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kiri-ah · 4 years ago

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Something To Sink My Teeth Into || she/her pronouns version

Themes: Supernatural AU, Vampire AU, strangers to lovers, angst and fluff (so much fluff), something similar to those symbiotes from Venom and Hanahaki disease combined, interplanar travel, Jaemin and the reader are oblivious and Chenle gets mad about it, long conversations about vampires, vampires can't cry

Pairing: Vampire!Jaemin x Female Human!reader

Warnings: mentions of blood (minor), mentions of eating (human food and vampire food), character death, Chenle is kind of a butthole, in depth conversations about humans and vampires which include biting and blood drinking, Yuta's house gets set on fire

Word Count: 26.4k

Taglist: @bluejaem, @heyyyun, @generantionct (untaggable), @stayctday, @kunrengui, @allegxdly, @leetaeyonglover, @koishua, @choppedupcactus, @hyuckworld, @alexameliamg, @notbeforelong, @jaemotel

Summary: A trip to Poland goes terribly wrong - or maybe terribly right - when you're bitten and kidnapped by a vampire. Between passing out, almost dying multiple times, and falling in love, you have a lot on your plate. Oh, and the magic. Right. Teaser here.

A/N: This is so much longer than it was meant to be... *sigh*

This has only been edited by myself and a friend of mine, please excuse any errors. I worked hard to make the best experience possible. For that reason, please note that this is the !she/her pronouns version! He/him pronouns may be found here, they/them pronouns here. Please enjoy!

You were on holiday in Krakow, Poland. For your twenty first birthday, your parents had gifted you a weeklong trip over Spring Break, and you had been having the time of your life. You had found Krakow rich in historical influence - it had been the capital of Poland until 1596 and still had remnants of the past, like a Renaissance-era trading post and sections of the medieval walls that surrounded the city. Plus, the section of the city that you were staying in was very close to the city center, where you discovered aforementioned trading post, called the Cloth Hall, and an old cathedral named St. Mary’s Basilica.

The first night of your stay, Sunday night, you had struggled to sleep, because of the time difference and the excitement of arriving. You stayed in Monday morning, trying to at least rest a bit, and then ventured out to the nearest coffee shop when that didn’t alleviate your sleepiness. The barista had whipped up your favorite pick-me-up morning drink, and you went to sit outside in the fresh air, surveying the plaza over the rim of your cup. It was just the right time of year, you thought, because it was nice and warm without being too hot, just how you liked it. The sun had started to rise about the buildings around you, illuminating certain structures and giving them an unearthly glow.

When you finished your drink, you put the cup into the collection bin and walked back out onto the main square, just enjoying the sun on your face (over the sunglasses you had bought in the airport after forgetting to pack yours) and letting the warmth sink through your limbs after the tired night. One of the unfortunate things about the time of year you had travelled was the tourists. There were families and older couples and people your age taking trips with their friends, and most everyone stayed right where you were staying as well: right in the heart of the city. To avoid as many crowds as possible, you had booked a tour of St. Mary’s Basilica for Thursday morning, and reserved entry to the underground museum for this afternoon.

Tomorrow you planned to go and see Grodzka Street, where you were going to try and find a souvenir. In the same neighborhood was an ancient church called St. Andrew’s Church, which dated back to around 1079. On Wednesday, you were going to brave the crowds of people in the Cloth Hall for the same purpose, and also because it was a historical landmark that you just needed to explore. Wednesday afternoon was blocked out to be a rest period, as was Thursday morning. Then on Friday you were planning to go and see the Wawel Castle and Cathedral. From there you would explore the various attractions on the property, and then return to the plaza later to eat. That afternoon, you planned to go to the Jewish cemetery. Saturday was blocked out for a trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was a Nazi concentration camp and a Holocaust memorial out of the main town. When you returned to the hotel late that afternoon you would pack and get ready for your flight Sunday morning. It was going to be a very full and very fun week. Or at least you hoped it would be fun.

You explored the main square a little bit that first day and unpacked your things, making sure you had everything you needed for your trip and you didn’t need to walk to one of the convenience stores nearby.

The days passed quickly, and you finished each one completely satisfied. Everything and everyone here was so wonderful and you started to wonder how you had never heard of this place before this trip. It was absolutely one of the best places your parents could have picked.

On Friday morning you got up bright and early (well, actually, it was dark and early) to go to the Wawel Castle. You had heard from a travelling site that tickets sold out fast and it was important to get there early in the day, and you tried to heed that warning. At 7am when you arrived it was already busy, but thankfully not so much that the lines were too long. You wandered through the small exhibits and around the grounds. It was a bit more chilly today and you wrapped a scarf around your neck as you shivered, trying to find a less windy spot to hide out for a second. You found a little spot where you could take a moment and recharge your inner heater and were doing just that, burrowing into your small scarf mountain, when you realized that a person stood next to you. You looked up through your lashes at them and caught your breath - holy cow he had good genes. He had a sharp, sloping jawline that stopped at a chin less pointy than you had expected. His lips were plush and round, although he needed some chapstick. His hair was pushed around by the wind but despite that he looked, well, amazing. Sections were bleached, giving his hair an almost halo-esque look. His nostrils contracted as he inhaled and then his eyes cut down to yours, dark and deep and was that eyeliner?

He smiled then, a smirk that seemed far too self-assured for the situation, and leaned over towards your exposed ear. “I can feel you staring, sweetheart,” he murmured. The top of your ear, which had been feeling rather numb, flamed hot at his words. It almost hurt, the sudden jump into heat. You turned towards him fully, only eyes exposed by the scarf mountain. Your hair whipped around as the wind shifted again, but he didn’t seem cold, although he was in only a pair of black skinny jeans, a white t-shirt, and a black jacket. The jacket caught your attention for a second - it was studded with thousands of little rhinestones, like a varsity jacket gone shiny. Then he shifted closer into your space and you were forced to look back at his eyes, glittering in a way that seemed almost predatory. You sucked in a breath through your mouth and started to back away.

“S-sorry,” your breath came out in a whisper. Nobody seemed to notice your interaction. “I didn’t see you there, I’ll just leave.” You turned to go before his hand, surprisingly strong, clamped around your arm and pulled you back into his chest.

His voice came out in a growl as he blocked your scream with his other hand. “I am far, far too hungry for you to leave right now, precious.” The strength in your legs seemed to dissipate at his tone, you knew you needed to defend yourself, but ‘hungry’? What was that about? And precious? The hand wrapped around your arm let go and started unwrapping your scarf, exposing your face to both him and the frigid wind. He started to lean down, and you pressed your lips together tightly. At the very least, he wasn’t getting in your mouth. You may have lost the strength in your legs, but not in your will. Then he bypassed your mouth and leaned into your neck, inhaling and causing cold air to course along the column of your throat. He chuckled when you shivered, then bit into your neck.

The pain was overwhelming, you could feel each individual blood cell crying out, every organ protesting, your head started to pound with it. It hurt far more than even a dog bite should. It hurt like a shot at the doctor going on and on, echoing through your body and you were powerless to stop it. The pain flared in your neck and your brain seemed to slow down as the blood flowed away from it and into his mouth. You crumbled into him, and without detaching from your throat, he scooped you up into his arms, holding you there to be his personal bloodbag. You had long since stopped trying to scream, it was too difficult, too much effort.

Vampires, your thoughts whispered, before the pain covered you and you passed out, collapsing completely.

☽༓☾

You woke up in a... cozy cottage? There wasn’t any sign of your attacker and, in fact, no sign of anything vampire esque either. You looked around the single room at the soft fabric couch (covered in boho style throw pillows), the kitchenette (complete with pre packed food), and the window, through which you could see a combination flower and vegetable garden. There were two doors off of the room you were in, one that led towards the lush green outside, and one that must have concealed the bathroom.

The moment you realized this, you also realized that you really needed to use said bathroom, and struggled to plant your bare feet on the floor. Your legs didn't want to hold your weight, and you crumbled to the rug with a whine. Two seconds later, the door to the outside opened with a swish of fresh air and there, outlined by the sun, stood the most gorgeous person you had ever had the pleasure to lay eyes on. When he saw you on the floor, he groaned and ran a hand through his pink hair. "Shit, I'm so sorry, let me help you!" He ran over and you allowed him to half carry you into the bathroom. It wasn’t like you had any strength to protest, and he seemed nice. He smelled like sunshine on fresh earth.

Once you had finished using the toilet you tried to stand up again, now that you at least had some semblance of strength in your legs. After a few tries you were able to support yourself against the bathroom counter, with more than half of your weight against the frigid tiles. Your legs shook as you started standing more straight up, and you made a high pitched keening sound that you didn’t even know you could make; the man’s worried voice came through the door. His voice was higher and slightly panicked.

“Are you okay? Do you need help? Are you hurting too much?”

Your voice, which you hadn’t managed to make work properly, came out lower than usual and scratchy. A portion of your throat ached as you tried to make the sounds audibly. “Yeah,” you rasped out. “I can’t stand up properly.”

“Do you need me to come and help?” There was something about his voice that just made you want to trust him. It was soft but strong and even though he had toned down the panic, it still had soft tremors of worry running through it.

