springing painfully to the front of your mind at the sounds of the waves. Before the panic can ignite into a full blown attack Whitney steers you to the left, disappearing into the very edge of the park, through a brambled mess of branches and into a well hidden secluded little glade. He lets you look around for a second. It’s a tiny clearing, a large tree in the middle, its branches causing shafts of sunlight to ripple across the ground. It’s quiet too; the distant sound of the sea and the gentle sound of birdsong is all you can really hear. He shoves you forward, ending your appraisal of the area and you stumble, only just catching yourself from going face first into the trunk of tree.

He winces as he sits down, and you feel flair of sympathy but know better than to mention it. You've only ever seen Whitney’s father from a distance but you know he shares Bailey's fondness for physical reprimands. The one time you'd tried to talk to Whitney about it he'd lashed out immediately, shoving his cock so roughly down your throat, you’d been in pain for days and you'd ended up going to see Dr Harper worried he'd actually injured you.

Whitney sits still, head tilted back to rest against the tree and his eyes closed. He looks handsome, blonde hair a scruffy mess and you stand there awkwardly still a little shaky from the panicked adrenaline, torn between sitting with him and trying to run. You're not sure which would earn you the bigger punishment.

"Sit."

He opens one eye as you cautiously sit down next to him, shoulders not quite touching, and smirks at you. "good puppy." It's patronising, teasing, but the paltry praise still sends a warm little frisson through you that you try to ignore.

Whitney closes his eyes again, an unlit cigarette rolling between his long slender fingers. It’s beauiful here, peaceful, but you're still anxious. Why did he bring you here? You had been expecting to get fucked in all honesty, but this area felt way too secluded for Whitney’s exhibitionist streak.

The click of his tongue piercing against his teeth let's you know he's getting frustrated, probably annoyed, and you tense, bracing yourself for whatever pain was going to come your way.

“Just fucking relax,” he sounds angry, and more than a little uncertain, the click of the silver ball increasing in frequency. "I usually come here when I need a break from all the bullshit."

You are glad he's not looking at you, as the shock written across your face at his vulnerable admission would have undoubtedly earned you a rough punishment. In fact you think he's doing his hardest not to look at you, face tilted to the side and eyes tightly closed. You don’t know how to respond. This is his safe place? And he’s sharing it with you? “It's nice here.” It’s a pathetic response but you don’t know what else to say. He doesn't acknowledge you and you shift a little closer until your shoulders are touching. You feel him relax at the small touch and he finally places the cigarette in his mouth, shifting till he finds his lighter and lights it with a small satisfied hum. If he is closer to you after his shifting around, his leg and thigh touching yours, you don't mention it. The pair of you sit silently for a few minutes, the warm sunshine starting to make you feel drowsy.

"Don't leave. I won't do it again." It's mumbled quietly under his breath, he even stutters slightly and for the second time in the space of 10 minutes you feel stunned by his behaviour. Whitney’s moods often gave you whiplash but this was something new.

"OK." You practically whisper back but again you're not sure what else to say. "Thank you." You probably shouldn’t have to be thanking your boyfriend for not selling you off to a bunch of sailors, but he sounds so vulnerable, so unsure, so unlike himself that your mind is too shocked to offer you any other response.

The clicking of his tongue stud continues. It's the biggest giveaway to his real mood that you'll ever have. Running it along his teeth is something he does when he's genuinely stressed or frustrated. You don't think he's aware he does it and you've never brought it up in case it takes away the only indicator you have to his true feelings.

You’re hit with the desperate need to reassure him, but you know any words you offer will immediately be thrown back in your face, so you opt for a more subtle approach. You let your hands relax on your thighs and rest your head on his shoulder. He freezes for a split second at the contact but soon relaxes again, and thankfully he doesn't shove you off. The clicking sound stops as well.

"Tell anyone and I'll think of something worse than a gang of lonely sailors."

It’s a cruel but half hearted threat, a instinctive reaction to protect himself against appearing weak or soft so you don't reply and just nod, not wanting to ruin the fragile moment. You have no doubt insecurity and embarrassment will change his mood in a while, probably forcing you into some public sexual act in an attempt to reassure himself of his dominance over you and you want to enjoy the peace while you can. He switches the cigarette to his other hand and hesitantly wraps his pinky loosely around yours. You desperately want to link your fingers together but you know when you’re pushing your luck, so you sit quiet, content to let him push himself outside of his comfort zone without fear of reprimand or acknowledgement. It’s an odd talent you’d found yourself developing, the ability to comfort and encourage him without him realising you are doing either of those things. At least not yet.

He finishes his cigarette slowly, giving you the chance to doze off on his shoulder. "You better not have drooled on me." The confidence is back in his voice and you feel an odd mix of disappointed and content as he shoves you off him, still surprisingly gentle.

He dusts his hands off on your jeans and you pretend to ignore the pained noise he makes as he rises, looking away as he presses a hand to his ribs. “Get up then,” There's a pink tinge to his cheeks as you look up at him, and he's definitely avoiding eye contact with you as he holds out a hand to help you up. You take his hand but push yourself up, you don’t want to cause him anymore discomfort. You stand there holding his hand and you think for a split second that he’s going to kiss you, but you realise that’s too much gentleness for Whitney in too little amount of time as he smirks, and flicks your forehead hard instead. "c’mon slut, let's go to the pub."

[rhosyn-du]

Never make a mess when a total catastrophe will do - Chapter One

Pairings: Jimon, past Clace, background Clizzy, a bunch of other minor background pairings Rating: Explicit Art: @cor321​ Beta: @all-thestories-aretrue​ Tags:  Alternate Universe - College/University, fake dating, oh my god they were roommates, friends with benefits, idiots to lovers, pining, miscommunication, holidays, drinking games, mistletoe, symbolically significant Oreos, domestic fluff, brief mention of past character death, Jace’s self-worth issues deserve their own tag Summary: What do you do when you find out your sister is not only dating your ex and love-of-your-high-school-life but is also bringing her home for Christmas? Bring your annoying, hot, annoyingly-hot roommate as your fake boyfriend to show them you're totally fine with it, obviously! There's no possible way this could backfire. Link: AO3, Tumblr Master Post

Chapter One

“Lightwood’s Mortuary, you stab ‘em, we slab ‘em. How may I direct your call?”

“You know,” Izzy said, “that joke would land a lot better if you hadn’t turned green last week when I mentioned getting to do my first cadaver dissection.”

“First of all,” Jace said, abandoning his laptop in favor of flopping back onto his bed, “it’s creepy that you say ‘getting to’ instead of ‘having to.’ And second of all, no one wants to hear about how much fun you had slicing up dead bodies over Thanksgiving dinner.”

“Max wanted to hear about it.”

“Max also can’t wait to get to middle school because he heard you get to use actual fire in science class,” Jace pointed out.

“Max is just into science like his big sister,” Izzy countered breezily. “Anyway, I wanted to talk to you about Christmas.”

“Please,” Jace said with far more enthusiasm than the situation probably warranted. “I’m desperate enough for any distraction that will take me away from trying to memorize third declensions that I would love to discuss whatever family holiday drama is so colossal I’m hearing it from you instead of Alec. Is Robert planning to show up uninvited to Christmas dinner with his girlfriend again? Oh! Did Mom finally snap and kill him? Is that why Alec isn’t calling? Is he helping her hide the body?”

“Oh my god,” Izzy laughed. “Dad and Annamarie are spending the holidays in Provance with her family, and there are no bodies to be hidden. This is what you get for taking Latin instead of Spanish like a sane person.”

“This coming from a woman who’s studying both,” Jace pointed out.

“Yeah, because a basic understanding of Latin and fluency in Spanish will both help me get into med school, and I need all the help I can get if I’m going to get into Grossman. Besides, I’d never imply anyone in this family is sane. If you studied more, you’d know that ‘Lightwood’ is just Latin for ‘totally fucking cracked.’”

“Please,” Jace snorted. “It’s not even a Latinate name. It’s Germanic. ‘Lightwood’ is Old English for ‘totally fucking cracked.’ Speaking of which, what’s the Christmas disaster?”

“It’s not a disaster exactly,” Izzy hedged, and Jace felt a sudden frisson of actual unease. Izzy normally had no problem speaking her mind. “It’s not a disaster at all, actually. It’s just. I invited someone.”

“Oh.” Jace relaxed. He didn’t know why Izzy was making such a big deal out of this. In the years since the divorce, Maryse had often encouraged her kids to invite any friends without a place to go to join them for holidays. Izzy’s own roommate had come for Thanksgiving last year. “That’s cool.”

“No,” Izzy said, like he was missing something obvious. “Jace, I invited someone. Someone I’m seeing. Seriously.”

“Oh,” Jace said again, this time with dawning comprehension. “That’s great, Iz. I’m happy for you. Wait, Mom’s not doing her overprotective, no-one-is-good-enough-for-my-children thing again, is she? Is that why you called, you need me to run interference?”

“No, no,” Izzy reassured him, although her voice still held an underlying tension. “Mom’s been great, actually. They knew each other already, so that probably helps.” Jace heard a shaky inhale before Izzy continued. “You, um. You know her, too, actually.”

“Oh yeah?” Jace said with forced ease, wracking his brain for any clue as to what could have Izzy so freaked out. Whatever it was, Jace wasn’t going to add to her stress. As far as he knew, Isabelle had never even been serious enough about someone before to even use the term girlfriend or boyfriend, let alone bring them home for Christmas. “Who’s the lucky lady?”

“It’s Clary,” Izzy said in a rush. “I’m dating Clary.”

The world seemed to tilt on its axis, and Jace was glad he was already lying down.

“Clary?” he repeated. “M—” He just barely stopped himself from saying “my Clary.” Because she wasn’t, not anymore. Not for a long time. “Morgenstern?” It was a clumsy recovery, but it was the best he could manage. “You’re dating Clary Morgenstern?”

Jace and Clary had met at the beginning of Jace’s junior year of high school. Clary, a year younger, had just lost her mom, and the two initially bonded over the shared experience of having lost parents. But Clary was fierce and bold and so full of passion even in the depths of her grief that Jace really couldn’t help falling in love with her. They’d dated for nearly two years—practically forever in high school terms—and even though they’d both known they were growing apart by the time Jace had to choose between his first-choice college in Boston and staying in New York to go to NYU, Clary would always hold a special place in Jace’s heart as his first love.

“Yeah,” Izzy said on a heavy exhale. “For a while now. That—that’s why I called. I didn’t want it to be weird, you know? For us all to just show up and for it to be a surprise. But I guess I probably shouldn’t have done it over the phone, either. I just didn’t think—”

“Izzy,” Jace said, much more calmly than he felt. “Breathe. It’s okay.”

“God, I should have told you sooner,” Izzy continued as though he hadn’t even spoken. “I just knew it probably would be weird for you, so I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure—”

“But you are now,” Jace interrupted again. It wasn't really a question. “Sure.”

“Yeah,” Izzy breathed. “I’m so sure.”

“Then it’s not weird,” Jace lied. “I mean, come on, my sister is dating someone who makes her happy and who I know will treat her right. What kind of idiot would I have to be to complain about that?”

“Really?” Izzy pressed. “Because I told Clary I wanted to talk to you before we finalized plans. So, if it is weird for you, or even if you just don’t want to be the only single person at the table on Christmas—”

“I won’t be,” Jace interrupted.

There was a pregnant pause, and then Izzy squealed so loud Jace had to pull the phone away from his ear.

“Oh my god, Jace! That’s amazing! Why didn’t you just say you were bringing someone, too, you jackass? Do you know how worried I’ve been about telling you about me and Clary?”

Which wasn’t what he’d meant at all—he’d only meant that Maryse was single, too—but Jace couldn’t resist the excitement in Izzy’s voice, not after her earlier panic.

“If I’d known you were all freaked out, I would have said something sooner,” Jace improvised. “It’s kind of new, and I haven’t even had the chance to tell Mom yet.”

“Let me,” Izzy insisted. “I’ve been trying to get her to admit that she and Luke are an item for ages, and maybe knowing that we’re all happily attached will be the push she needs.”

“Hold up. Mom…and Clary’s stepdad?” Jace was starting to wonder if this was some bizarre stress nightmare brought on by impending finals.

“Yup,” Izzy confirmed, popping the “p.” “They’re not even subtle about how much time they’re spending together, but Mom keeps talking about how they’re ‘just old friends.’” Jace could practically hear the eye roll.

“Anyway,” she continued, “if I leave now, I can catch Mom closing up the bookshop and maybe finally get her to crack. Don’t worry about Christmas plans. I’ll take care of everything. Talk to you later!”

“Iz, wait,” Jace started, but he was interrupted by the telltale beep of the call ending.

Jace stared at his phone, wondering how, exactly, he’d managed to make such a disaster of things. He couldn’t deal with this right now, he decided, tossing his phone aside. He just had to get through finals, and then he could come up with some excuse for why his nonexistent girlfriend couldn’t make it for Christmas. An excuse that wouldn’t make Izzy suspicious. Or Clary. Or Alec. Or— Fuck. Not thinking about it.

He turned his attention back to his laptop only to realize after several minutes of staring blankly that he wasn’t prepared to think about Latin anymore, either. Fuck it. He was going to spend the rest of the evening on the couch, drinking beer and watching stupid people doing stupid things on TV and thinking about absolutely nothing at all.

Because Jace just couldn’t catch a break, he found both the couch and TV already in use. He wanted to be annoyed, especially since he knew this was at least the dozenth time this semester his roommate had watched Return of the Jedi. Part of him was annoyed. But another part of him was…not annoyed. And that was yet another thing Jace wasn’t going to think about.

Jace’s first impression of Simon Lewis, when he’d walked into History and Literature of Music their freshman year, had been that he was kind of hot, in a nerdy way. His second impression, when he actually talked to Simon a few days later, was that the guy was annoying as hell. Over the course of the year, as they somehow ended up hanging out with the same group of friends, it became a tolerable sort of annoying. So tolerable, in fact, that when Jace found himself desperate for a roommate the next summer when Raj bailed on him last-minute, he’d agreed to let Simon have the second room in the surprisingly affordable apartment he’d found.

Jace’s third impression of Simon came four days after they’d moved in together, when he happened to be walking down the hallway at the exact moment Simon stepped out of the bathroom, towel wrapped around his waist, a stray droplet of water trailing down his surprisingly well-defined abs. In that moment, Jace must have lost his mind, because he had the sudden, almost overwhelming urge to follow the path of that droplet with his tongue and, oh. Oh no. Jace had been wrong this entire time. Simon wasn’t just annoying. He wasn’t just nerd-hot. He was annoyingly hot.

And Jace was maybe just a little bit in trouble.

Because he’d seen the kinds of people Simon dated. Thoughtful. Driven. Well-adjusted. Unlike Jace in pretty much every way that mattered. Not that Jace dated, but he wasn’t the kind of person Simon hooked up with, either, he was pretty sure.

(Jace confessed his fourth impression of Simon to Maia several months later, after many, many shots of tequila. Maia laughed at him for a solid five minutes, but she also poured them another round and never mentioned it again after they sobered up because she was actually a pretty good friend despite how much she always seemed to enjoy Jace’s suffering.)

