#jay b fanfic

[yoonia]

Love is Banned | jay b

— title: Love Is Banned | pairings: Jaebum/Jay B (GOT7) x female reader | genre: pwp (porn with very little plot), post break-up!au, brother’s best friend!au | word count: 10,901 words 

— summary | Heartbroken beyond repair, you escape to your brother’s place hours away from home, desperate to avoid the Valentine’s Day soiree happening around you—only to find yourself trapped in the middle of his love-filled house party. Seeking solitude, you are surprised to find the perfect source of comfort from the last person you had ever expected to meet tonight.

— full fic ratings & warnings | +18 / M for mature; involves swearing, alcohol consumption, drunk sex (with consent), explicit sex, teasing and drunk flirting, sex/dirty talk, soft dom!Jaebum, inexperienced reader, oral sex (female receiving), fingering, clit play, hair pulling (male), restraints/light bondage, light spanking, breast play, nipple play, biting, rough sex, exhibitionism kink, minor pain kink, forced orgasm, multiple orgasms, unprotective sex, creampie, minor aftercare. 

— fic drop date: March 18th, 2025 | read on AO3 | main masterlist | wip | mailbox | feedback box | ko-fi | divider credit

— story note: part of Lost Boys: Threadbare Hearts series | I was supposed to post this on Valentine’s Day, but life kept getting in the way and this took way longer than expected to finish. This fic was roughly edited, but I hope you can still enjoy reading this one. | If you’re interested to be tagged/notified on any of the other stories included in the series, please enter your blog username/url through the taglist form here.

— tracklist: worst behaviour — kwn, kehlani / I can’t wait to get there — the weeknd / slow grind — muni long / slow — wizkid, anais cardot

“You’re not supposed to be here.” 

Those words slip out of you before you can stop yourself.

Because this room was supposed to be empty. At least, that was what you were hoping to find when you came up here. 

Placed far in the hidden corner upstairs of your brother’s home, the small guest room should have been a safe place. It should have been able to keep you far from the racket happening below. 

As far as you know, the room is rarely used—except as a second storage room where your brother would stash his old personal things once he’s no longer using them or when you need to stay over for the night with no disturbance from your brother and his guests. Apart from the two of you, you’ve never known anyone ever using the room. 

That had been the reason why you went upstairs and straight to here once you got the chance to escape. To get away from the damn party that you wanted no part in, expecting some peace and quiet, and a moment to yourself. 

You never expected to find the room—your safe haven—already occupied. 

“I don’t see any rules telling me to stay out of this place,” the man sitting in the darkness responds to you in a mocking tone. You recognise his voice before you get to see his face, as he is almost completely hidden in the shadows with none of the lights turned on, and with his back resting against the foot of the bed where the lights coming through the window can’t reach him. 

Judging from the slight slur in his speech, and the large bottle of liquor sitting on his side with half of its content mostly gone, you can tell that he already has some alcohol running in his system. Possibly from drinking here all alone while everyone else is trashing your brother’s home. 

He lets out a low chuckle and continues, “And, as far as I know, you don’t live here, so I don’t think you’re one to make the rules anyway.”

You cross your arms, going on the defensive—something that your body has been trained to do since you were a teenager facing the group of rowdy boys that your older brother hung out with back in school. “That’s not what I meant.” 

Another low chuckle comes from him before he finally moves, leaning forward until his face is visible under the streaks of dim light filtering from the hallway behind you. Just as expected, your uninvited guest turns out to be Jaebum, one of your brother’s high school best friends who seems to be hanging out around him still. Seeing the recognition on your face, he shows you a grin that no doubt would have been able to make every girl coming in his path blush from head to toe. 

Of course, you would know this to be true. You are a woman, after all, and you used to be one of those girls who were drawn to them. Not just girls, too. Other seniors used to flock around them, following everything they did at school while vying for their attention. With your brother being a part of their group, you would often find them hanging out at your family’s house after school, either in the living room or your brother’s bedroom, something that everyone else had always been so envious of while you could never find the comfort in as they used to invade your safe space.

Just like what he is doing now. 

You should have expected to find at least one of your brother’s friends to be around when you first came and saw the party happening, knowing that they still hang out together even after years have gone by. You just didn’t expect you were going to come across one of them this way. 

“Why are you here anyway? The party’s downstairs,” you curiously ask him once you’ve gotten over your shock. Seeing him now, you cannot help but picture the way you remember him from all those years ago. Years may have passed, but it doesn’t seem like he has changed all that much. He still seems like the same older boy who once made your stomach flutter whenever he was near or when he gave you a bit of attention. 

“I’m not really in the mood to join the party,” Jaebum says, shrugging, “I should be asking you the same thing. Why aren’t you downstairs with your brother? I thought you drove all the way here to join his party.” 

As if.

You narrow your eyes and scoff, murmuring almost to yourself, “I was supposed to come here to avoid all kinds of parties.”

That was the truth, anyway. While you’ve never specifically celebrated Valentine’s Day before, you’re not someone who has any aversion towards it either. Until recently, when you finally have the reason to. 

Dealing with a breakup only days before Valentine’s Day did that to you. It made you become sceptical and bitter, almost allergic to the love fest happening around you. So you decided that you had enough. Knowing how similar your brother is to you when it comes to Valentine’s Day, you drove hours away to his house, thinking that you would be able to spend the night and have the chance to confide in your brother. 

What a surprise it was for you to find the house packed with his friends and colleagues, with most—if not all of them—wearing pink, partying together with your brother who had his new girl of the season clinging to his side. 

How was I supposed to know that he was so smitten and in love with someone he met while we weren’t in contact that he felt like celebrating tonight? 

“Are you staying or going?” Jaebum asks, pointing at the opened door behind you with his chin, with you still standing on the threshold like a lost kitten. “You’re letting all the noise come in. I came here with just as much need to avoid all the ruckus as much as you do.” 

Realising that he is right, and you are at risk of missing your only chance to hide from your brother and all the excitement happening downstairs, you step deeper into the room, closing the door firmly behind you. The moment you are engulfed in the darkness, however, you immediately begin to regret it. 

Shutting the door only means that you are stuck in the same room with him, with no lights—except for the reflecting streetlights you see coming from the window—and possibly no escape. You look over your shoulder, longing for the brief of peacefulness you found in the hallway, instead of whatever awkwardness waiting for you should you choose to say.  

A low chuckle is heard, and you turn to face your brother’s best friend only to see that he isn’t sharing the same uneasiness you are feeling about this odd situation. 

“Now, that’s better. So are you going to join me? You’re not going to just stand there all night until the party’s over, are you?” Jaebum teases you as he leans back against the bed, getting as much comfortable as he can while he sits on the cold floor. “Come sit here with me. I don’t bite,” he says while tapping the empty spot right next to him, his grin widening when he adds, “Unless you ask me to.” 

You are left with no other options. Saying no to his offer would either send you back to the party downstairs or back to the room you’ll be sleeping in tonight, which is the other guest room that is closer to where the party is since your brother had insisted on keeping you close tonight. Just when you try to imagine yourself turning back around to get back to the party instead of staying, a loud cheer echoes through the house. 

Looks like whatever game they did just ended, you wonder, as another cheer breaks through and people start chanting again, telling you that the party is still far from over. Might as well stay here for now rather than regretting it later. 

“Fine,” you say with a sigh, before lifting the bottle of whiskey in your hand—one that you stole from the makeshift bar that your brother had set up in the kitchen. “I’ll share if you share yours.”

Through the dim light, you see the familiar grin spreading on his face again. “Don’t worry, I’m quite generous when it comes to sharing pleasure,” he teases with a wink, causing your cheeks to burn. 

“Whatever,” you respond, trying your best not to get affected by his presence as you walk over to join him. 

As you settle back against the foot of the bed, staying just an arm’s length away from him to stay close yet still distant enough to feel comfortable, your eyes fall on the bottles sitting next to him. The large bottle of high-quality branded liquor has been reduced to nearly half of its content, and there are a couple of small vodka bottles lying close by, with varying levels of contents—either half drunk, emptied, and only two of them still full.   

Was he really thinking about drinking all of this alone? 

Jaebum tilts his head, noticing the way you are eyeing his drinks. “See anything you’re interested in trying?” 

“No, I’m fine,” you hurriedly answer, then take a long drink straight from your bottle to hide your face. You wince at the strong taste of whiskey, but you tough it out and force yourself to speak calmly as if nothing happened, “You look like you’re trying to drink your entire life away.” 

Jaebum follows your gaze and laughs softly. “Is that how it looks?” he hums, picking up a small, nearly finished bottle of vodka and tossing the rest of its content down his throat. He savours the taste with a groan and says, “Hmmm…maybe I am. ” 

He opens his eyes and looks at you with glossy eyes. Combined with the small smile he is giving you, it’s enough to cause those old familiar flutters to rise in your chest and stomach. You pick up your bottle, taking a mouthful of drink out of it that burns your throat, hoping that it would be enough to wash the feeling down, and maybe cool yourself off before it turns into something more. 

Something completely unbidden.  

It takes only a couple of shared drinks before you finally start sharing each other’s stories, spilling all the heartaches and misfortunes that both of you have been dealing with while living away from home. 

It’s quite surreal to think that both you and Jaebum can find something to relate to and share aside from the booze that you’ve smuggled away from the party. You also find it pleasingly surprising that opening up and talking about your problems turns out to be helpful. 

Even more surprising is that it seems equally helpful for both of you. 

For you, who had just been dumped by your college boyfriend merely months after he started his new job in a different city, claiming that being in a long-distance relationship was a risk he wasn’t willing to take when he was building his career. 

For Jaebum, who had to watch his ex-fiancee marrying someone else just over the weekend, only less than a year from the day they broke off the engagement when she first claimed to be having cold feet about the thought of marriage. 

“Well, that sucks,” is all that you can say once he is done sharing his story. 

Hearing your comment, Jaebum lets out an incredulous laugh. “Really? That’s all you’re going to say after I just opened up about the lowest moment of my life?”  

You only laugh and shrug it off. “What more do you want me to say? Are you hoping for some kind of wise advice? From me? Or a pat on the back while I promise you that everything will be okay?” you retort with a snort, and you don’t miss the way Jaebum rolls his eyes on you. 

“I wish I had more to say, but I’m not good with words and I don’t even know you or your ex enough to comment about your life,” you stop with a bitter chuckle, “—or her poor choices.” 

Leaning back, you let out a deep sigh. You cannot help but realise that despite the different circumstances you both find yourselves in, you can't deny how similar your situations truly are. “But I do know how terrible it feels to know that the person you want to be with isn’t thinking the same about you. It just—” You let out another sigh, and add, ”—sucks, to be the one left behind feeling like you’ve been tossed aside.” 

Jaebum says nothing for a moment but clearly appears to be thinking deeply. “I don’t even know your ex,” he says, “but I can judge—hard—and say that he’s a moron.” 

“My brother said the same.” A bitter chuckle slips out of you when you think about your brother’s reaction when you first told him about the bad breakup. You may not have told your brother all the details about your fallen relationship yet, but he was able to comment about what a fool your ex had been to sacrifice a good relationship that he had spent years building with you for a new job that he had barely dedicated a month of his time, much less his entire life to.

But was the relationship you had with him really all that good? Was it enough for you to hold on to those memories as much as you did?

Looking up to the dark ceiling above you, you let your mind wander, as if you can see your entire life written somewhere up there. “I’ve been trying to think of him the same way but it’s hard to do it when I keep remembering all the good things we shared. They might not have been much, but the good memories keep overlapping with all the bad ones just when I try to forget them.”

Jaebum scoffs lightly from your side and nods. “Unfortunately, I can agree on that one.”

To hear the tone in his voice as he says that, and see the haunted look in his eyes when you look at him, an ache pulses in your chest. At the same time, you are surprised to find some comfort just by being here with him, listening to him opening up to you while sharing your own story in a way you haven’t been able to do with anyone else—allowing your lonely, broken souls to meet each other’s match. 

Just as silence forms thickly around you, you find yourself looking far back into a distant past and seeing yourself when you were younger. You can also Jaebum then, existing alongside your brother’s other close friends who seemed hard to reach, much less to talk to. 

Not the same way you’re doing it now, anyway. 

“You know, I always thought you guys were snobs back then. Or maybe I was too intimidated by you. You were all popular in school, and my brother’s warning to stay away from you guys didn’t help much in making me feel less wary about getting close.” 

Jaebum snaps a look at you and barks out a laugh. “Wait—What? What did your brother say about us?” 

You shrug, smiling when you explain with a chuckle, “He just said it wouldn’t be a good idea for me to get close to you guys. Told me to stay away and not fall for any of your charms and get tricked into joining your band of groupies.” 

Once again, Jaebum laughs. “Why the fuck would he say something like that?” 

“Who knows?” you answer with a shrug, feigning innocence as you bite back a smile. 

Because you know exactly why your brother would give you such a warning. 

Compared to your older brother, who was considered one of the most popular kids at school, you were way more inexperienced—both in socialising with people and in relationships. 

Your brother may have managed to keep his dating life private—from you, at least—yet the same couldn’t be said about his close friends. Jaebum and the others were quite notorious when it involved the rotation of girls they were constantly seen dating and hanging out with. Most of the boys were known as players, always spreading their charms to anyone around while breaking hearts left and right. 

“I guess he was just looking out for me,” you finally admit out loud, realising that your brother may have caught your eyes wandering whenever his friends were close. It was hard not to pay attention when you had these attractive seniors hanging around nearby, sometimes even at your home with your brother. “Even if he used to tease me, he’s still my older brother, after all.” 

Jaebum lets out a scoff and laughs. “That’s funny, seeing that he gave us all different kinds of warning when it came to you.” 

“What do you mean? What kind of warning?” 

Turning his head, Jaebum’s grin widens when he sees your reaction. “He told us that you were off limits. That we shouldn’t even think about talking or flirting with you, much less to ask you out.” Your jaw drops, which only makes him laugh. “Some of us suspected that Bambam had this silly crush on you back then, but was quick to back off after your brother warned us to stay away.” 

Surprised to hear this, you cannot help but laugh. It’s not unusual for your brother to meddle with your business. Back then, being a curious teenager, having a meddling older brother felt like a burden. You used to hate it growing up, even if you knew that he only had nothing but good intentions to keep you safe from harm. Looking back at it now as an adult, you only think that the whole situation is hilarious. 

“Can’t believe that you guys were so afraid of my brother to follow his silly rules,” you gently mock him while shaking your head. 

“Hey! That’s not fair! Have you ever seen your brother when he got mad? Like, really mad?” Jaebum defends himself. 

You only laugh in return, knowing exactly what he is talking about. You have seen your older brother’s other side that shows up whenever he is angry, and it’s not often that he may overreact over trivial things that are out of his control. But it doesn’t stop you from finding it funny for a group of bad boys to be so afraid of your brother to not risk breaking his rules. 

Not that you believe that you ever had any chance with these boys in the past. You never even dreamed of having any of them make a move on you, much less pay attention to you. You know exactly what kind of girls they were attracted to, and you never saw yourself as anything remotely on par with any of those girls. 

“I thought you were tough guys who’d love a challenge. At least, if I remember correctly, that was something that some of you used to brag about back then.” 

“You’re one to talk,” Jaebum scoffs. “Have you ever taken a risk, even knowing the consequences and not knowing if it’s going to be worth it?” 

You stop for a moment to think. “Well—” 

You feel hesitant to answer, only because your mind immediately goes to the things you’ve done only to end up having your heart, hope, and dreams broken to pieces as a result. The latest risk you’ve taken, especially, involved giving your heart to a senior you met at college—someone who was smarter, more popular—that you kept questioning if you were living a dream. You’ve even come close to giving up your dream, ready to take a huge risk of moving to another city and starting over just to be with that person.

And look at where it has gotten you now. Abandoned and forgotten, left to pick up all the broken pieces, only because he wasn’t willing to take the same risk to be with you. 

When you still have no answer, Jaebum lets out a scoff. “I knew it. What would a strait-laced girl like you know about taking risks? You should try to live out your life a little, be daring, then you can argue with me about what taking risks truly means.” 

You hear what he is saying, yet your mind is stuck on one simple detail. You’ve never really talked to him so openly before, so you’ve never known how he really sees you as a person. Hearing it coming from him only makes you reflect on yourself the way you never did before. 

Strait-laced? You wonder to yourself. Is that really how people see me?

You must admit that it doesn’t make you feel good to be seen that way. Having good grades throughout school and college and being a nice girl growing up doesn’t make you a prude. 

“Hey, I’ve done stuff!” You turn to face him and start defending yourself. “Unlike you, I’ve done real daring stuff while I was away for college. I climbed a rocky mountain after graduation and built camp on the rocky peaks while there was a storm. I did bungee jumping and paragliding when I went to Bali last summer. I went surfing and—” 

Jaebum raises his hands in surrender mode and laughs, cutting you off before you can continue listing all the extreme things you’ve tried ever since you left home. “Okay, daredevil. So you took risks against nature. That’s great and all, but I’m talking about the other risks. Much like how you’re daring me to cross your brother.” 

You swallow hard, knowing exactly what he is saying. You look away when you start feeling deep regret over your past decisions and heartaches weighing heavy in your chest. “Oh, have I done those as well.” 

Jaebum must have noticed something shifting in your mood, because his gaze softens. So does his voice when he asks, “Was it worth it?” 

You let out a bitter laugh. “Would I be here planning to drink my ass off until I forget my name if it was?” 

A knowing look passes over his gaze. “Your last break up.” He nods, then raises his bottle to knock it against yours. “Maybe you were betting on the wrong things to take a risk on.” 

You can only smile. “And of course, you would know about it.” 

The low chuckle that he gives as a response sounds hollow. “I sure do.” 

Leaning back against the bed again, you take a drink from your bottle—suddenly noticing that you may have gone through more than half of it—and gently ask him, “Tell me then, how do I know what kind of risk I can bet on which I won’t be regretting later on?” 

“You know that’s not how it works,” Jaebum says with a low chuckle, “And I don’t think I’m the right person to teach you something like that.” 

“Right,” you hum to yourself, suddenly realising how silly it is for you to ask him for such advice. 

“Maybe you can start small. Instead of diving directly into something serious like a relationship or making plans to build a future with the first person you meet who gives you attention.”

You raise your eyebrows. “Such as?” 

“Ever been on a one-night stand?” 

You burst out laughing. “What?” 

“No? Never? Yeah, I don’t think so,” he says while shaking his head. While he is right in assuming your lack of experience in that field, it doesn’t stop you from wanting to defend yourself. 

“Hey, wait a min—” 

“How about casual flings? Anything other than your serious relationships? Ever been in one?” 

You open your mouth to answer, only to immediately shut it back up before admitting loudly, “No, not really.” 

He nods. “I figured.” 

Your jaw drops. You look at him with narrowed eyes. “What does that supposed to mean?” 

He tilts his head as he looks at you. At this point, you are beginning to dread the way his grin seems so enticing, and how his low voice is starting to make you feel things inside when he speaks. “It’s just that I can’t see you hooking up with random people just for fun.” 

You bite your lips, hating the fact that he is right. You hate knowing he can read you easily even when he barely knows you aside from being his best friend’s sister. But something must have gone wrong with your head—or perhaps you’ve drunk too much alcohol tonight—because you cannot stop thinking about what he is trying to say. 

“You’re right, it’s not something that I can see myself getting into,” you admit with a small voice, as you look back into your life and wonder how different it would have been for you if you weren’t someone who feels too much, and too deeply, when it comes to relationships. 

“Maybe I should change that,” you finally say, almost to yourself rather than Jaebum. Still, it doesn’t miss Jaebum’s attention that he whips his head towards you.

“Huh? What do you mean?” 

You ignore him, already getting too deep in your thoughts—perhaps something that you shouldn’t be doing when you have alcohol in your system. “I’m saying that maybe you’re right.” 

“Wait, I didn’t say anything,” Jaebum quickly interjects. 

“I never gave casual relationships or hooking up any thought because I’m afraid I’d get emotionally attached, like most girls do,” you turn to him and add, “I’m sure you know this too.” 

Jaebum only raises his eyebrows, knowing that you are referring to his history of hooking up with random girls in the past—along with the series of drama which followed every time he ended a fling—and he just lets you continue. “But maybe that needs to change. That’s a risk that I’ve never taken before, but at least I now know not to get my emotions involved.” 

He laughs, almost in disbelief. “Are you sure about that?” 

“I am,” you stubbornly answer, “because I’ve sworn to keep away from love. Because I’m done with it. From now on, love is completely banned from my life. No more.” 

You take a chug out of your drink and continue to ramble before Jaebum can say anything. “But that doesn’t mean that I can't have fun, right? You said it yourself, that I need to live a little, so that’s what I’m going to do.” 

You can hear Jaebum chuckling from beside you. “Alright, daredevil,” he teasingly says, “And how are you supposed to do that?” You can tell without looking that Jaebum is narrowing his eyes on you when he sounds sceptical. 

So you turn to him, giving him a sweet smile as you explain, “There are people downstairs that I may not see again in the future, right? I could just walk downstairs and pick out someone I’m attracted to and have one wild night before I get home.” 

The more you speak, the more you feel doubtful, but you push it down and take pleasure in the way Jaebum’s eyes keep widening the more he listens. But as the excitement grows on you, so does the pounding in your head. Maybe you’ve had too much to drink already. “Although I might have to wait a minute before going down there to join the crowd of people. I need to wait until my head stops spinning.” 

He lets out a low scoff and shakes his head at you. “You don’t have to go that far.” 

“As a matter of fact, I think—no, I believe I do need to do this,” you cut him off. “I’m done living by the rules and being afraid to take risks that don’t go with my life planning.” Pointing the bottle in your hand his way, you continue to speak, “You were the one who put these ideas in my head, so don’t bother stopping me.” 

Chuckling softly, Jaebum leans closer. “That’s not what I was saying,” he gently says, as if he can read your thoughts and knows that you aren’t exactly sure about what you are saying. 

“What did you mean, then?” 

Jaebum only stares at you with a look that makes you feel like he is trying to strip down every layer you have—not of your clothes, but your truth. 

He softly hums before he finally speaks again. “I’m saying that maybe you don’t have to,” he says, once again with that voice of his that would easily draw people to him. Maybe have women drop their panties for him, even. But there is something different now when he speaks to you slowly, with his glossy eyes looking deeply into yours. 

“I don’t have to do—what?”

“You don’t have to go through the crowds of drunk people downstairs to find someone, is all I’m saying. Aren’t you worried about your brother finding out what you’re up to? He’s still down there leading the party, isn’t he?”

As if the party itself can hear him, a loud cheer erupts from downstairs, answering his question. You can picture your brother, always the life of the party, being in the center of it. You can already imagine him pulling you to join him the moment he sees you returning to the living room. You have lost track of time, and you quickly realise that your brother can notice anytime that you’ve been gone quite a while and that he might start looking for you soon. 

“Then, what should I do?” 

Not a word comes from him while you are starting to doubt anything can really happen tonight. Only seconds ago, you felt like you had found your new self. But you know that this drunken resolution will lead to nothing more once you are sober. Before your mind can get into any further wanderings, Jaebum suddenly shifts closer. You turn to find his face already close to yours, while he has his arm resting behind your back and the other winding around your waist. 

Surprised at the sudden closeness, you make no move to push him away. Your heart makes a stupid, unexpected leap in your chest, which only accelerates when he starts speaking to you in a low, sultry voice, “You could just look somewhere closer instead of going down there. It’s not like you don’t have a willing participant already available nearby.”

You blink, and blink again, your mind taking its sweet time processing his words that everything seems meaningless. Surely, he couldn’t have meant—

“And who might that be?” you ask with a small voice, which only seems to amuse him. 

You watch the grin on his face growing wider before he teases you, “Who else is here? I don’t see anyone else, do you?” 

“Hah,” you let out a sarcastic laugh, still refusing to believe what you are hearing, even if your heart is beginning to react, going out of control with its rapid beating. “Stop joking. Now you’re only mocking me.” 

“I wish I was joking, but I know what I’m asking,” Jaebum says with a smile on his face, his voice lowering when he asks, “Is it really that hard to believe that I’d make such an offer?” 

Before you can process what he is saying, Jaebum leans closer, close enough until you can feel his warm breath falling against your lips. The scent of his cologne, mixed with the strong smell of booze, surrounds you as he keeps you trapped between the foot of the bed and his hard body hovering close so that you can feel his heat. 

“It makes perfect sense, don’t you think?” he asks you, already sounding convincing before he even starts laying out his offer, “We’ve both been scorned by our past experience, and while we’ve learned not to fall for it again, we both still have needs. I still need to forget, which drinking seemed to fail in doing, and you need to discover this new side of you without worrying about getting attached. Maybe I can teach you a thing or two about it since I know just exactly how to do it. And you know who I am, so you’d know how to find me and kick my butt off in case you regret it in the morning.” 