You thought about it for a second and considered yourself in the mirror. You looked, quite frankly, horrible. Your hair was a mess (more than usual), your eye bags were sagging unnaturally, and your eyes themselves were dull. You did look like you needed help. You sighed. “Sure.”

A moment later he opened the door slowly and stepped into the space with you, putting one arm around your waist to help support you. You relaxed some of your weight onto him and closed your eyes briefly. It would have been a wholly relaxing moment if not for your stomach. It grumbled up at you and you thought for a moment that it sounded like an angry octopus trapped inside of you. Then you blinked to clear the thought away as the man laughed. It was deeper than you expected from a man with pink cotton-candy colored hair, a low chuckle that rumbled through his body and, in turn, yours. You shook against him slightly with the movement and his other arm came to help you lean more against his body. He was stronger than you expected and you could feel the muscles in his arms shift as he reoriented himself.

“Let’s get you some food,” he said, smiling. “Unfortunately I’m not sure I’ll have much you’ll like.” You just nodded. Your throat was still throbbing uncomfortably where you were bitten and you weren’t sure you had the energy to even debate his statement. You were sure you would eat whatever he gave you. He led you into the main room again and helped you settle onto the couch. He walked over to the kitchenette and picked up a can of soup, then walked back to you to verify it was a kind that you liked. Once you had approved it, he went back and put it in a pot on the electric stove, starting to heat it up. As he stood over it, you had some time to think as you sat on the couch. The first thing you realized was that you still didn’t know what his name was, which was an issue. You couldn’t thank him properly without knowing his name. The second thing you realized was that you didn’t know where you were, exactly. The third was that you had probably missed your flight back home and your parents were going to murder you for it when you eventually got back. You shifted so you were more comfortable before trying to speak again. You started with the easiest vocal warmup you remembered and the man looked over at you with eyebrows raised.

“You good?” he asked. You nodded in response, hoping that your throat would relax and stop throbbing.

“Yeah, I think so,” you told him. “The side of my neck really aches where that man bit me.” His eyebrows furrowed at this and you thought maybe you just imagined it, that nobody actually bit you, but the pain was real enough in that moment and it was certainly real enough when he bit you. “Also,” you continued, “I still don’t know what your name is.” He seemed to think about this for a moment.

“I’m Jaemin Na,” he said eventually. “This is my house. And I think maybe we need to take a closer look at your bite, I didn’t realize it still hurt. Usually the throbbing goes away after a day or two.” You found yourself nodding along before his words sank in.

“Okay, uh, nice to actually know who you are now. I’m Y/N,” you said. There were suddenly many more questions floating around your brain. Usually he had said, which meant he had dealt with vampire bitten people before. How? Was he one? Why weren’t you a vampire? And how long had you been asleep for? They circled around your head like a dog chasing its tail until you realized that Jaemin was in front of you. It seemed like he was waiting for you to say something.

“Sorry,” you murmured. “What was that?”

“I said we have all the time in the world for you to ask me the questions I know you must have. Don’t psych yourself out. You’re safe.” Despite the fact that you knew next to nothing about him you found yourself once again trusting him without reason. He just seemed like a genuinely nice person, someone you could believe to tell you nothing but the truth.

“Okay,” you agreed, and it came out like a sigh. Your throat gave a particularly unpleasant throb and you unconsciously brought a hand up to rub at it. Jaemin’s hand fastened around your wrist and pulled it away, looking closely at your skin. He sighed.

“You’ve probably figured out by now that the man who bit you was a vampire. If you haven’t, have your moment of denial now.” You just looked back at him, surprised.

“Denial?”

“Yeah. Usually when humans find out about vampires for the first time they aren’t very accepting of it. I’ve had to replace my windows a few times from thrown objects.” You almost laughed before realizing that he was serious.

“Okay, well, I already got that, so go ahead,” you prompted.

“Great!” His eyes got just a little bit less heavy with your statement and he continued, “contrary to popular belief, vampires don’t actually turn humans all that often. If we had that little self control the whole population would be dead or turned already.” You noted his use of the word we and shuddered a little. He could attack you too? He seemed so gentle.

For the first time you noticed your soup in a bowl on the coffee table. Jaemin reclaimed your attention by speaking again. “We’re also pretty good at choosing who to bite, and when. We’re not heartless. We try to choose people with good metabolisms so that we can return them to Earth quickly.” At this you inhaled so sharply that he paused, looking over at you.

“We aren’t on Earth anymore?” you asked shakily. He shook his head with a quirk of his lips. That distracted you enough to calm down for a moment. He really was a gorgeous person. Was the word person still applicable to vampires? You didn’t know. He sucked you out of your thoughts again with a hand waved in front of you.

“No, we’re not on Earth. Where we are… it’s like a parallel plane of existence. Vampires can live here, do live here, in bigger bunches than we can on Earth. We call it ‘Vahmpyr.’ I always thought that was a really unoriginal name, but I was turned after it was discovered so I didn’t have much of a say. It would be like you trying to rename Earth.” He picked up your bowl of soup and stirred it around, handing it to you, before continuing.

“This is my vacation house of sorts, where I nurse humans who have been bitten back to their healthy selves. Generally we vampires try to keep one certified nurse or doctor in each coven just in case, more if the coven is large. It’s a handy skill to have. Especially if you happen to have parts of your coven who are as chaotic as ours.” He looked over at you and smiled wryly before adding, “I didn’t poison the soup, you know.” You looked down at your lap where the warm bowl sat and laughed under your breath before picking up the spoon and taking a bite. It was delicious. You flashed him a thumbs up with your mouth full and he smiled brightly again.

Once you had swallowed you asked, “how can you bite humans and not turn them? I didn’t know it was possible to not turn us.” He nodded like he was expecting this question.

“It’s kind of a strange feeling,” he told you. “Biting, I mean. It’s not like the human feeling of biting into a piece of meat. It’s just… it’s amazing. It’s like cold fruit on a summer’s day, hot chocolate while snow falls. It’s at once a feeling of absolute power and absolute devotion because tasting a human’s blood puts them above everything else, at least for a few moments. At the same time you’re aware that their body is falling apart and right into you. It’s intoxicating. Every once in a while you’ll bite someone that just tastes extraordinarily good, or meet someone with a unique and, pardon my language, delicious, smell. Then your body sort of automatically realizes you want them to stick around and releases the venom.”

“So,” you said, interested by his version of vampires, “if you bit me right now, I’d be fine?”

His eyes sparked with something new. Anger, you thought, or something close to it. “I just spent four days nursing you back to health and you want me to bite you just to see what happens?” he asked incredulously.

“No! I was just confirming. I’m sorry,” you murmured, and shoved another bite of the soup into your mouth for good measure. He sighed.

“I’m sorry too, it feels so easy to talk to you. I forget that you’re new to this.” You choked on your soup while he and he hurriedly patted your back as you regained your breath. “Are you alright?”

“Did you say you spent four days nursing me back to health?” you asked, head spinning. Four days. Four days. Four days. “I’ve been missing from Earth for four days?”

He deliberated for a moment. “Yes, and no. You’ve been off of Earth for four days, yes, but you aren’t missing.” You raised an eyebrow in response and he hurried to explain more. “I mean, obviously you’re here, and yes, you’ve been here for four days, asleep, recovering from Jisung’s bite. On the other hand, there’s still a you on Earth right now. That’s the interesting thing about Vahmpyr. We can bring humans back, with some effort, and while they’re here, a version of them is still on Earth. It’s still you. And if you go back, from what I understand, you get your other half’s memories back, like you never left. It’s quite the phenomenon.” He seemed completely serious and you were inclined to believe him, but this was insanity. Another you, a perfect copy, walking around on Earth while you hung out with the vampires in their parallel plane? You pinched yourself. It hurt, and you winced. Jaemin looked at you with this horrible understanding glimmer in his eyes like he was saying I know how this is. It’s weird and unimaginable but it’s here. Please don’t break any of my things.

Eventually you just kept sitting and looked back at him. “This really is good soup,” you said. He looked at you in surprise before bursting out laughing, face lighting up like the horizon at sunrise.

“You’re not going to attack me?” he asked between chuckles. “That’s the normal response. And thank you, that’s my favorite kind of soup too.” You shook your head, smiling back at him.

“I decided that there’s no changing it even if this is just a fever dream induced by an infected human,” you explained to him. “And wait, can you actually eat still? Like stuff besides blood?” In response he ran over to the small kitchen and grabbed a spoon of his own, dipping it into the bowl and moving it to his mouth. When he was done he smiled at you.

“I can still eat human foods. Nothing is as good as blood, of course, but I can still enjoy it. It’s just dulled by the transformation. And I’m glad that’s the stance you take on being transported to a different plane, I’ve known humans to react rather badly.” He took a moment to think. “For example, there was a woman who was convinced we had sexually assaulted her, which is a fair thought, but she wouldn’t let me explain anything to her. She ran outside as soon as her legs were strong enough and ran right into Lucas. He’s a really big guy, wide and tall and strong and such. She was so terrified she ran into my bathroom and I had to give her the spiel from through the door. Not the finest of interactions.” In spite of yourself you laughed. You could imagine the woman’s fear, especially if this Lucas was as infuriatingly gorgeous as Jaemin and the man who had bit you. You probably should’ve felt the same way, but something about Jaemin was just relaxing, and you felt safe with him.