“What’s wrong?” Simon asked around a mouthful of instant ramen. Jace refused to acknowledge that the way his cheeks puffed out when he ate was cute.

“Just.” Jace shook his head. “Holidays. Family stuff.”

“Your sister planning to make Christmas dinner again?” Simon asked.

“Worse,” Jace said, flopping onto the other end of their stained Goodwill couch. “She’s dating my ex.”

Simon winced. “Ouch, dude.” Simon poked at his noodles with a pair of well-used disposable chopsticks. “You still have feelings for your ex?”

“What? No, of course not. It was ages ago, and we were practically still kids. And the breakup was mutual.” He made a face. “But Izzy’s bringing her home for Christmas.”

“Okay, yeah, that could be a little awkward,” Simon conceded.

“It gets worse,” Jace admitted. “When she told me, I kind of panicked and said I was bringing someone home, too.”

Simon frowned. “I didn’t know you were seeing anyone.”

“I’m not,” Jace told him. “Which is kind of the problem.”

“Wow. You really know how to make things difficult for yourself.”

“Thanks,” Jace said. “Very helpful.”

Simon shrugged, then said, as casual as if he were offering to toss Jace’s towels in with his to make a full load at the laundromat, “You could always take me home with you.”

Jace stared. “What?”

“I mean, I’m going to be in the city anyway,” Simon continued, “and it’s not like my family does Christmas. I think Mom and Becky can manage the traditional Chinese takeout and Fast and Furious marathon without me.”

“Your family watches The Fast and the Furious on Christmas?” It was the only part of that Jace was emotionally prepared to process.

“It used to be Die Hard, but Mom’s got a thing for Vin Diesel, so now we alternate years.”

Jace stared a moment longer, waiting for any of this to make sense. On the television, Boushh threatened Jabba with a thermal detonator.

“Right,” Jace said when it was clear the situation wasn’t going to make sense of itself. “Okay. Rewind to the part where I’m supposed to take you home with me for Christmas and, what, pretend you’re my boyfriend?”

He could picture it all too easily. Simon wielding his enthusiastic charm to keep Izzy out of the kitchen while Jace helped Maryse make dinner. Simon joining Alec in coaxing Jace toward the piano when it was time to sing carols. Simon flushed and smiling after a couple mugs of Magnus’s deceptively alcoholic eggnog. Simon’s hand in his because that’s just something boyfriends do.

It was a horrifyingly tempting prospect.

Jace pushed those thoughts away, crossing his arms over his chest and directing all the scorn he felt at himself into the stare he leveled at Simon. “What’s that supposed to accomplish other than giving me a headache?”

“Hey,” Simon said, setting the dregs of his ramen down on their secondhand Ikea coffee table, “I’ll have you know that I make an excellent boyfriend.”

That wasn’t exactly news. The fact that Simon was friends with basically all of his exes said as much. But Jace wasn’t about to let on that he paid that much attention to Simon’s dating habits. Or to pass up such a good opening. “That why you’re single?”

“Not the one currently desperate for a holiday date here, pal,” Simon pointed out.

“I don’t know, you seemed pretty eager to be my holiday date just a second ago,” Jace said, adding a wink just to be obnoxious.

“It was an offer, jackass. One which I now deeply regret.”

“Which you should,” Jace told him, turning to the TV and pretending to watch. “Now we can both forget this conversation ever happened, and I can go back to figuring out what I’m going to tell my family about why my nonexistent significant other can’t make it for Christmas this year.”

“Right,” Simon muttered, picking up his bowl and turning his own attention back to the movie.

Jace told himself he didn’t feel just the tiniest bit disappointed.

“The thing is,” Simon said several minutes later, as Boba Fett tumbled into the Sarlaac pit, “my cousin Rachel is getting married on Valentine’s Day. And my Bubbe Helen is still pretty cranky with me for breaking up with Maia.”

Jace frowned at him. “You and Maia dated for like a month and a half. Over a year ago.”

“Yeah, well,” Simon said, “Bubbe Helen really liked her, but I think maybe that’s because Maia’s the only person I’ve ever brought to a family function. So, I was thinking maybe if I brought someone else to Rachel’s wedding, she’d get the hint and drop the Maia thing. And then you suddenly needed someone to take home for Christmas, and I thought we could, you know, help each other out.”

It was a terrible idea, and Jace meant to say so. He really did. But what came out of his mouth instead was, “You want to introduce me to your grandmother?”

“I mean,” Simon said with a shrug, “she’d probably be happier if you were Jewish, but I honestly think she’d be happy to see me with anyone who’s not a total asshole. Ever since she found out Maia and I aren’t together anymore, she’s been acting like I’m going to end up a lonely old maid or something, which I totally don’t get, because A, I’m only twenty-one, and B, she doesn’t think it’s a problem that Becky’s single and Becky’s two years older than me.”

“Glad to know I meet the very minimal requirement of not being an asshole.”

“Not a total asshole,” Simon corrected with a teasing grin.

“You’re really making a compelling case for trying to convince our families that we’re a couple,” Jace said drily. But he was maybe just a little bit weak for Simon’s smile, so he added, “But you might as well tell me how exactly you think this would work. Theoretically.”

“Theoretically,” Simon repeated. “Right. Well, we’d need to come up with a game plan, obviously. And rules. Rules that we actually follow, because that’s where things like this always fall apart, when someone ignores the rules.”

“Where things always fall apart,” Jace repeated. “Is this something you do often?”

“What? No! I just mean like in movies and stuff. Fake dating is practically its own genre, so we have a ton of examples for how not to do it, and…” Simon frowned as his voice trailed off. “And now that I’m saying this out loud, I’m realizing how dumb it sounds. You’re right. We should forget this conversation ever happened.”

“Or,” Jace said slowly, knowing he was going to regret it but unable to stop himself, “we could spend some time coming up with a plan and then decide if we think it will work.”

“Wait, really?” The slow grin spreading across Simon’s face did nothing to ease Jace’s sense of impending doom, but it did fill him with a soft warmth that made the doom easier to ignore.

“Why not?” Jace shrugged with practiced nonchalance. “I’m done with classes at noon tomorrow if you want to do it then.”

“I’ve got a break from then till three if you don’t mind meeting near campus,” Simon said. “Say, Java Jones at twelve-thirty?”