We’re still not friends, and not close enough for that level of trust, is what you want to say to him. 

But the words refuse to leave your lips, and your mind is getting hazy from how close he is getting. His nose brushes against yours, and your heart once again makes a giant leap which is so hard to ignore. He tilts his head, his lips coming closer to yours for a little tease, making your lips tingle. 

“Well? Come on, think about it,” he murmurs, with his lips hovering close but not enough to touch. Yet, between your hazy mind and the alarm bells ringing inside your head—warning you about your brother and his rules, about how much of a bad idea this is—you can feel yourself drawn into it. Drawn into him. 

“I think—” you barely manage to say, “This is going to be a bad idea.” You lift your gaze to look into his eyes and immediately feel like you are drowning in the depth of his gaze. 

Jaebum bites his lips while lowering his gaze. “What if I can change your mind?” 

“What are you planning—oh!” 

Whatever it was that you wanted to say dies on your tongue when Jaebum presses his lips on yours. He tenderly moulds his lips against yours, instead of devouring them in a heated kiss. Yet it’s still enough to steal words from your mouth. 

I must be going crazy, is the last thing that comes across your mind before you wrap your arms around his neck and return the kiss, allowing yourself to melt into his heat. You can feel him smiling into the kiss, pleased to know that he has practically won you over as you press your lips harder against his. 

As he deepens the kiss, the world around you seems like it’s spinning. It takes a moment before you realise that your whole body is tilting backwards, pushed under his weight as he gently lowers you back on the floor. The dust-covered carpet cushions your weight as you rest on your back. While you are trying to get comfortable, your eyes flutter open to see him slowly crawling over you. 

A soft moan slips out of you as he reclaims your mouth again. His tongue reaches inside, as if demanding you to pay attention to him instead of letting your mind wander and let it get filled with doubt. He runs his hands down your waist, his chest pressing you down against the hard floor, and then he stops when you protest with a whimper when your back starts rubbing against the rough carpet beneath you. 

“Hmmm, this won’t do,” he murmurs against your lips, his eyes searching your face to find any sign of discomfort. With a hum, he glances over to the bed and pushes himself up. 

The world around you starts spinning once again as Jaebum scoops you up from the floor and lifts you in his arms. You barely have the chance to hold on when he moves towards the bed and gently lays you down on the mattress. The sheets feel cold beneath you, yet he quickly makes it up with his warmth when he joins you. 

The sight of him hovering above you, with his eyes glowing in the dark, full of dark intent, feels like a part of a fever dream. Everything that he said he wanted to do to you, you can see it in his gaze. It’s enough to leave you breathless, to make you feel hot inside. To feel like you are wanted. 

A grin forms on his face as he asks, “Now, where were we?” 

Once again, the crippling doubt inside you holds you back, when you can easily pull him down to you and take over. “You were trying to convince me,” you answer with a whisper, when you wish to feel his kiss again so he can stop you from thinking so hard.

“Did I do a good job, then?” 

You take a deep breath. “I—” you try to answer, but the moment you see the look he is giving you, everything inside you, including your sane mind, simply stops working. 

Outside, coming all the way from downstairs, the music is still blaring loudly the later it gets in the night. The sound of people dancing, chatting, and cheering over some sort of drinking game can be heard through the thick walls. 

But here, the air is getting thick with tension, and it’s hard to focus on anything else when you are pressed down against the hard mattress beneath you, and you have your brother’s best friend hovering on top of you with a sick, teasing grin on his face. 

And oh, how much you struggle to keep your eyes away from those enticing lips, knowing how good they feel when they are pressed against yours. 

All you have to do is lean closer or pull him down to you, and you can have that kiss once again. 

“So? What do you say?” he asks again while his gaze moves to your lips, lingering for a few seconds too long as he catches you licking your lips, tasting the ghost of his kiss. “It’s a one-time offer, and time is ticking. How much longer do you think before your brother comes up here and catches us together?” 

You cannot help but grin at the mention of your brother. “Aren’t you afraid that he might just do that and break your nose again like he did years ago?” you ask, referring to the infamous incident in the past when they had a massive fight over a silly girl who turned out to be playing these boys around—the perfect reverse play of what they used to do to the girls at school who worshipped the ground they walked on.

Jaebum only laughs it off, and your heart skips a beat when you realise how much his voice has changed over the years. And how much you still love hearing it the same way you did then. 

“I think it’ll be worth the risk. As long as you’re in.” 

Worth the risk. 

Yeah, there’s nothing stopping your heart from trying to break free from your chest now that you hear such words. You shouldn’t believe it. But you want to believe it. You want to believe that he thinks you are worth risking your brother’s wrath. 

“Well? Are you in? Or are you going to walk out that door and forget everything we just talked about?” 

You bite your lip as you consider your options. His offer is tempting, but are you brave enough to take that risk? 

One night. No attachment. No promises. And you get to leave this place free of your pent-up frustrations and needs. Maybe dare yourself to feel some pleasure from the one you are forbidden to touch.

Even if you might have to ignore the familiar flutters in your chest rising the more you look at him—the same way it used to happen all those years ago whenever you saw him when he was hanging out with your older brother. 

“Not a chance,” you answer him with a grin, before you lift your legs and wrap them around his waist, your arms coming around his neck as you pull him down towards you. “Game on.”  

Wearing a victorious smile on his face, Jaebum claims your mouth in a kiss, and your entire body softens. He pushes his tongue to deepen the kiss, taking possession of every last bit of doubt you might still have left until there is nothing more but lust and passion and all you can feel is the need you want him to fulfil. 

Clutching the back of his shirt, you begin to pull it upward, and he slips down to let you strip him off of it before he does the same with your top. Tossing your blouse away, Jaebum begins crawling down, his lips tracing the length of your neck on his way down, brushing gently on your breasts as he peels your lacy bra off of your skin. Then he continues making his way down, his hands grabbing hold of the waistband of your pants before tucking them down your legs, taking your flimsy panties along with it. 

Cold breeze washes over your skin once you are left bare and naked on the bed, but it’s quickly replaced by the heat of his gaze perusing you with a look of hunger written on his face. He runs his hands down your waist, to your hips, sliding them under your thighs as he bends down to trace your skin with his kisses. You feel his mouth moving close to your center, causing your heartbeat to pick up its pace. 

He doesn’t waste his time teasing you. Tightening his grip on your thighs, he smoothly dives between your legs, burying his face at the center of your heat. 

A moan slips through your lips when you feel his tongue slipping through your wet folds. You feel his mouth wrapping itself around your clit and giving it a suck, causing your back to arch and a louder moan comes rumbling out of you when a delectable rush comes flowing through your body. Your hand clumsily land on his head, fingers winding through the strands of his hair as you search for something to hold on to while you rock your hips against his lips. 

You hear him chuckling softly and moaning against your heat, before he begins to move his tongue and mouth more aggressively, alternating between pushing his tongue into your warmth and licking your arousal to suckling on your throbbing clit. His actions drive you over to the edge, your orgasm tearing your body as you continue to rock against his face, following the rhythm of your pulse. 

It comes too quickly, stemmed from your pent-up frustrations and nerves, yet neither of you has yet to have enough. Finger clenching tightly on the strands of his hair, you push his face to your quivering center, wordlessly telling him not to stop. With a hum, Jaebum continues—lapping, licking, and sucking—and adds his fingers into the mix, pushing them deeply through your pulsing walls and causing another dynamic orgasm to tear through your body. 

“Jaebum…fuck!” you curse between your cries of pleasure, unable to hold your voice down. 

Yet he makes no sign of stopping. The sounds you are making only seem to be urging him on, as he continues working his mouth and fingers on your heat. 

It isn’t until moments later, as the spasms coming out of your center begin to subside, that Jaebum finally lets you go. With one last kiss on your soaking folds, he pulls away and shifts back until he reaches the foot of the bed. 

As he rises on his feet, you open your eyes to look at him, marvelling at the sight of him—his chest glistening with a thin sheen of sweat, his messy hair that comes from the work of your fingers, and his slick lips, still wet from your release. 

“I wish I could take a picture of you right now,” he murmurs while he starts working on his belt and pants, his eyes never wavering from you as he takes everything off. 

Keeping your gaze on him, you follow every movement as the final pieces of clothing leave his skin. Your breath catches at the sight of his thick shaft bobbing out of its restraint. You can almost see it twitching and pulsing as Jaebum continues to look at you, his gaze runs from the tip of your toes to your hair, going back and forth as he takes his time to get his fill of the image of you lying vulnerable on the cold bed. 

This is happening, you tell yourself as you inhale a deep breath. You cannot believe that you are seconds away from actually fucking your brother’s best friend. It feels hot and naughty—risky—but the thought itself is so damn enticing that your body is humming with new desire. 

Jaebum licks his lips and wraps his hand around his rigid cock. His gaze remains on you as he slowly strokes himself, getting himself harder. The sight of him touching himself while watching you does wild things to your mind. It feels exhilarating, and you don’t even question if this sensation has anything to do with the drink you had earlier, knowing that this is all because of him. 

Feeling brazen under his gaze, you move your hands to trace your skin, going up until you reach your bare breasts. Gently, you cup the soft flesh with your palms and begin kneading, and embrace the waves of heat rolling through your body. The sensation gets stronger when you watch him licking his lips, his hand moving slightly faster, as if watching you has put him in a trance. 

“Are you going to just stand there and watch? Or am I going to have to do this alone?” you tease him with a low voice that sounds completely unfamiliar to your own ears, while slowly folding your legs up, spreading them open to show him where you want him to be. 

A groan slips out of his lips as he watches you, enthralled, and Jaebum hastily climbs the bed, moving swiftly to cover your body with his. “I already promised that I’ll be the one showing you everything,” he grumbles as he covers your wrists with his hands and gently pulls them away from your chest. Holding your wrists together in one hand, he brings them over your head and keeps them there. 

“Hold still,” he whispers, as if restraining you wouldn’t be enough to keep you from moving. “And try to keep your voice down this time. We don’t know if anyone is going to find their way up here.” 

He covers your mouth with his and your body relaxes against his as you lean into the kiss. He presses you down into the bed under his weight and starts running his free hand down your body. You feel his touch on your breast, already sensitive after your teasing touch, and your chest arches into his palm. 

Jaebum pinches your nipples, and then he bends down, his mouth capturing one peak after another, tongue swirling around the tips until they become hard and raw. 

“Ah, fuck—” you curse with a gasp when each brush of mouth and finger sends delicate sparks that travel all the way down to your core. Everything inside you throbs—not of pain, but pleasure—and you can no longer hold back the cries coming out of your lips when Jaebum latches on one nipple and gives a light bite. 

Hearing your voice, Jaebum releases his mouth from your throbbing nub with a pop and pulls back just enough for you to look at his face. Under the shadows of the limited lights filtering through the windows, his gaze feels intimidating, yet enthralling at the same time. The way he looks at you makes you feel desirable that it unleashes everything inside you that you never knew existed.

“I told you to keep your voice down,” he complains with a deep voice that sounds almost like a growl. “Anyone can hear you if they get anywhere close, and it won’t be long for your brother to find out what we’re doing.” 

“I thought you were willing to risk it?” you tease him, which only makes his eyes grow darker. 

“Are you challenging me?” he asks you with a low voice. It stirs the insides of your belly, yet you ignore it for the moment and shrug playfully. 

“What if I am?” 

A low chuckle rumbles from him. There is a dark glint in his eyes as he gently pulls your thigh up, folding your leg until your hips are slightly lifted from the bed. A wicked smile spreads on his face as he leans down, pressing his lips on the corner of your lips and murmurs, “Naughty girl.” 

Anticipating a kiss, you never expect to feel pain flashing from the side of your bare bottom, inflicted by none other than his wandering palm. 

“Hey!” 

Opening your eyes widely, you see him grinning with pride. He tightens his hold on your wrists to keep you still as you wriggle beneath him while he runs his other hand around the burn from his unwarranted smacking.

“What? Don’t naughty girls deserve to be punished and spanked?” 

Something sparks inside you. While you are more inexperienced compared to him, you have learned about a variety of sex plays that one could enjoy in bed to know what he is doing. “Oh, so you like that kind of game, huh?” 

Jeabum bites your bottom lip. “It’s not a game, baby. I like to be in control,” he murmurs, then lifts his head to look into your eyes to ask, “Are you afraid of me? Will that scare you?” 

Nibbling your lips, you consider his words. You’ve never known that pain could be so pleasing. Your skin still burns after the impact of his light spanking, yet it seems to amplify the pleasure pulsing right inside your core when the pain is slowly subsiding under his incessant touch. 

“No,” you answer with a whimper, “Not at all.” You stop fighting his restraint and instead use it as leverage as you push your hips upward, taunting him, “Come on, show me how you’re going to punish me for being bad.” 

“Fuck,” he chuckles nervously, stunned, but is quick to recover as he folds your legs up and smacks the other side of your butt in response. A sharp gasp leaves your lips when you feel the sting, which turns into a soft sigh as he gently rubs the pain away, giving you a brief moment of respite before landing another smack near the tender skin that he first touched. 

Jaebum repeats the light smacking a couple of more times, going back and forth from one side to another, always followed by gentle touches to soothe the pain away. By the time he is done, the pain no longer stings so badly. The throbbing on your skin has travelled deep into your center, replacing every bit of pain with pleasure so raw that is barely comprehensible to your mind.

“Oh, you liked it, didn’t you?” Jaebum teases you with a low whisper, chuckling softly at the way you are rocking your hips against his palm. Letting go of your hand, he holds down your hips and slips his fingers between your folds, humming softly as he is met with your slick arousal. 

“Look at you, getting hot and wet after a bit of spanking. I never expected that you would have this wanton side hidden under your good girl facade,” he keeps muttering as he continues pushing his fingers inside your heat, moving them between your throbbing walls at a languid pace while you begin rocking back into his fingers. “I kind of like this side of you.” 

You can barely hear his voice at this point. Your mind is blinded by the sensations you are feeling. Incoherent noises keep coming out of your lips, and your body is moving on its own, chasing for every bit of pleasure you can get from his touch. 

Jaebum bends down, pressing his lips on the tip of your breasts. “Fuck, I want to be inside you so bad, baby,” he mutters breathlessly between giving your nipples teasing kisses. The touch of his lips feels distracting, along with the steady thrusts of his fingers inside your heat as pleasure rocks through your body, making it hard for you to focus on his words. Yet you still don’t miss what he is trying to say.

Rocking your hips against his, you look up through your bleary eyes and whisper, “Yes, please. I need you…inside me…now.” 

You are not one to beg for anything. Ever. Nothing like this. But the need to feel him is clawing at your chest. You want him. Your body needs him. And there is nothing that can stop you from begging him to let you have him. 

Jaebum says nothing, but his actions are enough to answer your plea. Pushing his fingers deeper, he presses his thumb against your clit, rubbing the flesh just enough to send your body spiralling towards the edge. 

Trying your best to hold back your cries, you bite your lip and bury your fingers on his shoulders. But Jaebum isn’t one to let you go off easily. With his mouth still working around your breast, he gives your nipple a lick, before capturing the hardened nub between his mouth. You feel him humming against your skin, right around your puckered flesh, before a searing pain sparks across your body when he bites down. 

“Ah…fuck. Jaebum!” 

Screaming out his name, you almost cry as your orgasm tears right through your body. While it’s not yet enough to satiate your need, it is still enough to make you feel like you are floating up high. Every cell in your body sings, all coming alive under his touch, and the heat unfolding in your core spreads like wildfire. 

Before you can recover, Jaebum has already made his move. Looking pleased with himself, a smile spreads on Jaebum’s face as he pulls back, dragging his fingers carefully out of your pulsing heat, leaving behind the rapid throbbing inside you to fill the void he left behind. 

Without wasting any more time, he rises on the bed and pulls your ankles up to his shoulders, keeping your hips elevated. Then he presses forward and drives his full length into your quivering core with one firm thrust. You cry out loudly at the force of his thrust. You may have gotten slick and wet enough for him to slide in easily, but your pussy is still sensitive after the multiple orgasms that the intrusion drives a delicious pain that rocks your entire body. 

Your back arches off the bed, and he is quickly drawn towards your full breasts as they once again rise before his eyes. His hand that isn’t holding your thigh up reaches down to give your soft flesh a firm hold.

He gives your breast a gentle knead, taking away your attention from the tightness down below as he begins to fuck you hard with deep rhythmic thrusts, his hard shaft plundering your body. 

“Oh…oh, God!” you keep sputtering random words when you feel the pleasure rising inside you like a tidal wave.

He continues driving into you, getting deeper with each thrust and sending you almost slipping on the bed. His hands move down, gripping your hips to pull you back to him before you are pushed all the way back to the end of the bed. Driving you back against him allows him to get deeper. You feel the force knocking the air out of your chest, while waves of pleasure keep rolling through your body with each thrust, each rock of his hips, and you find yourself already hanging over the edge of your climax. 

You reach up, grasping a hold of his strong arms as you join the rhythm of his thrusts, rocking and pushing against him at the same pace, until you begin to feel the ripples of your climax rising, uncoiling, ready to devour you as you quickly reach for the edge. 

Opening his eyes, Jaebum drops one of your legs, keeping hold of the other just to keep you spread open for him as he bends forward, enveloping your body with his. His mouth finds yours then, kissing you deeply to swallow the sounds of your moans. Then his lips begin to move away, going down your chin, crawling its way to the column of your throat, before going up again to capture your earlobe. 

“I’ve always wanted to fuck you for so long,” he whispers to your ear, too soft of a voice for such dirty words that it makes your head spin hearing it coming from him. Then he thrusts forward, pressing deeper before he begins rocking again, hard and fast, he continues pumping his thick cock into the depth of your warmth. “Fuck, you feel so damn good!” 

You give in to the rising pleasure, your head falling back into the pillows while your chest once again rises and arches with how intense it feels. Your mind is filled with bliss, that you can barely focus on his words, or anything else that is happening around you. 

The party below seems so far away, even if you can still hear the beat of the music vibrating through the floor and walls. But none of it matters now. What matters to you right now is him; the pace of his thrusts that continue relentlessly without fail, moving faster and harder, and the way he is working your body with his expert hands. 

The grip that he has on your hips feels unyielding, anchoring you to him while denying you escape as he chases for his climax. You can feel his fingers pressing harder into your skin, nails scrapping on your soft flesh, no doubt leaving some marks and indents that you may find much later on once everything is over. 

“Are you close?” he breathlessly asks while moaning, showing you signs of his coming release. 

The answer coming out of your mouth sounds like a sharp cry, “Mmmh—yes!” 

Jaebum captures your chin and turns your face to look at him. “Keep your eyes on the door. You’ve been loud for a while now, and I know you didn’t lock the door when you came in,” he gently says, grinning as realisation dawns on you. He’s right. That was quite a risk to take for you to enter the room without locking and going further with this whole thing without checking things over. Fear grips at your chest, though it only intensifies the pulsing happening down below, right here he is burying his cock into. 

“What would your brother think if he sees you like this, writhing like a pure, little nymph and taking my hard cock deep inside your pussy?” Jaebum questions you with a voice so low it almost sounds like a growl. 

You have no idea which triggers the most delightful, yet the most carnal pleasure to roll through your body; the deep voice which vibrates from his chest, his dirty words that are planting these wicked images in your mind, the steady thrusts of his cock inside your heat, or the visual image of getting caught fucking your brother’s best friend, in your brother’s house, while people are partying downstairs and most possibly hanging out in the other rooms present on this floor.

“Fuck, you’re tightening around me. Thinking about getting caught turns you on, huh?” Jaebum says with a furious grunt, yet without missing a single thrust as he rocks his body against yours. He pushes deep and shudders, just as your walls are clenching tight around him. 

“Oh, yeah. That’s it, baby.” 

He keeps muttering the same words over and over again, coming together with his incessant thrusts. You watch as his eyebrows crease, as the veins in his neck are straining, his breathing laboured heavily, and the sounds he keeps making are mixed with a series of moans. You can feel the telltale signs of his release pulsing inside your depth, going in the same rhythm as yours as it begins to rapidly build up inside you. 

Getting lost in the pleasure, Jaebum digs his fingers into your hips and thighs as he continues to savagely pound into you. When once again his body shudders, your body pleasantly trembles at the same time. 

“Look at me, baby,” his strained voice growls, demanding your attention. And you simply give it to him, wanting to look at the one who is giving you this carnal pleasure right in the eyes just to convince yourself that this is real. 

Once your eyes are on him, your body is giving in to the pleasure, Jaebum moves his hand between your rocking bodies. You feel a slight pressure on your throbbing clit as his thumb finds your sensitive bud, and you can feel your muscles clamping around his cock, sucking around his girth as he slides in and out of you at a rapid pace. 

“Come for me, baby,” he growls, just in time you feel the coil in your stomach snapping, then he gives your clit a sharp flick while he buries himself deep inside you. “Come.” 

Under his command, you tip over the edge, shattering into a million pieces that shoot up through you like a fountain. Your chest feels tight when you scream out your climax, yet neither of you cares to stop it as he joins you with his deep moans. Jaebum continues giving you a couple of more thrusts, until you feel him shuddering at the same time your whole body quakes with your final release, and he joins you with a loud shout coming out of his lips, the warmth of his cum filling your tight walls that it almost sends you to another orgasm. 

You almost lose your sense of balance, when you can barely recognise between left and right, top to bottom, until you feel your body—now all hot and covered with sweat—pressing against the sheets beneath you, all messed up under your weight and the rigorous fucking, and the slickness of his cum seeping out of your throbbing center. 

When you feel him lowering your trembling leg down to the mattress, you slowly open your eyes, finding Jaebum bringing one of your hands to his lips. He kisses your wrist, before stepping away to grab his discarded shirt to start cleaning all the mess pooling on the apex of your thighs. 

“Do you think we were too loud?” you whisper to him once he is done and joins you back on the bed, lying right beside you with a content sigh. 

The sounds from the party below have started to grow distant, a sign that the party is slowly winding down, but not completely ending just yet. 

While the rest of the house is still filled with the remaining noises from the party, the room is filled with the silence that falls heavy once all the delirium comes to a halt. 

As you lie there on the bed, with the shards of your climax still continuing to course through your limbs while you are struggling to control your breath, you feel your body warming up with contentment and the presence of Jaebum’s body heat as he pulls you close to his chest. 

Meanwhile, your mind seems to have sobered up, allowing you to process everything that had just happened. 

As if he can feel the gears in your brain working hard, Jaebum shifts on the bed, and once again his face comes into view. 

“Want to get out of here? My new place is within walking distance from here. Maybe we can continue where we left off and finish the rest of the alcohol we still have before your brother catches us with the stolen goods.”

His offer seems genuine. It also provides a chance to escape the possibility of having to deal with reality, and everything else that involves your brother and facing the consequences of your actions. And you do still have some bottles to finish. 

“I like that idea.” 

Your body is still strained and sore, yet it doesn’t take long for both of you to get dressed and pack up all of the remaining bottles to take with you in your escape. 

You can barely remember how you manage to slip away from the house unnoticed, even with the party still lingering and your brother’s guests lounging tiredly everywhere you look, or how you are able to reach Jaebum’s new apartment on your wobbly legs. 

Everything blurs as you continue your business with Jaebum at his place for the rest of the night until morning comes, only that none of it involves finishing the rest of the alcohol that you’ve managed to snatch away from your brother’s party, but has everything to do with the lessons that Jaebum had promised you about embracing pleasure. And you make no effort to put a stop to it when Jaebum continues giving you pleasure until the next day comes, continuing while your minds are completely sober. 

Seems like you actually are terrible with all this one-night stand business, after all. 

— ©Yoonia, all rights reserved. reposting/modifying of any kind, translations, or unsanctioned adaptations of any piece of writing posted on this blog are NOT allowed.

[csprint]

rock, paper, scissors

jay b x female reader content warning: smut, oral, sexual language, ruined orgasm

you’re playing a dangerous game you aren’t so sure you can win. because jaebeom’s not usually needy. and on very rare occasions does he show a particular need for affection and attention. but when he does, you take advantage of those moments as much as you can.

you’re usually the clingy one; the first to grab his hand. the one that initiates cuddles, and you’re usually the first one to show how much you want him with desperate, breathy whines.

he has his moments, and since they don’t happen often, they usually kick in hard. if jay b suddenly got the urge to grab your hand and hold it tight, he would. if he stared at your face at night when he couldn’t sleep and traced over each of your features, he just had to press a kiss to your pouty lips, even though you were sleeping soundly. and if he felt a pang of heat in his stomach, his pants feeling slightly tighter than usual, and lips stinging from biting too hard, he just had to tell you that he needed you. badly.

for weeks, both of your schedules had not been exactly the best. barely seeing each other. touching. and the one time you finally have a short window of opportunity to see each other, you’re hit with one of the worst aching arousals and jay b was also feeling like a bull in rut.

frustratingly, there was only time for one of you to get off, so it all came down to this. a game of rock, paper, scissors. it was your idea.

mistake.

that was a mistake.

there was nothing he took more seriously than this game. his eyes gleaming with a mix of excitement and determination. you can tell he’s really invested in winning. you on the other hand, are trying to play it cool, but your mind is racing. if you win, he eats you out. if he wins, you have to give him oral.

precious seconds was being wasted as you sit across from jay b, curling your scissors into a fist.