“I get it,” you told Jaemin. “All of you guys; the guy who bit me - what did you say his name was? Jisung? Yeah, him. Jisung and you and probably Lucas, you all look like models which I guess goes with the vampire narrative, but it’s a little shocking since I’ve never seen someone so good looking. It’s nearly scary.” You looked back up to see Jaemin looking surprised.

“You think we’re good looking? Even after you got bitten by one, abducted by another, and have only heard of the third in a story about someone running away screaming?”

You shrugged. “All of that doesn’t change the facts. You’re still some pretty perfect looking human beings.” A moment later you realized what you had said and wrinkled your nose. “Sorry, uh, creatures. Is that offensive?” Jaemin laughed again and wow you could get addicted to that laugh. It was so carefree. You supposed that came with immortality.

“Technically ‘creatures’ is more accurate but isn’t very nice-sounding, even if we are unnatural monsters.” He said this as though he had come to terms with it. Even if we are unnatural monsters.

“I don’t think you’re unnatural,” you told him. “I mean, if there is a higher power out there then He or It or They created a whole plane for you and if not then nature did. I don’t think Vahmpyr would exist if you were unnatural.” He looked at you without speaking as you took another spoonful of soup.

“That’s… that’s a new way of looking at it.” He looked conflicted, like he was trying to reconcile your view of him with his view of himself. “I don’t think our plane was meant to exist though, by higher power or nature. Humans are beautiful because they age and there is room for change within your society. It’s hard to change an entire plane full of the unchanging.”

“Maybe so,” you argued, “but you’re obviously gorgeous on the outside, and on the inside it seems like you have a good system too. If I was a vampire I don’t think I’d take care of the humans I had bitten. It wouldn’t have occurred to me. They would all die. I would be dead, come to think of it.”

“That’s true,” he conceded. “You really do have a unique view of things.”

“Thank you?” It came out sounding more like a question than you intended. You finished your bowl of soup, licking the excess off of your upper lip. Setting the bowl back down seemed to break whatever spell had kept you in eager conversation with him. You supposed all of your questions had been answered, for now. Jaemin helped you get set up with Netflix on his TV and went back outside to his garden. He explained that you could call for him through the open window if you needed him, he would be right nearby. You nodded, already distracted by the opening scene of your show.

After a while you realized that there were low voices coming from outside. It sounded like Jaemin was talking to someone. You turned the volume down on the TV a little bit to listen. Maybe you could meet the infamous Lucas or someone else in Jaemin’s vampire family.

“... have to bring her to me?” Jaemin was saying. “You tasted her, you know her scent. This is painful. Her scent is all over my things, my bed.” He let out a small groan and the other man with him chuckled breathily.

“Hyung, I didn’t mean for her to smell so good I swear, it was a spur of the moment decision. I was hunting in her area and her scent was so enticing. Plus, I was hungry!” You shuddered at the mention of hunting. This one, who must be Jisung, was far less civilized than Jaemin, it seemed.

Jaemin made an angry noise and his words hissed out when he spoke. “You think it was enticing out in the open air of Poland? On a windy day? I’ve been smelling her acutely on my things, in my house, for four days and it hurts. My venom has been going non-stop for the entire period and it’s not like I can just change her, she’s got a life ahead of her!” Part of your heart went out to Jaemin - he was trying so hard to take care of you and even caused himself pain for it. That explained why he had reacted so negatively when you asked what would happen if he bit you. You wouldn’t have been fine. You would’ve become like him. The thought didn’t cause the anger or disgust you thought it should have. It sounded nice, almost, to be like him. To stay in his safety for eternity.

“Jaemin,” said a new voice. It was strong and rough like tree bark lined his throat. “You can return her back to the real world in just a few more days and you’ll be free of her. It’s not like she would want to stay here anyway, her friends and family are back on Earth. We can keep Jisung home and have him feed on Chenle until he learns his lesson.”

Someone, presumably Jisung, made a wounded noise. “I can control myself, I promise. Don’t make me feed on Chenle, Hyung, he doesn’t taste anywhere near as good.” Definitely Jisung.

“Jisung,” said Jaemin’s voice. “Don’t argue, you brought this on yourself. And me,” he adds as an afterthought.

Jisung’s sullen voice responded, “fine, Hyung, but Chenle isn’t going to be happy either, you know.” You thought maybe Jaemin must have nodded or something because nobody said anything for a while. You turned off the TV, suddenly bored with the program and head full of new questions. The top one on the list was why. Why did you affect them this way? Why did Jaemin treat you so nicely when you were hurting him? Why did Jisung sound like a puppy who had been reprimanded? Why did Jaemin and the other man have the power to ground him, essentially? Then there were the who questions. Who was the man with the voice like tree bark? Who was Chenle, and why wouldn’t he be happy? Lastly were the when questions. When would you be going home? When would you see them again? Would you see them ever again? When would Jisung be allowed to hunt again?

You were so deep in your head that you didn’t notice the door opening and Jaemin coming in, two men behind him, until he stopped and waved a hand in front of you.

“Y/N, you okay? I brought you some people to meet.” He stepped back and you forced your eyes to refocus on what was in front of you. When you looked up at him, he presented the two other guys like he was a car salesman and these were his favorite models. “This is Jisung, you’ve met him already although I don’t know if you remember him.” You nodded, looking over him. He had on a grey crewneck sweatshirt over a pair of black sweatpants today and looked far less terrifyingly beautiful flanked by his hyungs.

“I remember him,” you told them. “You’re the one who bit me.” You didn’t think it was possible for him to look more sheepish than he already did but he managed to, and shrank back so that he was standing half-behind the other man. The other guy had bleached hair falling messily over his forehead, and even though he was shorter than Jisung, he seemed to command your attention more. He had on a green sleeveless shirt that showed off arms rippling with muscles. You gulped, looking up at him, but then he smiled at you. His whole demeanor changed. He felt less like he was about to kill you and more like he might accidentally strangle you to death in a hug. His eyes scrunched up into little crescents and you found yourself smiling back.

“I’m Jeno,” he said, walking forward to shake your hand. “Sorry I didn’t come to visit earlier.” His voice still sounded like bark lined his throat, but less so now that he wasn’t bothering to limit his volume.

“That’s fine,” you replied. “I just woke up earlier today.” You glanced towards Jaemin; he looked like a proud mom watching you interact with his friend. “Jaemin fed me, and since then I’ve just been sitting here watching TV. I can’t find my phone, and even if I did I’m not sure I could walk over to it. My legs are out of practice.”

Jeno smiled again. “That’s pretty common for Jisung’s victims. We found out he has these little back teeth that make it more painful for the people he bites so they usually need more bed rest to recover from the strain on their bodies and the blood loss.”

You nodded, as though that made sense. They still let Jisung hunt with his unpredictability and extra teeth? That seemed a little irresponsible of them, but you supposed that Jeno and Jaemin weren’t that much older than him in the first place. You tried to bring up your next subject subtly.

“Speaking of recovery, when do you think I’ll be going back to Earth?” The change in the room was immediate. Jeno’s smile faltered enough for you to see his eyes, Jaemin’s shoulders slumped, and Jisung’s foot started tapping against the rug. “It’s not that I don’t like it here,” you interjected, “I'm just worried that my, uh, double self will get up to trouble and stuff. What if someone notices it’s not me?”

Jisung looked at Jaemin. “You either did a really bad job of explaining this or she wasn't listening, Hyung.” Jaemin glared at him in response and chose not to dignify the statement with an answer. Jisung huffed at him and turned to you. “It’s you, y’know, back on Earth. Like… when a starfish gets cut in half, both halves grow into full starfish again. Something similar happened to you. Same organism, same you, just two different places. Is that a weird comparison?”

“What he means,” interjected Jeno before you could reply, “is that the you down there has all of your experiences and memories and the same brain. It’s the exact same person as you, just two versions of you. When you go back you won't even have a bite scar.” At this you lifted your hand to rub at the mark on your throat. You saw Jisung’s eyes follow the action and he licked his lips. You put your arm back down into your lap and swallowed, the sound echoing in your head.

Finally Jaemin spoke. “And to answer your question, as soon as we get you strong enough to walk on your own you can go back. I mean technically there’s a body waiting for you down there, but we don’t know what would happen if we sent you back faulty, so we like to be careful.” You laughed at his use of the word faulty and nodded.

“Okay. Do you guys have a portal or something that’ll take me back?” At this all three men burst into laughter and a high pitched squeal joined the mix, coming from the doorway. Yet another man was standing there, thin orange-dyed hair flopping as he doubled over laughing.

“A- a portal,” he wheezed out between laughs. “No, we don’t have a portal.” You threw him a disgruntled look.

“I was just asking…”

Jaemin looked equally off-put and said, “Y/N, this is Chenle, Jisung’s best friend and our second child. Sorry about his lack of a filter.” His lips pursed unhappily and you rushed to reassure him.