“Sure,” Jace agreed to the background of Jabba’s sail barge exploding. He hoped that was less metaphorical than it felt.

~~~

“I thought we were planning a couple of fake dates, not staging a major military operation,” Jace said as he surveyed the notebooks and stacks of paper strewn across the rickety cafe table in front of Simon.

“Oh, sorry,” Simon said, hastily shoving exactly one of the many notebooks into his backpack. “I was just reviewing notes for my econ final while I waited.”

“Is all of this really necessary?” Jace asked, attempting to clear enough room on the table for his coffee and the banana muffin that was attempting to pass for lunch.

“It’s so necessary,” Simon told him, reaching over to steal a piece of Jace’s muffin. “I don’t want to end up like Melissa Joan Hart in My Fake Fiancé.” He popped the piece of muffin into his mouth. “Or Melissa Joan Hart in Drive Me Crazy. Oh! Or even worse, Melissa Joan Hart in Holiday in Handcuffs.”

“I have no idea what you just said.”

Simon sighed heavily. “I’m saying we need clear, well-defined rules if this is going to work.”

“Is rule number one ‘don’t be Melissa Joan Hart’?” Jace asked, snatching his muffin away when Simon reached for it again and taking a pointed bite.

“No,” Simon said, with far more seriousness than Jace thought the situation warranted. “That’s rule number two. Rule number one,” he continued, opening a blue notebook to a fresh page, “is ‘absolutely no sex.’”

Jace choked on his muffin.

“If there’s one thing everyone seems to agree with, it’s that things always break down when that rule gets broken,” Simon continued as though Jace weren’t struggling to breathe around a mouthful of muffin and why Simon thought they even needed a rule for that.

Jace washed the remaining crumbs of muffin down with a generous swig of coffee, then leaned back in his chair with a deliberately cocky grin. “I mean, I know I’m damn near irresistible, but do you really think you need a rule to keep from jumping me?”

“Rule three,’’ Simon said, scribbling furiously in the notebook, “treat each other with the same respect we’d treat people we’re actually dating.”

“Hey, I would have the same question for someone I was actually dating.”

Simon looked up from the notebook. “That explains so much about your dating history.”

Jace flipped him off, and Simon flashed him a shit-eating grin. “Nope, sorry, rule one. But,” he continued, serious once again, “we should have rules about what kind of physical affection we are comfortable with. Like, I know we don’t normally do hugs, but it would be weird if we never hugged in front of your family if we were dating, right? What about holding hands, is that too much? And what about kissing? I’m definitely cool with cheek kisses, but I don’t know—”

“Simon,” Jace interrupted before he could get too worked up. Or make Jace think about more things he really shouldn’t be thinking about. “You’re allowed to hug me. And hold my hand. Honestly, I’m sure I’d be fine with anything you’re comfortable doing in front of my family, so how about we just go with this: casual touches are fine and for anything else, I’ll follow your lead.”

The look Simon gave him was so searching that Jace almost worried for a second that Simon would be able to see right past his crossed arms and feigned nonchalance to the part of him that was less worried about showing physical affection than how much he wanted it, the part that avoided hugging Simon because he liked it.

“Okay,” Simon said finally. “But you have to promise you’ll tell me if anything I do bothers you even a little bit.”

“You mean like singing Shake It Off at the top of your lungs in the shower?” Jace asked.

“That was one time!” Simon protested. “I was up all night studying and under the influence of too many energy drinks. We agreed never to mention it again.”

“No, you told me never to mention it again and I laughed at you.”

“See, this is why we need rules. You’re already breaking number three.”

“Yeah, because we’re not pretend-dating yet,” Jace said. “That one might be a little rough, but I’m sure I can manage with some practice.”

There was that searching look again, but then Simon nodded like Jace had said something particularly insightful. “You’re right, we should practice.”

“We—what?”

“If we’re going to convince people who actually know us that we’re dating, then we should practice first,” Simon said, like it was the most reasonable thing in the world. “Not just the rules we know are going to be hard, but all of it, so we can work out any kinks in the plan before showtime.”

And maybe it was reasonable, but it was one thing to put on a show for his family, for Simon’s family, for a few days at a time in places that might be familiar to each of them individually, but that weren’t theirs. It was entirely another thing to do it here, in the cafe they went to at least twice a week, or on campus where they’d first met and had to keep on attending classes for at least another year, or even worse in the apartment they shared, around their friends—

“I really should have thought of it earlier,” Simon continued, blissfully unaware of Jace’s inner turmoil. “My best friend back home, she’s an amazing liar. Like, seriously, she got away with everything when we were kids. But any time she needed me to back up her story, she’d make me practice with her like a hundred times until she knew I could convince her mom and stepdad, even after I got good enough that I didn’t have to practice to convince Mom. Man, those two could sniff out the tiniest discrepancy in any story. Like, if normal parent bullshit detection is a one, my mom’s is probably a solid three, but Fray’s parents? Eleven, easy.”

“I’m pretty sure no one I’m related to has supernatural bullshit detection,” Jace told him. “And it’s common knowledge I’m a better liar than you are, so if you can fool your mom without practice, so can I.”

“Maybe,” Simon conceded. “But a little bit of practice couldn’t hurt, right?”

Jace was pretty sure that it could hurt, actually, but he was also pretty sure he was the only one in danger of getting hurt, so it probably wasn’t worth consideration. Especially weighed against the hopeful enthusiasm in Simon’s expression.

“What did you have in mind?”

“We could start by pretending we’re on a date right now,” Simon suggested. “We’re already sharing a muffin. So, just treat me like you’d treat anyone you were on a date with.”

“My dates don’t usually involve this many notebooks,” Jace told him. “And if my date stole my muffin, the date would be over.”

“Come on, you’re not even trying,” Simon said, gathering up the papers and notebooks. “You’d really ditch your date over a muffin?”

“Absolutely,” Jace insisted. “They’d have to be seriously good in bed to make up for it, and I’m pretty sure rule number one says you’ll never get muffin-stealing privileges.”

“If the biggest benefit to sleeping with you is getting to share your muffins, then I’m not the one missing out,” Simon told him.

“You selling your body for muffins now, Lightwood?” an amused voice interrupted. “I bet I know a few people who’d toss a bran muffin or two your way for a chance at that ass.”

“Which is why you’re not my pastry-pimp, Roberts,” Jace said, smirking at Maia as she helped herself to one of the table’s empty chairs. “I only trade this ass for top tier, gourmet muffins. If your muffins don’t have at least two Michelin stars, I’m not interested.”

“I give him a week until he’s working corners for Entenmann’s,” Simon told her. “He was just threatening to walk out on our date over a bite of mediocre banana nut.”

Maia’s eyes widened. “Your— Oh, shit, sorry,” she said, scrambling out of her chair and throwing them both an apologetic smile that Jace was pretty sure wouldn’t be directed at him if he were sitting with anyone other than Simon. “I swear I didn’t mean to interrupt, I just thought you were studying or something. You guys have fun, and I’ll just—”

“It’s a practice date,” Jace interrupted, “not an actual date. And Simon’s a dirty muffin thief who won’t even put out, so I’m not sure it really even qualifies as any kind of date.”

Maia looked between the two of them, then slowly lowered herself back into the chair. “I know I’m going to regret asking this, but what exactly is a ‘practice date,’ and why are the two of you on one?”

“Jace needs a fake boyfriend to take home for Christmas, and I need a fake date for Rachel’s wedding,” Simon explained, snatching the last bit of Jace’s muffin without remorse. “And we thought we should practice dating before trying to convince our families that were actually, you know, together.”

“That’s a terrible idea, and I regret any part I played in the two of you becoming friends,” Maia said flatly.

“Yeah, that would probably worry me more if you didn’t say that like twice a week,” Simon told her.

“Oh god, Simon, what did you let Jace talk you into now?” another voice asked, and suddenly there were three more people crowding around their tiny table, because apparently all of their friends were at Java Jones today. Which, in retrospect, Jace should have expected, given how often they all hung out there.

“It was actually my idea,” Simon told Maureen, sliding his chair closer to Jace’s to make room for her, Bat, and Lily. “Jace is taking me home to meet his family over the holidays, and I’m taking him as my date to my cousin’s wedding.”

This proclamation was met with a stunned silence that was broken when Lily turned to Jace and punched him in the arm.

“Ow! What the hell?”

“That’s for abandoning me, jerk,” Lily told him. “Not that I can really blame you—either of you,” she added, giving both Jace and Simon an appreciative once over, “‘cause damn—but I thought we had an understanding.” She sighed heavily. “Now that you’ve gone over the dating Dark Side, who’s going to be my wingman? You’re probably going to start doing all kinds of relationship-y things and talking about feelings—” she said it like it was a dirty word “—and crap like that.”

“I am not going to talk about my feelings,” Jace said, at the same time that Simon said, “We’re not actually together. We’re just pretending.”

“They’re planning to try to convince their families they’re dating even though they’re not,” Maia explained. “Because they apparently think that’s not just a disaster waiting to happen.”

“Oh,” Lily said, sounding oddly disappointed.

“Fifty bucks,” Bat announced, “says that when this blows up in their faces, Jace is the first one to break down and call Maia in a panic.”

“Hey,” Jace protested.

“Oh, you’re on,” Maureen said, ignoring Jace entirely. “Sorry, Simon, but no one panics quite like you.”

“I’m in,” Lily said, “and I agree with Maureen that Simon will break first, but his call to Maia will be interrupted by Jace calling five minutes later.”

“Why am I the one getting all of the panicked calls?” Maia wanted to know.

“Because you’re the only person at this table who isn’t an asshole,” Simon told her, “but nothing’s going to go wrong, let alone panic-inducing levels of wrong, so you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“Dude,” Jace said, “she’s an asshole to me.”

“You like it,” Maia and Simon said in unison, causing the rest of the table to collapse into laughter.

“Okay, fine,” Maia said around her giggles several minutes later, “if you’re all betting, then count me in, too. I bet that these fools,” she looked pointedly at Jace, then at Simon, “don’t call me when this whole thing goes to hell, but I somehow end up having to haul their asses out of trouble, anyway.”

“I rescind my assessment of you as not an asshole,” Simon told her.

“I’d think twice about calling the woman who’s going to haul your ass out of trouble an asshole if I were you,” Bat said.

“Back to this pretending to be together thing,” Lily said. “What exactly does that entail?”

“That’s actually what we were trying to figure out when you guys showed up,” Simon told her. “We started a list of rules, but we only made it to four so far.”

“Your list should definitely include making out,” Lily said decisively. “Having made out with both of you, I can say with confidence that you’re definitely missing out if you don’t. In fact, you should try it now so we can let you know if it looks authentic.”

“You just want to watch them make out,” Maureen said.

“Yes,” Lily told her. She didn’t add ‘duh,’ but it was implied. “I always want to make hot people make out. But in this case, I’m also being helpful.”

The ensuing argument over the line between helpful and self-serving was thankfully cut short by the opening guitar line of Blonde Redhead’s Barragan.

“Sorry, I’ve gotta take this,” Simon said, holding up his phone. “I’ve been playing voicemail tag with Becky all week.” He looked at Jace. “Talk more about this later?”

“Sure,” Jace told him.

“Tell your sister I said hi,” Maia called after Simon as he headed away from the cafe’s crowd.

“You know,” Jace told her in a low voice, “you could always tell her hi yourself instead of always asking Simon to pass messages.”

Maia gave him an unimpressed look. “After everything I just heard, I’m pretty sure you’re the last person in this room I should be taking relationship advice from.”

“Bite me,” Jace told her, but he didn’t disagree.

[yconic]

"Divorce is a special kind of pain. It's like death without a body, " is what they say when two halves of a whole heart separate.

Tony never understood when he was younger, never extended the notion of two people who gifted each other to eternity in union splitting up beyond 'Just not talking for a bit.'

He looked at it from a small perspective belonging to a small person, as if the people in question were just two good friends who couldn't decide on what game to play, hurt each other, and needed space.

His parents had done it more times than he cared to count. The frigid silences and artificial prompt politeness between the socialite power couple Howard and Maria Stark could last for two days, or two months, depending on how deep the issue picked out that time ran.

Tony sat straight as he watched the clock tick away, dutifully counting the hours that would bring Maria closer to home from whichever elicit travel affair she filled her time with while Howard closes himself into his workshop, stewing in anger and bitterness that leak out from the door he's not permitted to trespass.

He learns to measure the gravity of their squabbles, - If it's a small argument, Maria picks Germany, France, or Spain. She sends a letter stating the duration of her stay. She sends Tony well wishes, with a touch of formality for a mother, and her name is elegantly plastered on the bottom in cursive.

When Howard fucks up, she picked China, Britain, or Italy, and she disappeared from the earth until she emerged at her like. Howard is Howard, - the relationship between him and his son was too cold for Tony to tell how his father was like without the disdain gleaming in his eyes, but the liquor cabinet always needed at least a daily refill after a spectacular drama.

He looks back at those moments and realizes, with a shade of pity coated in something more sour, mellow but active, that divorce was never an option for them, the cycle of co-dependency and maintaining legacy had to be kept no matter how demanding that task was.

He can't bring himself to be angry when he feels so bad for them. All that money, and they couldn't buy a second of peace.

It doesn't take long for him to realize his parents don't love each other.

Tony was young, but he was never a child. He was naive, gullible, innocent, - but he was awake. While he didn't clearly understand what love was, he looked at the unhappy frowns on the miserable faces of the pair and thought: 'If that's how love looks like I want no part in it.'

He doesn't love people for more than one night, - A full week if their company was good enough to distract him from the rich golden color of his whiskey that gradually tastes bitter, and more bitter every time. It's not love, he knows, - He keeps that special for his family. But the kind of feeling he has with strangers, with nobody's with a name, resembles what he knows of love too much for him to change meaning.

He won't know how "love" feels like. He refuses to be the caged bird his mother was, to take form in the monster Howard let himself become.

Then, life gives him Steve.

He nests into Tony's life like a storm with skin, hair kissed by sunshine and eyes filled with an ocean that the brunette longs to sink into. He has a boyish charm to him, an old soul that swoops Tony off his feet. It makes him want to slow down, even if he belongs to the future, to activity, to progress. He wants to sit and listen to the stories Steve has, told in a Brooklyn swird that gives character to every word.

Steve looks at him like Rhodey told him all people should look at him. 'Like they can't see the status, or the money, or the power. Like they just see Tony, and nothing more. Because Tony will always be enough. ' Steve looks at him like he hangs the moon for him.

Tony never stood a chance. He looked at Steve, and thinks: "Oh, shit. He's It for me."

He just knows that this one, this Captain, decorated to the teeth, hiding in awkwardness at this petty mingling, social climbing Gala, lowering himself at the bar because he didn't know anybody, was made for him. And if Steve clings to Tony the whole night, he agrees with the parallel drawing out on his part.

He doesn't leave Tony's side, arm snug and comfortable around his middle like they've known each other for longer than time itself, and Tony loves it more than he has the courage to say.

Steve looks at him when the epilogue of the night strikes, too soon for either of their likings. He's tall, broad-shouldered, strong but has the softest eyes in the world. It hurts Tony to arch his neck to stare, but he doesn't want to miss a thing. "I've... I didn't laugh like that since I was in tour. You made my night, Tony."

"It's nothing, -" Because it really is. Considering the sins to his name, the least he can do to atone some mistakes is make as much people as happy as he can. And Happy is a great look on Steve.

He does learn one thing: When Steve says something, it stays how Steve says it. "No, its everything, Tony. I didn't smile once since coming home, " he croaks, like the confession pains him, and Tony aches alongside him. "Everyone is worried about me, saying that, that I seem upset, or sad, or just, never happy anymore, but how else am I supposed to feel?"

"You can't let others tell you how you feel, " Tony soothes, without thinking, a hand softly brushing against Steve's cheek. A frisson zaps through him at the feeling of the soldier's stubble spiking his skin. Steve leans into his touch like it's the most normal thing in the world. Tony's heart grows. "It's not even in your control, so why should it be in theirs? " He understands how Steve feels. More than the world would care to listen.

"Exactly. So, if it's not too much trouble, " his shyness compliments Tony's smitten. "Would you mind making me smile again?"