“this is what our relationship has come to? betting a children's hand game for a quickie.” you took a few seconds of deep breathing and serious internal contemplation of what choices you must have made in life to have led up to this moment.

his rare moments of neediness.

“i’ve got a meeting to get to, y/n. just lose so i can make it there.” jay b challenged.

best two out of three, you both count down and throw out your chosen hand signals. your heart skips a beat as you see jay b’s choice - rock. you’ve chosen paper, and you can’t help but let out a triumphant smile as you realize you’ve won.

jay b’s face falls, and he looks at you with a pout.

“i won!” you laugh. he rolls his eyes, not amused at being teased. who knew when he’d get another chance like this, another opening in your schedules to see each other. “we’ve got 7 minutes left. make it count.”

he mockingly scorns you before pushing you back on your couch, hovering above you. he starts with open mouthed kisses against your collarbones and trails very, very slowly up your neck until he reaches your lips. nips specially at your top lip, softly, and rubs circles in your sides. you know that jay b loves to take his time throughout most tasks in life, and this includes kissing you. he doesn’t kiss you too often, but when he finally does it’s worth the wait. you doubt there would be a place on your body he doesn’t want to kiss. he’ll continue until you’re a squirming mess.

“you’ve kissed me enough. stop prolonging and get down there, already.” you detach him from your jaw.

he pulled back and sucked his teeth, hiking up your skirt, “so impatient,” he mumbled under his breath.

feeling the contact of his lips against your skin again made you shiver with anticipation, peppering small pecks up the flesh of your thigh. you brought one hand up cupping your breast. your other hand moved to his hair, sliding your fingers through it. jay b lowered his head and places small kisses on your panties. his kisses were teasing and challenging. just the perfect blend of playfulness and intensity, coming close to your cunt but stopping just a few inches away simply just to tease you.

“jay b.” you whined, pushing up your hips to get closer to his face.

he held your waist down and used his index and middle finger to slide the fabric aside and closed the gap between you. his tongue slid through your folds, making you gasp. he circled his tongue around your clit, not adding too much pressure. his fingers gripped your thighs that were unconsciously wrapping around his head. jay b worked his tongue, slurping and licking around your clit. your moans got louder as he removed his hand from your waist and slowly pushed his index finger inside of you, continuing sucking. you moaned lowly as his finger reached your sweet spot.

your grip around his hair tightened as he pumped his finger in and out of your aching hole. with the next push, jay b added his middle finger. he curled them inside of you, his tongue swirling circles now with more pressure. you cried out as your walls clenched, legs shaking, pulling closer to his head.

jay b’s eyes are deep, a very dark and intense brown, and they stared and watched with great concentration as you revel in the knot building up in your stomach. you were close. something which brings a smirk to his face. you felt shivers run down your spine as you felt that familiar feeling inside usually before you come undone.

just as you’re about to reach your peak, jay b suddenly stops, his tongue and fingers ceasing their movements. you’re taken aback by his sudden withdrawal and sat up, confusedly watching him gather himself.

“times up. can’t be late,” he says, his voice casual. you try to reach out for him, but he’s already turning away, grabbing his jacket and heading for the door.

“lim jaebeom!” you glared. he gives you a brief, teasing smile, and then he’s out the door.

you’re left feeling frustrated and teased, your body aching for release.

[veethefreeelf]

JAY B Fic Recs

M - Mature (minors DNI) / F - Fluff / A - Angst / HpE - Happy Ending

None of these works are mine, I tagged all the authors, make sure to go to the authors page, like and reblog their works

The Back-Up - one-shot, 12K - by @inyournightmares97 - full Masterlist -> A / F / HpE - not mature but suggestive

The Leading Lady - one-shot, 11.6K - by @inyournightmares97 again because they have amazing works -> F / HpE

Chocolate Eyes - one-shot, 19.5K - by... you guessed it @inyournightmares97 because they write Jaebeom beautifully -> A / F / HpE

DREAMIN' - one-shot, 15K - by yes, again, @inyournightmares97 -> A / F / HpE

Illecebrous - one-shot, 2.9K - by @flurrys-creativity - full Masterlist -> M / F / HpE

Mistletoes & Christmas sweaters - one-shot, 4.2K - by @flurrys-creativity again, just do yourself a favor and read all their works -> M / F / HpE

Moonlight Café - two-shot, 15.9K - by @milfgyuu - full Masterlist -> M / A / F / HpE

Wet - one-shot, 8.2K - by @spacequokka - full Masterlist -> M / F / HpE

Out of this World - one-shot, 11K - by @kpopchangedme - full Masterlist -> M / A / F / HpE

mistletoe? oh no! - one-shot, 6.9K - by @wonderlustlucas - full Masterlist -> A / F / HpE

Bad Habit Series by @jae-daddy - full Masterlist - please go through their masterlist, their Jaebeom works are unbelievably good -> M / A / F / HpE

Please mini Series by @jae-daddy again because I ALREADY TOLD YOU THEY ARE AMAZING -> M / A / F / HpE

Vermillion Series (Ongoing) by @flowered-mp3 - full Masterlist -> M / A / F / HpE

Far From Home Series by @red-exo - full Masterlist -> M / A / F / HpE

to kill an empire Series by @ahgaseda - full Masterlist -> M / A / F / HpE

Fragrances & Lost Fragrances Series by @jj-ktae - full Masterlist -> minor M / A / F / HpE

Erotica Series by @jj-ktae again because their stories are absolutely brilliant -> M / A / F / HpE

HOLIC Series by @taexual - full Masterlist -> M / A / F / HpE

What I Wouldn't Give mini Series by @flowerbeom - full Masterlist -> M / A / F / HpE

Tension - one-shot, 6.6K - by @flowerbeom again because they are a brilliant writer -> M / minor A / F / HpE

Dating Lessons - two-shot, 18.4K - by @parkhabits - full Masterlist -> M / A / F / HpE

Five Minutes - one-shot, 7.2K - by @parkhabits again because they are an amazing GOT7 writer

Worth Fighting For - one-shot, 5.7K - by @prettywordsyouleft - full Masterlist -> minor M / A / F / HpE

Poets and Parties - one-shot, 5K - by @kpopfanfictrash - full Masterlist -> M / A / F / HpE

Check Your Messages - one-shot - by @kwrittink - full Masterlist -> M / minor A / F / HpE

Taming The Brat Series by @deliriousscenarios - full Masterlist - THIS one is my favorite ever. I've re-read this more times than I can count -> M / A / F / HpE

Before Sunset - one-shot - by @mintjoonlep - full Masterlist -> M / F / HpE

INDEFINITELY Series by @noona-clock - full Masterlist -> A / F / HpE

hypnotic - two-shot, 23.7K - by @tuanhood - full Masterlist - this one is one of my absolute favorites as well -> M / A / F / HpE

[norixseaweed]

Black Out Chapter Master List

Status: Paused

Title: Blacked Out Characters: Jinyoung, Jay B, Fem-OC Rating: 18+ Summary: Yuna is just a girl who wants to live her life to the fullest as much as she can. She’s a hard worker who still likes to have fun. That is until she blacks out at a party and wakes up in a strangers bed. She didn’t remember a single thing. Did she get taken advantage of? Will this event unravel her life into a mess?

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5 - coming soon (maybe?)

[vad-hander]

I Love You More

pairing: Jaebeom x reader

others: Jinyoung, GOT7 members

genre: fluff

warnings: idol GOT7!au, married couple, pure softness, crying

Words: 1,1k

______

short soft one-shot inspired by GOT7's concerts this weekend and them being so emotional and crying and saying a lot of things that tore my heart apart. Jaebeom will always hold a very special place in my heart and I was excited to write this! I haven't written for got7 in years, so let me know, if you're interested in more

alsooo, I've never posted anything this short, so let me know if you enjoy stuff like this and I should be doing more of it!

_____

You stood in the corner of the waiting room, your eyes trained on the only man that actually mattered in your life and as the teardrops streamed down his pretty face your heart squeezed in an attempt to pump blood into your head and steady out its beats. Your heart ached, but you held back from crying  in this moment with him - if he’d see your tears you knew it’d be an undying contest of emotional breakdown and you didn’t want him to go through that. You loved him too much. He only ever deserved love, happiness and much easier life than he was living now. 

Jackson patted Jaebeom’s head and the staffs that filled the room tried to continue with their duties, but also be mindful of 7 crying and sobbing men in the centre of that room. Your gaze shifted to sobbing Mark and the way teared up Youngjae and Bam tried to calm him down. At least this view wasn’t tearing your heart into pieces. As a figure approached you, though, you had to readjust your eyes and focus on the man in front of you. The very next moment Jinyoung’s very warm hand grabbed yours and pulled you behind him. He felt your resistance and turned around, reading your face expression perfectly.

"I think he really needs you to calm him down." Jinyoung pulled onto your arm once again and you followed. "Hey, Seunah" Jinyoung called out in an attempt to whisper, but making it more of a low growl. Jackson, raising his head and seeing Jinyoung pulling on to you took a step back. Giving you space to come closer and giving you two space for privacy. Jaebeom raised his head a little, as he felt the loss of contact and took a few blinks to focus his teary eyes on you. Both Jackson and Jinyoung respectfully took a few more steps back and as you approached Jaebeom a little more, you couldn’t hold back a pout. Jaebeom straightened his back properly and it seemed the tears streamed down his face at a much lower pace. You pursed your lips and took a little step closer, not forgetting precaution and turning around to read the room - everyone seemed busy with themselves and their duties. But in all honesty - you couldn’t just stand and watch him any longer, even if the people watched you two attentively - your heart ached the moment you saw that first tear fall down his face back on stage. 

“You did so well-.“ You still whispered, everyone acted busy, but peoples’ ears were always perked up. Jaebeom blinked more tears down his face. Shit, you only made it worse for him. “Everything went so perfectly. You worked so hard. I’m so proud. These should be happy tears, everything worked out amazing. Right?“ you tried to give Jaebeom a smile, your words only made the tears fall down harder, while Park Jinyoung expected you to do the opposite. “Ah-, love, don’t cry.“ You finally sighed and reached a hand to his face, cupping his cheek and making a lame attempt at catching the teardrops - it did seem impossible. The waterfall that streamed down his face was impossible to stop with a finger. Jaebeom leaned in into your touch and closed his eyes. You tried to caress the softness of his cheek, while not making it too inappropriate for a working environment. “Everyone’s so proud and everyone are so thankful for the things you do. You’ve put so much hard work into this, it’s okay to cry. I can’t even hold back my tears for you and ah-.“ Jaebeom suddenly draped his arms over your shoulders and lost his face in the crook of your neck. You patted his nape in a very weak attempt to calm him down. He seemed crashed, drained and exhausted. You really wished you could lift him up just like that and transfer to bed and let him get as much sleep as he needed - doesn’t matter if its 12 hours or a week. You watched him work so hard all these weeks to make the concerts possible, you watched him all those years make all those things possible while also being a sweet and loving husband to you. “I just hope it’s tears of relief. As long as they’re not tears of pain - it doesn’t matter. We could cry all night long, right?“ You tried to give him a little kiss, forgetting all the work space boundaries in your head, landing your lips on his jaw. You patted his nape a few more times, moving your arms lower - you gave his waist a squeeze and rubbed your face against his shoulder - the sobbing man in your arms seemed to calm down at least a little. 

“I love you.“ you breathed out, somehow in unison with Jaebeom and as shocked as you were at the silly little coincidence, Jaebeom moved back a little and looked at you properly, with no tears falling out of his eyes,  beautiful irises focusing on you. 

“That’s silly of us.“ You giggled, moving your fingers to dry out the tears on Jaebeom’s cheeks. 

“But I, definitely love you more.“ He even made a weak attempt to smile and made you feel more at ease yourself. The air suddenly felt lighter and the second time he tried to make that little smile - the smugness on his face, your chest burned with love. Jaebeom covered your palm with his and moved it closer to his mouth. “I wouldn’t be here without your support.“ You knew exactly what he meant by that, how hard it was for both him and you to get his mind to a better place. You weren’t about to shy away and act like you weren’t behind it all. In a great partnership with the man himself, of course. 

“I know.“ You accepted with a playful nod and watched his lips give your palm a kiss with a smile. You were glad you could refer to dark times with a joke and a smile now. Jaebeom let go of your arm and tried to dry his face with the shirt he wore. 

“Ah!“ Jinyoung materialised behind you, his firm palm on your shoulder making you jump in place. “Nothing like a wife’s touch that could calm a man down.“ He teased happily, wrinkles round his eyes as he smiled were the reason for a little upward motion on the corners of your lips. 

“Sh! Shut up, there are strangers in this room.“ you hissed at the man, feigning annoyance. Jinyoung ruffled your hair with a teasing face expression.

“Hey, show some respect.“ you played back, your unending battle of teasing continuing every time you opened your mouths.

“Right, show some respect to my wife!“ Jaebeom chimed in, regret on his face immediate, as the both of you knew the comeback would be explosive. Jaebeom wrapped an arm around your waist, you not being sure whether he was backing you up or wanted you to back him up in this.

Jinyoung, though, already moved on -  looking at the members and then at his leader and giving you nod. 

don't forget to like and follow for more <3

[spacequokka]

Beautiful Thing | 08

Pairing: Yugyeom x Reader, Jackson x Reader, Jaebeom x Reader, Future GOT7 x Reader Genre: Fluff, Angst, Soulmate AU, Poly AU, Enemies to Lovers AU (Jinyoung) Rating: PG-13 Summary: Yugyeom finds himself at odds with BamBam when he tries to be kind and friendly to you. Word Count: 4.0k Warnings: language ofc

[ Previous | Masterpost | Next ]

Yugyeom felt like he was going to vomit. The butterflies in his stomach wouldn't settle down. His skin had been buzzing since he hugged you at the hotel. He'd tried to tell himself that he was just excited because the situation was new, something he'd never experienced before. However, in the back of his mind, he knew the truth. It was all about you. You were the anomaly.

The group filed onto the smaller private airplane, a courtesy given by the SeoulMate company given the unique situation. It was nicer than he'd expected and a bit more luxurious than the ones he'd traveled in before. Perfect for your first flight with them. With him. You brought up the rear, dragging your small carry-on bag behind you like a dead body. Your lips were curved in the cutest pout he'd ever seen and discontent rolled off you in waves. He slowed his pace until he got to your side.

"Would you like to sit beside me?" He gave you a shy smile. "I'm pretty sure Jackson's gonna sit with us."

BamBam overheard the question and turned around. "What? You usually sit with me."

'Oh...' Yugyeom's eyes widened, and he shrugged a shoulder. "If you can convince Jackson to sit elsewhere...It's her first flight and I wanna keep her company. It's just one time, bro." BamBam's eyes darted to you and narrowed before he turned back around, increasing his pace to disappear among the staff.

"Oh, great. The drama queen's mad at me, too." You sighed loudly and rolled your eyes. When you looked up at Yugyeom, the butterflies went nuts. "You don't have to sacrifice your bromance for me. I'll be just fine. It isn't like I didn't agree with this."

He patted the top of your head with a smile. "He'll get over it. I think a three-hour plane flight is a great time to get to know you. After all, you're a person, not an inconvenience."

Your breath caught for a second, and your mood visibly brightened at his words. "Thank you. It's nice to hear that after all the glares Jinyoung's throwing at me."

"No one's glaring," Jinyoung muttered as he squeezed by and settled into a window seat.

Yugyeom directed you to a window seat on the opposite side of the plane, but you shook your head. "No thanks. I don't need a visual reminder of the impossible physics of this death box."

"Can you please not call it that while I'm in it? Thanks." Mark interjected without looking up from his phone.

"What else should I call it?" You fired back.

"How about 'majestic vessel of life' or something? Anything but that."

"Oh okay. This 'fanciful fucking unicorn' then."

"Language!" Jaebeom called out from somewhere. Yugyeom couldn't help but notice how comfortable you were with bickering with them. Did you even notice it? Though he wished it interactions weren't negative, you fit right in.

"Oh, fuck off." You mumbled under your breath and dropped into the middle seat.

Yugyeom spotting Jackson making his way down the aisle, eyes set on you. He smiled and stood up. You whined as he practically smothered you as he pushed his way to the vacant window seat, crushing you into the seat before letting up. He couldn't help but smile as you blinked owlishly at Jackson as he busied himself with digging around in his bag. "I brought extra stuff in case you need anything." He dropped a water bottle into your hands and put a travel pillow around your neck.

"Jackson, wait—"

Yugyeom filled the seat next to you, looking around to see if the group had all found a seat with his hand out to Jackson. Without being asked, Jackson gave him a water bottle, too.

As usual, Jackson turned into a mother hen with his attention devoted solely to you. It was a refreshing change from being on the receiving end. "The bathroom's in the back, but I'll walk with you if you're uncomfortable walking on your own."

"I know I said this was my first flight, but really, you don't have to go through this much trouble."

He paused and looked you in the eyes. "It isn't any trouble. If anything, it's a pleasure." His face lit up with a wide grin. "I'm doing something useful for you, right? You don't mind, do you?"

Your shoulders drooped in defeat and Yugyeom bit back a chuckle. No one was immune to Jackson's charm. "Yes, this is fine. Thank you, Jackson." You smiled at him. "It means a lot that you care."

A Christmas tree would fail to compare to the light he gave off upon hearing your words. He meant well. Everyone knew that. It'd take patience and reassurance to break him out of his habit of seeking validation. Though they as a group had become accustomed to it, Yugyeom found himself hoping you'd stick around long enough to help them out.

It wasn't long before the pilot came on with his greeting and itinerary with the stewards and stewardesses shooing away electronics and making sure everyone was buckled in properly. Jackson gently took your hand and held it while they explained the standard emergency procedures. You didn't realize you were manhandling the armrest and gritting your teeth.

"It'll be okay. I promise," he whispered, raising your hand to his lips and pressing a soft kiss to your knuckles. Why hadn't Yugyeom thought to do that? "I won't let anything happen to you."

"You can't possibly keep a promise like that." You said flatly. Yugyeom's fingertips grazed your knee a few times before you realized he was itching to hold your other hand. Without thinking, you grabbed his hand and squeezed it when the plane shook and began edging forward down the runway.

"I can!" Jackson said indignantly. "I can swim—"

"We're not going over water." You and Yugyeom said in unison. A tingle sparked between your palms but you didn't show any signs of having felt it too.

"I've been skydiving—"

"You're afraid of heights." You and Yugyeom answered together. Yugyeom glanced at you but your eyes were on Jackson. Did you even hear him?

"Okay, but I'd die to protect you!"

"Jackson," you put your hand on his knee, "It's okay. You don't have to try so hard for me."

"But I want to." He spoke softly with a slight pout.

"Honestly, that you even want to is more than enough for me." It was just enough to cheer him up again. Yugyeom noticed Jaebeom watching, eyebrows creased with concern. When you continued to speak, Yugyeom turned back to you. "But make sure you care about yourself just as much, okay? I mean it."

Jackson nodded, cheeks flushing with color as he looked down at your clasped hands. "Okay."

Soon enough, the plane was in the air and Dallas became a cluster of dots on the ground. You visibly relaxed into your seat as Jackson rubbed the back of your hand with his thumb. Yugyeom wanted to do something like that, but he wasn't sure you'd allow it. You hadn't known him as long or as well as you did Jackson. The monitor in the seat in front of him flickered between advertisements and a thought struck him.

"Hey, we can watch a movie to pass the time." He nudged your shoulder with his. "What kind of movies do you like?"

You looked at him before your eyes went upward. "I'm not too picky, really. Though maybe we could save the scary stuff for later?" When your gaze returned to his, another tingle blossomed over his skin.

"I can work with that." He smiled before touching the screen. A few swipes later and logo music began to play.

The flight was relatively smooth, with only a few patches of turbulence along the way. You leaned against him the entire time, still holding Jackson's hand, eyes glued on the screen. At some point a stewardess came along with food and he found himself sharing popcorn with you. He thought of Jackson's time alone with you and realized that despite you both being surrounded by others, you were still in your own little bubble. Not quite as intimate as sharing a full meal, but basically a movie date. He'd told himself he'd just be friendly, make you feel as welcome as he could. Yet, he couldn't deny the sparks whenever your skin brushed against his. Couldn't stop his thoughts from embracing the idea of you being his soulmate. By the end of the movie, you were dozing off, using Yugyeom's shoulder as a makeshift pillow. He didn't mind one bit.

He entertained himself with sending memes to BamBam, ignoring the fact that he was left on read. He could understand his closest friend's annoyance but he had to admit he was having the time of his life. He'd beg for forgiveness later if needed. Right now, he wanted to enjoy the moment and commit it to memory. When you woke up from your nap, the plane was beginning its descent. You looked out the window and saw the glittering buildings below, signaling your arrival at your destination.

As the plane touched down and taxied to the gate, you and Jackson clasped hands tightly, your eyes closed as if that would make the descent any smoother. Yugyeom found himself humming a song and seized the moment to hold your other hand, mirroring Jackson's calming caress with his thumb. He was more than pleased with himself when you seemingly melted against his arm again, eyes still shut.

"Oh, god tell me when its over." You muttered and he liked that you sought him out for comfort.

As soon as the seatbelt sign turned off, everyone began standing up to gather their belongings from the overhead bins.

"See? We made it!" Jackson exclaimed with a triumphant grin as he unbuckled his seatbelt. You let out a sigh of relief and opened your eyes, returning his smile. "Yeah, we did. This time, at least."

Yugyeom leaned in and caught your gaze. "Are you okay?"

You nodded, feeling shaky but trying to hide it. "Yeah, I'm fine." You attempted to stand up and grab your bag from the overhead compartment but stumbled when the plane jerked suddenly.

"Whoa there," Jackson caught you before you could fall. "Maybe we should wait for everyone else to get off first."

You nodded gratefully and sat back down. BamBam shuffled off the plane with the others, pointedly ignoring Yugyeom. When the plane was finally empty, you stood up again and grabbed your bag without any problems this time.

Yugyeom nodded in agreement before looking at his phone. "Our luggage should be at baggage claim already."

"That's quick," you said as you followed them out of the plane and towards baggage claim. Soon enough, all three of you were standing in front of a carousel waiting for your luggage to come around.

When you spotted your suitcase and stepped away to grab it, Jackson leaned in and whispered, "Are you and Bam gonna be okay? I don't think I've ever seen him this pissed at you of all people."

Yugyeom shrugged. "He can't be mad forever. And I guess it's new for him. He's never had to share my attention with anyone like this before."

"Yeah, he can be pretty childish sometimes." Jackson nodded.

Yugyeom chuckled as you struggled to free your luggage from the moving belt. They both took a step forward to help you but Jaebeom made it to your side first. "He'll be okay. Just needs time to calm down. In the meantime," he tilted his head to the side, eyes still on you, "we can make sure she's having fun."

"Here, let me get that." Jaebeom reached over your shoulder, startling you in the process. As you moved aside for him, he caught a whiff of your perfume, something light and sweet. He grabbed the handle of your suitcase and yanked it off the belt.

"Thank you..." You frowned and it took him a second to realize why.

"Just call me Jay." He set the luggage down and pulled up the handle. The frown went away instantly. "I don't mind."

You fiddled with the suitcase, unable to look at him. "You sure? I don't want to disrespect you or anything in front of the others."

He shrugged and fought a smile as he slipped his hands in his pockets. "Its not like those brats care."

You smirked. "I know, I just...It's not the same is it? I'm not one of them. That and I don't wanna add to your stress if I can help it."

He found himself smiling, touched that you cared about his wellbeing. "As long as you're traveling with us, I'll treat you no differently from them." He gently bumped you with his elbow. "Just say no to Yugyeom and his stupid pranks."

"They're not stupid! As long as you have a sense of humor, they're fun!" Yugyeom pulled you away. "Don't listen to him. He's old and boring."

With a strike like lightning, Jaebeom grabbed the back of Yugyeom's neck and squeezed. "Say that again."

Soon enough everyone's baggage was found and loaded onto the shuttles going to the hotel. Due to the size of the group, they had to split up. Once again, Yugyeom and Jackson insisted on riding with you. Jaebeom caught the nasty look BamBam gave you and he was grateful that Jackson didn't see it. He didn't feel like mediating another argument so soon after the one between him and Jinyoung. The animosity was understandable to a degree. You were an outsider to most of them, and trust was a hard thing to earn in their world. However, since he'd shaken your hand he was beginning to see that Jackson had a point. People with bad intentions give off bad vibes. Ones that, as far as he could tell, you didn't have.