“No, that’s okay, I don’t know if that was stupid question. No feelings hurt, he’s fine.” Jaemin looked unconvinced, so you sat up more towards Chenle and reached out a hand. “I’m Y/N.”

“Oh is that your name?” he replied breezily, shaking your hand quickly. “They were right, you do smell good.” Out of the corner of your eye, you saw Jaemin shift protectively.

“Chenle.” His voice came out a growl, raising hairs on the back of your neck. “Don’t you dare.” It was interesting, you thought, how this dynamic worked. From what you had heard with Jisung, Jaemin had always contained himself, like he was reprimanding his favorite child. With Chenle he seemed almost dangerous, like it was possible for him to hurt a fly, and things much bigger than a fly. You wondered if he was this way with all of his patients, or if Chenle just bothered him more with you than usual.

“I’m not going to, mom, chill out a moment.” Chenle, you decided, must be the bad egg of their group. Every family had at least one, and here was theirs. He seemed the most likely to hurt something for the fun of it, and it almost seemed like he should have been the one to attack you, not Jisung. You wondered, in the distant back of your head, whether he had extra teeth for biting like Jisung did. Maybe it was better not to find out.

“Please don’t call me mom,” Jaemin sighed in response, all of the fight leaving him a rush. His muscles were still tense, though, and he ran a hand through his cotton candy colored hair.

“Chenle,” said Jeno, “I think you and Jisung should go talk. He has news for you.” Jisung shuddered slightly, his nod small and tense. You remembered his reaction earlier, when he had been informed that he needed to feed from Chenle for the time being. Chenle looked between Jisung and Jeno and an expression appeared on his face that didn’t seem natural on him - uncomfortable confusion. What you had seen in this past tension filled minute was that he was self assured and rambunctious. Now you wondered if he respected Jeno, regardless of that. You supposed you didn’t really have time to find out, you would be going home as soon as you could walk on your own. Speaking of which-

“I need to use the bathroom again,” you said as Jisung walked out of the house with Chenle right behind him.

“You should try getting up on your own,” Jeno suggested. “The more you sit around the harder it’ll be for your legs to get strong again.” You nodded and used the arm of the couch to haul yourself to your feet. Your knees started shaking again and Jaemin hurried to support you a little, until you felt a little more steady on your feet. Once you did, you tentatively took a tiny step towards the bathroom. Your arms flew out to your sides to help with balance and Jaemin took the mother bird stance, worriedly standing within arm’s length to catch you if you started to collapse. Jeno watched from a few paces away and smiled at you.

“Let’s see if you can get to me, okay? Then we can help if you need support.” You nodded and gritted your teeth, shuffling forward on your weak legs slowly. The good news: you made it to him without falling or using Jaemin’s ever-there assistance. The not so good news: you practically fell into Jeno when you got to him, using his body for support. He helped you find your center of gravity again before acting as a crutch to get you to the bathroom.

“If you need anything,” Jaemin told you, “I’ll be right out here. Don’t over-exert yourself.”

“I’ll be fine, it’s just like one step to the toilet, and there’s a nice strong counter” you assured him, and closed the door behind you as you stepped away from Jeno’s warm strength. Immediately you felt weak again but you reached out to hold on to the edge of the counter while you walked and got safely to the toilet. Your legs screeched at you as you lowered yourself onto the seat and you relaxed a little bit once you were seated. Recovery was going to be hard.

☽༓☾

Two days passed in a blur of pain and people. You met quite a few new people, like the infamous Lucas (who was a giant baby and who adored you), a woman named Joy who had actual red eyes like the legends said, and a man that everyone called Ten. Actually, you weren’t sure if Ten counted as a man. He dropped by Jaemin’s house the third day, right after Jisung and Chenle had just left after getting some flowers from Jaemin’s garden. He walked in on tentacles, long and thick ones that wrapped around the door frame and curled and uncurled as he talked. He muttered something about wishing they would just admit they were gay and asked Jaemin if he happened to have clams. Jaemin, looking amused, supplied him with an entire bucket of the little creatures. Ten gave him a jar in response and flounced out the door without even looking at you.

“Jaemin,” you asked, “what, or who, was that?” Jaemin laughed happily and the sound was so perfect that you wished he would just keep laughing forever.

“Ten is kind of unique,” Jaemin said. “Obviously, he’s got tentacles, which is unusual, and then he’s also not a vampire so none of us can quite figure out how he can get here, to Vahmpyr. But he can see the future, sort of, which is pretty helpful sometimes. Warns us when we’re getting too active and need to be careful of humans. He’s also convinced that Chenle and Jisung are gay and that they just need some guidance.”

You couldn’t decide on a question to ask about these revelations, so you settled for a very intelligent sounding “huh,” and continued your walking around the house. You were doing a lot better now with your exercises and had been able to make it around the room without holding onto anything for support four times now. Jaemin laughed again and you felt yourself actually flinch from the force of his happiness. It was addicting, almost. He went back to his Gaelic scrolls, which he was translating for a man called Kun, who you had yet to meet.

You had a sudden thought and you found yourself needing to talk, to explain about the other day. “Jaemin,” you said, dropping into the seat across from him at the table with a low groan. “The other day when Jisung and Jeno came, you guys were talking outside, you know?” He looked up from the scrolls, giving you a raised eyebrow like ‘so?’

“So I may or may not have listened to your conversation,” you told him, watching as he gave you his full attention, clicking his pen closed and rolling up the scrolls gently. He didn’t look angry, exactly, more apprehensive than anything. Like he was back to worrying about you throwing things and breaking his windows.

“And?” he prompted, closing his eyes for a moment. When he opened them you saw something strange there, like fear. But certainly the immortal and beautiful Jaemin couldn’t be scared of you. You must’ve been interpreting it wrong.

“Well you guys were talking about my smell,” you started slowly. “And, uh, you said that you- that I was causing you pain. And I was just wondering, why keep me around? Why not take me to a human hospital, or just kill me? Or turn me? Why did you make yourself suffer?”

He inhaled deeply and then shivered a little bit. When he spoke, his voice was soft and a little scratchy. “For one, we’ve never had a case like this before. I mean obviously there have been people who have smelled good to me before, but usually I’m able to ignore it. With you… it’s like my vampire body can’t get enough of your scent. It wants to turn you, to keep you, in its selfishness. That part of me is weak, in its greed. And of course I couldn’t kill you, I could barely control myself when Chenle- when he-” Jaemin took a deep breath to steady himself. “He wanted to bite you. You smell good to our whole coven, to everyone who’s met you, at least, which is a first. Thankfully you don’t appeal to Jisung the same way you do to me though, because by now you’d be a full fledged member of the family. Jeno is really good at hiding it, but I could tell he wanted to drink from you too, when you used him to help you walk the other day. I think the only ones not affected by it are Lucas and Ten, although that could be because they’re both gay, I’m not sure.” As an afterthought, he added, “actually Lucas is demisexual but I’ve only ever seen him date guys.”

Skipping over the bit about Lucas’ sexuality, you spoke, horrified. “I’ve been hurting all of you? Seriously, why not just make me go to a regular hospital on Earth?”

“Well it would be a little hard to just give you to a hospital on Earth and be like, ‘here, take this body which may or may not have a vampire bite in its neck,’” Jaemin told you. “And also because I haven’t given up on a patient yet, and I didn’t want the first to be because I can’t control myself. And as to why I didn’t turn you… I didn’t want to take your life away. I still don’t. I think your life is going to be a good one and I don’t want to steal that. That’s why you’re going back tomorrow.”

An empty feeling settled in your chest. “You’re sending me back tomorrow? I still haven’t met so many of your friends though!”

He leveled you with a stare. “The rest of my patients never got to meet any other members of the coven. This was a one and done. You don’t need to know the rest of them. Especially not Yuta or Hyuck, good gracious.”

Who are Yuta and Hyuck? you wanted to ask, but his tone implied the end of the conversation, so you refrained from forming the question. “Okay, uh, I’m going to go sit in the garden.”

Jaemin flashed you a barely-there smile, opening his scrolls again and clicking his pen open. “Mhm. Be careful.”

You went out to sit under a tree in his front yard. Actually there were a lot of trees in his front yard - his house was in a forest. He had neglected to mention that when he first told you about his home and you had found it fascinating how it worked. When you walked out, there wasn’t any path out of the small clearing that housed his cottage. When you imagined a person, though, a tree tunnel would open and you could go any which way you wanted. You had tried imagining your parents the first time Jaemin told you about it and it hadn’t worked. He had explained that it only worked for people on this plane of existence, which made sense. When you had imagined Joy, it had shown you a way to a small town. Jaemin had forbidden you to go anywhere without him in case someone got territorial or hungry and killed you by accident. You respected that, you didn’t want to be murdered, but you wanted to see Lucas, and talk to him. He had fun stories to tell of his best friends. Jaemin seemed a bit huffy. It would be fine to go and see him, right? You’d just go and be back quickly before Jaemin even realized you were gone.