Tony is, utterly, indubitably, irrevocably, without a shade of doubt, fucked.

He smiles anyway. "You know, soldier, I think I could pull some strings."

---

Their love is like rain in June. It's mellow and distractingly peaceful, makes their worry and everything that ever went wrong scarce away. They can breathe around each other even when they feel like drowning. For once, Tony feels like it'll be okay.

But Life decides to do what it always does when Tony finds something good. It takes, and it takes, until there's nothing.

Steve tells him about Bucky. About the fallen brother that vanished in the mission that stole everything for Steve. "Only one soldier fell off that train, but two died that day, " God, Tony is so worried when Steve talks like that. "It should've been me. I wanted it to be me."

Tony listens and he pictures Rhodey falling. Steve loved Bucky in ways he couldn't even hope to understand.

It turns out, Death is not something so permanent after all.

It's a lovely night for them when Steve gets that call. He's wrapped around Tony and holds him in his arms as if he'd rather go to war again than let him go and Tony's heart never beat so loud for anyone. He would have never let Steve answer if he knew that phone call was the beginning of their end.

Bucky's alive again, is reborn from snow and war and ashes. Broken, but alive. Held captive by terrorists and is unmade, undid, but still alive. Everything around Steve is lost after that.

Tong gives him space and resources, help, support, he gives everything to Steve like on their wedding day. He gives him his care and gentle hands and soft words and love with a heartbeat. And Steve is just... Too preoccupied looking at Bucky to notice. Tony feels like a selfish bastard for wanting his soldier to look at HIM instead of coddling his friend at every moment notice.

He wants Steve to stop suffocating Bucky when he already looks like he's just inhaling instead of breathing.

He wants his husband back.

That's why he deserves what's coming to him. That's his punishment.

They drift apart slowly, as most terrible pains start.

Steve starts spending more and more time around the mental help facility Bucky asked to be enlisted into after his hasty return that had everyone clutching at their pearls. He wants to do it alone, Tony figures easily, starves for a journey he wants to walk himself, for the kind of autonomy only a man who lost it for too long craves.

His bitterness aside, Tony marvels at how similar they are. Maybe In another life, he and Barnes would've made a handsome pair of kindred souls.

Steve doesn't agree. He looks sickened, struck even, at Tony for having the Gall to suggest maybe Barnes would be more responsive if he talked with someone who had mirroring experiences. "God, Tony, you don't... You're not a soldier. You're just a man. You've been through pain, sure, but not like Bucky. No one went through what he did. I'm honestly speechless you ever thought you could compare."

Steve says that, it's why it hurts so bad. The man who swore he'd walk back into the hellfire of war just to find the people who hurt Tony and tear them apart.

The man who couldn't be moved by anything. No nightmare, no night terror, no panic attack, no argument. Nothing convinced Steve to leave. He stayed through it all.

The man who cried relentlessly when Rhodey walked Tony down the alter because 'He couldn't believe how lucky he was to marry someone so beautiful.'

The man who hasn't written Tony a love letter every morning like he used to do in over a year.

The man who spent more time sleeping in hospital rooms than in their bed.

The man who used to not go even one day without saying "I love you". Tony can't even remember the last time this sentence was spoken between them unless he said it first.

The man who agreed to couple therapy, then acted like it rained the next day.

Tony would will himself to shove this under the rug. To put a blind eye to it, to make it work, to ignore Rhodey's disapproval and Pepper's warm worry, to push away the pain blossoming in his chest, threatening to overspill.

But this man adopted a child with him.

---

"That one" Steve points to a small boy, thin but sturdy-looking even in the hand me downs from the orphanage, short limbs supporting a mess of brown hair that looks impossibly soft. His eyes are big and kind. Tony wants to take him home and feed him. "That one's ours."

His name is Peter, and he got into a fight with older kids when they wanted to stomp on ladybugs. He pushes back, but not unkindly. He's no bully. Instead, he takes the time to teach them why disrespecting and hurting nature is wrong, then takes their hands into his own, playing with the tiny creatures for hours.

Tony falls in love immediately. "Let's bring him home, Cap."

---

He can't do it. Tony can't look into Peter's adoring eyes, wide and brown that feel more like a mirror than anything, and see the fear he had for Howard, or the sadness for Maria. Tony can't handle looking at the love of his life and see another him.

Steve is Peter's role model. His knight in shining armor, his protector, everywhere he goes he sings praise to anyone who cares to listen. About his fearless father, his heroic antics that seem so tall for him. "My daddy's a superhero!" Tony doesn't have the heart to take that away.

And Tony loves Steve too much to see him become Howard.

So when Steve misses their son's 5th birthday party because he had more pressing business in D.C, Tony realizes bitterly, there's no saving this. People labeled him as a mechanic, a futurist, but he feels unworthy of both when he couldn't fix or foresee this.

There's no coming back from this.

Natasha doesn't voice it, but she doesn't need to. She tucks her phone away after a third failed attempt to coax, threaten, and guilt Steve into joining them, with muted movements, and Tony can tell she agrees.

Tony's grin is too wide when he looks down at Peter when he drags him off to paint his face, unaware of his father's turmoil. He laughs. He smiles. He celebrates. He has a nice day with his family.

He pulls Pepper aside and asks her to prepare his lawyers in the same breath.

This is why Tony knew love wasn't made for him.

---

Tony's always been good at hurting himself. The more pain he inflicts on himself, the less it'll hurt when someone else does it. So he unpacks the stash of letters he kept locked away in a seif, because they're prized to him, more than any sleek car or company, and reads them before he burns the bridge.

They feel like warm kisses and goodbyes.

'Left for a grocery jog, ran out of coffee. It's supposed to be cold, so don't you even think about leaving the house without a jacket! I'll know. Take care of yourself, even when I'm not there. '

' I love waking up next to you every morning. I love how you hide from the sun in my chest. I love how grumpy you are when Pepper calls for updates and all you do is cuddle me and whine. I love your messy bed hair and how you fall asleep in the shower.

'I never cared for jewelry before but seeing my ring around your finger never gets old. I still can't believe you said yes, but I'm glad you did. You deserve more, but you settled for someone like me. I can't believe it when you say no one would want you forever, I hate that someone made you think like that, that they let you go, but their biggest mistake is my biggest win. Jokes on them.'

'I can't imagine my life without you. Its all radio silence and broken static. Like an artist with a blank canvas and grey paint. You're the best damn thing that ever happened to me, and the fact that I have you means there really is someone up there looking our for me. I'm never letting you go. I love you, I love you, I love you, '

Tony stains the paper with tears as he listens to the song of heartbreak in his chest.

---

"Nat, " Tony pleads, choosing not to look at the tremor in his hands as he neats the papers he wants to see burn. "There's no need for that, come on. You know I love you, but I'm a big boy. I don't need you to hold my hand for this."

Natasha shrugs. "Indulge me."

"He wouldn't do anything to me."

"I thought there were lots of things he wouldn't do. Like stop loving you, for one, " she doesn't mean to be a jab, but Tony strokes his right arm and lets the hurt wash off. He sometimes forgets how blunt and terrifying Pepper's wife is capable of being. "Being paranoid is worth being safe."

They find Steve in the kitchen, sitting stiff and unfamiliar as if he didn't design the place himself. Tony swallows down the pressure in his throat and forces his eyes to stay dry. He wants to rest his hands on Steve's shoulders and pepper the lines of laughter on his flushed face with kisses.

But they're behind that now.

Steve raises his eyes to look at him. He's tired, run-down, missing the spark Tony marked as one of his favorite traits of the blonde. The life wasted from them, telling Tony that he's surviving, but not living.

Tony looks at him back and his eyes say, 'Me too.'

Steve's mouth twists into an imitation of a smile, tries his luck at mimicking something of the reassurance and ease variety, to hide his emotions with a mask of cracked peace Tony undressed a million times, just as Steve undressed his. He's always been good at reading the man. Or, was.

Steve's eyes fall on the documents Tony's holding with his naked hands, no ring in sight, and Tony watches something die in him.

The room drowns in silence for a while.

Natasha stands as a loyal shadow at his side, silent but sharp, hands folded in front of her crotch like a guard dog waiting to pounce. There's a forced calm into her breathing that puts him even more on edge.

Papers brush smoothly above the marble surface, ear piercing to him. Red hot blazing into white noise. It's the most terrible sound he's ever heard. He prefers his breathless, agonized screams in Afghanistan to this.

Steve recoils away, standing up suddenly and shakily, as if the documents are bombs about to kill him anytime now.

He turns his head, refusing to look at them. Refuses to accept they're real.

"Throw those away, Tony, " he says, voice edged with the kind of suffering that would bring Tony to his knees on other circumstances."Get them the hell away from me and never bring them up again, you hear me? I'm serious.''

Carefully, Natasha chimes in, tone mild and neutral. " Steve. Tony would like to speak with you about something, alright? Let's sit down, and talk like grown-ups, -"

"Where's your ring!?" Steve shouts, tiptoeing at the border of desperate and hysteric. Tony wants back into the cave, wants the water to take him away from all of this. It's hard to kill something that's already dead. "What did you do with it!? Why aren't you wearing it!? You PROMISED me, you promised you'd never take it off you JERK, you lying -"

"And you promised to love me until the day we die, but by the looks of it we both could use a lesson in honesty, " Tony cuts icily, colder than colder. His words are resigned, hollow, at the brim of mechanical. He thinks all the people who say Starks are more machine than men had a point. "I'm the fuck up in this relationship. What's your excuse?"

He thought he'd feel vindication watching Steve taste a fraction of his sorrow, that his destroyed look would make something in Tony retaliate. It does nothing. Tony loves him stronger, fiercer, and there's no win here for anyone.

His mouth tastes like ashes.

He just wants to stop, to sink in his bed and swim in ratty hoodies drenched in cheap but sweet cologne, smudged with paint of all shades, and feel Steve's arms shield him from the world.

He wonders if it'll keep Steve up at night, how it never occurred to him that the danger he wanted to defend Tony from might have his face.

"I'll do better. Tony please," Steve begs him, and Tony wonders if the situation is so low a man with his nature would resort to that. He's shaken by big hands engulfing his own for exactly a moment before Natasha intervenes, pushing the blonde away with a hint of regret. Steve recovers, looks right through her at Tony who wants to wipe his tears away. "I'll do better, I'll- I'll spend less time with Bucky if you want, -"

"Bucky isn't the problem. It's not about HIM, it was never about him, this is US, Steve. We, our marriage, our family, its been here longer than Bucky. I never wanted you to - to erase him from your life, I just wanted my husband. Peter wanted his daddy. Bucky could've been apart of that, but you just, you just pushed us aside,-"

"I won't do that anymore. I, - Do you want me to be at home more often? I can, sweetheart, I can do that no problem. I can be at home, I can make time for dates and-and for activities, I can take Peter to the park and play ball, - Do you remember that? How we used to play until he fell asleep? I don't mind, its no problem, -"

Something in Tony snaps.

"WE'RE NOT YOUR FUCKING CHORES," His voice is more roar than man, ragged, tight, pushed to the last limit. The garden of silent pain, fury, rage, and fear he's been harboring finally blossomed into something that seemed to shake the world. His body shudders. "We're not some,- some pestering tasks that you have to save your precious time to complete! Some fucking pets other people have to force you to care of, or some dirty laundry you decide to wear whenever you feel like washing! We're your damn FAMILY,- " A sob hitches his anger, and by the broken look on Steve's face, it's worse than any rage.

He narrows his eyes in disbelief, as if Steve was some stranger and not someone he gave years of his life to. A laugh is pushed out of his chest, choked, long, and terrible. "I would've ended this sooner if, - God, if I knew how much of a burden we became for you."

"Tony, Tony don't say that, " Steve's face is blotched red, painted in punishing torment. "I love you and Peter more than anything in this life. You're mine, both of you, how can you think I don't love you? I, -"

"Just love Bucky more, " Tony finishes, note flat, accepting, rehearsed. His voice feels as hollow as his chest when Steve flinches. "I'm just... I'm so tired. Steve,I'm tired, and- I can't do it anymore. My son, my baby is not going to be a burden on anybody. I can put up with a lot of shit, but Peter is my limit. I can't and I won't put anyone above him. Not even you."

Horror shines bright and clear on the blue eyes Tony loves so much. He spots Steve's finger tremble at his sides, notices the hesitant movement of his Addams apple.

Natasha was wrong. It's a rare occurrence, but it happened.

Steve never stopped loving him.

It makes signing the papers so much harder.

---

Steve lost Bucky to ice, snow, and time. Tony loses Steve to fire, anger, and distance.

---

Pepper is surprised when she hears Steve ended up signing willingly.

She doesn't want to ruin the calm air that finally settled over the emotion packed atmosphere surrounding the living room, currently stashed with carton boxes filled with Steve's stuff, ready to be delivered tomorrow as Tony wanted, but it's a needed talk.

"What did you say to convince him?" She asks, not demanding an answer but clearly expecting one. "I'd just assume Nat had him in an arm lock until he agreed, but, in all honesty, Steve would probably lose an arm than do what people tell him to. Seriously, I've seen anarchists with more respect for authority than this guy."

Tony laughs, too loving and too fond for this predicament. "I said you'd drag his ass through every courtroom in America and drain him of everything he's worth?"

"Mmm. Try again. I mean, that's a Sunday for me, but he's already heard that talk before." Giggles are shared between the pair on the couch, snuggled under fuzzy blankets with wine glasses that clink slightly. Pepper's face relaxes into something sympathetic, earnest. "Was it something Peter related?"

"No, " he shakes his head. It never crossed his mind once, no matter how hurt he was. It felt too much like what his father would do. " Peter is his son, too. No matter what happens between us. There's no changing that. "

"No one would blame you if it came down to that, you know that, right?"

He hums. Pepper waits.

"I asked him to let me say goodbye to my husband instead of forcing me to stay with Howard."

A sharp intake of breath settles something cold beneath Tony's skin. He closes his eyes, and accepts the wine Pepper pours in his cup, neither commenting on how it spills over the rim.

---

Talking to Peter is the hardest part.

He doesn't understand why suddenly there's only two people there instead of three, why he isn't woken up by two pairs of arms tickling him and kissing his sleepy eyelids every morning, why Tony's laughter isn't echoing through the house as Steve spins and twists him around in the living room dance session they had at least once a week.

Why, apparently, Steve now has a permanent residence in DC and can only see him twice a week as their legal agreement states.

Why he has to live in two different places and split his playtime.

Why Tony bought a new apartment and they had to move away, stretching the distance between them and Steve.

"Is Papa comin' home today?" A hand squeezes Tony's heart painfully tight at the small question. He looks down at his son, smaller than usual and playing with his fingers at his feet. His frail shoulder raise, housing an anxious breath as he awaits an answer.

Tony takes his tiny hand in his own, leaning down to press kisses on the back of his son's palm, apology on his lips. "Yeah, baby. He has to come and pick up his stuff. Maybe you can play a little when he arrives! I'm sure he'll be happy to see you. "

Steve sends Sam to pick up his things and Tony feels guilt bite at him for hissing 'coward' in his mind.

Peter is excited to see his uncle Sam but the disappointment when he hears a truck coming instead of the deep rumble of a motorcycle engine doesn't wash off. He soldiers on, smiles for Sam because as little as he is, he's careful with people and their emotions. His goodness is organic. He takes after Steve like that.

Sam's always been frustratingly talented at deciphering his thoughts, even when his face is emotionless. It's one of the many reasons why Tony thinks him and Rhodey match so well. "He said he's really sorry he couldn't come, but... Okay, his excuse is just sad, because I doubt you'd believe he'd rather attend a Zoomba class than see you and Peter. Truth is, he's scared."

"Of facing me?"

"Of hurting you."

"Yeah, well, he's already got that job done on the to do list, " Tony huffs, petty and aware. He tosses Peter his baseball that lands in the backyard, gently nudging him away from the conversation. They watch the ball of energy squeal in delight as he runs to fetch it, tension momentarily on hold. "Sorry. You don't need my shit. Let's just load this and be done with it."

Sam huffs. "Man, I've been involved with your shit for a while. Appreciate the feeling but it's a bit late for that. Trust me, me and Rhodey have in length discussions about it. I'm neck-deep in white boy drama, but well, sacrifices of the job. Not much you can do."