He told himself he'd reserve judgment until later when enough time had passed, but that handshake seemed to change something in him. Cool static had rippled throughout his body when your warm, dainty hand filled his. It'd taken every ounce of control he had to force himself to let go. Holding your hand felt right, as natural as breathing or singing.

And he could see he wasn't the only one affected. Even now you were sandwiched between Jackson and Yugyeom, discussing the things to do in Las Vegas with Jackson holding your hand and Yugyeom's arm around your shoulders. One would never guess you hadn't known them longer than a few days.

He was a romantic at heart. It was hard to say which side he took in this as he'd always imagined having a soulmate of his own. Someone meant just for him, one he didn't have to share with the others like he did everything else in his life. Was that selfish?

Thoughts like that wouldn't help him here and now. When the vans stopped outside their hotel, he remembered the brief phone call he'd had with JYP. Taejoon had predictably snitched on him, stressing that the decision to bring you along was Jaebeom's doing. As a result, any expenses that you occurred were coming out of Jaebeom's pocket. He was lucky he made a decent amount of money from royalties otherwise he'd have trouble booking and paying for your room. The need to keep it a secret from the guys wasn't entirely unfounded. He could see Jinyoung throwing a hissy fit and possibly making you feel like you needed to pitch in. For the sake of peace, it'd be his little secret.

"Here you go," he smiled handing you the key cards to your suite. "It's on the floor below us. Hopefully we won't bother you."

"Thanks—" Your fingers touched his and that soothing ripple of calmness washed over him again. "Don't worry. I've dealt with way worse than this chaos. It's almost like a mini vacation at this point."

Jackson materialized at your side, peering over your shoulder. "Is it a double? Can I room with you if it's a double?"

Jaebeom pushed him away with a hand covering his face. "Don't be eager or weird. She gets a room to herself. She'll be able to sleep in and go down to breakfast."

Jackson pushed his hand away. "But what if she gets lonely? We can't leave her here by herself."

You rubbed his arm with a look of concern Jaebeom was sure couldn't be copied by even the best actresses in the world. "I don't mind. I can't begin to imagine how busy you guys will be. I'd only slow you down and I don't wanna hear Jinyoung's mouth."

Jinyoung scoffed as he pushed by, heading for the elevators. "Wouldn't have to worry about it if you weren't here."

Three things happened simultaneously. Jackson opened his mouth to fire back as Jaebeom turned to tell Jinyoung to be nice. Yet, you beat them both to the punch by speaking up with a forced smile. "Jackson, would you like to see what my room looks like? You can walk me through the hotel room check you were telling me about on the plane."

Your sweet smile and gentle pull on Jackson's arm sucked the tension away in an instant. Jackson turned his attention back to you, eyes alight with his eagerness. "Of course!"

It was weird to have someone else be the voice of peace. The two of you started toward the elevators and Yugyeom joined, pointing at a brochure he'd picked up. BamBam and Mark joined Jinyoung, leaving you three to wait for another one to come back down. Jaebeom adjusted his backpack and joined the queue. He hated that what was supposed to be a simple promotion with fanmeets was slowly dividing the group in two. Hopefully, once it was all said and done, their personal relationships would still be intact.

After an intense game of rock-paper-scissors, Jaebeom and Jackson ended up sharing a room for the duration of their stay. It was the first time since they landed in America that they'd had this much time together. Jackson wanted to sneak down to your room to stay up and talk but Jaebeom wasn't having it.

"Absolutely not."

Jackson flopped down on his bed with a disappointed frown. "Come on, Jaebeom. It's just a little fun. Besides, it's not like I'm asking to sneak out of the hotel."

Jaebeom sat on the edge of his bed, phone in hand as he scrolled through the schedule for the next few days. He sighed without looking up. "It's not about having fun, Jackson. We need to be careful about how we handle things with her here."

"But she isn't like other people we've met. She's different," Jackson insisted, his voice laced with a sincerity that made Jaebeom pause. There was something different about you, something that made everyone act a bit out of character.

"Different or not," Jaebeom finally said, locking his phone and meeting Jackson's gaze. "We have to maintain some professionalism. We can't set precedents that we might regret later."

Jackson rolled onto his side, propping his head up with his hand. "You like her, don't you?"

The question was abrupt, and Jaebeom felt a defensive wall go up instinctively. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"Everything," Jackson shot back softly. "Because if you have feelings for her—even purely platonic ones—then it makes sense why you're being extra cautious. You care."

Jaebeom rubbed his temples, feeling the onset of a headache. "I just met her, Jackson."

"Love at first sight is a thing, y'know. There's nothing wrong with trusting your gut and just going with it."

He sighed deeply, hating that he had to be the one to burst Jackson's bubble. "You say that a lot don't you? Throw yourself all in for anyone who catches your eye and shows you the tiniest bit of attention and care just for, what, it all to fall apart? Love at first sight seems to leave you alone and heartbroken too often, doesn't it?"

Jackson went silent, the easy smile fading from his face as Jaebeom's words settled over him like a heavy blanket. For a moment, the room was thick with unspoken thoughts and regrets, punctuated only by the distant hum of Las Vegas beyond their window.

Finally, Jackson let out a deep breath and sat up, swinging his legs off the bed to face Jaebeom more directly. "Maybe you're right," he admitted quietly, "but every time it feels real, feels like it could be the thing that changes everything. Isn't it worth the risk?"

Jaebeom didn't answer immediately. He knew Jackson's heart was in the right place. It always was. But as their leader, it was his job to think about the consequences, to protect not just his own heart but also those of his bandmates—and now, seemingly, yours.

"Perhaps," he finally conceded, "but remember we have our responsibilities. We're here for work first." He glanced up at Jackson, noting the genuine confusion in his eyes. "Let's try to keep things simple and not complicate matters further."

Jackson nodded slowly, though his disappointment was palpable. He lay back down, staring at the ceiling. "Alright, Jaebeom. I'll keep my distance. For now."

Jaebeom felt a twinge of guilt watching Jackson's enthusiasm dim—a brightness that was rare in the often grueling routine of their industry—but he knew boundaries were essential, especially with so much at stake professionally.

Was it bad that Yugyeom wasn't as bothered by the tears as he used to be? Now that they'd been given dummy devices to wear to keep up the ruse of "searching" he thought he'd feel even worse about lying to their fans. They truly believed they had a chance to pair with a member of the group. It was wrong, immoral.

Yet when he filed backstage with the others, he couldn't help but smile when he saw you tucked away in a corner with a notebook in your lap. As everyone began to change and found a stylist, he found himself wandering over to you.

"Hey there." He plopped down in the chair next to you and you jumped.

"Oh, jeez!" You put the hand holding the pen over your heart. After a quick glance around the room, your gaze found his. "It's over already?"

"It's been two hours. Have you been writing this entire time?" He leaned closer to see your notepad but you quickly hid it against your chest. "Oh, come on. It can't be that bad. May I see, please?"

You hesitated, biting your lip as you considered his request, then slowly lowered the notebook. "Only because it's you," you said with a half-smile, handing it over. "Tell no one that I let you do this."

Yugyeom's eyes lit up as he gently took the notebook from your hands. His gaze flicked across your neatly scribbled words, a mixture of excitement and curious respect etching across his features. As he read, his expression softened, and occasionally, a chuckle escaped him.

"Is this about my dandelion tattoo?"

You shrugged shyly. "I noticed it when we were on the plane. I couldn't stop thinking about it so...I put it in words."

"This is really pretty." Yugyeom said sincerely, looking up at you with admiration. "The way you describe it makes me even happier that I got it. And this part," he pointed to a line in the middle of the page, "where you talk about how music can be a person's dandelion—it's beautiful."

Flattered by his compliments, he watched as your cheeks deepened in color as you fought the smile. "Thank you, Yugyeom. That means a lot coming from you."

He nodded and handed back the notebook. "You should keep writing. Who knows? Maybe one day you'll write a song for us."

The idea made you laugh softly, the sound mingling with the constant buzz of activity around you. "Oh sure. Maybe I will," you agreed playfully.

Yugyeom stood up just as one of the staff members called him over. Before he left, he turned to face you again. "Don't forget us when you become a famous writer," he joked with a wink.

"I won't," you promised, watching him walk away before turning back to your poetry.

[ Previous | Masterpost | Next ]

[dragonnarrative-writes]

Data Breach

Read on AO3

Word count: 12.8k

Alternatively titled "Lockdown."

CW: Public partial-nudity, references to sex work, Kidnapping, implied trafficking, threats of violence, anxiety/panic, body horror, brief mentions of medical trauma, character being hunted, brief mention of cannibalism, guns, knives

Notes: Naya "Bambi" Walker and Veronica "Bricks" Mason are my characters. Morgan "Sparrow" Voss belongs to @sentientcave.

I'm very excited because this is my first "complete" fic. And I wrote it within my first year of posting fanfiction! Thanks to everyone who has been here with me through it all!

The genetic and cybernetic enhancements that the public took for granted were a drop in the bucket. No one protested the same-day medical procedures for aesthetics and practicality and security. What harm is a microchip to automate one’s home, modified musculature that needed less exercise to maintain? Who was ever going to protest genetically coded locking mechanisms?

Soldier modifications are a violation of human rights. The deployment of those soldiers isn’t, unless they use their enhanced abilities to commit a war crime. But the process of modification, experimental and unregulated, driven by greed, desperation, a cold war that bled and screamed…

In the early days of accelerated genetics, on the heels of the prosthetic revolution, things had been hellish. Rejected limb grafts.    Explosively contagious viral infections previously rare in humans. Incompatible bones and organs and structures drowning experimental groups in their own fluids. Hunting and prey drives that only became apparent on the battlefield.

The deployment of modified soldiers isn’t a violation of human rights. But if even a single civilian is caught in the crossfire, it’s a war crime.

What the governments of the world did to the men and women who served them - and the populations they were supposed to serve - was a flood of destruction that led to international court-martial and proposed executions.

Only proposed though.

Naya, green around the gills from her latest information dive, wonders if maybe those proposals had more merit than she’d initially thought.

The files she found about the modified joint task forces, the Ghost Team JTFs, are more horrifying than anything she’s ever seen. Bone and dental removal, replacement, and additions. Brain implants, deeper and more invasive than most civilian interface units, which go just under the skin. Increased metabolism, shortening of the digestive tract, automatic injectors with stim packs that keep soldiers awake and lucid through unimaginable horrors.

Her hands shake, spilling tea leaves on the counter as she disconnects from her VPN network. She’d stumbled upon the initial files surrounding what had been Task Force 141 days ago, had quickly skimmed and duplicated their contents to read and review on her own time. Those had been bad enough. Reading about a Scottish soldier, shot in the head and brought back only to have his body altered. Another sergeant suspended in a tank as his genetically altered body attempted and failed to process all of the poisons they wanted him resistant to. A lieutenant who’s frontal lobe was hacked through to make room for a larger processor. The Captain captured and tortured and changed for investigating what was happening to his unit…

And that was before the videos.

Finding more information on Ghost Teams is virtually impossible. Official reports, even the ones she breaks into, list the 141 as defunct. Her fellow archivists don’t have any other information, and aren’t willing to help her dive again.

>>>Flower: even if the GTs are still alive >>>Flower: it’s too dangerous >>>Flower: too many powers want them to stay buried >>>Flower: we’ll lose everything if we go digging >>>Bambi: you don’t have any contacts i could ask? >>>Flower: i‘m sorry bambi

There’s more security, when she returns to the original server, too much for her to feel comfortable to try to force her way in. Her bots identify a couple of devices on the network that might be exploitable - a printer, two coffee machines - but she leaves them alone, for now.

Instead, she trawls conspiracy theory forums for any mention of experimental modifications, missing soldiers, and questionable medical equipment shipments. Experience means her bots filter through everything, which saves her more than a few headaches, but also means that she waits hours before a possible hit. And that hit is a dead end.

The hours turn to days before she’s able to find an abandoned, locked forum with deleted answers to heavily coded questions. The last post is seven years old, ostensibly informing community members of upcoming changes to the forum. The veil over the warning of government surveillance is thinner than tissue paper.

It’s the closest thing she has to a lead, so she makes a new post and sets her bots to monitor it.

>>18|\/|48(Guest): GTJTFs producing new 141 units? Leaked production reports, new specs?

She doesn’t expect a response, but maybe an auto-responder will give her a clue of where to look next. So it’s jarring when she gets an encrypted email with a reply from “dimentionspoker@noreply.co,” an hour later.

new units? have info on old units if you need references. let me know.

—

The middle city isn’t the safest, for all that the well-to-dos topside like to pretend that the truly unsavory elements aren’t that close to their picturesque lawns. Naya’s lived here her whole life, though she’s worked above a time or two. Even so, she’s never ventured this close to the freight shafts down to the docks.

The bar she steps into is loud and smells like liquor and motor fluid. It’s dim, and smoky, and she feels eyes on her as she makes her way to the bar. Her interface lights up with pings and an attempted ID and bank chip skim. All they get for their trouble is her least informative ID tag - Bambi.

The bartender, a large bodied person with the simple tag of Engine, operates behind the bar with four cybernetic arms. There’s no digital queue for her to log in to, or even a service request button on the seemingly organic wood bar. So she stands, hands folded on top of the bar for them to finish pouring drinks and notice her standing there.

Just as the barkeep’s attention slides her way, a warm body presses up behind hers. She stiffens as a the person jostles her to lean heavily on the bar. “Eng! Another for me. And whatever my cute new friend wants.”

A refusal is on the tip of her tongue, but when she looks up into slitted yellow eyes haloed by curled black and purple freeform locs, she gets an encrypted message.

>>>Bricks: Hello Bambi. >>>Bricks: Order a drink and come with me.

—

"They shouldn't be locked up. They're people, not mindless killing machines."

Across the table, under the dim lights, the woman called Bricks cocks her head. She’s a true cyborg, someone who’s modifications are probably keeping them alive. The cybernetics of her left arm extending well into her ribcage. She doesn’t hide it. Under dark overclothes, a slouching shirt exposes the metal of her collarbones, the servos that whir as she breathes. She swirls her glass of Jack and Coke with an amused look on her face as a barely muffled moan pierces through loud music.

Naya takes a deep breath to keep from fidgeting. It took three months to arrange even this meeting with the elusive American arms dealer, in the back of this dingy bar on a busy Friday. She wasn't about to lose the lead just because she could hear lewd comments and barely muffled squeals of pleasure from the nearby hall to the washrooms. The more concerning noise was coming from behind her, anyhow, the thump of knives into a dart board, distressed beeping from the unlucky mini-droid bound to the target.

"You want me to set up a meeting with the Watcher," Bricks drawls, sitting back in her chair. Her pointed cybernetic nails drum against the table. She doesn’t bother to whisper, but both of them have been disrupting any listening devices in range. "So you can make sure that Price's monsters are being treated humanely?"

"They're not monsters," Naya hisses.

"You've never seen them." It's not a question.

"I don't need to see them to know they shouldn't be kept locked in cages."

Bricks freezes with her glass halfway to her lips. Her eyes narrow. “Cages?”

“That’s what I saw.” Gritting her teeth, Naya hisses. “Look. You know what it means to be augmented, what extensive modifications are like. But without anesthesia? I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, not even my worst enemy.”

“You’d be surprised what I would wish on my worst enemy, sweetheart.” Bricks chuckles and throws back the last dregs of her drink. "But you know what? Fine."

"Fine?"

"Fine. You want in so bad? I'll set up a meeting with the Watcher, and Price."

Well. That was easier than expected. "What'll it cost me?"

"Oh, your whole life, probably. Your whole world view, certainly," Bricks chuckles. She gives Naya an obvious once over, gaze lingering on her breasts. "But you don't owe me any more than a quick flash of your tits."

That does make Naya’s confidence falter. "W-what?"

"You heard me. C'mon, give me a little peek, and I'll send a message right now. You can have Price's monsters off their leashes by the end of the week." Bricks grins, slit pupils pulsing wide with interest. "We don't even have to go anywhere, just pull down your shirt a little bit."

"I'm not..." Naya looks around, furtively. "This isn't exactly priv-" She flinches as she's interrupted by a loud moan, followed by a cheer from the rest of the bar.

"You're asking me to let your hands get real dirty, sweetheart." Bricks stands and circles the table to crowd Naya against the wall. She dips down to breathe into her ear. "And unless you want word to spread of a cute, clean cut, little topsider digging into illegal soldier mods, you're gonna pull your tits out and take the money I give you, after, Bambi."

There’s something behind the predatory look in the taller woman’s eyes. A challenge. She’s called Naya’s bluff, hasn’t she? When she refuses, Bricks will send her off with a laugh and a pat on her ass. And she’ll be back at square one, unable to face the danger of diving deeper again.

But Naya’s never been accused of knowing when to back down.

It’s the work of a moment to have the various video feeds in the room start a ten second loop. Her bots use movement patterns to make the video seem natural to anyone not looking closely. Bricks makes an interested noise when the video feed from her cybernetic eye continues showing Naya’s darting eyes and regular breaths. Her organic eye takes in the way Naya’s hands come up to unclasp the front of her shirt.

She takes a deep breath before hooking her fingers into the neck of her undershirt. She looks down as she inches it down to reveal the scalloped edge of her bra, instead of looking to see if Bricks is aroused or amused or some other, worse thing.

Before she can truly expose herself, a warm hand touches her wrist. “So eager. Not even gonna give me a little tease?”

>>>Bricks: Nice trick with the cameras, but you’re going to call attention.

Naya tips her chin up and immediately regrets it when Bricks leans down to meet her. Her breath shivers between their lips. When a metal arm comes up to block her view of the rest of the room, she turns her face away.

>>>Bambi: It’d be more suspicious if I let everyone have a clip for distribution.

“Smart girl,” Bricks whispers against her temple. “Take the credits.”

The fund transfer Bricks initiates has a public comment attached. ‘Classy. Could almost be the real thing.’ Naya glares up at Brick’s smirking face as she accepts the transaction. Two hundred. It feels like too little and too much money at the same time. Almost immediately, she gets inquiry pings from six other patrons the bar.

“And that’s your alibi,” Bricks chuckles, stepping back so quickly that she barely has time to put herself to rights. “Let’s go, sweetheart.”

—

Naya tries not to fidget in the freight elevator, down, down, down, into The Throat. Bricks's arm is a possessive weight on her shoulder. On the other side of the lift, a startlingly tall man stares at them through the holes in a cloth sack. When she meets his eyes, something writhes where his mouth should be.

"Eyes to yourself," Bricks growls when he takes a half step in their direction. Her cybernetic arm crackles warningly.

The man visibly considers his options before making a guttural sound. A thick appendage, tongue or tentacle, Naya can’t really tell, pokes out from under the hood. He mutters something she doesn’t understand in under-tongue. Bricks hisses something back, pushing Naya behind her as she takes a threatening step forward. The man flinches, then crowds himself into his corner. He doesn’t even look in their direction for the rest of the descent.

When the doors open, Bricks holds her back until the man leaves, then steers her out into the street. Naya's been under-city before, but not in this bloc. The air is just as stale and hazy as she remembers, but this shaft doesn't see as much vertical commuter traffic as some of the others, so the street is dark instead of lit with neon. The faintest bit of light filters down from straight above.

Groping for something to say, she asks, "Did you know that guy?"

Bricks snorts, keeping an arm around her's waist as she steers her along. "Yeah."

“What did he want?”

She gets an uninterested shrug. “The same thing any bottom dwelling opportunist wants.”

It’s not hard to imagine what she means. When she doesn't say anything else, Naya searches for another topic. She swallows her pride and forces herself to say, "Thank you for setting up this meeting."

"Don't thank me yet, sweetheart. You're gonna hate me soon enough."

"I know it's dangerous for you," she insists as Bricks draws her down a side street. Dangerous is an understatement, if the Ghost Teams are so far gone that they’re experimenting on human beings. "Even if things are hard, moving forward, I appreciate your help."

Bricks doesn't answer. Instead, she knocks on a barred door. It opens a crack, and she and the other person hiss low words at each other. A shining green eye looks Naya up and down, the door shuts, and Bricks draws her away.

They stride, briskly, back to the main street. Bricks asks, "Do you have a respirator?"

"Yes."

"Put it on, don't speak."

Wordlessly, Naya unfolds the mask from her pocket and covers her mouth and nose. Bricks pulls a dark scarf from her shoulders and wraps it around Naya’s head and neck, and then drops a poncho over her head. Somehow, the mercinary looks bigger in just her thin shirt, the muscles and metal in her shoulders more pronounced.

Ten minutes into their silent walk, a man melts from the shadows and starts walking on Naya's other side. Though she can’t see much under his baggy clothes, his gait speaks to digitigrade modifications. When she glances up, he has a faceplate under his own hood. His voice, when he speaks, is robotic. "Bricks."

"Roach."

“You’re looking smug and determined.”

“I’m on a very… interesting job.” An encrypted message gets passed between the two of them, and Naya frowns behind her mask. She shouldn’t be able to tell that a message was sent, though, so she bites her tongue. Bricks smirks down at her, then turns her eyes forward. “What’s on your mind?”

"Shadows are hunting you. Seven thousand credits."

"That's insulting," Bricks dismisses. "Mace take the job?"

"That's insulting," Roach parrots back. Somehow, his metered and inflectionless voice sounds amused. A flurry of encrypted messages flows between them. Once those have finished, he says, "Come see us when your business with the Watcher is done." And then he fades away into the shadows again.

"Good job," Bricks whispers. "Stay silent. Keep taking deep breaths. Walk straight ahead. Don't run." And then she ducks down a side street, leaving Naya alone in the dark.

Fuck.

She keeps putting one foot in front of the other. Measured. Brisk, but unhurried. A couple of people pass on the other side of the street, then a man passes on her side. Under her poncho, she palms her pocket knife, but no one spares her a second glance.

After a full minute, Bricks slides out of the next alley and falls into step with her, a cigarette that smells like real tobacco between her lips. In her cybernetic hand, she has a twitching, bleeding length of what looks like an octopus tentacle the size of Naya’s forearm.

"You can talk now,” she says. “But you don't want to ask about this."

—

The respirator makes a lot more sense when Naya is led to a shaft to the Belly.

She’s never been to the middle level of the true undercity. Technically, no one should live in this industrial level, so there’s very little in the way of individual commerce and amenities. There is an abundance of dead “topsider tourists” every year, mangled and hacked to drain all of their resources before anyone can realize that they haven’t come home.

This lift is much smaller, just big enough for her to stand behind Bricks as the woman primes her arm. The edge of a plasma knife glows blue from within the mechanics of her bicep. When Naya activates the plasma in her own knife, Bricks looks over her shoulder at the near silent hum.

“You ever use that before?”

“Once.”

That earns an interested noise as the other woman faces forward again. “On a person?”

“…No.”

“Well, there’s a first time for everything,” is all she says about that as the elevator shudders to a stop. “Stay behind my right arm. If I tell you to drop, you fall to the ground and don’t move until I tell you.”

When the door opens, it’s into a pitch black alley. The only light is the obscured gleam from with Brick’s left shoulder. Something in the darkness hisses. Bricks strides forward, and Naya has no choice but to follow after.

They walk for a few minutes without incident before Bricks knocks on a nondescript door. Next to it, a biometric scanner creaks open and scans one of her eyes, then one of her metal fingers. Naya flinches at the noise of a series of locks grinding open.

A stern faced blonde woman is on the other side of the door when Bricks gestures Naya inside. She’s not wearing a respirator, but then, neither is Bricks. The woman doesn’t say anything, so Naya doesn’t either. She just waits for Bricks to finish securing the door, then returns to her spot just behind her.

“Watcher,” Bricks greets with clear good humor. “I brought you a little something.”

Naya huffs a surprised breath from her nose, but stays silent. The Watcher. The overseer of at least one of five active Modified Task Forces. She looks so… normal. A woman in her mid forties, maybe, face lined with stress but open. Naya feels a little thrown off. When the lights flicker, however, she catches the red shine of a cybernetic eye. Whatever mods she has, they’re hidden so well that Naya can’t even sense them.

The Watcher’s eyes scan her for a moment before she’s looking back to Bricks. Naya only has a moment to wonder why she hasn’t been pinged before she asks, “Alive?”

“You always pay more when they’re alive.”

What? Naya stumbles backwards until she hits the door. “What?”

Bricks throws a grin over her shoulder. “I told you not to thank me.” Turning back to the Watcher, she says, “Thirty thousand credits. Had a run in with the King on the way here.”

“No one told you to bring her alive. Fifteen, and we void the Shadows bounty on you.”

“Twenty five. You want her alive, trust me. And I can handle the Shadows on my own.”