You decided that you just needed to talk to a friend right now and focused your mind on Lucas, finding an apartment building on the outskirts of the largest vampire city you had seen so far. With a little more effort you could find his apartment, although you couldn’t see him. The trees opened and you glanced back at Jaemin’s cottage before setting off.

As you walked down the path you reveled in your ability to walk. After two days of walking in short bursts and trying to regain strength in your legs you were finally able to walk like a normal human being, no flailing arms or stops every few meters to take a break and rest your muscles. It was nice, after so little freedom within Jaemin’s one room cabin. You liked being out here better. You avoided tree limbs and roots as you went, always focused on getting to Lucas. At one point your focus switched from his apartment to a convenience store and you panicked, realizing that you couldn’t go there. There, you might actually get murdered like Jaemin had predicted. He hadn’t nursed you back to health and struggled through your scent just for you to go and get yourself killed. You waited, walking more slowly, until the view at the end of the tunnel switched back to Lucas’ apartment’s front door. You breathed out a sigh of relief and continued on your way.

It was fascinating to you how there was no life in the forest besides the plants. You didn’t hear or see any insects or birds and you wondered if that was because they were afraid of the vampires or if they just didn’t exist on this plane. You decided to ask Lucas when you got to his house. After a while you realized that the image at the end of the tree tunnel was no longer a moving image of where you wanted to go, but rather the actual thing, growing bigger as you progressed down the path. You found yourself increasing your pace in your hurry to see Lucas.

When you left the comfort and relative safety of the forest, you nearly ran across the street separating the apartment complex from the trees. You stumbled at one point and almost fell to the pavement but recovered and kept going. You entered the main door and started up the stairs, still hurrying a little faster than your body thought was necessary. You speed walked until you reached the third floor and started looking through the numbers, looking for a door marked with ‘311,’ the one you had seen in the forest while looking for Lucas. After a good few minutes searching, you located the hallway his apartment was in and walked down it, looking at the odd numbers on the right. They counted down from 39, so you had a ways to go. Part of you wondered if the vampires just didn’t care about your presence, because apparently your scent was pretty strong and you were sure that you were stinking up the whole hallway with your human-ness, but nobody had come to murder you yet.

When you finally got to the door labeled with a faded ‘311,’ you stopped to take a breath before knocking on the door. An uncomfortable pause (where you wondered if Lucas was out after all) later, the door opened and you breathed out a sigh of relief, only for the air to stick in your throat at the sight of a man shorter than Lucas, but much scarier.

He had dark brown hair, obviously lightened but only a bit. It fell over his forehead and stopped just short of his eyes. His lips set in a grim line as he looked over you before they pulled back into what should have been a heart stopping smile, but was instead a snarl, a grimace of distrust and anger. The feature that stuck out most to you were his eyes. You imagined that when he was happy, his eyes would glow with an inner light. Now they were dark and they promised violence.

No sooner had you come to this conclusion before he had you pinned against the opposite wall. “Give me one good reason,” he hissed, “why I shouldn’t just kill you.” His arm pressed into your throat, keeping you pinned against the wall, on your tiptoes to accommodate the height of his arm.

Lucas, I came to see Lucas, you tried to say, but it got stuck on the way out of your throat and instead what came out was a weak, “Lu…” followed by a wispy groan. The man furrowed his brow and moved to hold you against the wall by your arms so you could speak. “Lucas,” you gasped, air rushing back into your body and allowing you to speak once more. “Friend.” The man put you completely down now, on the floor, and you moved to massage your throat before his eyes, dark and threatening, halted your movement. Lucas certainly has a knack for choosing friends, you thought.

“Don’t move,” he growled, “Or I’ll throw you out our living room window. It may not kill you, but it will hurt.” Then he turned around slightly and called, “Xuxi! There’s someone here to see you!”

You heard shuffling inside before the figure of Lucas appeared, tall and thick and seeming like safety incarnate in the presence of someone as terrifying as the man who still had one hand next to your head.

“Yang?” he asked. “Is everything alright?”

The man, Yang, shifted so that Lucas could see your face. “This one just came knocking on our door and said he wanted to see you. Do you know her?”

Lucas gasped slightly and sped up, blurring a little, so that he reached you in less than a second. “Oh my gosh, Y/N, are you okay? Yangyang, this is the human that’s been staying with Jaemin for the past week, she’s my friend!”

“Hey Lucas,” you said weakly, finally reaching up to massage your throat now that you had someone to protect you from being thrown out the living room window. “I’m okay, I think. Just a little lightheaded.” Part of you wanted to add, Is his name Yang or Yangyang? but you figured now wasn’t the time to ask.

A strange look crossed Lucas’ face. “Well, I’m glad you’re alright, come inside and sit down, I’ll get you some water.” You followed him into the apartment, Yang (Yangyang?) behind you. He still slightly scared you and you stayed as close to Lucas as possible. Lucas spoke again as he grabbed a water bottle for you. You noted idly that it was Dasani. “But, uh, didn’t Jaemin tell you to, like, not come out here? So you didn’t get murdered? Cause that could’ve ended a lot worse.”

“Not you too!” you cried, exaggerating the syllables. “I know I could’ve died, but I wanted to see my friend! How hard is that to understand? Did it bother you so much that I wanted to see you?”

Lucas figited uncomfortably. “Well I appreciate that you came to see me, that’s really nice of you. It’s just that Jaemin was right. This really isn’t a safe place for you to be. I mean Yangyang could’ve killed you if he didn’t have such a heart of gold.” You threw a disbelieving glance towards the man in question and he shrugged, mouth tugging up in a mischievous grin.

“Okay, I mean, I can go back if you don’t want me here, I have to be back before Jaemin realizes I’m gone anyway,” you said, drinking more of your water. Yangyang and Lucas both froze.

“You didn’t get his permission?” Lucas asked in a tone that confused you. Was he scared of Jaemin? “Or tell him you were going for a walk? Or anything?”

“No, of course not. He would’ve said no!” you protested unhappily. This was not how you imagined this trip going.

“Okay,” Lucas said. “I’m taking you back right now. Jaemin will- well, he won’t kill me, but he’ll be scarily close if he finds out you came here.”

With a heavy sigh, you stood up. You knew that if he needed to, he could just throw you over his shoulder and carry you all the way back to Jaemin’s cottage. Darned vampire strength. “Fine.”

You got down the hallway and into the stairwell before Lucas tensed up again. “Shoot,” he muttered, looking down the stairs below. You couldn’t hear or see anything, and you were about to tell him so when he sighed and you heard a pitter patter like rain, growing louder by the second.

Moments later Jamin appeared in front of you, pink hair mussed and eyes wild with a mix of fear and anger. For a moment he didn’t even speak, just glared at you. The fear faded from his eyes. When he did speak, the words seemed like poison being spit off the tongue of a snake.

“I can’t believe you,” he seethed. “I kept you in my house, fed you, nursed you back to health. I let you use all of my things and was even going to send you home once you were perfectly healthy again. I gave you one rule. One! Just to keep you safe! And you go and break it. You could have died, Y/N, do you understand that? I did everything in my power to keep you in an environment where you weren’t in danger! I didn’t allow Hyuck to come over, I made sure that you were prepared to meet Lucas and Jeno and even Jisung! But all of my efforts faded to nothing when you opened that doorway to the city. I’m taking you home right now, I can’t bear to keep you here any longer, not when you obviously have no sense of self preservation!”

He picked you up before you could even blink and you felt a sharp wind on your face as he ran home. His steps sounded like raindrops falling on pavement, sharp but small, a pinprick of sound in an otherwise silent stairwell. Lucas had disappeared from view in less than a second and you shut your eyes against the vertigo of being carried at such a speed. Everything blurred, everything was indistinct and most things weren’t even worthy of notice. Jaemin smelled like ink, and you had space in the very back of your mind to wonder if he had spilled his, in his haste to find you. It didn’t seem like a very vampire-like thing to do.

A few moments later you entered the canopy of the forest and every once in a while you heard a stick break under his foot or a rock get catapulted out of the way. Then you felt the sun on your back again and you gasped as Jaemin dumped you onto the warm grass, standing tall before you. He said something in a language you didn’t know - it sounded vaguely like Latin - and the grass fell out from under you as the ground opened up and you fell into space.

☽༓☾

When you woke up the next morning to your alarm, you wondered briefly if your entire experience with Jaemin and the other vampires was a dream. The puncture wounds that had been on your neck were utterly nonexistent, and there was no evidence on you that you had even left the comfort of your bed. On the other hand, you had clear memories of your time in Vahmpyr, short as it was. You remembered how it smelled and how the trees had felt as you walked outside. You remembered the feeling of the cool granite of the bathroom countertop. Mostly you remembered being with Lucas, Jeno, Jisung, and Chenle. You remembered almost dying at the hands of Lucas’ roommate and you remembered the terrifying flight in Jaemin’s arms.

Jaemin.

You grimaced at yourself in the mirror and spit out your toothpaste. There was no way your mind could have made up someone as excruciatingly kind and beautiful as Jaemin was. At the same time you felt anger bubble up inside of you. He hadn’t even given you a chance to say goodbye - he had just put you through to your Earthly self without any words between the two of you. You hadn’t said goodbye to Lucas or Jeno either, nor had you seen the rest of your new acquaintances. The anger flared, hot against your insides, and you could swear you actually felt your chest twinge. You spat out the last of your toothpaste and replaced your toothbrush in its holder, going to get ready for your day.