He's playful, Tony knows this, in the corner of his brain that isn't raided by anxiety, yet fear claws at him, sharp and cruel and unexpected. Coldness spreads inside him like wildfire, almost matching the thoughts racing in his mind. Sam and Rhodey were talking? Were they arguing? Had Tony harmed Rhodey's relationship as if he didn't wreck his own enough?

"Talk?" Tony rasps, pushes the words out of his constricted throat that seems to close more and more, synchronizing with his lungs. Sam's wide, concerned eyes tells him the surface looked as bad as the inside."You... You and Rhodey, you guys- Bad talk? You, you fought about it?"

His mind torments him by showcasing Rhodey yelling in Sam's face and Sam yelling back, both standing their ground like two soldiers on a mission and defending their friends like avenging angels. Rhodey is more brother than friend, he'd take his side, like the devoted friend he always proved himself to be, but he watches with a cut breath as Rhodey locks himself in his room and weeps.

Rhodey sharing his fate is Tony's own horror movie.

"...ony! Tony, deep breaths, come on, " gentle hands guide him away from the void his own psyche trapped him into, speaking in a low voice that plucks him back up little by little. "Come on, in and out. Focus on my voice, that's good. Listen to me, Rhodey and I did not and will not fight about this. We're fine, Tony, promise! We agreed, no side pickers. This isn't war, and we won't get into some life or death fight for your and/or Steve's honor, " he tries for a little grin. ''I mean, I'm not supposed to tell you, but we don't like you guys that much."

Tony laughs, at once, a pathetically small sound, but he's grounded enough to laugh. He basks in the lack of sound around them, like the silence of an after battle, suffocating, but free.

The quiet hangs in the air as they load the truck, too, not oppressing, but welcomed, with a touch of comfort that burns just right. When the last box is secured and road-ready, him and Sam stay just a bit on the porch to stare at the house. Because that's what it is, isn't?

'Is papa comin' home?'

There is no home. Not if Steve's missing.

"Steve said you can keep those, if you want," that sentence made Tony hunch his shoulders, releasing that bitter aftertaste in his mouth again, blending with something sweet, and igniting the warmth that pierced as deep as his very marrow. "Nothing he loves or wants back is in those boxes."

Yes, Tony wants to scream. I want to keep the sketchbooks he has for me. I want to keep the photo albums. I want to keep the paint, the charcoal, the brushes. I want to keep the stuffed animals he won me at the fairs. I want to keep his clothes. I want to keep the dances in the living room. I want to keep his love, attention, care, worry, sadness, anger, grief. I want to keep my husband.

Instead, Tony reaches for his back pocket, and squeezes his ring. It burns in his palm, almost begging him to put it back in it's place, or on his finger, where it fitted like it always belonged. His being feels it, as if connected, and he decides to even the odds in the cowardice department.

Sam holds his breath as Tony hands him the ring, with hesitance, with no indication he wants to. "You sure about this?" It's a careful question, painfully gentle, far softer than Tony deserves.

No. Not by a long shot. "Yeah, " he mutters, almost lost in the air. "It's not mine anymore."

Sam curls his hand around the ring, pockets it, and Tony wrestles with the urge to ask for it back. His eyes are trained to the floor, on his shoes, the fine leather ones Steve bought for him on their anniversary, he realizes.

He watches droplets of water splash and dissolve into the concrete. It's raining, he figures, he should take Peter inside or he'll catch a cold. He looks up to watch the dark clouds, and the senine blue above mocks him.

"It's okay, " Rhodey picked a good one, Tony thinks, as Sam covers his crying form away from Peter's eyes. "It's okay, Tony. Just... Let it out. You earned this."

"I tried, " he sobs in Sam's neck, sobs his demise his failure, his bottled cocktail of emotions that waited to implode. "I tried, Sam, I tried so hard, I swear I did."

"We know you did, Tony. We all know."

---

Peter wants to meet Bucky one day.

"Papa used to talk about him all the time, " He says, oblivious to how vexed Tony is hearing that. He apprehends himself, reproaching that he should be over it already. "He sounds pretty cool! I want to see his Terminator arm!"

"It's a Tin Man or Robocop arm, at best, " He smirks at the pout Peter throws his way, smoothing it out with his thumb. "And he's in a hospital. You and I hate hospitals, remember?"

Peter whines and makes his eyes larger, pitifully glassy and sad, just the way to wrap Tony around his little finger. "Daddyyyy, pleeeease!" He hooks his fingers around his arm, hugging it close to his chest and his lower lip trembles.

He imagines Steve behind him, smothering a laugh in his shoulder, egging Peter on like two conspirational buddies. He melts, pushing the rush of yearning back, and knows it's a battle lost. Peter is too lovable, too determined, too bright eyed.

He's morbidly curious, in a way, to see what was so special about Bucky that it made Steve want to trade that.

---

Bucky and Peter hit it off in a heartbeat.

The facility hosting Bucky is uncomfortably pristine, from door corner to ceiling. Everything is tailored and arranged with ridiculous precision, clinical, professional, boring, and detached, as most medical spaces are. His workshop dances circles around it in the personality field, and he tells Bucky as such.

He laughs at him. "That's an interesting way to say you're a chronic untidy mess."

'Chronic untidy hot mess, " Tony corrects, hating how easily he falls into conversation with him. He tells himself it's merely a distraction from the stomach twisting smell of medicine, stingy and sharp smothering the air. "How offensive. I demand a trial by combat. Peter, make him pay in blood!"

Peter turns to Bucky, unblinking. "Your hair's greasy."

A theatrical gasps spreads in the room from the blue eyed brunette. Tony beams, kissing Peter's cheek. "That's my boy. I'm sure Bucky's bleeding a lot on the inside."

"Yeah. You know, where blood usually is, " Bucky snarks, heatless, propping Peter off from the spot on his leg and putting him on the ground . "Why don't you go ask nurse Joy to give you some magnets for the arm? Your father and I gotta talk adult business."

"Uncle Clint says adult business is just gossip for grown ups. " Peter retorts, smirk on his lips, half raising on the edges of his mouth. He got the smugness from him, that much Tony will admit. Bucky huffs a laugh that mirror Tony's own and waits for Peter to be out of the hearing range to say his next words.

"I owe you an apology."

Tony blinks, hastily, and speaks before he can even register what he's saying. "No, you don't. Drop it." It comes off razor sharp, yet Bucky must be used to worse, because he doesn't falter.

"I ruined your marriage. There's no forgiving that, but I DO regret it and you'll damn well listen to what I have to say."

"Look, I appreciate it. I do. I'm not... Mad at you. You're just in the crossfire of this clusterfuck. There's no forgiving because there's nothing to forgive, " he murmurs under his breath, words quiet, but sincere, he realizes. "My failure is my own to carry. "

"Stark, relationships need more than one person. Stevie ain't exactly blameless in this whole thing, - Far from it, trust me, I let him know. He got the scolding of the damn lifetime, because he threw away a damn good thing. He made a home for himself and then demolished it. You didn't hand him the sledgehammer, he picked it up on his own dumb self."

"You know, your philosophy lesson would impact me better with wizard lingo. Throw in a riddle or a prophecy and I might bite. " Receiving a blank stare to his quip, Tony sighed, eyes downcast.

"Look. I called it off, alright? I lit up the matches, I burned down the bridge, and I watched it turn to ash. But it was meant to happen, one way or another. We were just too different. Guys like me break the world apart. Men like Steve put it back together. He'll move forward. Like he always does."

Bucky's reply is instant. "No, no he won't, " it's said with such conviction, with such a finality, that it has Tony freezing. "He'll never move on. Not from this. I've never seen him like that for anybody, hell, never seen ANYONE like that. You and him? That's a forever kind of deal. You don't need a ring and name change for that to last. You don't have a choice."

Tony swallows, slowly, unsure. "So what? We just keep path crossing like fate has us tied together, in each other 's range but standing on parallel lines, never meant to cross? This isn't a fairytale, Barnes. It's real life. And even if it wasn't, that's still far from fair."

"It is real life. Which means it ain't fair, Stark. "

Tony takes Peter home, cuddles him closely as if he might disappear, and eyes the empty area around the right side of the bed with a lonely glint that burns in the darkness.

---

The first time Tony meets Steve after the divorce, it's for Natasha's birthday party.

Time jumps from slow to fast, alters between stagnation and overwhelming in the first 6 months that pass after the finalization of their parting. Some days are agonizingly slow. As if the world wants him to stomach every second, consume every minute, where Steve is not with him, isn't his anymore, and choke on the pain that tastes just as sharply as the first time.

And in some, time goes by in blink record, not keen on giving Tony the courtesy of healing, of moving on, of according him the patience or kindness in adapting his feelings to his pace, to accommodate to the arrangement it dragged him in.

Concern crawls inside him regardless of how many times he buries it, makes a tangly nest right in his chest, and makes no effort to move. He doesn't blame Steve for not wanting to meet him, to look at him, to give him the chance of staring into the bright, baby blue eyes that hold everything beautiful in the world.

Tony's seen the wonders of the world, all 8 them, and they all pale put next to Steve.

He feels seething, scalding guilt showering him for thinking that. Because Steve is not his to worry over, not his to call wonderful, not his to care for. Not anymore. He repeats that like a mantra against his eardrum when Natasha asks him if it's fine if she invites him to her party, too.

It's the perfect excuse to see how he's doing, but Tony elects to ignore that and remind Natasha grown-ass people don't ask other grown-ass people for permission on what to do. "Do I look like Pepper to you? No? Then why would I order you around?"

A discreet smile reaches Natasha's features, exhibiting confidence but betraying relief. She loves them both, Tony knows, and wants her friends first, not the fallen lovers. "Just wanted to know if I should hide the sharp knives or prepare some spare sheets."

His face heats ferociously, climbing all the way to the tips of his ears, and all the embarrassment in the world is worth listening to Natasha laugh. Something sharp-edged inside of him brittles at the prospect of seeing Steve, thought, and he holds his tongue from saying something of that nature won't happen.

In the company of his solitude and shame, Tony wonders later, is he afraid of seeing Steve again because he fears the blonde is not doing okay, or because he is?

Later on, he sees Steve stand in flash before him, chatting with some faceless figures, hair longer than last time and flattened slightly at the nape, sporting a beard that framed his gorgeous face perfectly. The impeccable balance between scruffy and well-groomed. Tony itched to run his fingers against it.

"It's the divorce beard, " Clint muses, elbow jolting Tony in the side to show the humor. "Give him a few more weeks, and you'll see him shopping from the Hobo shop. All wrinkled shirts and ketchup stained clothes or something. Men are useless without their wives.'' He winks in Tony's way, but Tony is too entranced by Steve to acknowledge it.

His fists are bruised, Tony notes with a wince as he gets drunk on Steve's form with a studious gaze, creamy skin battered and laced in a cluster of dark purple, crimson, and small patches of yellow shaping his knucklebones.

A trail of question rests blistering on his tongue. 'What happened? Who did that? Who were you fighting? Why? Are you okay? Did you win?' But he closes his eyes and bites his tongue, knowing these questions don't belong to him anymore.

He gave up his rights to that.

But then, Tony spots them.

His breath is knocked out of his lungs in a silent punch, eardrums pushing out all the sound attempting to penetrate his ears. His fingers loosen so much they almost drop his water, feeling tingly numb. Tony's eyes, large and surprised, trace the circle of gold curled around Steve's fourth finger, gleaming softly against the artificial light around the dining room.

Steve is still wearing his ring.

But then, his chest burns and booms, heart roars fiercely behind his ribcage as he notices the thin string of black leather circling around Steve's neck, loose as a necklace, hanging low enough for Tony to eye the shape of metal halo looped right in the middle of the material.

Steve was wearing Tony's ring, too.

The realization left him petrified in place, more statue than man, in stunned shock as he bore into his former lover who only then noticed the brown eyes looking at him, transparent astonishment clear as crystal in his features.

It's like a spell breaks.

Tony's limbs move mechanically, on autopilot, running to the nearest room, getting himself away from what his body detects as danger. Urgency is packed on his step, taking him to the bathroom in record time, but Steve's always been the runner, more athletic between them, and his sprinting lands him a spot in the sleat Tony wass about to slam.

He's pinned to a wall effective immediately, feels cold tiles plant clammy kisses on the back of his head and neck. Tony almost hisses at the force of the slam, but before he can make a peep, his lips are stolen in a savage, fierce kiss.

It's pure desperation conveyed in the most unconventional way. Steve pounces on him, lips wild against Tony's own, pouring every emotion he went through in the past few months,- Longing, yearning, craving, hunger, desire, - his being, his love, his soul into that kiss, barely giving Tony the chance to breathe.

"St-Steve, " He gasps, head tilting slightly to the side to escape the ministrations, to gulp air, moving to avoid the chase at reconnection Steve is playing at by trying to capture his lips again. "Wait, wait a minute, -"

"Missed you, " Steve's voice is thick with want, hitching in the small puffs of air that came off raggedy and breathless, words melting over Tony's mouth. Steve's face glows with a blush he wants to kiss with inhuman greed. "I missed you, I missed you,Tony I missed you" Tony's fucked.

[lambden]

for the songs i'll go with 33 and more vesemir/fil because there can't be enough for our small rarepair :D

... I suppose the nature of song memes is that every so often you have to write a drabble based on a sketch comedy song about three men enjoying their morning coffee after fucking all night long. Also here's some Luka/Filavandrel/Vesemir with an emphasis on the first two, I hope it's still to your liking! <3

Send me a ship and a number 1-100 and I’ll write a drabble based (loosely) on the corresponding song from my 2021 top 100 on Spotify.

Luka hardly opens his eyes as he pads around Vesemir’s kitchen in bright orange socks, tight briefs, and somebody else’s shirt. He’s thankful for all the times he’s crashed here and the wealth of experience those countless sleepovers have given him when he can locate and start the coffee machine with ease. Its beeping is too quiet to be heard in the bedroom but Luka winces at the sound anyway, only relaxing when coffee begins dripping down through the filter. He closes his eyes fully, leaning against the counter and letting the drip lull him back into unconsciousness. He’s so sleepy he thinks he could pass out right here if given the chance— but then the other two bastards would certainly mock him for sleeping standing up.

Speak of the devil, and he appears; Luka turns with a smile that only fades slightly when he sees Filavandrel walking into the kitchen. He’s always felt awkward around his best friend’s boyfriend, especially since he and Vesemir have a history of falling into bed together. He supposes he doesn’t need to feel awkward anymore. Not when Filavandrel had gasped his name so deliciously last night.

He tries to come up with some clever pick-up line or barb about their evening together, but looking at the blond, Luka is surprised to find that Filavandrel is strangely cute in the morning. His long hair is tied up in a messy, loose bun that hovers close to his right ear— it must have been pushed in the night as he laid his head on the pillows between Vesemir and Luka. Luka remembers expecting Filavandrel to complain about the lack of space but the standoffish man had been the one to drag them both in and snuggle them to sleep. There’s still an imprint of where the sheets had been rumpled against his chest, and the pink lines by his collarbone will certainly fade soon so Luka revels in them while he can.

Filavandrel pulls a face and yanks up the collar of his shirt as though Luka had been ogling his cleavage. Laughable for so many reasons; firstly, Vesemir has the best tits of all of them, so there’s nothing to even ogle. Secondly, that’s Vesemir’s work shirt, and it’s too big for the guy anyway, and if he doesn’t want to be stared at then he should probably wear his own clothes. And thirdly, yes, fine, Luka had been ogling him, but his brain isn’t even online yet.

The coffee machine dings. Filavandrel says, about as haughty as someone can sound while wearing fuzzy green slippers, “That’s my shirt.”

“Huh,” Luka squints down at the shirt he’s got on, trying to read the slogan upside down. He can’t parse it but he’s sure it has some important political message. He shrugs, a smirk playing on his lips. “I guess you’re right.”

“We’re too old to wake up wearing each other’s clothing,” Filavandrel scolds him, moving into the narrow space between Luka and the kitchen island. He nearly bumps into the countertop but stops himself just short, rocking onto his tiptoes to open the cupboards instead. His shirt— Vesemir’s shirt— rides up as he does, treating Luka to a glimpse of his bare lower back. Filavandrel grabs two mugs reflexively and then pauses, reaching for a third.

Mouth suddenly very dry, Luka points out, “You’re wearing Vesemir’s clothing.”