Naya gapes at the two of them. A quick glance over her shoulder and query to the door confirms that the locks won’t open again without a lot more force than she could manage, even if she wouldn’t have to fight Bricks to get out. And the Watcher… isn’t motivated to let her live. Fuck. The little knife in her hands feels less than useless.

“She wanted to meet you,” Bricks continues, crossing her arms. “And Price.”

That makes the Watcher pause and look over Naya again. “Oh?”

“She used his name,” Bricks confirms. “Real skilled code-breaker.”

“Hm.” The Watcher frowns, then says. “Thirty thousand is a low ball offer, then.”

“She thinks you’re keeping the task force in cages,” Bricks chuckles. “I want to watch when she sees them for the first time.”

That gets a huff of amusement. “Thirty thousand and a show… Deal. Bring her.”

When the Watcher turns away, Bricks looks back at Naya with a surprisingly gentle smile. “Good job. Now comes the hard part. Let’s go.”

“What’s going to happen to me?” she doesn’t want to walk forward, but there’s not much else to do. She tries to stand away from Bricks, but it’s hard in the narrow hallway.

“Nothing, now,” Bricks laughs. “Got you through the door alive, and Watcher can always use a code breaker.”

It’s hard not to feel stupid. Naya struggles to keep her voice even. “So this was just… a bounty for you?”

“Better me than König.” Bricks wiggles the tentacle that she’s still holding in metal fingers. “And better now than when an actual bounty was on your head. Diving into secure government information brings out the worst kind of trouble. The Shadows would have killed you in your bed. Kortac would have chipped you, if they decided keeping you was worth it. This way, everyone gets what they want.”

“Except me,” Naya points out.

“You’re still alive, for now,” the Watcher points out from a few steps ahead, without looking back. “Considering the problems you’ve caused me, it’s tempting to kill you myself. But Bricks is right. I can always use a Breaker.”

“I don’t do that professionally,” Naya protests weakly.

The Watcher doesn’t break stride. “You do, now.”

They get into another elevator, big enough for eight people. There aren’t any floor indicators, but as soon as the doors close, it starts to descend. Wrapping her arms around herself, Naya shivers. At this rate, she realizes, she may never see the sky again. She’ll be locked in a cage next to the 141, underground, let out to circumvent code for… what? To support more killing? More human experimentation? If she doesn’t cooperate, will they experiment on her? Put a processor in her brain to erase everything about her except for her skill?

Tears gather in the corners of her eyes, and she can’t help a sniffle.

“None of that,” comes the surprisingly gentle voice of the Watcher. When she approaches, she puts a gentle hand on Naya’s shoulder. “You’re here now. There’s no going back. But we take care of our own.”

Bricks snorts. “For given values of taking care of. You are keeping the boys in cages after all.”

“That’s not helpful,” the Watcher says, producing a tissue from her pocket and dabbing at Naya’s eyes. She pushes the makeshift hood back and gently removes her respirator, scanning her face with hard blue eyes. Eventually, she asks, “Why did you come here, Bambi?”

Shoulders coming up around her ears, Naya gets the feeling that because I’m an idiot isn’t the answer she’s looking for. She looks down at her sensible shoes, bracketed by the Watcher’s own worn work boots, and confesses, “Bricks said I could meet with you, and Price. And… I thought I could… encourage you to treat the modified soldiers more like people than animals.”

“And I suppose this encouragement was going to come with a threat to leak records to the public?” The Watcher’s mouth twitches into a sardonic smile when Naya looks up at her again. “Bold.”

Bricks chuckles. “Naive.”

“Hopeful. And some of the best plans are the simplest,” the Watcher dismisses.

Naya wouldn’t call her plan to connect to the building’s intranet and threatening to disrupt all of the life support systems “naive.” Now that she’s locked in, it feels like a distinctly hopeless course of action. She’ll have to think of something else, fast.

The Watcher steps away as the elevator comes to a stop. The doors open into a large control room, huge observation windows giving a 360 degree view out into dimly lit halls. Bricks ushers Naya out, heavy hands on her shoulders, until she pushes her into a chair facing a window to the left side of the room.

“Did we miss feeding time?” Bricks grins and pulls a puzzle ball from her bag. Her cybernetic hand twitches and whirs as it clicks through combinations.

“Luckily for Bambi, yes.”

Before Naya can ask what feeding time entails, something drops from the ceiling on the other side of the glass, startling a yelp from her. It’s a man, tall and lean, slitted eyes shining a red orange as he stares at her face through the glass. He’s half dressed, only in loose pants. Thick, dark streaks of something wet cover his chest and splatter down his legs. The grin that splits his pretty face puts three pairs of sharp canines on display, stained red.

The Watcher pushes a button, an intercom. “Gaz.”

“Who’s this cute little thing, Laswell?” Naya shivers as Kyle “Gaz” Garrick looks her up and down. He looks just like his personnel file, except for a wildness around his eyes that changes his face from welcoming to something dangerous. “Could practically smell her from the street.”

“Back away from the glass, you’re filthy. What the hell did you roll in?”

The man ignores the Watcher, face going soft as he leans down to get on a level with Naya. “Hello, honey. Such a pretty girl, what are you doing down here? You a friend of Bricks?”

Something about his crooning voice makes Naya’s hair stand on end. At the same time, she finds that she can’t look away from the man’s eyes as he tilts his head. They’re such an interesting color, and he keeps shifting ever so slightly in ways that draw her eyes to follow. He jerks quickly to one side when her eyes dip down to the red and brown splashed down his chest, then smiles when she looks back at his face. His teeth - even the extra ones - are perfect and red. Naya’s heart beats a little faster.

A loud pop and sudden flash makes Naya jump as Gaz reels back with a snarl.

“I told you not to touch the glass,” the Watcher grumbles. “Clean up. Make yourself presentable. And remind the others to put their masks on.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” he hisses. With one last, sweet smile to Naya, he turns and strides away before leaping up to grab an exposed beam and hoist himself into the shadows above the observation room. He disappears in the space of a moment. No matter how Naya squints, she can’t tell where he’s gone.

“Don’t look any of them in the eye,” Bricks whispers from close behind, chuckling at the way Naya jumps. “They’re predators, sweetheart, and you’re the sweetest bite of prey they’ve had in a long while.”

“Bricks,” the Watcher (Laswell?) chides. “Get her keyed in. Bambi, you’re not to be alone in here. We’ll get you interfaced with security so you know how to do a lockdown sequence before you’re introduced to the Task Force.”

When she’s handed an interface chip, Naya blanches. “I can’t, I don’t have a hard disk reader. Why do I need to know the facility’s lockdown sequences?”

“There’s no where in this facility that they can’t get,” Bricks replies, distracted as she opens a floor panel to extract a series of wires, and what looks like a very robust integration cable. “And if you’re going to work here, you’re going to need to be able to keep them from dragging you off and eating you.”

“Bricks.” Laswell snaps. To Naya she explains,    “Everyone who works here needs to know how to lock down in case of emergency.”

Naya gapes. “Emergencies? They can - They’re not -! They have full access to the facility?”

“Of course. They can get out of the facility, too,” Bricks snickers. “Who’s going to stop them?”

“Bricks!”

“All of the records say that they’re severely restricted.” The tight squeak in Naya’s voice is undeniable. “What do you mean they could eat me?”

“Old records,” Laswell answers without looking. A terminal lights up under her fingertips. “The only way the SAS would let us keep the facilities without bomb chips. Let me know when you’re ready for input.”

“The part about eating me?” Naya flinches as Bricks circles behind and pushes her hair up to expose the port beneath her left ear.

“If you’re as good as I think you are, you don’t have to worry about that,” Bricks says, shoving the cable into place. “Go.”

“What-”

Laswell launches the integration before she can get the question out. Naya’s whole body jolts, brain flooded with sudden input. She doesn’t dive into the data so much as she’s dragged under the tidal wave of the facility.

The whole structure unfolds around her, five floors, twelve stories down, three shafts up, two elevators, one stair. She’s in the observation tower, which descends three more floors. Heat, cooling, air filtration, power, food storage, office of Watcher One Kate Laswell, office of Bravo One John Price, research labs east and south, conference rooms, break rooms, sleeping quarters, inventory, directory of personnel.

Access Denied.

It’s nothing to shuffle the alert away. Asset Records. Veronica “Bricks” Mason, Gary “Roach” Sanderson, Mason “Mace” Ward, [Redacted] Nikto, Morgan “Sparrow” Voss. The list goes on. Task Force 141. Kyle “Gaz” Garrick, John “Soap” MacTavish, John “Bravo One” Price, Simon “Ghost” Riley. Vital statistics steady, duplicate identification signals, three dead copies, one living set. Security, kill switch overrides. These doors won’t close, but they’ll tell the observation tower that they have. Interesting.

Diving a layer deeper, she observes three separate security records. One is distressingly familiar, the records she’d found before, that spurred her to find Bricks, full of echoes of old code, now that she can see it. Then the one with logs going to Watcher One Kate Laswell, current and accurate. Except that the third log indicates security discrepancies and pings to KGKLJMJPSR. She logs the discrepancy on her own, internal system, a reminder to see if she can piggyback on someone else’s clearance.

Now that she’s thinking about it, she scans for what her clearance is supposed to have access to. It’s the second level, the one that doesn’t actually close the security doors surrounding the servers, sleeping quarters, and the observation tower. Well, that won’t do. She makes a digital copy of KL’s access and patches it into her own.

Just as she finishes, four ID tags simply labeled “Ghost” enter the lowest observation tower floor. That’s a glaring red security alert, and it only doubles in urgency as he accesses the hatch to the system port cable.

“Oh, that’s bad,” she hears herself say aloud as she gropes, blindly for the cable in her neck. “Ghost is accessing, I need to disconnect before he-“

Three more security alerts come up as the ID tags for Bravo One, Gaz, and Soap appear around the top floor of the observation tower, their floor. Naya quickly circumvents the overrides on the blast doors, and half observes rolling shutters covering the windows as Laswell makes a startled noise. Unfortunately, Ghost finds her while she’s distracted.

And he is a ghost, sliding between the layers of Naya’s own security code like a cold breeze. He rifles through her ID cards before she can even try to lock down. When she tries to lock him out of her interface, he slams through so fast it sends her reeling. Unfortunately for him, and for her, he trips over her Brain Blast in the process. The packet of musical theater data explodes to override everything she’s connected to, knocking her out of her connection to the facility and blaring Ohmigod You Guys through the speaker systems of the facility.

“What the fuck,” Veronica Bricks Mason shouts, covering her ears.

“Sorry, sorry,” Naya yelps. She manually reopens her access to the facility and cuts the sound. Her head spins with new information that she doesn’t have time to let her organic brain process. Ghost is nowhere to be found, but she doesn’t wait around to see where he pops up again before locking herself down and physically removing the cable from her neck. “Ghost tripped my security protocol.”

“You shouldn’t be able to influence any part of the facility,” Watcher One Kate Laswell observes. “Which means you’re every bit as good as Bricks says you are. Why did you lock down the tower?”

“Just this floor,” she answers absently, looking around as her interface flashes and labels new data points about her surroundings. It takes a moment for her to filter through everything enough to focus. “Bravo One, Gaz, and Soap were approaching as Ghost tapped in on the bottom floor.”

“I should have charged more,” Asset:Mason chuckles.

“Maybe you should have, Veronica,” Naya replies without thinking.

The woman just laughs. “Oh ho ho, you’re even better than I thought.

Watcher One Laswell drums her fingers on the table. “You don’t have a hard disk reader. Can you still access the facility without a hard line?”

Naya has to shake her head before she runs a quick system check. A ping to the 141 Facility gets a happy little ping back. “Yeah. My, um… my interface is a bit more robust than standard.”

Watcher Laswell nods. “Noted. Reset the security settings.”

Naya almost does it on autopilot, but stops herself. Running a quick check, she shivers. “They’re still out there. Three of them.” When Laswell only nods, she nudges the blast doors and security shutters to open. It takes a moment, but eventually they start to rumble to life.

Worryingly, when she can see through the windows again, Bravo One, Gaz, and Soap are no where to be found. The only active vitals in the facility say they’re right across the glass from where Naya is sitting. It sends a chill down her spine. Diving through the facility systems, she had felt untouchable. But she’s been outmaneuvered again. Unless…

She stands and leans closer to the glass, looking up into the shadows above.

Three pairs of eyes shine down at her from the darkness.

“They’re up there,” Naya whispers. When Laswell simply answers in the affirmative, she activates the intercom with a gulp. “Um. I’m sorry about the noise.”

“That’s quite alright, sweetheart,” a deep voice answers. “Ghost has a way of startling pretty girls. And I quite like a bit of theater.”

Well it’s not Gaz, and there’s no hint of a Scottish accent. “Are you… Bravo One? John Price?”

“You are a clever one.” One of the pairs of eyes squints and tilts. Another shuts, and doesn’t open again. Soap’s tags move a short ways away as Price continues. “Bricks says you asked to meet me.”

“Yes, sir,” Naya says, and then remembers too late that Bricks said not to meet their eyes. She tears her eyes away and jumps at the sight of John “Soap” MacTavish standing a few feet down the hall in front of her.

He looks good, surprisingly so. His hair is long, braided mohawk shining. A gleaming scar is the only indication of the wound that almost killed him. He’s healthy, big and bulky and dressed casually in black joggers and a tight black tshirt. Bright blue eyes with crossed pupils scan her face with interest. When he grins at her, his sharp teeth flash with titanium augments.

“Gaz wisna exaggeratin,’ ye smell quite nice, Bambi,” Soap purrs.

“What part of ‘masks on’ don’t you all understand?” Laswell grumbles.

“They’ve already got her scent,” Bricks snickers. “Did Ghost get your tags Bambi?”

“He did,” Price confirms from above. “Naya Walker, also known as Bambi. Computer scientist, you’ve sold a couple of database systems. Quite impressive.”

A pit opens in her stomach. Ghost had access to her system for less than three seconds. Her throat is tight when she says, “Thank you, sir.”

“So polite,” Gaz chuckles from above. “Come say hello, doll.”

Naya chances a glance back at Kate, then looks back at Soap, then up at the single pair of shining eyes above as Price’s ID winks away from your awareness. “I’m not sure I have clearance for that.”

“You didn’t have clearance to know about this facility,” Gaz points out. “And yet, here you are. Pretty as a picture.”

“Jesus,” Bricks mutters as Laswell makes a startled sound. “We really should put a bell on you.”

And then a huge hand presses against the glass next to Naya’s face. She startles backwards and runs into a huge, solid body, and yelps as a strong arm catches her about the waist.

“Caught ya,” a fourth, deeper voice rumbles above her. His other hand catches both of her wrists and immobilizes her as she stares at dark brown stains up to his wrists. “Been teasin’ us f’ months, dippin’ in an’ out ‘f m’code. So careful, li’l fawn. But not careful enough.”

“Ghost,” Laswell says. The whine of a plasma weapon being primed pierces through the otherwise silent room. Naya squeezes her eyes closed.“Hands off. That’s my Breaker.”

“’S’at so?” Ghost bends down, so far down, it seems, to drag the tip of his nose along Naya’s temple. “Seems she moight be mine, since I invited ‘er.”

“Speaking of,” Bricks interjects. “I’ll take my finder’s fee, now.”

“Bricks.” Laswell hisses.

“Transfer’s cleared, Bricks,” John Price says with a chuckle. “Pleasure doing business, as always.”

Like Gaz and Soap, Captain Price is bigger than his file made him seem. They’d shaved him, when they had replaced some of his bones with metal, but now his facial hair is as full and vital as the rest of him. This close, Naya can see the mechanics whirling within his eyes.

Leaning against his free side, Gaz licks his lips with a tongue that seems too long. But she only sees them for a moment before she’s being turned around, still wrapped in Ghost’s arms.

On the left side of the room Bricks lounges in a chair, tossing and catching and cycling through the combinations on her ball. She’s grinning like she’s gotten away with murder. Maybe she has - she’s been paid three times today for possibly the easiest bounty of her career. Across from her, Laswell holds a glowing knife in a loose grip by her side, shooting an annoyed glare at the other woman.

“What the hell is this?” Laswell hisses.

“You told us to stop hunting your techs,” Price chuckles.

“Bambi is mine,” Kate reiterates, glaring out the glass.

“Just a wee taste, Watcher,” Soap burrs from somewhere. “Ghost is code breaker enough, ye dinnae need another.”

Naya feels her entire body go cold. She takes a deep breath, reconnects with the facility, and runs Flash_Bang.exe.

—

The underground building has a straightforward layout, but that’s dangerous. Naya flicks away the alert when Ghost manages to patch his way back into the facility and silence the music - fuck, it only took him twenty eight seconds? - and ducks under a desk in the office she broke into, one floor down.

It’s hard to stay one step ahead of him, but her spiders and bots repair the five second camera feed loops as soon as he forces the cameras back online. He only wastes time breaking a third of the bot codes before he seems to realize that they’re replicating and switches to tagging, leaving them to run their processes.

It takes two agonizing seconds for her to open the audio relay from the observation tower without revealing her location to Ghost’s sweeping pings.

“-vilian running wild and scared through a secure facility, John.” Kate snaps.

“I thought she was your new breaker,” Gaz snickers. “Not really a civilian.”

“Nae,” Soap interjects. Naya is glad she doesn’t have video to see the nasty smile she can hear in his voice. “Watcher’s right. We cannae let her get too far.”

“She’s fucked the cameras,” Ghost chuckles. “Could get them back online, but it’d take some time.”

Price hums. “Location?”

“West labs’re pingin’,” Ghost answers. He sounds pleased. “Don’t mean much. She’s got bots spoofin’ her IDs.”

“Smells like she’s gone to the east wing,” Gaz purrs. “Lots of classified documents that way, Laswell. Hate to think of what she might come across if she makes it down to the third floor.”

There’s a tense silence before something slams. Eventually, Laswell hisses, “Fine. Bring her back. Alive and unharmed.”

“No promises,” Soap laughs.

Naya scrambles from her hiding spot as she confirms that the cameras in this south wing hall are looped. She needs to get back to the north side of the facility to get to the stairs that might take her up and out. But first she needs to get them off her trail… Somehow.

There’s a janitor closet two doors down, and she spoofs the signal to unlock the door just long enough to slip through it. She looks for bleach and prays it will be enough to mask her scent, then curses to herself when she realizes the bleach will be an obvious mark of her presence. She can’t just erase herself in the physical world the way she can, digitally.

An encrypted message alert calls her attention.

>>>Bricks: Soap will run at you directly. Gaz likes to ambush. Good Luck!

“I c’n see that, Bricks,” Ghost rumbles.

“She’s already at a disadvantage,” the mercenary chuckles. “Poor little thing, you’re going to eat her alive.”

“Oh, she’s not as harmless as all that,” Price laughs. “Took over the whole facility, gave Ghost the slip-“

“I let her go,” Ghost interrupts.

“Set up the meeting so there’d be no one here but us. Got her hands on the codes she thought would let her take control of us, the mindless killing machines.” John continues. He chuckles. “She’s a smart little thing.”

“She got the deadswitches?” Bricks sounds genuinely surprised.

“Command codes. The first ones,” Ghost confirms. “Duds, since we don’t have the chips, but she don’t know that.”

Well, she does now. Naya grabs three bottles of bleach and puts her respirator back on as her mind races. Part of what made soldier modifications so disgusting were the control processors. The irony of finding out that the 141 had somehow removed theirs was not lost on her. They’re already as free as she’d hoped to help them be, and they’re using that freedom to hunt her like animals.

The IDs for Soap and Gaz are still a floor above, moving slowly, following her trail. Ghost and Bravo One are still in the observation tower. She opens one bottle and rolls it back down the hall she came down, then jogs the other way, splashing the bleach as she goes. The observation tower in the center of the floor has mirrored glass, spiking her heart rate every time she catches sight of herself out of the corner of her eye. It’s so jarring that she almost doesn’t realize Gaz and Soap are coming out of the nearest elevator.

She ducks into an office just as the bell dings around the corner.

“Ach, that’s nae very nice, Bambi,” Soap calls. When he speaks next, it’s muffled, likely by his own respirator. “Ghost, she’s scent bombed the whole steamin’ floor. Where is she?”

“Don’t be lazy, Johnny,” Ghost chuckles. “’Ardly a hunt if there’s no challenge.”

“She’ll want the stairwell,” Gaz says. “Lock it down.”

“Already done,” Ghost says. “But locks aren’t exactly a deterrent, if you ‘aven’t noticed.”

“Bottle rolled down this hall,” Gaz says. “So she probably took the other.”

“Aye, that’s what she wants us to think,” Soap chuckles. “I’ll clear this side.”

Naya holds her breath as heavy footsteps start toward her hiding spot, then go so light she almost can’t hear them. She watches the light under the door and resists the urge to flinch at the appearance of a shadow. The man - Soap’s ID sits like a brand so close to her own in her interface - lingers by the door for a long moment then moves on. He’s so quiet that she keeps the map of the floor up to watch his progress. He’s listening for her, she realizes, stopping at each door. She’s lucky that the air circulation vents are above the door, or he might have heard her heart racing.

When Soap and Gaz each turn corners to start investigating the south wing, Naya finally lets herself take more than the shortest breath. She eases the lock open with a flinch at the mechanical click, but neither Soap nor Gaz change their trajectory. When she opens the door and peeks out, the hall is empty. So she eases her way out, crouches low, and shuffles as fast as she can to the stairwell.

She gives the locks three scans before coding them to unlock. The light turns green without incident. She waits for a moment. Soap and Gaz move just a bit farther away. Naya breathes a silent sigh and eases the door open.

“Got her,” Ghost says. “She’s in the stairwell.”

Above her, a door slams open. Naya yelps and starts jogging down the stairs before she can hear what Captain Price yells down at her. She brute forces her way through the lock codes for the third floor and pulls the door open, throwing her bottle of bleach at the wall before slamming it shut. She trips every proximity alarm she can, leading west through the third floor as she throws herself down the next flight. At the fourth floor door, she creates a signal loop, mindful of the door sensor she’d overlooked before. She hears Gaz and Soap slam through the second floor door open just as the door to the fourth closes behind her.

Too late, she realizes that she can’t hear into the tower anymore, and the map of this floor is all static in her interface. The schematics she had before are corrupted - Ghost’s doing, most likely. She can still see the locks on the doors, the terminals connected to the intranet in the various offices. It will have to be enough.

She darts into the eastern wing of the floor and realizes that no, it won’t be enough. The layout is different than the upper floors. The observation tower has no windows in this direction to speak of, for one. And the cameras are few and far between. The doors are also farther apart, and low pile carpet gives way to hard linoleum.

When she turns the corner, she gasps and ducks. Not that it would have helped any. She’s faced with a gymnasium, weight machines and benches and treadmills like a normal gym, except with weights so large it’s almost comical. There’s no one here, but the open space feels like a threat all the same. She turns tail and jogs back toward the observation tower.

As she turns south, she realizes that the tower has no windows on this floor. It’s not a relief, not really. Even if no one can see her, she’s trapped. Gaz and Soap are still looking for her, one floor up. How long will that last? The bleach trick can only work for so long, probably. And Ghost is good, it’s only a matter of time before he breaks into the camera bot code and finds her. How is she going to get up, past the first floor, let alone the next twelve flights of stairs to the streets of the Belly.

God, how is she going to make it home?

Her vision blurs with tears before she can finish taking her next breath.

“No, no, no, no, no,” she whimpers before a hiccup jolts through her. Her breath shudders from her throat as she swipes at her eyes. “No, no, keep it together, it’s gonna be okay. I can figure this out, I can. I can, it’s okay.”

“Bambi? Talk to me,” Brick’s serious voice comes through, suddenly, fuzzy but definitely there. “Those sound like tears, sweetheart.”

Naya sobs, she can’t help it. It’s a few seconds before she can force more words out. “Why did you do this to me?”

“You asked me to bring you,” Bricks reminds her with a soft chuckle. “Didn’t know you were gonna try to take over the whole facility, or I might have set something else up. But if you come out now -“

A hand touches Naya from behind and she screams, throwing a HardReset packet into the space before she can even wonder if that would have any impact on Soap or Gaz. When she whirls around, though, a man she doesn’t recognize is slumped against the wall, barely keeping the weight of a bricked cybernetic leg from dragging him to the floor. Her interface has a moment to tell her this is “Mace,” before she’s darting around him and running again.

“Fuck!” the man shouts. “Watcher what the fuck- No, I’m on the fucking training floor, why the hell-“

“Bambi,” Bricks shouts, “Do not go into the w-“

She slams the connection shut and tries, unsuccessfully, to wipe her tears away. The distraction is probably why she doesn’t realize she’s heading north, but she knows her mistake as soon as she hears the stairwell door open.

She screams again, right in Gaz’s face, can’t help it now that she’s finally made noise. She dodges his reaching hand and bolts, knowing she can’t outrun him, but what else can she do?