The next few days were spent alternately missing the simplicity of life on Vahmpyr and being angry at Jaemin. Assignments piled onto your shoulders and in addition to that, you discovered some sort of disconnect between you and the part of you that had stayed on Earth while you were out. That part of you seemed to dismiss your time in Vahmpyr as something it had dreamed up all on its own. It didn’t acknowledge you and liked to take control of your body whenever you weren’t paying full attention to it. Every time it did that you felt the twinge in your chest again, except it got more and more painful. You started having headaches that the other part of you didn’t seem to feel but which pressed against your skull like tiny war hammers thudding into the bone by your temples and occasionally your eyes.

Your vision would go blurry and you started having lapses of consciousness, only to wake up and find yourself doing just fine with your other part in charge. During these lapses you would dream of being in Vahmpyr again, and you saw Lucas smiling with Yangyang, Chenle rolling his eyes at Jisung before hugging him tightly. Other men you didn’t know and other women you hadn’t met also flew across the screen of your eyes but they disappeared quickly. Ten even passed by once, haughtily scrolling past everyone until he sidled up to a tall man with long blond hair who smiled down at him and pressed a gentle kiss to one of Ten’s tentacles. A man with red hair and an eyebrow slit served coffee to a man who chewed like a rabbit. A group of three guys held up a sign that said “Go Taemin!” as a group played football. A woman in a suit jacket over jean shorts sat with a box of papers, crying. Joy played a game with other girls where they tried to push lockers over on each other. Everything (with the exception of the lockers) looked like fun. It was better than Earth, at any rate. Every night you went to bed wondering if you might just die by morning and leave the other half of yourself behind to control the body. You were just along for the ride at this point.

The evening of your fourth day back on Earth you went to sit outside the dorm building on a bench, just for some fresh air. For once you had control of the body and you let your head tip back, closing your eyes and just feeling. The bench pressed up against your back in a way that hurt slightly, but your body had been wracked with pain for two days straight and it didn’t ache so much as behind your eyes or inside your skull. The evening breeze blew across your eyelids and brought with it the scent of sun-warmed dirt.

It smelled like Jaemin, that first morning you woke up in his house. When he had helped you across the cottage towards the bathroom and been outlined by the sun, when he had made you soup and sat with you on the couch while he explained where you were and what he was.

Your body shook with a particularly painful pound on the inside of your ribs. You let yourself relax against the bench again and the sensations enveloped you once more. You felt yourself let go of your body on Earth and float away, less falling and more weightlessness, floating away on a wind that smelled of sun on dirt and felt like arms wrapping around you while rain fell on summer-warmed pavement. You floated away on this wind and it lifted you endlessly until you nodded off, finally free of the pains that had kept you company for the past few days. You wondered if perhaps you had died of it, if being back on Earth had perhaps been more detrimental to you than beneficial.

Then your back hit something hard and the breath was knocked from your lungs, waking you up again and telling you that something had gone very very wrong or very very well. You gasped air back into your body and rolled over weakly, now in a body you recognized as the one you inhabited on Vahmpyr. Grass poked your inner arms and you pushed yourself up to sitting with your legs crossed. You massaged your chest as you inhaled and found yourself miraculously free of pain, aside from the slight burn of breath inhaled too quickly after loss of oxygen. The war hammers in your head had vacated the premises and the aches of your ribs had subsided, making it easier to breath and just sit without drawing in pained gasps.

You registered a return of cold as a shadow fell over you and looked up to see none other than Chenle, with Jisung behind him. Did they never go anywhere without each other? Well, besides hunting.

“Y/N?” He gaped down at you, and you looked back up at him.

“The one and only,” you said, before you realized that didn’t apply to you anymore. “Well, one of only two in existence.”

He laughed that weird dolphin laugh he had again and reached out a hand to help you up. You took it, standing unsteadily on two feet that didn’t ache the moment you put weight on them. “What’re you doing back here? Jaemin-hyung said he sent you back to Earth.”

You feel the corners of your mouth tug down almost instinctively at the mention of Jaemin. “He did. I don’t think Earth agreed with me,” you told him. Jisung walked forward and looked you up and down.

“Maybe we should take you back to Jaeminnie hyung, he’ll know what to do.”

You groaned. “I really don’t want to deal with him at the moment.”

“We can take him to Kun-ge,” Chenle interjected smoothly. “He’ll know better than Jaemin-hyung anyway, he’s been a doctor and a vampire longer.” A side of Chenle appeared that you hadn’t seen yet, a side that took charge in a way that wasn’t just insulting anyone near him. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all. He took your hand with one of his and grabbed Jisung’s arm with the other.

“Come on, let’s go see Kun-ge!”

☽༓☾

Kun, as it happened, lived in the same building as Lucas. Actually he lived one apartment over, behind the door labeled ‘313.’ When he opened the door he seemed strangely unsurprised to see you there, just breathed out a sigh and let you in. He had nice light brown hair that worked well with his skin tone and eyes that smiled even when he wasn’t. He had this aura of parenting around him, like he took care of everyone he knew. It was comfortable to be around him from the start. Once Chenle had explained where he found you, Kun sat you down and asked exactly what had happened.

“Listen,” he said seriously. “I’ve never seen a human react the way you did. Nobody has ever come back, from what I know. We have to figure out exactly what happened, why you came back, and how to get you back to Earth.”

You inhaled deeply, relishing in the painless breath. “Okay, uh, I’m not really sure where to start,” you told him.

“Tell me about how you got sent home.”

“Okay. So, I left Jaemin’s cottage to come and see Lucas and I guess Jaemin is a lot scarier when he gets mad, because he was not happy when he found out I had left. He did this, like, superfast running thing, very Twilight, and carried me to this random clearing, I guess, I didn’t look around much.” You paused to let Kun write that down on his very professional looking clipboard, but he waved you on. Right, he was a vampire. He could write stuff fast.

“So he sort of dumped me on the ground and said something in a language I didn’t know, it sounded like Latin but I’m not sure. Then the ground sort of opened up and I fell and fell and fell until I rejoined my, uh, Earthly body.” You paused to take a breath and think about how to convey what happened when you got back to Earth.

“When I got back there was this weird disconnect with my body. Like, uh, there was me, in my body, and there was also this other part of me, the part of me that stayed behind when I came here the first time. That other part sort of took the main control of the body we lived in, and it felt like I was along for the ride. It liked to pretend that I wasn’t there, that my time here in Vahmpyr wasn’t real. It was weird. Then a little into my stay, I started getting these super bad pains all over my body.”

Kun interrupted you by holding up a finger. “How long were you home before the pains started?”

You thought back, struggling to pinpoint when they had started. “I think maybe a little longer than twenty four hours? When I got back I woke up in that body, and about one sleep later I started getting the pains, which would be like twenty five hours. Twenty four and a half, maybe. At first it was just these weird twinges in my chest, like my ribs were popping every time I took a breath, then it progressed. I got these horrible headaches, and my chest hurt all the time, and walking felt like attacking my feet, and my neck was always super achy. The thing is, my other half didn’t feel any of that. It was just my half of our consciousness. Then about on my fourth day back I went outside and sat on the bench outside my dorm. I laid back and, uh, it felt like I died or something. I just felt my consciousness leave the body and I guess the other half is still there living down there and now I’m here.”

Kun, Chenle, and Jisung all sat on the couch together, Kun looking over his notes while the other two guys just sat in silence. After a minute Kun spoke. “I don’t really know what happened to you, but I’m almost certain that your connection to your human self is gone. Or at least, your Earthly self. I don’t think we can send you back anymore, I’m sorry.” He looked at you, eyes full of remorse. You expected to mirror that feeling, but you discovered that it didn’t bother you so much. The other half of yourself would keep all of your friends and family from having to mourn you, and you could stay here, painless.

“I’m actually kind of glad about that,” you told them, and Chenle’s head snapped from picking at his jeans to look at you.

“Glad?” he demanded, incredulous. “To stay here?”

“Well yeah, I mean I was in pain most of the time I was back on Earth so it’s not like I’m eager to go back there. Plus, since I didn’t actually die nobody has to mourn me. And part of the time I was like… seeing Vahmpyr. Like is Ten dating this super tall guy with blonde hair? And Joy was pushing lockers over on her friends? And you two!” You turned an accusatory finger at Jisung and Chenle. “You two are adorable together!”

Jisung sighed. “Not you too…”

Kun shushed him. “You could see what was going on here in Vahmpyr?”

“Well, sort of,” you told him. “I saw that Lucas and Yangyang were having, like, a picnic?”

Kun’s eyebrows furrowed and he muttered, “I knew they had one without me.”