“I couldn’t tell whose it was in the dark,” hisses the blond. Luka loves how quick he is to anger. He can’t resist sliding up behind Filavandrel and moving his cold hands up along the man’s spine, laughing when he jumps. The frisson of fury is still simmering in his voice but he sounds a little breathier as he says, “Fuck, you’re insatiable!”

“I’m not the one who was begging last night,” Luka teases, hands slipping around to rest on Filavandrel’s sharp hipbones. He mouths at the side of the man’s neck, reveling in the way Filavandrel arches beneath him. “I thought you’d never let us go to bed, you were so eager for it.”

“I could have gone all night,” Filavandrel sniffs. Then, with the hint of a smile as Luka kisses his shoulder, “But that big lughead needs his beauty sleep.”

“’Course he does,” Luka laughs. Filavandrel starts to turn in his arms but before the blond can return his kisses Luka snatches his hands away, reaching for one of the mugs labelled with a map of some fictional fantasy country. “Hey, hey, coffee first!”

Filavandrel rolls his eyes but nods, still smiling distractedly as he reaches for the mug. The sun rises outside the kitchen window and a warmth spreads through Luka’s chest entirely unrelated to the coffee as he watches Filavandrel. Maybe last night’s misadventure wasn’t such a terrible impulse decision after all.

[sealie-seolh]

Un'emozione da poco

The man was a void—weirdly, he wasn’t a telepath—it was the strangest experience Adepa had ever encountered since leaving the Housing. As a fifth generation telepath, six generation model G-T, she was the epitome of evolutionary engineering. Every human emoted on every level be it base or carefully cultivated and refined.

How could such a blank mind even exist?

The man, turned and stared at her—a curiously piercing, pale-eyed stare. Adepa gawked, she couldn’t help herself. She felt like she was watching one of her favourite, early 2000s nature documentaries about the then world. The extinct cat—a leopard—carefully lapping from the stream as it eyed the cameraman—threat on both sides evident.

He had sensed that he had caught her attention, though. How?

The man smiled, ruefully. ‘Lost?’ he signed with large hands and blunt fingers, and pointed at her. ‘You?’

Adepa almost thought that he meant because she couldn’t read his mind, but then realised it was because she had turned left instead of right and she was now in the delta-prohibited warehouse facility of the spacehub. She had been far too intrigued by the mystery of such a strange fellow, a void on the edge of her consciousness. They didn’t even make nulls anymore. Occasionally, they were born, but RNA engineering could repair them if they were—

“Nicolò?”

Sun and moon, she thought, there’s two of them. She hadn’t even known that there was another person in the warehouse. The second one actually spoke words.

Nicolò gestured at her—twisted his fingers, conveying additional meaning like a third or fourth generation G-T adding nuance to lesser telepathic communication. Words? Adepa’s ears rang.

“Boo!” the second one rapped, and Adepa startled back a step.

Nicolò jabbed his fingers into the back of his other hand, ‘Naughty,’ he chided.

“Whatever,” the bearded man drawled.

The disconnect from hearing such emotional laden scorn without sensing it was highly discombobulating. She was surprised that a null could do that.

‘Leave,’ Nicolò signed. And then touched his chin and let his hand drop.

Adepa wondered at the disturbing pale-eyed null. How could you understand its motivation? And the other, did he actually only have words to only communicate with?

“You’ll have to excuse us, mi’lady.” The bearded one bowed. “We have a lot of work to do.”

Talking was just so crass.

::What work?:: she projected without thinking. How were they even able to work? They should be in a protected enclave.

“I work fine.” Astonishingly, the bearded one responded.

Clearly, he had base telepathy and a modicum of empathy. The nuance rolling through and over his spoken words made her wince.  He implied so much on so many physical levels—terse words, a twist of his lips, narrowing of his brown eyes and a sad, shake of his head—it was difficult to parse. Stunned, Adepa closed her hands over her ears, surprising herself. She took a much needed breath, finding stability. She knew what she needed to do, she should call for assistance to contain the pale-eyed null. Bracing herself, she let her hands drop and straightened her back, rolling her shoulders down.

“Yusuf.” Nicolò caught his forearm. Yusuf lowered his clenched fist.

“She’s going to—”

“No, she won’t,” Nicolò said calmly—calmly. So many words. He opened his mouth and,

“C'è una ragione che cresce in me

E l'incoscenza svanisce

E come un viaggio nella notte finisce”

She sank to her knees, arms crossed over her chest trying to hold herself in, even when she couldn’t tell what was trying to break out.

Yusuf knelt before her. Shush, he thought sibilantly. Shush.

“Dimmi, dimmi, dimmi che senso ha

Dare amore a un uomo senza pietà

Uno che non si è mai sentito finito

Che non ha mai perduto”

The frisson of hair on Adepa’s arms, across the back of her neck, and down her spine disarmed her. What was that? Her ears rang. Her heart throbbed. Tears on her cheeks caught her by surprise.

“It’s called singing. And that is one song of millions,” Yusuf said. “Something your people have lost as you have pursued an ideal.”

She was paralysed by Nicolò’s voice—by this singing.

Yusuf patted her on her shoulder, commiserating, and stood.

“You can come out now; we’re leaving,” he said nonsensically, and opened a container door at the back of the hold. Children, small children, were clustered together in a huddle holding onto each other. She hadn’t sensed them; more nulls.

“Mai per te, per te, una canzone

Mai una povera illusione

Un pensiero banale, qualcosa che rimane

Invece per me, per me, più che normale.”

The ‘singing’ captured her. Peripherally, she would recall later in the medical centre that Yusuf had chivvied the children away through a partition to the docked cargo vessel. But her focus had been on the voice, the echo of raw emotions rising through her very being.

“You live in a manufactured reality,” Nicolò used words that grated as he paused by the space lock. “I think that you could live well without it, but that is not my decision to make—that is yours. But you should not make the decision for the children.”

And then he had left, the song incomplete. Only the resonance remained, singing along her nerves, as she knelt sobbing into her hands—changed by exposure to a single song.

No wonder they were lost to history.

fin

[ditsydaydream]

Feelings of Frisson

Newt (TMR) x OC

[part 2 of 2]

Frisson: a sudden strong feeling of excitement or fear

‘Winston you have to start taking better care of yourself.’ I insisted, wrapping his wounded forearm in a clean bandage.

‘Sorry, Florrie.’ He said, sheepishly, slightly wincing at the bandage.

‘This is the third time in the past 5 days I’ve had to bandage you up. Half of my bandages are being used on you. Honestly, it’s like you deliberately butcher yourself to come and see me. I joked.

‘Yeah…So where’s Newt?’ He asked.

‘Bedrest.’ I finished tying the bandage up and put a little bow at the end, Winston smiled. I grinned back at him, as I started tidying away my herbs and bandages.

Suddenly, Ada flew into the Med Hut, slamming the door open.

‘The box. It’s coming up.’ She gushed, breathily.

But it’s not due for another week?’ I questioned; my eyebrows arched.

‘We know.’ Ada replied.

Every Glader was sprinting over to the rising Box, Winston, Ada and I bolted out the door to join the crowd of confusion that was gathered round. I slid to the front of the crowd, desperate to get a good glimpse at whatever was happening.

Gally pulled the metal doors open. The box was bare, no supplies, no Greenie, nothing was in it. Except a single scrap of paper, that was crumpled up on the floor. Confused looks flew around the Gladers. The whole situation was suspicious. Gally jumped down into the Box, landing with a large clang as his boots hit the rusted metal frames, and picked up the flimsy paper. He uncrumpled it, a black marker had scrawled ‘Florence’ on one side. Underneath it was some smaller black scribbles.

Gally’s eyes roamed the paper for a second. He quickly folded up the note, and handed it to me. I leant down and grabbed it, still confused.

‘Everyone back to work.’ Gally ordered.

Protests came from the Gladers.

‘They can stay if they want. I’m sure it’s nothing bad.’ I hoped.

‘Trust me, you don’t want them here for that.’ Gally said darkly, herding the grumbling Gladers back to their jobs. ‘Go to the Med Hut, get some privacy, I’ll wake up Newt.’

Newt had dislocated his shoulder yesterday whilst helping the builders move some supplies. Clint and Jeff had help me pop it back into place and I told him to take a day of bedrest, he protested but eventually I got my way and he’d dragged himself off the hammocks and dozed off.

‘C’mon, he was hurt, he’s resting – do we really need to wake him?’ I argued, my mind now in a frenzy and panicking over what disastrous thing could be on the paper that had made Gally so deadly serious.

‘Yes.’ He said solemnly, taking off towards the hammocks.

Ada nodded at me reassuringly. I jogged over to the emptied Med Hut, clutching the note so tightly in my hand I felt my nails dig into my palms.

I sagged down onto one of the beds, in a state of terror of what the note could say. Trying to convince myself it couldn’t possibly be that dreadful, I took a deep breath before opening the crumpled paper.

‘Florence

This note is in regard to your pregnancy’

I turned the fragile note over, revealing a paragraph that had been hurriedly jotted down.

‘The Glade is unsafe for children. It would be inappropriate to raise one here. You and the other girl subjects in the Maze are forbidden from ever having offspring.

This pill will terminate your pregnancy. You have 60 minutes to consume the pill. This is a direct order. Failure to comply will result in the execution of Subject A5, known as Newt.

~ The Creators’

A small red pill was strapped to the bottom of the paper. I didn’t doubt it was an empty threat for a second, I don’t know how they’d kill Newt but if these people had the power to put us in here without any memories, they could slaughter him like a dog.

I didn’t realise I had been holding my breath, until my lungs begged for air. Letting out a loud gasp, I dissolved into the kind of despair that can take one's mind prisoner and never give it back. I sank down to my knees onto the hardened wooden floor. My chin trembled as if I was a small child. I breathed heavier than I ever had before. I was gasping for air that simply wasn’t there. My throat burned forming a silent scream. I released the most hysterical cries, the screaming sobs only interrupted by the need to draw breath. I cried as if my brain was being shredded from the inside. Emotional pain flowed out of me like a dam bursting. My mouth released a cry so raw, I felt dust fall from the support beams

Tears streamed down my face, they pooled into a small puddle of salty sadness below me, as my hands were placed on the wooden floor, the only thing keeping me from collapsing.

Barely able to breathe, I gripped the paper tightly, watching my tears soak the fragile note. This wasn’t fair. They can’t do this. I don’t have a choice.

My breath was as jagged as sharp rocks, but I knew what I needed to do.

I ripped the red pill off the paper, and discarded the paper, watching the pill lay in my palm. Panting, I whispered, ‘I’m sorry’. I snapped my eyes shut. I threw the pill into my mouth. I swallowed it.

Newt charged into the room; panic written all over his face. He saw me, sobbing like a child on the floor and quickly pulled me into a hug as he fell to his knees. He tried to soothe me, he stroked my hair gently and rubbed my back but my heart-wrenching screams wouldn’t cease.

‘Florrie, love, what’s wrong. What happened? Are you okay? Is the baby okay?’

Words failed me and I just continued sobbing into his chest, letting my heart bleed its pains. Newt picked up the discarded note, his eyes scouring the paper, horror consuming his face.

‘No.’ He gasped, in shock, tears welling in his eyes. I sat back from him; I saw the heartbreak on his face. He looked like a broken shell of a person.

‘Florrie, where’s the pill?’ He whispered, his voice fighting off a sob. ‘Where’s the pill?’ He repeated, his voice slightly firmer.

‘I’m s-sorry.’ I sobbed, my voice catching on my hysterical weeps.

Realisation dawned on his face, he looked like someone who had just had all the joy stripped from their life. He wrapped his arms around my neck and pulled me into his body, cradling my head as my tears stained his shirt.

‘You didn’t have a choice.’ He reasoned, I knew he was pretending to put on brave face for me but inside he was breaking like a shard of glass.

For a while, we just stayed there, holding each other. Our hearts were beating next to one another, and I felt as if without Newt’s arms wrapped around me and keeping me grounded, I’d slip into a deep sleep and never wake. His care was like a life support machine, keeping me alive when I didn’t have the strength to. And after today, I didn’t know if I’d ever had the strength again.

These ‘Creators’ had taken so much from us, I was terrified of how much more they would take, because God knows I couldn’t lose anymore.

‘I’m so sorry, love. They can’t do this to us.’ A mix of grief and rage intertwined in his trembling voice. Newt’s mouth turned into a snarl and he radiated fury. But the anger was nothing but a shield for pain, like a cornered soldier randomly throwing out grenades, scared for his life, lonely, desperate.

‘It’s not fair, Newt. It’s not. They took our child from us.’ I wept.

‘I know, love. But I promise, when we get out of here, we are going to make them pay.’ He said darkly, a growl in his voice.

A ball formed in the pit of my stomach, I recognised it as an old friend, my thirst for revenge. I changed that day, became bent on destroying the Creators, became a fighter. These people had taken everything from me, my memories, my family, they had tried to take Newt but I fought for him and I won.

They weren’t people, they were monsters. And I’d fight against every last one of them.

[ally-127]

aaa, your hoshi story has got me feeling some type of way :’’) i’m a sucker for those kinds of prompts and, if you’re willing to write it, i’d love a story with that premise except the reader tries to get his attention/test out his lifestyle so they dress up and happen to get hit on by some random person and then the confession happens ! with any seventeen member you want if you decide to do it :)

frisson

(noun) a brief moment of emotional excitement

in the night in itaewon universe

pairing: jun x reader ; kihyun x reader (surprise!) word count: 2.5k (yikes) warnings: alcohol consumption ; swearing ; jun being a jerk music: ‘afraid’ by day6 a/n: if you were hoping for a happy ending like hoshi’s, anon, i’m really sorry please forgive me. 😟 on a happier note, i’d like to thank minhyuk and kihyun for their cameos in this.

jun was never around anymore.

ever since soonyoung introduced him to itaewon, you had spent most nights cooped up alone in your shared apartment, either working or wrapped in a blanket burrito and binge-watched korean drama until sunrise.

he would arrive back into the apartment right after you’ve switched off the tv, footing unstable and stumbling about the corridor. your eyelids would be droopy and your footsteps would be heavy from the complete deprivation of sleep as you approached him.

sometimes you wondered if you were as drunk as he was.

“where have you been?” you would then ask him even though you already knew the answer, pausing by your bedroom door.

“itaewon,” jun reeked of alcohol and second-hand smoke. he was dressed in black from head-to-toe, his hair a hot mess, and his chest glistening with sweat in the moonlight. even in this ungodly hour, he still looked good enough to devour.

“what’s so fun about it?” you tucked your hands into the pockets of the hoodie you stole from him. he didn’t seem to notice, though, busy hobbling to his room across of yours.

“everything,” his words were slurred from the vodka thriving in his bloodstream.

he’d leave the next day for practice before you could even get out of bed. you didn’t blame him, it was his job and yet the disappointment never failed to seize your chest every time.

there were plenty of days that jun had spent at home with you, especially when you both had similar off-days. now, he wasn’t around during that too. he was clubbing when he wasn’t working and he was working when he wasn’t clubbing.

and you missed him.

“jun,” you called from the couch, looking up from the laptop propped on the arm of the couch.

it was about nine p.m., you had already begun winding down by sending one last email. your body ached from sitting all day at the office you might as well have melted into the couch.

he had his hand on the doorknob of the front door, eyes wide as if he’s just been caught in the act of doing wrong. “what is it?” his arm was limp by his side as he ditched the door and made his way to your side. “do you need help with something?”

“no,” you sighed. “i was just wondering where you were going.”

“the usual,” jun shrugged.

“you’re never home anymore,” you looked up at him and closed your laptop shut.

he looked different that night. his brown hair was styled away from his eyes, revealing his glamorous forehead. he was dressed in the usual black; sporting a silk shirt and skinny jeans, on his feet were glossy chelsea boots.

your heart palpitated unusually fast. it was not the first time that it had, around him.

“it’s not like we’re dating or something,” jun scoffed and rolled his eyes.

and then your heart fell ten feet down to the ground.

there was something venomous in the way he said it, as if you had just asked him to do something atrocious. your chest caved in, hollow in hurt.

“right,” you cleared your throat and looked away, hands becoming clammy. “we’re not.”

“so can i go now?” he jutted a thumb at the door, silent demand across his features.

“y-yeah,” you shrugged, your heartbeat deafening in your ears.

it ached, but you were used to it.

wen junhui was your roommate-turned-best friend. you started to have feelings for him around last year, but it was obvious it would be a one-sided affair.

he was wild and carefree, spontaneity and fun the only aims he ever had in mind. meanwhile you, in your nine-to-five job, were a person who wished to have their life together, organised into a little book called a planner.

you figured you were too uptight for his liking. aside from binge-watching until daylight, your daily life was far too structured. meetings in the morning, lunch break at two and company dinners at eight didn’t seem to align with his own schedule and his life.

so you let him go.

well, you tried to let him go.