“Shite. Ghost!” Soap calls. “Lock it doon!”

Naya dives through a blast door as it slides shut, ignoring the myriad of voices that shout at her. Through the panic, she terminates all of her bots and slams all of her processing power into separating Ghost from the security access from the floor. He puts up a fight, but another BrainBlast and FlashBang gives her the two seconds she needs to take control.

An alert flashes.

<<Message from: WatcherOneKL. Accept?>>

Sitting on the floor, panting and sniffling, she gulps a deep breath. Someone pounds on the door, but it’s solid, and Ghost can’t get past her bots to regain control. She’s safe.

—

In the observation tower, Price frowns at the data pad in his hands. “Ghost, Bricks. Where did you say you found Ms. Walker?”

“Found us, really,” Ghost mutters, focused on the 3D hologram of the facility. Bambi’s ID markers dance all over the place. He’s running algorithms to try to find a pattern, but she’s three steps ahead, it seems. “Set out a lure and she tore through it like tissue paper. An’ then she made a forum post lookin’ f’r information on soldier mods.”

“Scrubbed everything clean,” Bricks adds. “We couldn’t find her for days after she blew through everything. I got lucky that I found the forum post, it didn’t even trigger Ghost’s spiders.”

Price hums. “And… did either of you confirm which hacker group she’s a part of?”

“Didn’t really have time,” Bricks answers with a shrug. “As soon as I confirmed who I was, she demanded to meet Laswell, and you.”

“Interesting. Any of you ever hear of a group called the Archivist Collective?”

Laswell frowns. “Collective for Anarchy?”

“No.” Price shakes his head. “Archivist Collective. It’s the only thing coming up with her background check. And she’s not a known member of any of the major hacking groups.”

Bricks shrugs. “Obviously, she’d use another alias.”

“No,” Price says again, walking over to show Laswell and Bricks the data pad. “None of her aliases are connected with anything but this Archivist Collective. And their only mission is to ‘Counter censorship through the collection, preservation, and dissemination of contested and classified texts.’”

Ghost makes an interested noise and leaves the hologram to start another terminal whirring. “Let’s see what they’ve got then -… oh.”

Bricks sits up from her sprawl. “Oh?”

“They’ve got an archive. Barely any security at all. Hosted on the GaiaPet: Craft servers.”

“GaiaPet?” Kate frowns. “Isn’t that a… virtual pet game? Where people make things with voxels? Procedurally generated…. They’re definitely robust enough servers for cyberattacks-“

“It’s jus’ a fuckin’ library,” Ghost grunts, navigating through. “Huge text files, embedded images. Some of it’s definitely classified. But tha’s oll… Oh, shite. Jus’ found our records.”

Bricks looks from the terminal in Price’s hand, to Ghost, and back. “Wait. John, you said she sold a couple of database systems. She’s got to be working with some data brokers, at least.”

“This says she developed and sold literal systems,” John says, horror dawning on his face. “A spreadsheet editor and a UI designed to organize complex data sets. As far as I can tell, she doesn’t sell information. Everything she’s got, besides those systems, is open source.”

“Oh, fuck,” Ghost breathes.

Kate strides up to look at his screen. “What?”

“She’s got an active account on GaiaPet. A pet frog named Señor fuckin’ Snuggly. Her last login was today, and her chat with the AI said ‘Wish me luck, if we can’t get those soldiers released, we can at least get the information out there.’”

The silence in the room is palpable. And then Bricks says, “Bambi? Talk to me. Those sound like tears, sweetheart.”

—

Naya keeps her arms wrapped around her knees until she stops shivering. In that time, two more message request alerts pop up, from BravoOneJP and GhostSR. All of them are marked maximum priority, and she has no desire to touch them. She can see the signal burst of Bricks trying to talk to her, but she’s muted the feed so that she can just have… a single second to breathe.

Her interface pushes everything away to prioritize an SOS signal, then automatically begins transcribing the subsequent Morse code message.

SOH. West wing dangerous stop. Battle androids stop. 15 active 20 inactive stop. GSR give code for control stop. Confirm stop. SOH. West wing dangerous stop. Battle androids stop. 15 active 20 inactive stop. GSR give-

She minimizes the message and sucks in the deepest breath she can, holds it, and forces herself to focus on her body. If she thinks about fifteen battle droids on this side of the door while modified soldiers hunt her on the other, she’ll start screaming and never stop. A part of her wants to lay down and just… give up. A big part. The whole part.

She opens the message from Laswell.

Bambi: You’re in a hazardous section of the facility. Ghost is standing down, for your safety. You will have to establish connection with the control tower to gain codes for control of battle -

Naya deletes the message and opens the one from Price. It’s more of the same, a demand that she open communication, a warning that the west wing of the floor is dangerous. She almost doesn’t open the message from Ghost, but… she doesn’t have much to lose.

She jumps when the message contains an audio file.

“Bambi, fuck, we didn’t know you was a literal archivist. Bricks an’ I fucked up. This is a truce, a suspension of hostilities. SOH. The training floor you’re on is fuckin’ dangerous, Bambi. Too dangerous for me to try t’ take it from you. You gotta take control of the droids. I can’t fuck wit’ ‘em while you’re in control of the space. I managed to confirm shut down of 20, but there’s 15 more. I c’n try to send the control codes this way, but the codes expire every 2 seconds. Better if you open comms. If you can’t, Morse confirmation, I’ll send the codes. Once you grab one, the rest will come for you. You’re fuckin’ fast, I know you can do it, but if you have an issue, open the door an’ Soap and Gaz’ll support.”

She’d rather be shot full of holes by military grade turrets than open the door. Her map of the facility is complete again, and she can see four IDs on the other side of the barrier. Soap, Gaz, Mace, and the redacted asset, Nikto, mill around, pacing between the blast doors and the central tower. But no one is pounding on the door or trying to open it, physically or otherwise. When she checks, her bots are idly cycling through access code randomization, but there’s no attempts at a breach.

Maybe Ghost is telling the truth?

She sends a Morse message.

Received stop. Hold for confirmation stop.

The answer is immediate.

Received stop. Holding for confirmation stop.

Does she want to open the comms? What if it’s a trap? Without knowing how long the code chains are, she’s at a disadvantage without a direct link to the tower. But if she opens connection to the tower, how can she guarantee that Ghost won’t command the androids to terminate her? On the other hand, if he is telling the truth, and the codes expire that fast, there’s no way she can locate and override that many machines that are actively trying to keep her out in time. And they are definitely trying to keep her out - her spiders have been able to confirm twenty units on standby, and fifteen empty holding stations, but there’s no sign of the other droids.

With a shaking breath, Naya opens the comms.

Brick's voice is the one she hears first. "Oh, thank fuck, she's back. Bambi? Can you hear me? Sweetheart, I need you to keep the blast doors static. If they cycle, they might start a lockdown sequence, and that will get the droids moving.” It takes two tries to get the words past her tight throat. "I don't want to die." "I'm so sorry, dove," Captain Price croons. "We’re gonna get you out of there.” "I won't tell anyone, I promise," Naya babbles though gasps. "I just want to go home." "You're gonna be okay, Bambi," Ghosts voice is surprisingly gentle. “Cleverest breaker above and below the city, yeah? Gave Soap an’ Gaz a proper chase an’ knocked Mace on ‘is arse. Coupl’a droids don’t stand a chance.”

“I’m not - I don’t know how to fight,” she whimpers.

“Who said anythin’ about fightin’? Pretty girl like you don’ have t’ lift a finger. Laswell?”

“Working on it,” the woman mutters. “Bambi, I need you to try to give us cameras without initiating any other processes. That’ll help- oh. You are fast. Give me a few seconds to find the nearest droids and we can give you the serial numbers.”

“She’s so small,” Price notes, somewhere in the background. “Possible the droids won’t even register her as a target.”

“I think we’ve fucked up enough today that we don’t need to risk it,” is Brick’s bone dry reply. “Sparrow is going to beat all of our asses.”

“Well, we’re about to give Bambi control of thirty-five full combat units,” the Captain points out. “Might not be much left of us to kick.”

Laswell breaks in. “Ghost-”

“Got em,” Ghost answers. “Bambi, ‘ve got a bead on the nearest units. ‘ow do you want to do this?”

Naya takes a couple of deep breaths and tries to hype herself up. It’s just code work. There are other variables, but at the core of it all, it’s just code. Yes, many of the variables have potentially painful and fatal consequences… But in the end, she can either do the code or not. And if there’s one thing she can do, it’s code.

“H-how,” she clears her throat and blinks back tears. “How many bits, per unit? For the key, I mean.”

“Forty ninety-six.”

Oh, just the highest security rating in the world, she thinks to herself, a little hysterical. She nods to herself and talks through the urge to giggle with nerves. “Okay. That’s seven hundredths of a second per unit, with the key. That’s… not so bad. I can probably handle them in batches of 5. Can I have the first hardware address? Morse, please.”

It takes a second, but the information comes through. It only takes a moment for a spider to highlight the machine in the network. Very quickly, her bots are able to identify and tag seven other units on her map. She shoots a summary data packet back to Ghost.

“Are these all droids?”

“Yeah, that’s half of ‘em. Laswell, she was able to identify all of the A-27 units, do you have eyes on any of the E-243s?”

In the background, Price mutters, “Kate hasn’t even laid eyes on all of the 27s.”

Another data packet comes through, and Naya is able to tag seven more dots on her map. Fifteen battle androids, and two of them just down the hall and around the corner on either side.

Naya takes another hiccuping breath. “How fast can they move?”

“A-27s are closest to you, they’re about a meter per second. The 243s move at about 4 per second.”

“Okay,” she says, holding her breath through another hiccup. She has two of her bots run movement simulations, and decides she’ll focus on the closest two A-27s, then the closest four E-243s. She has the processing power to do it, between her own interface and the facility. But… “I’m going to need these six keys first, but I have to let the doors cycle. How long is the lockdown sequence?”

Bricks makes a concerned noise before answering, “Fifteen seconds before you can open the door.”

So, if she messes this up, she’ll be dead for about 11 seconds before they’d be able to retrieve her body. Wonderful. “Ghost, I need all of the codes at once, in two packets, with the keys in this order. And then the next set of keys as soon as you have them. There’s a half second delay, so I need them as soon as they’re generated.”

Laswell sounds genuinely concerned when she asks, “Is that going to give you enough time?”

Naya runs the numbers again, and realizes that she’s fallen into a very peculiar state of calm. “I should have one point three seconds plus a little wiggle room per key. That’s plenty, for the first part. And if the first part doesn’t work… I don’t really have to worry about the rest of it.”

Captain Price’s voice is stern as he gives commands. “Gaz, tell Nikto to power up the cutter, in case we need to get you through the door. Bambi’s going to override the droids.” He’s quiet a moment, then, “Ghost says she can do it, and from what I’m seeing up here, I’m inclined to believe him. But the resets she did mean the door is going to lock down before she can open it again.”

Ghost says, “Ready to send the next round of codes on your mark, Bambi.”

Naya squeezes her eyes shut and sets her bots to be ready to receive and engage the keys. She takes one long, deep breath. Another. Lets all the air out in a huff. “Mark.”

As soon as the packet comes through, her interface is a flurry of executables and intrusion alerts. Her bots are fast, but the activation of the keys isn’t instantaneous. Just as she was warned, as soon as the first set of keys starts running, all of the droids set themselves to Active:Seeking, Objective:Eliminate. But almost as fast, they’re all placed back into Standby:HoldPosition in a wave that flows through the entire wing.

"That's all of em," Ghost sighs, four seconds later. Something creaks, probably the chair he's sunk himself into. "Fuckin' 'ell, she got all of em. Don' think she even needed me to provide the third set of keys. If she don't run screamin', I want her runnin' the damn-" Naya's heart spikes as an alert pings her interface. Her voice squeaks when she calls, "Ghost? There's two units coming online. They’re not listening to me, I can't stop them. What do I do?" Before she can hear his response, the power to the hall cuts out. Naya holds in a scream as everything goes dark and then red with emergency lighting. Captain Price's voice is overtaken by static, and then she loses the tower completely. Somewhere, in the darkness, she can just barely hear the whine of attack units Riley and Merlin priming their weapons.

—

“Goddamn it,” Kate snarls. “It’s the 9s. They’re jamming the signal.”

Bricks jumps up from her chair. “Bambi’s in there without access to the system?”

Ghost makes a disagreeing noise. “They’re active because she’s not an authorized user. They’re jamming anything that isn’t local to the wing, I should be able to patch- Johnny!”

“We cuttin, LT?”

“Forward these packets to Bambi, nothing else.”

“Aye - fuck!”

—

A message request from SoapJM flashes on Naya’s screen just as she finds out that these new droids can move at thirteen meters per second. When she opens it, she gets an immediate key packet. Every bot she has gets set to receive, but the keys are expired, so she has to wait an agonizing three-quarters of a second before the next ones come through.

Just as a next packet arrives, a blue beam of light slices across the end of the hall, then a second from the opposite side. She barely has time to match the keys to the hardware addresses before two furry muzzles round the corner, guns glowing from their shoulders. Naya has only a moment to recognize the controversial K-9 battle units before they both take a step in her direction. And freeze.

It’s an harrowing second of silence, two, three. She doesn’t even breathe.

With a whir, mounted turrets power down and withdraw back behind artificial fur. The K-9s change their status to Standby:AcceptNewObjective with identical head tilts. The one tagged Riley wags its tail and trots forward, tongue lolling like the average bio-dog. Merlin approaches with a little more hesitant body language, though Naya can see the way it’s integrating her tags into the authorized user list in its software.

She flinches away from the door at the high pitched whine of a plasma cutter on metal. Hastily, she sends an ‘All Clear’ message back to Soap, just as the lights come back on.

Captain Price’s voice resolves with renewed connection to the control tower. “-both of your necks. What were you thinking?”

“Oh, suddenly we’re all about vetting assets?” Bricks laughs. “You recruited me with a bag over my head.”

“You were an establlished CIA asset,” Laswell grits out.

Bricks scoffs. “And Sparrow and Nikto?”

“We wasn’t wrong,” Ghost interjects. “Bad intel aside-”

“No intel!” Captain Price half-shouts.

“-she took the facility from me twice and disarmed 15 droids in less than 4 seconds without any formal training. She’s good.”

“None of that matters if she’s dead,” Laswell snaps.

Naya clears her throat. “I’m not dead.”

“Bambi!” Bricks sound downright cheerful. “Doors are almost done cycling, you’re almost out. Hold tight.”

Petting a hand over the soft fur of Riley’s head, Naya feels for the lumps of it’s internal machinery. Of course, she can’t find it - K-9s were built for stealth and surveillance, to blend in with any other dog. These ones are modified for combat, but they’re still adorable.

It’s almost hard to believe that they were going to shoot her, less than ten seconds ago.

The blast door’s status changes to ready, an almost cheerful ping in her interface. She barely gives it a thought before initiating another lockdown sequence, then queuing two more behind it.

Ghost notices. “Bambi?”

“I need a minute, please,” she answers, then cuts the camera feeds.

Merlin eventually comes and sits just out of reach, tail thumping once against the ground. Naya pulls up it’s configuration settings and examines the personality controls. Calm, but friendly, alert, reserved, breaks “arbitrary dog rules” at a rate of 6%. Riley: open and playful, eager to please, breaks rules 17% of the time. Both locked to 141 facility 4th floor, west wing training center.

Do Not Remove.

—

When the blast doors open, Naya is standning a few feet back. Riley and Merlin lay on either side of her feet, solidly in a sleep cycle. Her fingers dig into the opposite sleeves of her cardigan as Soap and Gaz come into view, along with a fully functional Mace, and a fully helmeted cyborg she can only assume is Nikto.

“Steamin’ Jesus, bon,” Soap says taking a step forward. “Ye gave us a wee fright!”

“If you get within three feet of me,” Bambi says, pausing for a deep breath. “I’ll shoot you.”

Three set of eyebrows shoot up. Nikto’s faceplate remains unchanged. Gaz looks at the others before answering, “We’re sorry we frightened you, love. We didn’t know Bricks hadn’t-”

Naya interrupts him. “I would like to leave now.”

“Well…” Soap says with a shrug. “We can take ye back t’ Laswell?”

“That’s fine. Riley, Merlin, up.”

When the dogs “wake” and stand, Mace says, “They can’t pass that door.”

She takes a step forward, flanked by the dogs. “I think you’ll find that they can.”

“Nae, Bambi,” Soap says gently. “They’re hard coded-”

Riley’s turret activates as soon as Soap takes a step toward her. Naya takes another deep breath, and repeats, “If you get within three feet of me, I will shoot you.”

“Well you certainly won’t be doing that with the dogs,” Gaz scoffs. “We won’t touch you, but you really should come with… us.”

The dogs cross the threshold of the door with her, and the plasma cannon in Merlin primes with a dangerous, high pitched sound. When the stunned soldiers don’t step back, the dog’s chest panel opens with a blue glow.

“Three feet,” Mace says, taking two big steps back, hands in the air near his head. “You got it.”

“Yes, sir,” Gaz says aloud, taking his own step backwards. “The doors are open and we have eyes on her. She’s got the 9s with her. Well sir, it seems she’s taken a liking to them.” He pauses. “Soap did tell her that, but apparently she doesn’t really care.”

Naya rolls her eyes and enables the cameras in the hall. “So you’re all allergic to just saying things outright?” The muted audio feed is a flurry of activity, but she just gestures down the hall. “After you.”

—

In the end, everyone ends up in a second floor conference room. Naya stands by the far wall, Riley and Merlin a deadly guard panting in front of her feet. The other eight sit and stand at the other end, fidgeting and clearly searching for a way to break the silence.

Bricks tries first, “Sweetheart-”

“Give me a reason not to overload the filtration systems,” Naya interrupts.

That makes everyone flinch. Laswell clears her throat. “What-”

“Because,” Naya nearly shouts, “I could shoot at least two of you, but then you really would kill me this time. But if I backflow and spark the air, that would kill all of you.”

“Kill ye, as well,” Soap points out.

“I thought I was going to die about five times in the last hour,” Naya says, much calmer than she feels. “Mention me dying again and I’ll fry your interface.”

“Ghost just aboot did tha’ already,” Soap mutters.

“Need a hacker for an op. Thought you was a professional,” Ghost finally admits after a moment of tense fidgeting. “Way you ate through the files I laid out, blew through a 256 like tissue paper. Couldn’t find you after… Figured you knew what you was doin’. And y’do.”

Naya’s eye twitches. “And you couldn’t send me an email? Set up an interview?”

“I did try,” Bricks points out. “But you said all the keywords that tend to get a person fast tracked to a very classified meeting.”

“A very classified meeting where you sell me, twice and then hunt me for sport?”

“Everything sounds bad when you say it like that,” the other woman chuckles.

The air circulator over the door falls silent. In the ensuing silence, Naya can hear the servos whir in Bricks’s arm.

“Clearly, we made mistakes,” Laswell admits. “So. What do you want?”

“I want to not have been sold and hunted for sport. Barring that, I would like a time machine. I’d love to know what you consider an equitable offer, Watcher One.”

“What the fuck did you do?” Mace hisses at Captain Price.

“Apparently we made a tactical error,” the man grumbles. “And then a series of compounding tactical errors.”

“You did not ask Nikolai,” Nikto says, matter of fact. It’s the first Naya’s heard his voice, human and heavily accented. “Or Sparrow. She will not be pleased, I think.”

“None of Nik’s contacts c’n do what Bambi c’n do,” Ghost counters.

“Bambi can kill every person in this room,” Naya says, voice flat, emphasized by the glow of two plasma cannons. “Bambi can turn this whole facility into a goddamn crater. Bambi can post videos of the human experimentation to the holonet.”

“Woah, woah, woah,” Gaz says. “What human experimentation? No one’s experimenting on anybody.”

“I saw the videos!” Naya yells. “People in cages, people on operating tables, awake, screaming, crying. I saw people eating raw meat, off of leg bones, eating people!”

“Oh fuck,” Ghost says, voice wavering. His face is stricken when she looks at him. “Bambi, that weren’t for you to see, fuck, ‘ow deep did you fuckin’ go? I didn’t even-”

“That’s the job,” Bricks cuts in. “That’s why we needed a hacker, because we’re trying to stop that from happening, and we can’t get through their walls or exploit their vulnerabilities.”

“Oh, that’s just the “bad guys”?” Naya scoffs. “Okay. Why was Gaz covered in blood when I arrived?”

“Blood!” Soap yelps. “That was hydraulic fluid an’ oil! One of the bikes is actin’ up, and our mechanic isnae aroond!”

“It was in his teeth!”

“He’s bonnier than he is graceful!”

“Oh, fuck you, Tav!”

“You said you couldn’t promise to bring me back alive! Ghost called it a hunt!”

“Ah was jokin’!” Soap runs and hand over his mohawk. “We’re a right frightful lot, and sometimes we sneak aboot, but mostly people just cannae always hear us coming! Ye’d think we could catch one wee little civilian withoot incident!”

“You’re the one who was running through a secure facility,” Captain Price points out.

A plasma cannon discharges into the wall above his head. The whole room freezes for a beat before Naya hisses. “If you ever even think of implying-”

“Any information you find about Makarov and his dealings, you can make public,” Bricks interrupts. “Who, what, when, where, how. All of it can go into your archive.”

Laswell scowls. “Now hold on-”

Bricks talks over her. “We don’t have anything you want that you can’t just outright take, Bambi. That’s what you came here for. Information, and to get people out of cages.”

Nikto looks at Bricks and snorts before muttering something under his breath in Russian. Mace crosses his arms, leaning back in his seat and doing a much better job of keeping his thoughts off of his face than Soap and Gaz. The sergeants look horrified. Ghost looks about ready to throw up. Captain Price and Laswell share a sour, resigned look.

“You’ll have our backing,” Laswell sighs. “You’ll need something a bit more secure than the GaiaPet servers, or you’ll be tracked. But yes. You can disseminate the information.”

There’s a long moment of silence. Naya considers her options, arms around herself. The air circulator kicks back on.    Eventually, she says, “I want an advance. Thirty thousand credits, plus however much Price paid.”

“Done,” Bricks answers.

“And… I want seventy five credits an hour.”

“…Fine,” Laswell agrees.

“And I keep the dogs.”

Captain Price makes a disagreeing noise. “Those are government property.”

“Either I keep them, or I set them to self destruct and detonate every android on the fourth floor.”

Nikto says, “You are a bloodthirsty hind.”

“I’m really not,” Naya says. “But I’ve had a very long day. Do we have a deal?”

“Don’t think we have much of a choice,” Captain Price concedes.

Just then, the door to the conference room opens, and a brunette peeks her head in. Morgan Voss, “Sparrow,” as her ID tags her, nods at Laswell. “Just got in, didn’t know there was a meeting scheduled. What did I miss?” Her eyes drift up. “What the hell happened to the wall?”

[shiraishi--kanade]

Another thing I need pjsk fandom to realize:

1) there are literal 10 years old (and younger) children in this fandom;

2) the percentage of these children in the fandom is MUCH, MUCH higher than every single one of you here on tumbrl think it is.

"why do people write so much for popular characters?" "why do people write for kudos only?" aside from the fact that the "write for yourself" is a self-perpetuating issue in every fandom and the fact that every writer deserves engagement with their works, it's because there are kids here. Who want to fit in and get praised for their creativity. Which they can only achieve by writing for popular stuff. So maybe take that into account.

[squarebracketsmileyface]

Omegaverse fic is gonna be... Fairly dead dove whoops 💀 I just... Alex who can regenerate any and all injuries... And his true mate Jay who realises he doesn't ever have to buy meat again...

Also Alex has somehow turned into a misogynist (or whatever the equivalent is in the omegaverse, someone who thinks omegas are beneath them) who doesn't think he's a misogynist. He thinks he's god's gift to omegas, going around protecting them from alphas. Like buddy, you're just as bad as the alphas. He has such a superiority complex I don't know why (I do, it's cos he's special and one of a kind cos he's an enigma rather than an alpha beta or omega, and he let that go to his head)

Anyway snippet

He's such a dick. Like bitch that's your MATE what do you mean he's not pretty. Alex is so used to sleeping with all the hottest people ever since he's a successful film director, so he sees a normal looking guy who's had no plastic surgery and he's like "eh"

Figuring out how fictional I want my omegaverse to be is so fun, like, do they have tails? Are they just normal humans with heats and ruts? How does mating work? How powerful do I wanna make alphas ability to command omegas? (As you can see from above, pretty powerful to completely force Jay not to use a gun if he has one, tho that could be because of Alex being a step above an alpha, I haven't decided yet)

[eureka-its-zico]

Winterfall

Synopsis: When you thought of your life, Glenview Psychiatric Hospital was the last place you thought you’d end up. What could be weirder than calling a place like this home? Finding people who remind you that, sometimes, the messiest parts of who we are can be the best parts of us too.