“I also saw this guy with red hair giving coffee to a man who sort of chewed like a bunny. And there was this group of three guys holding up a sign that said “Go Taemin!” I think, and I guess Taemin must have been playing football with the others I could see, although I couldn’t recognize any of the people playing. Oh, and there was this lady with really pretty hair who had a box of papers and she was just, like, sitting there and crying. She had the part of her hair near her neck bleached and the outer layers were still black, and she was wearing a suit jacket with jean shorts, which is kind of a weird combination.”

Kun looked over his notes. “That’s really interesting. All of those things have happened since you left, definitely. Joy and her friends like to play games where they try to kill each other, because they’re all immortal. The red haired man was probably Taeyong, and the bunny man would be Doyoung. Ten is dating Johnny, and yes, he is pretty tall and has blonde hair. I haven’t seen Taemin-hyung in a while so I don’t know if he’s playing football again or not. I don’t know about the woman with the cool hair either.”

“Definitely Taeyeon-noona,” Jisung interjected. “She broke up with her boyfriend a few days ago, and she does have hair dyed like that right now.”

Kun raised his eyebrows in curiosity. “Huh, I hope she’s doing okay. Actually I think maybe we should worry more about whoever she broke up with, she’s not exactly good with breakups.”

As though it’s a secret, Jisung’s next words came out in a whisper, and he leaned closer to Chenle and Kun. You had to strain a little to hear. “I heard it was a human. He, like, got super insecure about the fact that she wasn’t aging with him and broke up with her. It’s killing her. She really liked that guy.”

“Why did she get with him in the first place?” Chenle sounded absolutely confused. “She knew it would end like this. That’s how the last two ended.”

“I don’t know, but now I’m really worried for the guy,” said Kun. “We might have to cover up for her.” The implications of his words sank in and you made a small sound. All three men snapped their heads up and it looked as though they forgot you were there.

“Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry Y/N! Do you have anywhere to stay where you’ll be safe for at least a few days? Jaemin’s cottage should be pretty easy to stay hidden in.”

“She doesn’t want to go and see him after what happened,” Chenle supplied helpfully. “I’m taking her back to my place once we’re done here.” Kun appeared to consider that, and then nodded his approval.

“That sounds alright. Tomorrow we can go out and get her some things to make her stay more comfortable. Maybe we can find one of the Outer Plots to put her on.”

“Outer Plots?” you asked, because the way he said it demanded capitalization in your head.

“They’re sort of exactly what they sound like,” Kun explained. “There are these pieces of land around the edges of the towns that nobody really lives on but they’re solid places to live, if we can get a good one. It’s a little bit like Jaemin’s land out there, lot’s of forest, so we can set up tree tunnels for you to get here fast, if you need to.”

You nodded. “That does sound pretty good. I don’t know what I’m going to do though, it’s not like I have all that many hobbies. I was midway through getting my bachelor’s when I left.”

“That’s fine,” Chenle said. “I have plenty of things to keep you entertained, and we can get some of the other guys to keep you company if we’re busy. There are a lot of us with a lot of open time. I also have a ton of extra textbooks from learning languages, so if you want you can spend your life becoming fluent in Japanese, Latin, French, German, Scottish Gaelic, Hawaiian, or one of the others I have. Or multiple, if you learn fast.”

“Thanks Chenle.” He wasn’t actually so bad, you thought. He had brought you to Kun and he was offering to let you use his house and his things. “I might just take you up on that.”

“You guys should probably leave now, actually,” Kun said. “At human speeds you’ll get home right on time.”

Chenle checked his watch and nodded. “He’s right. We should get going.”

You thanked Kun again and Chenle led you out the door, Jisung following behind you. You separated ways with him once you left the apartment building, his figure disappearing swiftly into the trees. Once you blinked there was no finding him again.

You walked behind Chenle quietly, choosing to observe your surroundings. You didn’t see much in the way of low quality or old houses here. It seemed as though a lower class had been eradicated entirely and the vampires could choose where they wanted to live. When you asked him how that was possible, Chenle laughed that peculiar screech of his and said, “when you’re reborn into a family of beings that has been around for millenia, you accumulate some shared wealth. Especially when some of the coven members have doctorate degrees and work on Earth full time, and some of us had familial connections as well, like money left in wills and such.”

You nodded. “So you guys are basically like the elite class of the universe.”

“Pretty much. My house is probably the biggest you’ll ever be in, because I like to splurge a little bit. Unfortunately you might get lost, though, and if you do, just call for me. I’ll make sure to be listening all night in case you need me.”

“It’s that big?” you asked in disbelief. “Do you live in Buckingham Palace?”

He grinned, showing off his incisors. “Bigger.”

“And you live alone?”

“Well, I haven’t always. Jisung and I will probably have sleepovers for all of eternity, and whenever a new coven starts they stay with me for a few days while they get their own living quarters set up, but for the most part , yes. I don’t actually spend a ton of time in the house, it’s more just for the sensation of owning a building that large.”

You shook your head. “As a broke college student, I find that completely unfair. I was working two jobs just to keep my head above water and you’re on this alternate plane just chilling in your house that’s bigger than Buckingham Palace.”

He smiled again. “Nobody said life was fair, Y/N. Nobody.”

☽༓☾

Three days and a shocking amount of Gaelic verbs later (you only got lost in Chenle’s palace four times), a house was ready for you to move in. Johnny and Ten had furnished it for you, and Chenle had explained that the two of them were the stylists of the coven, for the most part. The mysterious Yuta had also taken part in finding high quality fabrics to fit their vision. You had thanked the whole group of vampires who helped with the house profusely for not only building said house, but also for getting you a bunch of comfortable furniture. They had smiled and said it was their pleasure and all of the typical things, but what really stood out was Ten’s reaction. He had barely paid attention to you - he barely paid attention to anyone besides Johnny and Yangyang, who he called their baby - this whole time. When you had thanked him, however, he wrapped all but four of his tentacles around you in a surprisingly dry hug.

“It’s refreshing to have you around,” he had told you. “I’m glad we could help you get settled.”

Later as you reflected on it, you figured that it probably got pretty boring to know what was going to happen all of the time, and maybe you had disrupted the usual happenings of his visions and the vampires in Vahmpyr. Maybe you made other people happy too, to have a new person around.

One person who didn’t seem thrilled to have you back was Jaemin. Every time you made eye contact with him (twice, over the three days), he grimaced and turned away like the sight of you hurt him. Maybe he was mad that you were back within scenting range. He wouldn’t get near you, so it wasn’t like you could ask.

While settling into your new normal, you discovered that Chenle was actually a good friend. His love language was insults and pointed jabs, but he actually did care for his friends quite a lot. He had watched Jaemin from across your front yard as they were laying down grass seed and sighed.

“I wish he would just talk to you,” he told you sadly. “I’ve never, in all our years together, seen him like this. I’m not sure anyone has, even Taeil-hyung.” He didn’t elaborate on who Taeil was, and you didn’t press him. Was Jaemin really so mad that he couldn’t even look at you?

“Well,” you had said, “I don’t want to talk to him. He dumped me through an interplanar tunnel without warning me and yelled at me like the world was ending when I took a walk. I don’t think there’s much to be talked about. He must hate me.” Over Chenle’s shoulder, you had seen Jaemin flinch slightly. How strange. Part of you hoped that he felt the same pain that you did, a sort of ache that told you that you were unwanted. Another part of you murmured quietly in the back of your mind that you were being petty. You had chosen to ignore it for the time being. You were being petty, but so was he. He had thousands of years on you, so he should be the mature one, right?

“I don’t think he hates you. I think you both need to grow up and talk like adults,” Chenle had said flatly, orange hair seeming to flash in the sun. Jaemin sort of curled in on himself.

“Tell that to Mister Millenia before you lecture me on growing up,” you had replied. Then you reopened your Gaelic textbook and pretended to bury yourself in it, blatantly ignoring Chenle’s judgemental gaze.

“Fine,” he had muttered angrily. “You can both suffer for all I care.” Then he had stalked off and started pounding fence posts into the dirt so hard that Jeno had to tell him to take a break before he broke them.

You found yourself thinking about that moment as you walked through the trees, ironically on your way to see Jaemin. Since you had close to nothing to do , you had offered yourself up as an errand person to anyone that would hire and found yourself working for Kun running scrolls across Vahmpyr while he translated and examined them. It kept you busy and in shape, and Kun seemed happy with your service. This morning he had sent you to get the Scottish scroll back from Jaemin, along with a few other documents to pick up and drop off. You had saved this one for last, procrastinating on having to see him again. As his cottage came into full view, you sighed, preparing yourself for a cold shoulder and a very quick visit.

“Jaemin?” you called, knocking on the front door. It was closed for once, usually he kept it open for better air circulation. A moment later the door opened and there he stood, in all his cotton candy colored glory.

“Y/N? What’re you doing here?”

“Kun sent me, he wants that Scottish scroll back. He said he hopes you’re done translating it since you’re had it for a few weeks now,” you replied, willing your voice to stay professional. You were here for the scroll. When Jaemin didn’t reply, you looked up at him. “So? Where is it?”

“I don’t know why he sent you out like this, but I sent that scroll back three days ago, on our agreed upon date. I know he got it, because he sent me back a thank you with those little stickers he likes to use.”