as you sat by the couch, staring wistfully at the shut door where the ghost of junhui still lingered, you wondered just where things went wrong with moving on.

you replayed the things he said to you before he left in your head like a broken record. you hugged your knees to your chest and felt something ignite.

there was a sudden rush of adrenaline that coursed through your veins, a desire to change things up tonight.

next thing you knew, you were digging in the depths of your closet for appropriate clothing to wear in a night club.

jun’s silk shirt from earlier flashed in your mind and you managed to fish out something similar, one with a plunging neckline and long sleeves. among that pile of unworn clothes you found a leather pencil skirt from college, back when frat parties were your thing.

you weren’t all that uptight. you just knew when to loosen up and when not to.

tonight, however, you went darker on the eyeshadow and contoured your cheekbones, tied everything together by lining your lips with a seductive shade of rose. you let your hair down from its usual hairstyle of a messy bun, curling it loosely and tossing it over your shoulder.

for once, it was excitement that lit behind your eyes when you glanced at yourself through the mirror.

saint laurent perfume on your pulse points and knife-sharp stilettos on your feet, you were out the door in less than thirty.

it was time to have some fun.

you held your phone up to your ear as you stood by the sidewalk outside your apartment.

soonyoung picked up on the second ring.

hastily you asked for his location and he gave it to you without a second thought, to your relief. you expected it, anyway. there was no use of being subtle if he was completely wasted.

as you sat in the cab, you quickly contemplate what the hell you were about to get yourself into.

despite the differences in work ethics, the two of you spent so much time together it was natural to have jun’s influence over you.

he made you feel alive.

in all the times you spent with him, he made you laugh like there’s no tomorrow with that witty sense of humour of his. he, ever so lovingly, nudged you out of your comfort zone and nudged you here.

it was time you saw the world through his eyes.

there were stares and you could feel them as you walked in, wen junhui’s name upon your lips as you told the bouncer who you were here with.

it was hot and sweaty in here, almost claustrophobic as the bass, the lights, and the people—dressed similarly to you—filled the room.

you took careful steps into the club, eyeing the bar and then making a beeline toward it. you needed a drink before you could have the energy to scour the club to find him.

you paid attention to the people around you and realised how good they actually look, appearance-wise. even the tall bartender was hot. you discovered his name as he approached you with a charming smile on his gorgeous face and asked you what drink you’d like.

his name was minhyuk.

a gin and tonic was what you ordered. you took a light sip, sparing the handsome bartender a couple of glances before you turned in your seat to run your eyes across the dance floor behind. maybe junhui was somewhere among the crowd.

he’s a dancer, he should be.

“are you waiting for someone?” a voice, foreign, asked. it was almost melodious. a vocalist's voice.

you angled your head to the side. and god, what’s up with all these beautiful people tonight? another fine specimen of man, as good looking as one can be, sat to your left.

“i’m kihyun,” he extended his hand.

oh good. at least he had the decency to introduce himself before anything else.

in this unpredictable setting, looks could definitely deceive, and it was best if you kept your guard all the way up.

you shook his hand, murmuring your own name in response. his palm grazed yours, teasing, for a second before he let go.

“may i buy you a drink?” he asked. “that is if you’re not waiting for someone, of course.”

what a gentleman. you immediately swallowed back all your doubts.

“sure, why not?” you tipped back your first glass of gin and tonic and downed it all in one go.

whoever you were waiting for—jun—wasn’t anywhere to be seen anyway.

as if on cue, minhyuk the bartender appeared in front of you once again. “another one?” instead of you, he seemed to be looking at kihyun.

“it’s on me,” the gentleman beside you gave the bartender a curt nod.

“comin’ right up,” minhyuk chirped, plucking your empty glass from the bar top and twirling away dramatically.

you and kihyun shared a moment of laughter over the bartender’s antics.

if you thought kihyun with a straight face was handsome, his full-blown smile was simply impeccable. his perfectly straight teeth shone under the dim lights and it might’ve been the slight dose of gin talking, but you might have to go home with him tonight.

kihyun kept a respectful distance away from you the entire time you had your drinks, arms folded across each other on the bar top as his feline eyes fixed on you intently. he listened to you go on about your day and how you never expected to end up here.

“well, i’m glad you did,” he said, looking nowhere but at you. “you look beautiful.”

“thank you,” you hummed and sipped your drink to hide your embarrassment.

you took a moment to search the place for a

familiar figure once more and again, he was nowhere to be seen.

“would you like to—“ kihyun cleared his throat. “—you know, dance with me?”

then came the point where you gave up completely.

“i would love—“

“sorry,” it seemed someone else had come into the equation. “she’s taken.”

you tensed up in your seat, startled.

there junhui stood, in the safe gap between you and kihyun, an indistinct look painted across his face. you saw him earlier tonight, so you weren’t too surprised that he looked ravishing under this lighting but you still felt like you swallowed your entire heart:

you were at a loss for words.

“and who are you?” the man beside you glanced up at your roommate.

you completely ignored jun and your pounding heart, facing kihyun instead.

if you were going to argue with him, you made sure it was not in front of a lovely guy you’d just met and ruin the chances you probably had with him.

“kihyun,” you decided to say while your eyes remained on jun. “give me your phone.”

“uh,” he shifted in his seat to gain access to his pocket. he slid his phone out and handed it to you. “sure.”

“call me,” you dialled your number into his phone, slipping it back onto his hand. you glared at jun who had his eyebrows raised at you as if demanding to know what the hell is going on. “this is my roommate, by the way, and we’re just about to head out.”

the poor guy looked severely confused.

regardless, you stood up from your seat and wrapped your fingers around jun’s arm. you made sure a little fingernails pressed into his skin to let him know your current annoyance.

“i’ll see you around,” you waved kihyun a goodbye.

“no you won’t,” jun sniped, lips curling and arched eyebrows still raised.

you gave the other guy an apologetic smile before dragging junhui out of the club, nails now digging into his skin. you stormed past the entrance, to the empty sidewalk right in front of it.

“ouch,” jun mumbled, voice mocking you in the most absurd way possible. he rubbed his arm. “did you have to grip my arm so hard?”

“what the hell is your problem?” you were fuming. but at the same time, you were nervous. nervous to be standing in front of a love that will never be yours, dressed in an utterly different manner than what he was used to.

he noticed it too. “you look different.”

“of course i look different,” you snapped. “it’s none of your business, either way.”

“yes it is,” jun kept a neutral expression.

and you couldn’t believe it.

you laughed, one without a single trace of humour.

“how is anything i do your business?” you went on. “you’re never home and we’ve barely even spoken over the past few months, it’s like we don’t know each other anymore so i don’t understand why—”

“i’m sorry,” junhui cut you off. “i’ve been a ghost lately.”

“you don’t say,” there were tears gathering behind your eyes and you had no idea why.

“i’m sorry,” he reached out to hold your wrist in his hand before you could turn away from him. “i really am.”

“but why did you interfere between me and kihyun?” you asked.

his face dropped.

“because i was jealous,” jun finally said. “i was fucking jealous of him that he was able to catch your eye and make you smile the way you smile at me.i’m jealous he’s one step away from taking you home.”

“we’re not dating, jun.” you pulled his hand away from your wrist as you spat his words back at him. “anything i do with him has nothing to do with you.”

a tear escaped the corner of your eye as you realised this one vital thing.

junhui only paid attention to you when you paid yours on someone else.

you walked away from him, finally realising the real amount of hurt you inflicted upon yourself trying to chase him. all these months of wanting, of yearning, you’ve received nothing in return but a ‘hey’ in the morning and a ‘oh you’re still awake’ at midnight.

it was about time you dropped it.

you found someone new, someone you had the opportunity to feel what you felt with jun. this only happened because you saw the world through his eyes, and you had him to thank for that.

but you have to let him go. not all stories have happy endings.

you headed back into the night club, finding kihyun back where you left him and continued what you two had started.

it turned out, he was even better than you anticipated. he was entirely different from jun, but if his kindness and consideration could capture your heart, you didn’t mind.

the next morning, as you looked at kihyun who was asleep peacefully by your side after a long night, you decided to grab your laptop to write a letter.

a letter to terminate the lease on your end for the apartment you shared with junhui

—early.

[hawksmagnolia]

Thank you so much 💕 I was wondering if I could send in a smut request with either Bucky or Destroyer!Chris - they’ve been dating reader for a few weeks and they want to go further - reader is nervous however because she still didn’t tell them she has a clitoris piercing and is anxious they’ll hate it and think it’s disgusting

Dear Anon, I hope you find this to your liking! It was super fun to write- everyone loves sweet and sexy Bucky. There is some swearing and smut ahoy!

It starts as a tiny crush.

A smile there, a wink during a meeting, a coffee left on your desk with a lopsided heart drawn on the side. You find yourself with pink cheeks and slightly stammering in his presence so you think it’s just friendly teasing. Natasha comes to your office one day under pretenses of getting some medical paperwork for Clint signed only to confide that Barnes seems to have developed a taste for pretty girls who dress like English majors. When you glance down at your leggings and an oversized sweater and then back at her knowing face, heat blooms across your face. The dress code is forgiving here and your office is chilly, so you dress for comfort. You often have to chase down Tony so it’s easier to wear your flat riding boots for a sprint down a hallway. Coming from someone who regularly wears black leather like a second skin, the idea of Bucky Barnes thinking that you’re attractive is almost laughable.

Bucky finally catches you alone in the hallway outside the gym, his metallic fingers wrapping around your bicep.

“You.” He says. “Are a hard woman to get alone.” He glances down the deserted walkway before focusing back on your face. His damp hair is half pulled back from his handsome face, a few strands cling to the hard planes of his cheekbones and jaw. He smells clean and masculine and part of your brain wants you to crush yourself against him.

“I have an office…” Your voice is breathy, your eyes looking up at him over the tops of your glasses. Your hair is escaping from its braid and you’re sure that you’re a mess from your most recent hunt for Tony across two floors to get a form signed.

“Yes, with lots of windows and we have the nosiest coworkers in the world.” He gives you a slightly crooked smile. “Come to dinner with me? Friday?”

You feel a frisson of shock all the way to your toes. “Um..yes?”

His smile broadens into a wide smile. “Great. Is seven good for you?”

You nod and he brushes the lightest of kisses across your cheek before jogging off down the hall.

You stare at the form in your hands, unsure what you just agreed to.

It turns out that Bucky does indeed have a taste for pretty girls who dress like English majors, but specifically for you. You find yourself looking for him, your heart giving a heavy thump in your chest when he comes by to see you. He always brings you something, a muffin from your favorite bakery, a tiny pot of violets for your desk. You’re together almost every night, sometimes Netflix at home, others its dinner or movies out and once even a concert in the park.

His kisses make your head spin and more than once you’ve had to hide a love bite on your neck or collarbone. He senses your hesitation to go further, the unspoken request to keep his hands above your waist. He doesn’t press but you see the questions in his eyes.

You’re at your place tonight - less chance of a nosy Avenger popping in for a chat. You’re wrapped around each other in the oversized chaise, your head resting on his chest and arms wound about his waist. Legs tangled together like the fingers in your hair, your bare ones ending in shorts and his in snug denim.

Drifting in and out of consciousness, lulled into lazy relaxation by the scrape of his blunt nails on your scalp, you startle when his voice rumbles through his chest.

“Is it me?”

“What?” You sit up abruptly and look at him confused.

He looks uncomfortable as he shifts. “I’ve been staying here with you for a couple of weeks. But you flinch if I even touch your hips. I didn’t know if it was…” he lifts his prosthetic hand and flexes the fingers.

Your mouth goes dry as heat pools low in your belly. It’s definitely not that, you’ve indulged in fantasies of your own involving his metal fingers pulling climax after climax from your core.

“No…it’s not you…it’s me.”

“Doll, how can it be you? You’re stunning, inside and out.” He picks up your hand and presses a kiss to your palm.

Untangling your legs, you straddle his lap, knees bracketing his hips, your hands framing his face. “You are biased.”

He tugs you down, his mouth on yours in a searing kiss. Instinctively your hips roll, pushing hard against the rapid hardening beneath his zipper and he groans into the kiss.

“You better tell me what’s going on before you make me crazy.” His pupils are blown black with lust as he cages your hips with his hands.

“I…I don’t want you to be…not turned on by me anymore.”

He sinks his teeth into your bottom lip. “Trust me doll, that is not going to happen.” He licks over your swollen lip and presses hot open-mouthed kisses down the side of your neck.

Tilting your head back to give him better access you finally answer. “I…I’m pierced.”

Bucky slows and then stops. “Why do I feel like you’re not talking about your ears?”

When you shake your head, he gives you a lazy smile. “Well now, you gotta show me.” Cradling you into his arms, he carries you to the bedroom and deposits you on the bed.

He kisses you so thoroughly that you have to gasp for breath when he abandons your lips, sliding his hands down your body and legs to nip at your ankle as he kneels at the end of the bed.

“Well?” His smile is borderline cocky. “You going to make me beg?”

“I’m considering it.” Feeling more confident than you have in weeks, you hook your thumbs under the waistband of the shorts and slowly slide them down your legs.

“Jesus doll…” Leaning forward he runs his hands up to the strings over your hips. “Do these even count as underwear?”

You can’t help it, you laugh until he presses his thumb onto your lace-covered slit, which turns the laugh into a moan.

He pauses, his eyes on yours. “Can I?”

You know if you say no, he’d stop in a heartbeat but you really don’t want him to so you slowly nod.

He hooks his thumbs in the waistband and slowly slides the fabric down your legs, skin breaking out into goosebumps under his touch. He tosses them aside and leans up to press a kiss just below your navel,

“Still good?”

The feeling of his breath across your skin is far hotter than you thought possible.

“Yes….oh god Bucky.”

His fingers on your hips, his thumbs parting your lips enough that he can see the tiny silver barbell piercing the skin above your clit.

“Holy fuck doll. I love this damn century.” He presses a kiss to the top of your slit as he drags a single finger over the piercing causing the breath you’ve been holding to stutter out of you. Leaving his fingers there, he climbs onto the bed and pulls you to him, his lips on yours.

You moan as he gently traces around your piercing before pushing first a single finger and then a second into you. You whimper as he fucks you with his fingers, his thumb on your clit, he bites your lip, your jaw, your neck. He feels your body tighten, tense as a bowstring as he captures your mouth to swallow your cry as your climax hits and you flood his fingers.

He lets you ride it out before sliding his fingers out and bringing them to his lips. The sight of him licking them clean is almost more than you can bear.

“Next time? I’m doing that with my tongue.”

“You don’t think it’s weird or gross?”

He wraps his arms around you. “I think it’s the hottest fucking thing I’ve seen in a long time.”

You smile and kiss the underside of his jaw. “Is it next time yet?"

@nano--raptor @cchellacat @eurynome827 @jobean12-blog@book-dragon-13 @aesthetical-bucky @marvelgirl7@sallycanwait68 @buckys-broody-muffin @softpeachbarnes@godofplumsandthunder @azurika-writes @ikaris-whore @this-kitten-is-smitten @randomfandompenguin @bucky-plums-barnes​ @bugsbucky​ @littleredstarfish​ @emilylyoness​ @hailmary-yramliah​ @daughterofsteven​ @ballyhoobarnes​ @jewels2876 @nomadicpixel

[samwpmarleau]

Would you write Arthur's reaction to the news that elia and rhaegar are getting betrothed

Another anon asked: Fic request: Elia and Arthur have a stolen moment just before she marries Rhaegar

He can’t say the news comes as a surprise, particularly. It’s an advantageous match, one that has Princess Loreza’s shrewd handiwork and the king’s pettiness all over it. He can’t fault the match.

And yet still it feels like a slap in the face. Fate’s fickle flick of the wrist. He leaves Dorne—leaves her—for the place perhaps least like it, only for his past to come barging right into his present. His best friend and the love of his life. Two of the very limited number of people he truly believes in, truly trusts.

Betrothed.

It was one thing to know, theoretically, that she would be wed. But being the wife to some Dornish bannerman is a far cry from the future queen of the Seven Kingdoms, eternally to be a constant presence in his life. Again, though far frostier this time around.