Pairings: Christian Yu x Reader x Jay B x Reader (It’s a love triangle, y’all) 

Series: ongoing 

Word Count: 5186

Warnings: mentions of self-harm, mental health issues, mental disorders, slight violence, sexual themes

A/N: This is a hard one to post. I’ve had this in my WIPs for over seven years. I’ve rewritten it multiple times. Consider if this was a series, I was willing to share. As someone who suffers from BPD II and PTSD, it felt strange to dive into mental health. In a way, I felt like I needed a safe place to get it out. To share. This fic isn’t meant to be sad. It’s meant to be about growth. The journey of mental health can be a messy one, but it doesn’t have to hinder our own growth. Our sadness does not define us. If I ever miss anything in the warnings for chapters, please let me know and I’ll fix it ASAP! This fic is loosely based off of one of my favorite films, Girl, Interrupted. And remember, if you you ever need to talk: Im here.

Shout out to my bestie @deadneverlander for always being the better half in our clownery. I wouldn't be able to do half of this without you.

There was something about the bleakness of winter that seemed to make countless people’s bones ache for the warmth of summer. Their loneliness is somehow made more apparent by rain clouds and negative degrees, turning thoughts into reminiscent scenes of a doomsday film. 

You’d always claimed that fall was your favorite season because the vast spectrum of your sadness didn't match the heat of summer. Sure, you loved the possibilities of hot cocoa, warm fires, ridiculous horror, Christmas films, and the first sight of snow. Somewhere along the way, however, came the anxiety of holiday dinners. Where the comfort you’d found in overcast skies turned sinister with repeated looks that reminded you that you were the black sheep; the odd man out with another year of nothing to show.

Fall no longer meant binges on shows and breaks from the endless routine that was work and school. It meant laying in the snow until your body heat forced it to melt underneath you, seeping into the fabric of your clothes to leave your nerves numb and transparent like ice. Your mind silently hoped it would be enough to extinguish the agony that blossomed in your chest. 

Jackets were no longer marked for warmth, but strictly to hide your struggle to feel anything past the chasm that’d grown in the past couple of months: to bleed out the parts of you that didn't belong. It wasn't a surprise it's what landed you a one-way ticket to the cozy room inside a psychiatric hospital. Maybe that's just what happens when you're found unresponsive with a belly housing a fifth of rum. The marks on your skin lay like a map to follow on how you got there; only being found like a frantic afterthought. 

Glenview Psychiatric Hospital, or GSH that was strategically labeled in bright crimson above the pocket of your prison-inspired sweatshirt, had been home for three months now. It was meant to be a place of healing, among the basic mood stabilizing and therapy sessions everyone held in a day. You felt further away from that concept with every group activity the doctors forced you to take part in. Your social anxiety becoming apparent each time it lands on you to speak, either to close the circle, or to be a part of the ridiculous game activities. The last time you played volleyball your face saw more action with the pleather ball than your arms ever did. 

It was currently 12:47 p.m. The clock giving you a false sense of hope that the time wouldn’t just creep by to leave you stranded the last thirteen minutes until you’d earned your freedom. There was, however, the off chance if Dr. Thompson wasn't hearing what he wanted; the hour-long group activity would be extended. 

You scanned the other six faces that made up your group: the huddled mess of piled sweaters and huddled blanket of Soomi a fleeting moment of comfort. It only took your eyes adjusting on her figure to know she didn’t have one. Her tiny body composed of thick layers of clothes to portray a false sense of shape. Her anorexia becoming so severe her family had no other option but to put her here, or watch her die. Jason’s endless finger taps on every surface he could touch the only giveaway to his OCD until he removed himself from his chair. Sejun with his alcoholism and Yuna with her acidic imagination that the wind whispered her deepest secrets out into the world. 

All this ending with your gaze narrowed on the statuesque figure of Jaebum who comically sat opposite of your current position. The two suicidal inmates that shared in the anxiousness of sadness but little else, and the usual reason why your group never seemed to end on time. 

You couldn't say it was a shame to be stuck sitting dead center of someone so attractive; as shallow of an observation as it was there was no denying how ungodly true that statement was. He held a silent attractiveness that resonated in the solitude he kept around himself, and Jaebum was indeed a solitary creature.

He preferred books over people. Usually moving away from anyone who got close to his latest reading perch without ever glancing up from his current book. Jaebum’s favorite place he’d reserved to get lost inside his fiction the seal of the window that looked out the expanse of the institute’s backyard. The entire estate currently covered in the dead burgundy and gold of a forest of oak tree leaves. 

It wasn't like you were laying avid amounts of your attention on him or anything. You didn't pay attention to how broad his shoulders looked in his old man sweaters that you could've bet money smells like mothballs. How his features seemed sharpened to match the fierceness that lived inside his eyes. The only thing that exposed his softness was the speck of a mole that dusted itself on his left eyelid. 

Jaebum just held a presence that demanded to be noticed. Whether he himself liked it or not. 

“Jaebum: do you have anything you’d like to add to the session?”

Dr. Thompson’s question made the both of you jolt in your seats. Youwere too busy staring down at your nails while you plucked away at the cuticles. Jaebum's head turned, unbeknownst to you, from looking at you to the good doctor. It was enough to make your cheeks flush hot. 

His crossed arms gave a soft shrug, and you hated how your eyes stayed captivated by the movement. You were willing to blame it on the charcoal-worn cable knit sweater he favored. It really did smell like moth balls and age making you willing to bet it wasn't his to begin with. 

“We talked about this guys. Shrugging is not an adequate substitute for an answer.”

His tone showing his frustration more than anger at his need to repeatedly inform the group. Dr. Thompson looked at each of you individually until he stopped on Jaebum, who didn’t seem the least bit moved. 

“I have nothing to say.”

A sigh escaped from Dr. Thompson’s lips as his head shook softly. His eyes averted down to the tin clipboard momentarily before they resumed their previous position. 

“And what is it exactly you would like me to add, huh?” You felt your body tense against the chair. Your hands grasping at its edges like it would be the only thing to keep you stable against the oncoming rage that was Jaebum’s agitation. “We do these pointless sessions over and over: again and again. For what? Do you think it “saves” anyone?”

Your eyes diverted from the safety of your knees; counting every frayed piece of cloth on your jeans that hung loose from torn holes. No part of you needed to acknowledge that he was standing. The room did that well enough with the tension his power caused. The room itself swelling with anxiety that made fidgety Sera begin to rock violently against the back of her chair. Her head shaking hair into her face, like a curtain to hide what she feared was coming her way like the abusive hands of her father. 

The orderlies were already beginning to circle his chair, but Dr. Thompson held up a hand of warding. He reminded you too much of an irresponsible ring handler at a circus. Unwilling to recognize his own tiger was about to maim him. 

“No, no that’s fair enough. I see you have an issue with the way we try and help our patients.”

“Help?!” Jaebum snarled. “Is that what you call it? Like you helped Simon remember all the things he wanted to forget! Is that what you call endless therapies until he killed himself! You consider being helpful with the way you handled Ian?”

Dr. Thompson regarded Jaebum quietly, but his eyes were focused and searching the young man’s face. You watched in helpless awe as one stood like a calm in a blazing storm, while the other raged so furiously you thought the walls would come down. No longer was his voice a strong current, but now thunderous words that hurled like lightning bolts were being directed at the man before him. 

Jaebum was right. Sometimes, the doctors picked and picked a part at you until you were left bare and raw. And if their words didn’t do it their physical methods picked up where they lacked. His anger was justified, because deep down so were you. But you didn’t have the towering strength like he did to stand up to anyone. Your fear of the seclusion rooms kept you prisoner: locked in your chair as a simple flick of Dr. Thompson’s hand sent the orderlies rushing to Jaebum’s side. 

“I think that’s enough for today’s session.” 

In the back of your mind you knew that Jaebum was right. In part. Who were counselors and psychologists to tell the broken mirrors of people how to put their pieces back together? Only to end up with more blood on their hands from struggling to put sharp pieces in place. They studied people like you, Jaebum...people like Ian who were features in their college books. They themselves barely ever one to experience it themselves. 

Healing, even if unconventional, was still healing in the end. There was no right or wrong way to get there, but here, with people like Dr. Thompson, their textbook solutions were the only solutions. Maybe that’s why it backfired so terribly with Ian. 

So for once, you wanted to stand up with Jaebum. To call out the injustices of treatments forced on patients, like Ian. Treatments they’d placed on patients that only wanted to forget, because no one wants to remember traumas and everything that makes them feel like failures. 

You knew, however, if you took that chance to be brave for once you would end up like Jaebum. Uselessly struggling against orderlies who came prepared with syringes to make you complacent and an endless day being locked for god knew how long inside seclusion. 

It was cowardice that kept your mouth shut. All of you stayed quiet as an orderly you aptly nicknamed, “The Bull,” grabbed at the neck of Jaebum’s sweater. That was all it took for him to react violently. Jaebum’s elbow flew back with such force it dislodged The Bull’s grip, which only seemed to make it worse. 

“Jaebum, please do not struggle.” Dr. Thompson’s voice didn’t sound as soothing as he probably imagined. Obvious agitation outlined every word; the struggle forcing all of you up from your chairs and away from the fighting. “Everyone out. Now.” 

A part of you hated listening. For not firmly digging your feet in to stand for something you agreed wasn’t right. It was an odd thought. Since Ian was the usual instigator of the chaos of how these ended. Never Jaebum. Maybe he just felt like in Ian’s absence he needed to take over for him. 

“You play god with everyone’s emotions and leave them to drown alone in the aftermath. You are the reason Christian keeps escaping and Hyujin is gone! It’s you! It’s all of you!”

Jaebum’s rage became more apparent with each sentence and broke as his throat formed the words of his former friend. Former because he’d found himself as one of Dr. Thompson’s experimental new treatments. A treatment that brought back too much Hyujin couldn’t cope with - was forced to confront - before he was ready. 

The ward still felt hollow - missing in the sound of Hyujin’s laugh. 

You would’ve been impressed with the way Jaebum was laying into the doctor. He was holding his own against the orderly at his arms until the Bull snuck behind him and brought him falling down to the cold concrete floor. 

That was the last you saw of Jaebum as you were ushered outside the doors. You faced them for a long time. No one questioned why you stood at the entrance as Jaebum’s yelling dulled to nothing. It was too late for you to run back and play the role of knight in shining armor and standing in front of the door would only make the staff assume you were waiting to cause a scene. 

Turning on your heel you headed towards the living area. Your mind racing heavily with indecision and not paying attention to the overcrowded chairs and couches. You bypassed them all to head to your favorite window seat. It was opposite to the one everyone knew as Jaebum’s; reading a new book every week during free time. It was so engrained to the fabric of the facility that no one tried to take it from him. Not even Ian. 

You folded into yourself as soon as you sat down on the window seat. Your chin pressed into your shoulder so you could get a better look outside. The vibrant colors of changing leaves reminding you that fall was coming. Maybe they would let you work outside if you were good? You were tired of doing bathroom and kitchen duties, but because of Ian’s latest stunt no one was allowed outside. Not until the fences were made higher with wire curled along the top. 

If thoughts could be breathed into existence, you were positive you alone would be deemed responsible for Ian walking, right then and there, through the facility's double doors. Of course, Ian could never simply enter a room quietly.

Christian entered every room like a force. Wild and unpredictable. Mother Nature couldn’t compete with his massive hurricane personality. No one could come close, because underneath all that unhinged nature was a magmatism that far outreached just good looks. 

Was Christian good looking? Devilishly so. It was his way with words, however, that left many people reeling. Not just fellow patients, but staff as well. He was painfully charming and, if you weren’t prepared for his wide-set smile directed in your direction, you were going to find yourself in trouble. Deep, deep Christian-flavored trouble. The staff had even labeled him with a warning of “verbal jujitsu” - you had to stay miles ahead of the conversation or you’d find yourself like the recently fired psych tech who’d handed over the ward keys without a second thought.

Seriously. That’s how Christian escaped this time. All the other times, well, the man could be considered the second coming of Houdini. 

“How have you been, Bob? Are your feet still giving you grief, Margo?”

It was impressive how he acted like it wasn’t a big deal he’d magically reappeared. The guard and orderlies awkwardly keep watch over the double doors he’d come through like he’d disappear back into thin air. 

You hated how happy you became hearing the richness of his voice. The way his accent reminded you of the battle of wills on what was the proper way to say, “water,” and the teasing you gave him about constantly saying, “Naurr”. 

“It’s Margaret, jackass,” the older psych tech mumbled in reply. She didn’t even bother to look up from putting a new bandage on Bob’s hands.

“Missed you too, babe.” 

You watched his reflection in the safety of the glass of the window. You didn’t want to show how eager you were to see him - or to find out that every time he left the ward became almost too much to bear alone. 

In the safety of the window, you could pretend the call to freedom was what kept your eyes hypnotized. Not the sleeveless tee he’d tucked inside the waist of skinny jeans that hugged to the muscles like paint or the layers of tattoos that covered honey skin. He wasn’t tan when he’d left. Where had Ian’s adventures taken him this time? 

You would get the chance to ask him yourself. 

When his eyes caught sight of your huddled frame curled in the window seat his trajectory changed completely. He didn’t think you’d noticed him yet, but it didn’t stop his infamous megawatt smile from brightening up his features and the butterflies he’d left trapped in your gut instantly springing back to life. 

The only downside? You were more than positive Ian saw you only as a sister. If he’d thought of you in the past as anything else you would’ve definitely known by now. As much as Ian was known for his charisma and whirlwind energy, he was also known for slipping into the janitor’s closet with more than a few now-fired staff members. 

In a matter of seconds, he left the mirage of the window to become real beside you. The smell of cigarettes and his preferred cologne enveloped you, instantly turning the space intimate. You tried your best to ignore him. Ian would receive nothing but the side eye from you after the latest shit he’d pulled. 

He let out a heavy sigh as a finger playfully poked into your side. He wiggled the digit in a weak attempt to tickle you thinking it would be enough for you to finally look at him. Fat chance. Using your elbow, you pushed down with just enough force to dislodge him from your side. The act forced a heavy sigh to flare his nostrils as he leaned back against the window. 

“Come on, ‘Roo. You can’t be that mad at me?”

Of course, he would use your nickname. The nickname you earned one night when he’d tried to tickle you until you couldn’t breathe. To be honest, he thinks you’d kicked him accidentally in the chest because you might wet yourself. The truth? Ian had gotten dangerously close. A few times it felt like his lips were just a few sharp breaths away from landing on yours, and that night you’d felt hollow. So hollow. All you wanted was to burn and Ian…he was so full of fire and life and for once you wanted to know what it felt like to be filled with something other than emptiness. 

You wanted to catch fire too. 

So you’d kicked out at him in panic. Hence how you became his Kangaroo. His ‘Roo. 

“Actually,” you began, biting out the world with each syllable. “I can be upset with you and I most definitely am.”

“Don’t be like that, ‘Roo. I know you missed me.”

“No, I didn’t. It was rather peaceful while you were off on whatever antics you decided to get into.”

A tsk sent his bottom lip into a pout as he crossed his arms. His shoulders lean further down the window and slightly into your view. 

God, why did he have to be so heartbreakingly handsome? 

You refused to make eye contact with him. Don’t do it. It’s a trick. You knew it was a trick. A sneaky ploy and yet…you looked. One look was all it took and Ian knew he had you.

“I missed you.” His voice caressed your skin like velvet causing it to erupt in goosebumps. “So, I know if I missed you that can only mean that you missed me.”

A snort of disbelief left you as you finally gave him what he’d been asking: your full and undivided attention.  

“Is that how it works, Ian?”

“Ah!” He beamed. “She finally looks at me.” 

You couldn’t keep your eyes from rolling as you tried to face away from him, but Ian wasn’t having it. 

“I shouldn’t even do that.”

“Where is all this hostility coming from?” He pouted. “Did you experience another one of Dr. Thompson’s riveting group circles?”

“It’s not funny, Ian. You always leave.” You hated how your voice betrayed you. The way it cracked before you could glue it back together. “You go and leave me here, without you, all the time. One of these days you may not come back.”

All the playfulness slowly drained from his features. The sly smile wilted to a grimace as deep brown eyes scanned over your face. Calculating your words with the body language of guarded arms and saddened eyes. His hands gently grabbed at your elbows to loosen your arms before turning you to him. His head dipped down just a bit to make sure he had you at eye level. 

“Hey, ‘Roo. I’m sorry. I come back for you, you know that right?” You knew he was lying, but try telling that to the butterflies fluttering around like crazy in your gut. “These assholes could never catch me if I didn’t turn myself in, and I only turned myself in to get back to you.” 

You didn’t know what you would’ve said at that moment. Maybe something he wanted to hear or maybe - finally - you’d have the guts to call him out on his bullshit. Luckily for you, the muffled sound of Jaebum’s screaming slowly grew louder until his struggling body was brought through the double doors from therapy. 

“Let me go, you assholes!”

You’d never seen Jaebum fight so fiercely before. The way he flailed his arms to find a way to get them released along with his legs kicking out like a madman. They practically dragged him down the hall towards seclusion. For a split second, in his struggle, his eyes landed on you. His gaze held yours for what felt like a lifetime until the spell was broken. It felt like slow motion as his face turned to see Ian on your right and all the fight drained from his body. 

Did he think he was fighting for Ian? Himself? Jaebum was never much for acting out. That was usually Ian who created trouble. Maybe that was why he looked so shocked seeing Jaebum being dragged down to seclusion. 

“Oi! What the fuck is this?”

Ian was up off the window seat in seconds. A couple of orderlies were already coming out from behind the nursing station to meet him halfway. Whatever they were saying, you weren’t all too sure. Ian was doing his usual of screaming and shoving causing the orderlies to prepare for a fight. The patients closest to all the commotion desperately trying to get out of the way. 

It was all chaos. All classic Ian. The only non-classic thing was Jaebum looking at you in a way you’d never noticed before. It created a row of questions that sat heavily on your tongue and ones you weren’t sure he would ever be willing to answer. 

It wasn’t until everything had settled down again that you snuck inside the room that held group therapy. Your eyes instantly homing in on Jaebum’s chair and underneath it one of his grandfather’s books. 

Before you dared to push all the way through into the room you gave one last cautious glance to the recreation room and slipped inside. You made sure to hold the door so it didn’t click into place. There was no denying if you were caught sneaking in somewhere you weren’t meant to be you’d be joining Jaebum in your own seclusion room. 

The sterile room with its egg-white walls was most definitely not your favorite. The only way to add your own source of color to its walls was to display your thoughts - projecting them out like a fucked up home movie that you’d rather forget. 

You made sure to cut across the room silently. Your legs bending at the knee to swoop down to grab the worn-down cover and secure it to your chest. 

You couldn’t explain why as you made your way out of the room towards the upper floor that held the seclusion rooms what made you want to do this for him. It’s not like he would thank you, but you weren’t looking for that. 

It wasn’t hard to notice the way Jaebum cared for his late grandfather's things. From the sweater he wore daily that was meticulously cleaned and laundered to the few books Jaebum was able to keep from his collection. He coveted them the way others valued trophies but it wasn’t praise that Jaebum found secluded inside their pages: it was peace. 

You didn’t know much about him. Jaebum wasn’t much of a sharer. He was reserved. The only way to know him was by the pages you held close to your chest. So, you weren’t terribly sure why you were doing this for him except for the fact you believed no one should go without something that they loved. 

Just as you were about to round the last corner to the hallway that held seclusion rooms 1 through 3, you caught a flash of an orderly speaking to a nurse. From the brief moment you’d caught before you found the safety of the opposite wall, they were more than likely flirting. 

Ted. That was the name written on his uniform. He’d called Ian a “Psycho,” a handful of times. You wondered if Ted knew the nurse he worshiped spent the same handful of nights sneaking inside Ian’s dorm. 

“Do you maybe want to go get breakfast in the morning?” 

Breakfast?! You mouthed to yourself before you snuck another peek around the corner. 

“Oh, I don’t know, Ted. I might have plans later.”

If your eyes could roll back any harder you would’ve seen brain cells. You knew exactly what her supposed plans were. You could already hear the moans that echoed down the halls like a haunting. The only thing haunted here would be you. 

You didn’t have to see Ted’s expression to know he was defeated. He was probably wondering how someone could refuse breakfast or maybe he was finally growing tired of being told no. The mystery of the unknown in this love triangle would sadly (not really) remain a mystery. You didn’t really care if they had breakfast together or hunted Easter eggs. You just wanted them to finish their awkward conversation and leave the damn hallway. 

A few more strangled pieces of conversation later and you could hear the shuffling of feet. Quickly, you moved inside a linen closet and quietly shut the door. Your ears straining - waiting - to hear a pair of feet move past your location so you could finish what you came to do. 

Every second you were out here and not inside your own dorm waiting for the nurses to come in and check you were there was one second too many in a chance at punishment. After a few more minutes went by and the coast sounded relatively clear, you creeped out from the linen closet and dashed towards the seclusion rooms. 

“Jaebum!?” You half whispered half yelled. “Jay!”

“What the hell are you doing over here?”

Ah, there was that condescending voice you’d grown accustomed to. Following the sound of his voice, and with the help of his fingers hanging out of the small seclusion window, you darted towards the back of the hall. Your arms still securely held onto his grandfather’s book and only began to loosen as you got closer to the door. 

“I wanted to bring you something before they placed it in lost and found.” 

With another cautious glance down the hall, your fingers wrapped around the edges of the book's spine. You offered it up to him and gently started to push it through the small window. Jaebum hadn’t spoken since he noticed what you held in your hands. His fingers overlapped yours as he took it from you. His arms immediately brought it inside with him with the sound of pages flipping while he made sure each page was still accounted for. 

“How did you-“ he began, but his words quickly died out. 

“Can you believe it ladies and gentlemen? For once, he was too stunned to speak,” you teased. 

Jaebum’s eyes narrowed in on your face. His hands wagged the book as if he was going to hit you over the head with it. Who knows, he might have if there wasn’t a 30-pound door stationed between you. 

“I’m serious. You came all this way to give me this?”

You shrugged his words off like what you’d done wasn’t a big deal. Both of you knew it was. So many factors that could lead you to where he was, or worse, if they believed you were trying to steal someone else’s property. Which, they one hundred percent would even though kleptomania wasn’t part of your conga line list of disorders. 

“I remember how much his things matter to you. I didn’t want Bull or Kojak The Great Dick to get a hold of it. I know they wouldn’t have respected it after today.”

You’d expected a lot of things to come out of this exchange. The main one? At least a thank you. All you were getting now felt like the cold shoulder that featured a very unnerving stare. With every second you were feeling more self-conscious and it took everything in you not to shout, “Boo!” in an attempt to get him to blink. 

You couldn’t take the awkwardness of the exchange any longer. Your feet were already backpedaling as your arms swung, thumb extended out, to indicate your exit before you spoke. 

“Great well, this was a fun chat-“

“He lies to you, you know.”

Jaebum’s words took you by surprise. You were sure that was the point. His face was set in deep lines of determination as if what he needed to say was something you needed to adhere to like the gospel from the Bible. 

“Okay, Jay I’ll bite: who is he?”

“You know who I’m talking about. Ian. It’s who he is. He doesn’t know how to tell the truth, and you always set yourself up for failure with him.”

Maybe Jaebum thought he was being helpful - calling to light all things you were aware of but couldn’t bring yourself to say out loud. You must have seemed too weak - gullible - in his eyes for him to believe he needed to say these things. 

You eyed him coolly through the window. Your tongue rolled around inside your cheek trying to decide what exactly you should say at this moment. Did he want recognition that you knew you were an idiot? What did it matter to him if you knew Ian didn’t give two fucks about you. 

So, the only thing you could settle on was the beginning of a long sigh before you spoke: “I know I might look like a love-sick puppy to you, Jay, but I know my place.”

He tried saying your name to stop you. You just ignored him as you shook your head and allowed yourself to begin to move back down the hall towards the safety of your own dorm. 

“It’s alright, Jay I get it. Take care of your grandfather’s things better, okay?”

You didn’t wait to finish your sentence before you were already turning to head down the hallway. The bottom of your feet itching for you to sprint in the opposite direction. Your mind raced over Jaebum’s words and matched them with the growing chasm in your chest.

So lost in your head, you barely caught the sound of his parting, “Thank you,” as you bolted around the corner. 

[yoonia]

lost boys: threadbare hearts — masterlist

— subtitle | Odes for The Brokenhearted

— premise | A collection of short stories about seven boys who are unfortunate in love, and how they walk down the path of redemption in search of healing, finding new meanings in life and love. 

— series ratings & full warnings | +18 / M for Mature; stories included in this series will involve multiple explicit scenes, with graphic depiction of mature scenes, alcohol consumption, stories mentioning or depicting infidelity and past trauma, mentions of failed relationships; more appropriate warnings will be added in each story once they are released. 

— note: stories may not be posted in chronological order. all fics written by @yoonia

— title: Love Is Banned | pairings: Jaebum/Jay B (GOT7) x female reader | genre: pwp (porn with very little plot), post break-up!au, brother’s best friend!au 

— summary | Heartbroken beyond repair, you escape to your brother’s place hours away from home, desperate to avoid the Valentine’s Day soiree happening around you—only to find yourself trapped in the middle of his love-filled house party. Seeking solitude, you are surprised to find the perfect source of comfort from the last person you had ever expected to meet tonight.

— read here | teaser

— title: If You Let Me | pairings: Mark Tuan (GOT7) x female reader | genre: single parent!Mark, exes to lovers!au, brother’s best friend!au

— summary | Years have passed, and you thought you had moved on. But when he returns with a child, everything you worked so hard to bury resurfaces. Avoiding him was the plan, but that becomes impossible when he makes you an offer you can’t refuse. And as if resisting him wasn’t hard enough, his son quickly wins you over with his charm and innocence. And the boy also seems to be determined to piece his father’s broken heart back together… through you. 

— read here | teaser

— title: We Go Down Together | pairings: Jackson Wang (GOT7) x female reader | genre: pwp (porn with very little plot), friends with benefits!au

— summary | You've shared moments of pleasure—both pure and carnal—always perfectly in sync, even if those moments never last long enough. You've told yourself this is enough, that all you want is a night in his arms, not a place in his heart. But what if he wants more? What if, between the fleeting nights and the spaces between your busy lives, he’s longing for something deeper than just desire? 

— read here | teaser

— title: The Perfect Mistake | pairings: Jinyoung (GOT7) x female reader | genre: best friend’s brother!au, forbidden love!au, rom-com

— summary | One-night stands are nothing new to you—avoiding messy relationships has always been your way of steering clear of trouble. But waking up next to your best friend’s older brother after a drunken night? That’s a complication you never saw coming. One that might be even harder to escape.  

— read here | teaser

— title: You Are | pairings: Youngjae (GOT7) x female reader | genre: best friends to lovers!au, unrequited first love!au, mutual pining

— summary | Youngjae has long given up on love—or at least the hope of having his feelings returned. Being your best friend is enough, even if it means hiding the gaping void in his heart shaped by your presence. But he isn’t the only one keeping secrets. And when the truth finally comes to light, he may have to face the possibility that his dream of being yours was never meant to be.  

— read here | teaser

— title: Crash Into Me | pairings: Bambam (GOT7) x female reader | genre: strangers to lovers!au, runaway bride, rom-com

— summary | Spending his free weekend at his estranged cousin’s wedding was the last thing Bambam wanted to do. He had no real expectations coming to the ceremony—aside from enduring nosy relatives and enjoying a few drinks. But he certainly didn’t expect to be accused of kidnapping the bride while trying to slip away from the disaster that the ceremony had become. 

— read here | teaser

— title: The Way We Lie | pairings: Yugyeom (GOT7) x female reader | genre: roommates to lovers!au, fake dating!au, rom-com

— summary | Moving to a new city feels like a fresh start—especially when you stumble upon an online ad that turns out to be a total jackpot. A spacious yet affordable two-bedroom apartment, a charming roommate who's both a goofball and a great cook—what more could you ask for? But things take a turn when a stalker ex-girlfriend and your conservative parents come into the picture, leaving you with only one way out; a little white lie that blurs the line between pretend and reality.

— read here | teaser

— series tracklist | listen to story playlist here

— masterlist | wip | divider credit | ko-fi | patreon

Note: If you’re interested to be tagged/notified on any of the stories included in this series, please leave your blog username/url in the replies down below! Or you can enter through the taglist form here. Please make sure that your url is searchable and your blog is public so I can tag you. 

— ©Yoonia, all rights reserved. reposting/modifying of any kind, translations, unsanctioned adaptations are not allowed.

[csprint]

saw your ateez hc about eating you out so what about how got7 eating you out?! 🫣

Mark:

With one hand pinning your arms and the other gently rubbing your clit. Mark goes slow and makes sure you’re experiencing maximum pleasure.

Jay B:

From the back, with his right hand holding you down so you can’t push him away, and his left slapping your ass if you even try.

Jackson:

Messy. Incredibly messy. For him, he’s not properly eating pussy unless half his face is completely drenched in your wetness. Definitely the type to slurp that bitch.

Jinyoung:

Jinyoung never half-asses anything, which is why he eats pussy until he sees tears welling in your eyes. He isn’t satisfied and he isn’t stopping until he’s made you cum at least three times.

Youngjae:

With his ass in the air, sucking on your clit while holding your hand, intertwining your fingers. He likes to stuff your panties in your mouth to keep you quiet, since this man’s tongue is sent from heaven.

Bambam:

Sixty-nine king. There’s something that drives him crazy about being able to eat you out while your mouth is full of his cock at the same time. Either you’re sitting on his face or lying side to side, it doesn’t matter. As long as he gets to lap his favorite pussy.

Yugyeom:

Gyeomie eats pussy like it’s his last meal. He always wants you sitting on his face so he has absolute full access. Don’t even think about getting up either. This man will hold you down and eat you out until his last breath. After all, who needs air anyways?

[hawkeyescoffee]

It's our hearts that make the beat (2)

Gwen I

Gwen kept glancing to her phone screen, but the short message Miles had sent her had not changed.

GhostGwen🥁👻🩰: Hey Miles.

GhostGwen🥁👻🩰: Can we maybe talk today?

GhostGwen🥁👻🩰: Like I can swing by your place after last period?

(S)Miles🌻🕸️⚡: Sure- I am done after 8th period @the dorm?

Again, she let her head fall onto her desk with a groan.  She wanted to do amends to her friend, but her guilt weight heavy even after saving Miles and communicating thru text wasn’t the best way to convey emotions.

Before she could do something stupid like text more that she might regret when Miles was currently at school as well, someone fell into the chair next to her.

“You look awful.”, Em Jay was commenting with a soft smile, that contradicted her harsh words.

Gwen’s (former) bandmate was dressed in soft pastel colors, classing tastefully with the easy punk aesthetic she was going for. Ripped jeans with silver chains, soft pink off-shoulder shirt, paired with a violet studded leather jacket. For once her kinky hair was bound in a messy bun. Did Em Jay get her ears pierced another time? Gwen didn’t have enough time to look but she was sure she counted four silver-studs in each lob.

“Well, I feel awful.”, she answered sprawling out so that most of her torso was now laying on the cold hard surface of her desk. She could have said something clever like ‘you aren’t a sight ether’, but a) did she have little energy to pretend she wasn’t miserable and b) was it straight up not true. Mary-Jane Watson always looked good.

read on AO3

[norixseaweed]

Blacked Out CH. 1

(This story is being reposted from my original page to here, moving all my stories to here! Here is the original) Title: Blacked Out Characters: Jinyoung, Jay B, Fem-OC Rating: 18+ Master List Next Chapter Summary: Yuna is just a girl who wants to live her life to the fullest as much as she can. She's a hard worker who still likes to have fun. That is until she blacks out at a party and wakes up in a strangers bed. She didn't remember a single thing. Did she get taken advantage of? Will this event unravel her life into a mess?

Yuna woke up groaning as her head was pounding “Fuck I must have drunk too much,” she slowly opened her eyes but quickly covered her eyes with her hands as the sunlight hit her face. She let herself adjust to it before putting her hand back down and sighing “Ugh my brother is gonna give me a lecture for drinking so much,” She reached for her phone on the beside table but didn’t find it “where did I put it...” she sat up and checked under her pillows and blanket before she froze in her place. She rubbed her eyes as she stared at the black and white bed set, she then looked over the room finally realizing that was in fact, not in her room. 

“Okay...okay, Yuna, calm down, did I let some dude take me home? Oh god,” she took a few breaths to calm herself before slowly climbed off the bed “Who did I come home with? Shit I can’t remember anything at all...” She walked over to the bedroom door and slowly opened it, peaking into the living room, when she saw that there was no one there she stepped out and looked around, admiring the large space “Damn this guy must be loaded...” she looked around the large apartment admiring the art and furniture. Her favorite part was the kitchen, it was a large kitchen with an island, her dream kitchen she always wanted to have.

She remembered she didn’t have her phone on her and decided to go back and see if it was in the bedroom. As she walked towards the room the bathroom door suddenly opened before her and a man walked out. He was taller than her and super gorgeous with a sharp jawline she swore could cut her if she dared touch it. His eyes were piercing into her as he stared at her, but she was preoccupied by his wet body that was only covered at the waist by a towel. She gulped, her heart racing as her mind went into so many places it shouldn’t be. 

“You’re awake, feel free to take a shower, I left a towel in there for you.” He said as he grabbed the towel around his neck and started drying his hair with it while making his way towards his room. He stopped midway “I have some hangover medicine on the kitchen counter, you should drink it.” His face seemed neutral the entire time.

Yuna was confused at how calm he was. She walked into the bathroom and washed her face, she thought about taking his offer to shower but she felt awkward. She never felt comfortable taking a shower in other peoples homes if it wasn’t someone she was close to. 

She stepped out of the bathroom, deciding it’s better to just go home but she needed her phone to call for someone to pick her up. She went over to the room the man had gone into and knocked on it. He soon opened the door, he was dressed this time, though he hadn’t buttoned up his shirt, his bare chest just calling out to Yuna, she quickly averted her eyes and tried to look him in the eyes but he was so intimidating. She couldn’t keep the eye contact.

“Do you...have my phone?”

He moved passed her and walked over to the the TV stand unplugging a phone from the charger before walking over to her and handing it to her “I charged it for you since it was dead." 

“Oh thanks...” Yuna really didn’t know how to act or what to do, she felt so awkward but she needed to ask him about last night “Um...” for some reason she wasn’t able to continue her sentence, so many thoughts ran through her head and all she wanted was to remember what happened, this was her chance to find out.

“Do you need a cab? I can get you one.” He asked, his eyes not wavering as he gazed at her. 

“Uh no no! That’s fine I can just call my brother! Thank you anyway!”

Yuna panicked and bowed her head to him before rushing out of the apartment. She found the elevator and made her way down and out of the building. “Ugh I’m so stupid why did I panic?” She scolded herself before turning her phone back on to find over a hundred calls and texts on her phone from her brother “Shit I’m definitely dead meat.” She let out a sigh before giving him a call back. There was barely even a chance for the phone to ring once before it had already been picked up “Where the fuck have you been?!” She flinched when he yelled “Jaebeom...listen, it’s a long story, kind of, can you pick me up?” 

“You had me seriously worried, where are you? I’m coming right now.” 

“I...don’t know actually, give me a second,” she looked for the name of the apartment and at what was nearby “I’m by an apartment building called Paragon Apartments...there’s a cafe in front of it and a book store...”

“Okay, I’m on my way, don’t go anywhere.” Jaebum hung up the phone. 

Yuna began to slowly pace back and forth as she tried to remember the previous night. She had gone to a party one of her co-workers was throwing for his birthday, she didn’t know the guy very well but she got an invite to go and she thought this could be a chance to meet someone cute. But aside for talking with a few co-workers and having a couple of drinks she couldn’t remember anything else. She looked up at the building she had come out from, cursing herself for always getting cold-feet when it came to confrontations. 

A black car soon pulled up by the curb behind her “Yuna!” She turned around and walked towards the car, she opened the passenger door and got in, putting her seat belt on “Thanks, Jaebeom...” she mumbled. He was still parked, staring at her “Do you have any idea how scared I was?” Time for a lecture she thought to herself “I went to pick you up from the party but you weren’t there, someone told me they saw you leave with some guy and you looked drunk as hell, you said you weren’t planning on drinking so much.” Yuna looked up at him and shrugged “I wasn’t...I don’t remember what happened, but I’m pretty sure I only had 3 drinks, but I guess I had more...” 

“You blacked out?”

“I guess so, i don’t remember anything,”

“Did you get the last drink yourself or did someone give it to you?”

“Someone gave it to me, someone I danced with...”

“You idiot, you should never take drinks from someone else especially not someone you don’t even know, he tried to drug you that’s why you blacked out!”

Yuna clenched her fists “I don’t care if you scold me, but can you not call me an idiot? I’m confused okay, I don’t remember what happened, I don’t know if anything happened, how do you think I feel waking up in a strangers bed with no recollection of how you got there?” It was all finally sinking in for her. She realized she probably was violated and she can’t even identify who did it. Jaebeom reached a hand out and grabbed her hand “I’m sorry, I’m not angry at you, I didn't mean to go off. I’m just upset...are you okay? Was the guy home when you woke up?” She nodded her head, her head lowered as she looked down at her lap “Was he the one who gave you the drink?” she shook her “So a different guy drugged you and then this guy took you home? Did he say anything?” 

“No, he just told me if I wanted to I can take a shower and he had hangover medicine for me sitting on the counter...he even offered me a cab, he acted as if nothing happened and I panicked when I wanted asked him about why I was there...” Jaebeom then moved his hand to stroke her hair “Are you hurt anywhere? Are you feeling okay?”

She shrugged “Let’s go home...”

He shifted gears and began driving home towards their apartment.

Once they arrived back to their apartment and pulled up to the front of the building Jaebeom looked over at his younger sister. “Go take a shower and I’ll go get us something to eat, okay?” He said, giving her a gentle smile. Yuna nodded and unbuckled her belt before getting out of the car and heading up to their apartment while Jaebeom made his way towards a nearby restaurant.

Yuna kept trying to force herself to remember that night, while also thinking about all the things that could have happened. What if that man was the one who drugged her? What if he was just a pretentious asshole who sees no big deal in drugging girls and using them, maybe that’s why he was so calm acting as if nothing unusual happened. It killed her to not know. The whole situation had triggered her anxiety and she didn’t know what to do, but she didn’t cry. She tried to calm herself by using some breathing techniques she learned from her therapist once. It helped her a little bit.

Around the same time she finished showering and getting dressed her older brother Jaebeom got home and began setting the table with the food he had ordered. “I got some soup for you and fried chicken.” He said as they both sat at the table. They ate quietly the whole time. When they finished eating and cleaning up Yuna had decided to go to her room but Jaebeom grabbed her hand and looked down at her before pulling her into chest into a tight hug.

That’s when she was able to finally cry. She hugged him tight and began sobbing against her older brothers chest. He stood there silently, letting her cry it out as he rubbed her back.

Jaebeom was two years older than Yuna, he always took care of her since they were young, despite the regular old sibling fights they always had, they still cared for each other a lot. They were very close, they were each others best friends. Everything Jaebeom did was to support her. After their parents had died when he was 20 and she was 18 in a car accident he did everything in his power to take care of her and eventually invested in a club which was now a successful one, he ran the club with one of his childhood friends. With the money he earned he helped his sister finish college. Yuna was of course thankful for everything he did for him, she worked hard not to be a disappointment to him.

She was a very smart girl, thanks to that she graduated with high scores and continued to get her masters. She had interned with a big company which recommended her to a bigger company. Because of this she was quickly accepted as an accountant at Samsung at the young age of 24. Needless to say Jaebeom was proud of her but he didn’t know she had jealous co-workers. He didn’t know there was rumors of her sleeping her way up to such a big company like that. But Yuna ignored all of it, but she did hate how everyone was immature. Of course not everyone believed the rumors or hated her. She was a friendly and open person.  

When the weekend was over and Yuna had to get to work she couldn’t help but be anxious as she walked in towards her desk. What if everyone knew she was drugged and taken home by some man? She was worried there could be rumors that would get her fired.

She sat down at her desk and began to work, when the woman working at the desk beside her came around “Hey, Lim Yuna,” she whispered “I saw you go home with a cute guy last night." Yuna tensed up and she became anxious, hoping she wasn’t going to say something bad, she looked up at her co-worker “Who was he? Was he good in bed? Ugh you’re so lucky you landed such a hottie!” Yuna let out a sigh of relief “Um, I don’t know, nothing happened between us, I was just drunk and he got me a cab...” she lied. She didn’t want to brag about sleeping with that man when she didn’t know what happened. When she doesn’t know if he was a good or bad person. 

“Oh that’s sweet of him, did you at least get his number?”

Yuna shook her head and the lady pouted, shrugging before going back to her desk. The day seemed pretty quiet and thankfully no one has brought up anything about her and the party. During her break she had a light lunch before walking around, she had wanted to find the man who invited everyone to his party to ask him about the guy she had been with that night but at the same time she was scared to do it. 

“What if he knows what happened and makes fun of me?” she let out a big sigh before heading back in to the building to the elevators.

As she stepped out of the elevator when it reached her floor she hadn’t realized there was someone behind her until she heard a voice.

“That’s sexual harassment, don’t make me report you.”

Yuna heard these words and blinked before turning around. Her eyes widened when saw the man from the other morning standing there with a tight grip on another mans wrist. The other man seemed familiar to her as well but she didn’t recognize him. The man pulled his arm away letting out a scoff before walking away. 

Yuna’s gaze was still on the familiar man’s face. She never thought she would see him again. At least not here.

Next Chapter

[limjaeseven]

Antidote

Pairing: Jaebeom X Mark / Jaebeom X Youngjae

Genre: Angst, Romance

Rating: Mature

Word Count: 1,362

Summary: Things haven't been looking up for Jaebeom for for god knows how long. Mark was the one person who was supposed to make things better, but there was a limit even to that.

Warning(s): Mental breakdowns, self neglect

[a/n]: So I haven't posted anything in ages even though I have nearly 20 fics piled up from the past two years. I'm finally taking the initiative to post them (fingers crossed). This fic was originally written for the kpop bingo collab which closed a while back but here it is anyways. I hope you enjoy!

Jaebeom didn’t know when it went from just a bad day every now and then to struggling to get out of bed every morning. Things were going fine, and the next thing he knew, they weren’t.

Coming home to his boyfriend Mark used to be his favourite part of the day, but their small quarrels had become fights that left them not sharing a word for days. Jaebeom didn’t have the energy to keep the distance but Mark drew his lines thick and deep, and Jaebeom couldn’t cross them till his boyfriend let him.

Work went from good to alright to a struggle gradually enough that Jaebeom didn’t even realise he was spending one, two, three more hours at work every night. Every day there would be too many files to go through, too many calls to make, too many meetings to attend, too much to do. The stress was making his hair fall out but he just kept going, hoping that just after this project, the next project, the project after that, things would get better.

His steps went from confident and fast paced to dragging, every movement a struggle against his body telling him to stop, to catch a break, to just give everything up.

“So you’re taking the day off for our anniversary, no?” Mark asked from across the dinner table. They had just gotten out of their last fight which consisted of doors slammed in each other’s faces, leaving late at night and coming back early in the morning without informing the other, and a week of eating meals seperately.

“I told you, I really can’t. This client is too important.” Jaebeom knew that the respite from the fight was short, that they would go back to doing what they were doing by midnight.

Mark sighed, frustrated. “I never ask you for anything, Jaebeom. I just want us to spend one day together. It’s our fifth anniversary, doesn’t that mean something to you?”

Nearly on the verge of tears, Jaebeom tried to hold himself together as he spoke. “I know hyung,” Jaebeom knew him using honorifics on the older would relay to him how serious he was, “But there’s nothing I can do. Even if I asked for a holiday my boss would reject it. I can’t lose this job, it’s everything I have. You know how much I love you but I just can’t do this for you. We can plan something for the weekend after, maybe?”

Mark looked conflicted, understanding his boyfriend on an intellectual level but the primal part of him hurt and torn apart, that his lover couldn’t spare him one day when it mattered the most.

“We both know that you’ll be busy on the weekend too, you don’t have time for me anymore. Not talking to you when you’re home is futile because you never even are. I know your job is hectic and meaningful to you, Jaebeom, but I need to see you, spend time with you, talk to you to be able to be with you. If I’m just seeing you twice a week in our home and we’re fighting for most of it, there’s no point in us going on like this.”

Jaebeom knew what those words meant but he couldn’t accept it. There was no way Mark was implying that, was there? He wouldn’t ever think of such a thing, would he? Mark had been his better half for as long as he could remember. They were practically married, they were ride or die, right?

The world came closing around Jaebeom and he couldn’t hold onto anything by the time he realised. His body shook and his throat closed. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t see, he couldn’t hear. He was trapped and he didn’t know what to do.

He didn’t know how long he sat on the floor of their kitchen, curled in foetal position, with Mark trying to get his breathing to even out. Jaebeom hadn’t had a panic attack in years and it scared both of them.

“Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go,” Jaebeom mumbled over and over again, hands clutching tightly at Mark’s sides. He could see the tears streaming down his lover’s face, and he knew what the expression on his face meant. He knew it was the end and he didn’t know what to do but cry.

Mark left a week later. Jaebeom had just returned from work and he saw the suitcases sitting in the living room. He knew this day was coming for a while, but he still hadn’t entirely processed it. They had spent every evening after that night together, a respectable distance between them as Mark spoke about the end. He wasn’t one to sugar coat, he wouldn’t talk about his day at work and pretend like they weren’t ending the relationship they built brick by brick.

He had stayed a few days longer just to make sure Jaebeom was okay, because even though they weren’t right for each other anymore, Mark still loved him. Still, saying goodbye wasn’t any easier. They hugged each other for what felt like hours, crying quietly into each other’s arms, till Mark had to pull away, his best friend at the door to help him out.

Jaebeom crumbled to the floor the moment the door closed. He slept there that night, waking up well into the afternoon. Emailing his boss an apology, who let him take the rest of the day off, he got to tidying up his house, trying not to cry every time he saw the empty spots where Mark’s things sat.

He knew he should have tried harder, but it was as if his body was working on autopilot and he was just going along on the ride. He knew Mark had every right to leave, that it had been building up for a long time, but it didn’t hurt any less. Jaebeom cried more times that day than he probably had in all of his life.

It was less that two weeks later that he collapsed at work and had to be taken to the hospital. Jaebeom hadn’t been eating, he barely had anything more than coffee to keep himself up and running. His body had finally given in and it took him nearly two days to get back to consciousness. The nurse who looked after him was a woman about his mother’s age, who chided him for being so careless, and convinced him to try therapy out.

Reluctantly, Jaebeom made a visit to the psychiatrist in the hospital where he was admitted, and he had to admit, just talking about what he was going through to someone helped. After he was discharged, he came back once a week, poured his heart out and listened carefully. They put him on some medication and slowly the dark clouds thinned out, sunlight peaking through the cracks.

After one of the sessions, Jaebeom found a man a few years younger than him sitting in the waiting room outside his psychiatrist’s office. He was undeniable pretty, Jaebeom thought, shooting him a quick smile before leaving.

As the weeks passed, he saw the boy over and over again, and they went from friendly waves to small talk between their sessions. Jaebeom found out that the man’s name was Choi Youngjae, that he was only two years younger than him and worked as a piano teacher.

“Hyung, do you want to meet up sometime?” Youngjae asked Jaebeom when the older let him know that his psychiatrist told him he had recovered enough for them to stop the sessions.

Smiling, Jaebeom pulled his phone out and handed it to Youngjae, “I would love to.” He didn’t know if it was too soon, but the way the younger man’s smile lit up his world every time they spoke, he was willing to give it a shot.

[ersatzworlds]

Things We Carry (1940s!au letter fic)

A/N: I wrote this almost a year ago for a personal writing challenge. The prompt was "things we carry", hence the title. I had GOT7's Jay B in mind while writing it (altho it was before he even enlisted lol), but really it could apply to any of your favs that have enlisted in the army. Hope you enjoy!

Genres: Kinda fluffy? Letter format

Word count: 319

Warnings: Mention of war

--

May 22, 1944

My dearest,

At the time of writing, it has been many weeks since you left suddenly with most of the men of the town. I have prayed for your safety every day since your departure, yet still I have worried for you. It has truly brought me great joy and relief to have received your letter, and I could not delay sending you a reply as soon as I read it.

Your mother and I have been keeping each other company. She sits right by me as I write. We have discussed together your gentle soul not suiting combat. It is hard to imagine you carrying arms. A good book in your hands suits you much better. I send with this letter some of your favourite books from your library. I hope they help you pass the time and lift your spirits.

If that doesn't help, I hope that news of our good health reassures you. Your mother and I have gone downtown yesterday to visit the old Dr. K. Mother is stronger than ever, and I myself am holding up well. While we were out, we also had our pictures taken by the photographer down the street, and, as you requested, I send those with this letter too.

If this still does not bring you enough comfort, my dear, because I know you worry for us, perhaps the idea of your darling wife carrying your child helps you. Your mother wanted me to keep this secret until your return, but when Dr. K confirmed my pregnancy, I knew that I must share this blessed news with you. I hope for the fighting to end soon so that when our child is birthed into the world, we may meet them together.

I long for your embrace, my dear. I sit in wait on your reading chair. My heart burns for you every day.

Your darling xx