He should have known, really, the moment Elia arrived at Lord Robert’s tourney. Why else would she journey such a long distance from home, when the Princess always so fiercely limited her outings? An exception had been made during Elia’s sixteenth year…but that was an exceptional exception indeed. The prize of Jaime Lannister, disguised as a yet-undecided tour of suitors.

But the shock of seeing her, of talking to her, of kissing her hand and saying with cool indifference, “It is wonderful to see you again, Princess Elia,” as though they hadn’t once been each other’s entire universe, had superseded his good sense.

And so, all he can manage is an incredulous stare, his heart pounding beneath his ribcage, his hand reflexively clenching into a fist when at the feast following the joust Rhaegar says—

“It is my great pleasure to announce my betrothal to Princess Elia of Dorne. House Targaryen holds House Martell in highest esteem, and I look forward to our union being forever fruitful.”

The announcement is met with applause and a fresh round of ale, because of course it must, yet it’s quite obvious to Arthur that he’s not the only one taken aback by the news. Though for different reasons. How terribly upsetting it must be for the people to have a Dornish crown princess, and a sickly one at that. Perish the thought.

He endures the spectacle long enough for the first course of supper to be served. But even his Kingsguard stoicism has its limits, and if he has to witness one more series of Rhaegar and Elia graciously accepting this lord or that’s insipid congratulations, he’ll vomit. He switches posts with Ser Oswell, who had been patrolling outside the Great Hall. The deafening sound of waves crashing against Durran’s Point is just as well, for it drowns out some of the gaiety behind the hall’s heavy oaken doors.

It works until he’s an hour in and is stopped not by the latest in an impressive string of drunken nobility but Rhaegar’s freshly minted betrothed. Elia. His Elia, who hasn’t been his for quite some time.

“Princess,” he greets with a bow. “Or perchance it is now ‘Your Grace.’”

“‘Your Grace’? That’s all you have to say?” she asks. “Four years of not a word since you left that note without so much as a warning, and now it’s pleasantries? You have some nerve.”

“By ‘nerve,’ do you mean delight that my closest friend and my countrywoman are to be married? I could no sooner fret over that than the marriage of Daeron the Good and his queen.”

“You lie as poorly now as you did when you were a boy.” Gods, he’s even missed her fury.

He could continue the ruse, but it would do no good. “What do you want me to say?”

“I suppose you don’t have to say anything,” she replies. “So long as we’re both aware that you’re the one to blame for this situation.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Oh?” She takes a step forward, oozing half a decade’s worth of resentment and arguments unhad. “We could have been many years wed by now. A babe, or two. Tywin Lannister slighting my mother was the best news of my life. Then you just left. To join the Kinsgsguard, pledged to a mad monarch growing madder by the day.”

The sound of a man retching nearby has Arthur lowering his voice and guiding Elia further down the dim hallway, away from prying ears. “It’s hardly that simple and you know it.”

“What I know is I was unpromised and you were the damned Sword of the Morning, as viable a suitor as it’s possible to me, and you didn’t even try. My mother—”

“Your mother would not have agreed,” he interrupts.  “She said as much when I asked her.”

Elia’s brow furrows, just slightly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Exactly what it sounds like.” If someone had told him a week ago that he’d be having this conversation right now, he’d have sent them to Maester Pycelle for a medical examination. “After you returned from the Westerlands, I went to her. She’d cottoned on, of course. I’m not sure there’s anything within Dorne’s borders the Princess isn’t aware of. ‘Don’t start,’ she said. ‘The answer is no.’”

It’s clear that Elia had not been informed of any of this, and he can’t decide whether that works in his favor or not. But her confusion in short order gives way to renewed anger. “Since when did you care about my mother’s opinion?”

“I didn’t at first,” he replies. “But how could I sway her when she was right? A second son of a lesser house I was, the heir to nothing. She refused Baelor fucking Hightower. She aimed for no less than the future Lord of Casterly Rock. What could I have given you in comparison?”

“What comparison? You could have given me you! All I’ve ever needed is you, just as you are.” Elia seizes the golden circlet on her head, that which marks her as Dornish royalty, and tosses it at him. It skitters off his ivory breastplate into his hands. “How could you ever think that I wouldn’t have given this up without a moment’s hesitation? That I’d want the likes of Jaime Lannister or Rhaegar the silver prince?”

He doesn’t let doubt creep in. Because if he does, if he lets himself wonder whether he could have not cowed to the Princess, he couldn’t walk himself back.

“You didn’t even wait,” Elia continues. “Four years it took my mother to arrange this match. More than enough time for her to have changed her mind about us. Yet the minute Ser Harlan came along with his offer, you abandoned me. We could have run away together, if it came to that.”

“Run away where, exactly?”

“I don’t know, anywhere. My good-sister is of Norvos, my niece’s mother is of Volantis, there’s even that hidden tower in the Prince’s Pass you told me about. We had choices.” She crosses her arms across her chest protectively. “So, yes, Arthur, you are to blame for where we stand now.”

“Where is that? Where do we stand now, you and I?”

For the briefest of moments, Elia glances at his lips, and he can’t help but feel a frisson of anticipation. But then it’s gone.

“Nowhere. Not anymore.” She holds out her hand for the crown, and numbly he returns it, watching as she places it once more atop her head. “A princess and a knight. A tale for songs, not life.”

He grabs her wrist when she turns to leave, but no words come. Rhaegar’s the bard who can bend people to his will, not him.

Elia snatches back her hand, with one last cutting remark: “I’ll see you at the wedding.”

[writingpuddle]

Could you share your hc of the foxes reacting to soft(er) affection(as they get) andreil??? Ps I owe u my life ty.

hello friend! to absolutely nobodys surprise this took like half a year to write, but i hope you enjoy!! it ended up being a lot more about andreil dealing with pda than the foxes reacting to it, but its soft as hell so who cares. ao3

—

The hallway was filled with the smell of pizza and the sound of chattering voices. Neil slipped through the door into the girls’ room, which was abuzz with conversation. It was only the original Foxes tonight, but there were still enough of them to make the small room feel crowded.

He ducked Matt’s offered drink and spotted Andrew sitting at the end of the couch, watching Nicky’s animated re-enactment of one of the final plays of tonight’s game with a blank look on his face.

Neil skirted the coffee table and perched on the armrest above Andrew. His eyes flicked up to meet Neil’s in greeting, then returned to Nicky. Neil repressed a small smile. Despite Andrew’s bored expression, the very fact that he was watching Nicky at all was evidence of his attention.

“In summary, I am a mad genius,” Nicky said. “We are so gonna win championships this year. I can feel it.”

“If the freshmen don’t ruin everything,” Kevin said from Nicky’s other side. He shot Neil a quick glance. “If we can’t play Neil and Jack at the same time, we’re at a major disadvantage.”

“I’m dealing with it,” Neil said, a little peevishly.

“No more Exy talk,” Andrew said. “The game is over.”

“Kev-iiin,” Nicky whined, prodding at him, “why do you have to ruin everything? Did you even see my tackle?”

“One good play does not make a season,” Kevin said.

“It’s movie night,” Neil said. “We’ll do a recap at practice tomorrow.”

Kevin looked like he was about to argue, but he stopped himself with a quick glance at Andrew. Neil couldn’t see what Andrew had done, but he felt faintly grateful anyway.

The lights flickered on and off several times. “Attention everyone,” Allison said. “We held a vote, and we’re watching Legally Blonde.”

“You were the only person that voted for that,” Dan said dryly.

“We did technically hold a vote though,” Matt said. “She lost, but she didn’t lie.”

“Legally Blonde is a classic,” Allison said, sticking her nose up. “You’re going to appreciate it, or else.”

There were a few mutters, but nobody really had major objections. Movie night had started as a post-game decompress, but it had quickly been established as tradition once everyone realized it was the only night of the week that they got to avoid the freshmen completely. Exactly which movie they watched was an afterthought.

Unlike many of Allison’s choices, this one seemed to strike something, because within a couple minutes even Kevin was snarking at the TV in Elle’s defence, while Nicky fruitlessly begged for everyone to please shut up so I can hear the movie.

Neil watched with some distraction. He’d still not really gotten into pop culture, despite Nicky and Allison’s efforts. He figured he’d just been out of the loop too long to care about getting back in it. But the movie was kind of entertaining. He admired Elle’s devotion to studying law, even if her ex-boyfriend seemed like a loser.

He propped an elbow on the back of the couch. Andrew’s eyes flicked up towards him before returning to the movie.

Neil dug his phone out of his pocket and tapped out a short message.

How accurate is the legalese

He heard the buzz of Andrew’s phone a second after it sent. For a long moment, it looked like Andrew would ignore the message, but as the scene slipped into another emotional confrontation with the ex-boyfriend, Andrew’s attention drifted from the TV screen to the phone in his pocket.

A response buzzed into Neil’s hand. Okay

From Andrew, that was as resounding an endorsement as Neil could’ve asked for.

Neil glanced down at Andrew, feeling warm and sort of fuzzy. The team was getting riled up by the movie and were paying him no mind. His body was heavy and sore from the game, but with actual striker subs playing this year, it was nothing compared to the post-game aches last year. Andrew’s head rested against the back of the couch a couple inches from his elbow, and Neil’s eyes drifted from the TV to the tufted strands of Andrew’s un-styled hair.

He tapped out another message, feeling a little lazy and a little bold. Touch your hair, yes or no?

A frisson of energy went through him when he pressed send. He tried to keep his eyes on the TV, posture casual, but he couldn’t help glancing down when Andrew flipped his phone open.

He paused minutely. It wouldn’t have been obvious if Neil hadn’t been watching; Andrew’s natural state was stillness. Neil bit the inside of his cheek as Andrew contemplated the message for a long moment, face hidden.

Finally, he typed out a slow response. It buzzed through to Neil’s phone. Now?

Neil gnawed on his cheek, debating the merits of a longer explanation. In the end, he just replied: Yeah

He closed his phone and focussed on the movie. Below him, Andrew opened his phone and read the message.

Neil figured he would need to think on it for a moment, so he was startled when his phone buzzed barely a second later.

Yes

Neil folded his phone away, his chest a little tight. He couldn’t remember what the movie was about anymore. Andrews’s eyes darted up to him again, almost wary, as he rearranged his lean against the couch to give him better access to Andrew.

Andrew exhaled heavily through his nose when Neil’s fingers slid into the fluffy mess of his post-game hair. He watched for a sign that he could stop, but Andrew just readjusted his shoulders slightly, head faced forward. Neil combed his fingers through Andrew’s hair, twisting the longer bits around his fingers. It was startlingly soft. Neil’s own hair was fried and twiggy from years of hair dye.

His gaze roved down the side of Andrew’s face. His eyes were half-lidded and hidden in shadows. Neil bit the inside of his cheek and returned his gaze to the TV, idly brushing his fingers through Andrew’s hair and marveling when Andrew leaned into his fingers like a cat seeking pressure.

A soft noise rustled across the room and Andrew stiffened, his shoulders tensing. Neil froze, his eyes shooting across the room.

Matt had one hand over his mouth, eyes wide with regret. His other hand was on Dan’s wrist, directing her attention across the couch. To Andrew and Neil.

Matt met Neil’s gaze and Neil gave a sharp shake to his head to stop him from saying anything.

It was too late. Allison had caught the movement. In seconds a half dozen sets of eyes were swinging over to where Neil’s hand was still buried in Andrew’s hair.

Neil retracted his hand a beat too late. “What?” Nicky said, twisting around in his spot next to Andrew. “What are you all looking at?”

Neil opened his mouth to tell everyone to stop gawking, but Andrew was already moving, pushing himself to his feet. Neil jumped up and followed him out the door, ignoring Matt’s apologetic protest. “Andrew,” he said, as the door swung shut behind them.

Andrew strode down the hallway to the stairwell, his movements jagged and tense. “Andrew,” Neil said. “Stop, look at me—”

He grabbed Andrew’s hand to slow him down and Andrew lurched to a halt, spinning around to face Neil. His face was pale in the naked fluorescent light, his eyes wide and flickering. Neil would’ve thought he was angry at how Neil had grabbed him if it wasn’t for the fact that Andrew’s fingernails were digging into his hand so tight that they were going to leave bruises.

“Hey,” Neil said. “Look at me.”

“Shut up,” Andrew growled. His grip on Neil’s hand didn’t relent. Neil took a slow breath, meeting Andrew’s gaze evenly.

They stared each other down in the stairwell. Andrew stood a couple steps above him, their hands linked in the open space between them. The buzz of the overhead lights droned in Neil’s ears.

Slowly, Andrew’s shoulders dropped, the muscle in his jaw smoothing out. Neil carefully shifted his hand, interlacing their fingers. Andrew squeezed, like he was reassuring himself that Neil was real.

Andrew turned back up the stairs again, this time without the frenetic pace. Neil let himself get drawn along by their linked hands, watching the lines of Andrew’s back.

Andrew shouldered his way out onto the roof, but he didn’t go straight to the edge like Neil expected. The door slammed shut behind them with a gust of wind and Andrew shook out his pack of cigarettes one-handed, propping one between his lips before tilting the pack towards Neil.

Neil shook his head. This close to Andrew, he didn’t need his own cigarette. Andrew folded the pack into his pocket without a word and dug out his lighter.

Smoke swirled and caught around them. Neil rubbed his thumb across Andrew’s knuckles, scanning the horizon. The sky was purple and bruised with storm clouds. Humidity hung in the air in thick curtains.

Neil’s phone vibrated. Andrew flicked his eyes towards him, but Neil didn’t make a move to grab it.

They stood shoulder to shoulder for a long moment as Andrew burned through his cigarette. Neil suppressed a shiver. His t-shirt wasn’t meant to guard him against the evening chill.

His phone buzzed again.

“Are you going to check that?” Andrew said.

Neil shot him an assessing look before scrounging his phone out of his pocket.

“Matt wants to know if we’re okay,” he said, looking up to study Andrew’s profile. “Are we?”

Andrew ashed his cigarette, a tiny wrinkle forming between his eyebrows. He didn’t say anything.

“Was it me touching your hair?” Neil asked. “Or was it that they saw?”

“I don’t care what they think,” Andrew bit out.

Neil read between the lines. “But it bothered you.”

“Nothing bothers me.”

“Am I still nothing?”

“No.”

Neil blinked. Andrew wasn’t looking at him, but the set of his jaw was tight. “Oh,” Neil murmured, looking away, a fizzing, bubbling feeling rising in his stomach. He wrestled it down before it could show on his face.

“It shouldn’t matter,” Andrew said.

Neil didn’t know if he meant what had just happened in the dorms, or this. He didn’t try to specify. “We don’t always get to decide what matters.”

“Don’t pretend at wisdom,” Andrew said. “I know you.”

“You do,” Neil said, resting his shoulder against Andrew’s. Andrew leaned back, just slightly, his broad arm radiating heat. “Are we okay?”

The wind gusted again, sending goosebumps rising up the back of his neck. “Yes,” Andrew said, after a few seconds.

Neil squeezed his hand, typing out a message clumsily with his left. Fine. Just needed space. Don’t wait up

Matt’s response came through instantaneously. Let me know if you need anything.

Neil closed his phone and shoved it into his back pocket. “Do you want to go back in?”

A longer pause. “Not today.”

Not today. But maybe tomorrow. Neil didn’t say it aloud; he didn’t need to.

“I’m going to head back inside,” he said. “I’ll text you when it’s done.”

Andrew nodded, a bare tilt of the head. Neil raised their linked hands and brushed a kiss across his knuckles. Andrew flexed his fingers when Neil released them, closing his hand and tucking it into his jacket pocket.

Neil lingered a second longer to make sure Andrew was really okay before slipping back into the stairwell. It was only a few scant degrees warmer, so he descended back to the Foxes floor quickly. The door to the girls’ room was still unlocked.

He pushed it open and had about half a second to edge into the room before Allison paused the movie and all eyes turned on him.

“Hey,” Matt said. “Are you–”

“I’m fine,” Neil said.

Allison rolled her eyes. “Right, we’ve never heard that one before.”

Neil shot her a glare. Aaron beat him to the punch, though. “Where’s Andrew?” he said, scowling at Neil.

“He needed a break,” Neil said, and nodded his head towards the TV. “You can keep watching.”

“Should we wait for him?” Renee asked.

Neil shook his head. At Renee’s prodding, Allison huffed and pressed play. Neil dropped into the spot on the couch Andrew had vacated. Nicky shot him an inquiring look, but Neil shook his head to dissuade questions.

The movie played onwards, not that Neil paid much attention.

Above, on the roof, Andrew watched the storm roll towards Palmetto, washing away the dust of a dry autumn. His hand in his pocket still burned with the imprint of Neil’s palm.

He rubbed his thumb over his fingernails and tossed the butt of his cigarette away. The wind mussed his hair, blowing away the ghosts of Neil’s fingers.

His hair was too intimate, he decided. That had been a mistake.

Hands, though. He could manage that.

Next time.

The first raindrops hit the roof and he pulled his jacket around himself, waiting for the storm to break.