“Oh. Um, I’ll just go then,” you muttered, turning around as you spoke. “Sorry I bothered you.”

Suddenly a hand was wrapped around your own, keeping you in place. Your breath caught in your throat, remembering the last time that had happened with a vampire. All that came out of Jaemin’s mouth, however, was, “Can I talk to you? Please?”

“Jaemin, please let me go,” you said, trying to keep your tone even. His hand released you immediately and you stepped a pace away from him and turned around so that you could see his face. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Well, uh, do you want some tea? I have some inside…” It was clear he hadn’t expected you to actually agree and he needed to collect his thoughts, so you nodded and he led you inside, sitting you on the familiar couch while he busied himself in the kitchen.

“I actually wanted to apologize,” Jaemin said after a minute. “I worried so much about protecting you that I forgot to let you enjoy your time here. It scared me how good you were at adjusting to this world, how much you liked being with Lucas and my other friends… I’m not used to humans reacting positively.” The kettle whistled and he took a moment to pour water into the mugs, steam rising gently from them in silvery whisps.

Once he poured the water, he continued speaking. “I wanted to make sure you knew that it wasn’t all fun and games here. I didn't want you to go looking for a place in our community because I was worried that you’d get killed. Vampires are pretty possessive of their property on Vahmpyr, for the most part, and you went right into one of the biggest apartment complexes within a day’s travelling distance - and that’s vampire distance, not human distance. Lucas told me about what happened with Yangyang, and I almost tore Yang’s arm off, I was so mad. He could have actually murdered you, and I couldn’t stomach the thought. What if Lucas hadn’t been home? What if Yangyang hadn’t given you that one moment to explain yourself? What if you had met another one of us on the stairs, without any protection? It terrified me to consider.” He walked over, a mug carried in each hand, and sat on the couch, leaving a large space in between you. It was strangely reminiscent of that first day, when he had explained Vahmpyr to you over soup.

“Of course,” Jaemin started, and you refocused. “That was only after I had sent you home, that he told me about that. When I dumped you in that tunnel, it was just fear of you being unsafe that made me so mad. The fact that you would willingly put yourself in danger, when I valued you so highly? Inconceivable. And yet, it happened. So I made another big mistake: I sent you home. I thought you would be better off there, regardless of what was happening. I knew you were healthy enough to walk to the city, so I thought you were fine. Apparently not. I heard from Chenle and Kun what happened to you back on Earth and it broke another part of me apart. I hurt you, in sending you back, not just in temporary emotional pain, but in physical pain that persisted through your entire stay. We still don’t know why you reacted the way you did, but it scared me to hear of it. I had made yet another mistake that could have killed you.” He paused to take a sip of his tea, and you did too. It was pleasant, not too hot and not too cold, just warming up your insides.

“Then the last straw came when you said I must hate you…” Jaemin’s voice broke slightly. “If anything, it’s the exact opposite, I realized I missed you more than I should, given you should be just a patient. I wanted to hug you the second I saw you, but you looked so mad to see me that I couldn’t do it. I was literally building a house for you and still couldn’t look you in the eyes for more than a moment. So I went home in shame, knowing that you were right, with thousands of years under my belt, I should be the more mature one. I decided that the next time I saw you, I would talk to you, no matter the circumstances. I couldn’t have you keep living thinking that I hated you. I didn’t actually expect you to come in when I asked. I thought I’d have to follow you through the woods, honestly.”

He fell silent, took another sip of his tea, and for the first time, you spoke. “I really didn’t want to talk to you. I wanted you to realize how much I hurt from your actions, but I think maybe I took that a little too far. I knew you were protecting me, but I really wanted to see somebody, and I knew you wouldn’t let me out, so I ran away. I didn’t really know what I was getting into. I probably should have asked you to accompany me, at least. Not my finest moment.”

Jaemin laughed weakly, taking another sip of tea. “Not mine either. I should have trusted you more.”

“And I shouldn’t have run off without even asking for your help..”

He smiled at you, that gorgeous little smile that made your heart smile back.

“Friends?” you asked.

He hesitated for only a moment, a strange sort of disappointment flashing across his face, before he was extending his hand to meet yours. “Friends.”

You grinned at him, finishing your tea. “Great. Now I need to go yell at Kun for sending me out to see you when I didn’t need to.”

“Isn’t it good that he did?” Jaemin asked with a confused frown on his face.

“Well yes, but it was a very Cupid-like thing to do, wasn’t it? I don’t tolerate my friends trying to play Cupid with myself and my other friends.” You stood up and walked your empty tea cup to the kitchen. “Do you want to come?”

He laughed. “No, you can just tell me all about it tomorrow, okay?”

You nodded. “Alright.”

You walked out into the cool twilight and started going towards Kun’s house. He had a big storm coming.

☽༓☾

A few days later, you were sitting in Jaemin’s cottage again, Gaelic textbook open on your lap. Since he was close to fluent in the language, he was helping you learn it. It wasn’t an extraordinarily difficult language, but some of the words were hard to pronounce and he had been eager to help you.

“Look here,” he said, pointing at some words on the page. “Say this for me.”

“Tha gaol agam ort,” you replied. He grinned.

“That’s how it’s written, but not how it’s said. Okay, now listen to me pronounce it. ‘Ha geul akeum orsht’. Repeat that for me.”

“‘Ha geul akeum orsht’? That’s how you say that?” you demanded. “This is like French! They don’t spell things anywhere close to how they’re said!”

“Unfortunately, most languages don’t. The same goes for Korean verb conjugations and English words and, yes, French everything, but it’s just learning new rules. After a while you understand it. I promise that you’ll get it eventually. You have the rest of your life.”

You looked over at him suddenly, questions rising to the forefront over Gaelic words. “Am I really going to stay here forever? Am I never going to see Earth again, just sit here as a useless human surrounded by powerful and immortal vampires, until I die?”

He seemed surprised by the questions. “I’m not sure any of us had really thought about it,” he said carefully.

“You all had just accepted the fact that I was stuck on your plane of existence with nothing worth doing to do? When am I going to use Scottish Gaelic, Jaemin? When will this actually come in handy, except to distract me? I’m here to do nothing, and the moment I go back to Earth, I start suffering. What am I meant to do here, Jaem?”

Jaemin gently lifted the textbook from your lap and put in on his coffee table, then pulled you into his side for a hug. You snuggled into him, inhaling the scent of sunshine and warm earth. Comfort.

“I don’t know exactly how to make you feel better,” Jaemin murmured from somewhere above your head. “But we all like having you around, you know that. It’s nice to have someone young around. We haven’t turned a human in about thirty years, so the novelty has worn off, and here we have this beautiful creature who is new in so many ways. You’re refreshing, and you’re human, so you’ll continue to be refreshing.”

“Well, thank you,” you said, muffled in his side. “But still, I don’t feel like I have anything worth doing here. You can all do anything I can do, just ten times faster. I have no unique skills or brains or anything. So what am I meant to do? I can’t even go spy on the other humans or anything because I can’t go back to Earth!”

Jaemin shifted you a little bit in his arms and started rubbing your shoulder softly. “Is there anything you particularly enjoy doing? Maybe you could do art, or gardening? Or I have this book of old forms of witchcraft?”

You turned to face him. “You have a book of witchcraft sitting around?”

He released you and rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. “I found a papyrus scroll in this ruined Egyptian city, and I kept it just ‘cause it was cool. Then I learned hieroglyphics so that I could translate it and made a copy. Unfortunately, witchcraft is… not my strong suit, and I’m somewhat afraid of giving it away in case I never see it again. I spent a lot of time and energy on that translation.”

“And you want me to use it?” you asked, confused. Why on earth would he give it to you if he didn’t trust the perfectly composed vampires around him? “I mean it sounds super cool, but aren’t you worried about it being in my hands? I am a human, after all.”

“Well-”

Jaemin was cut off at that moment by a sharp knock on the door. At least, you assumed it was a knock, it sounded a little bit more like a wet thwap than a knock. Jaemin blurred slightly as he ran over to the door and opened it, revealing cloudy skies dropping rain onto a harried-looking Ten.

“Ten-hyung?” he asked, sounding as confused as you felt. “I’d say this is a nice surprise, but why are you here? I thought today was your Earth day? Is everything alright?”

“Yes,” Ten said, gasping slightly as he spoke. “I ran straight here from the Pacific.” You took a second to think about the fact that Ten was swimming in the Pacific Ocean before refocusing on him. “-future just completely shifted, a few minutes ago. Y/N-” He turned to face you completely. “Whatever you two just did, it caused you to become a vampire in the future.”

“But we were just talking?” you told him, confused. “It wasn’t like Jaem was about to bite me.” You turned to Jaemin. “Right?”

He looked at you solemnly. “If you were going to have been bitten by me, it would have already happened. Ten-hyung, are you sure that she’s a vampire in your future? Can you see more details?”

Ten closed his eyes briefly like he was trying to focus, and in the meantime a tentacle wrung the salt and rain water out of his hair. Jaemin wrinkled his nose at the growing puddle. Ten spoke, eyes fluttering open slowly. “In the parts I can see, she’s covered in this, like, tree? It’s a little bit fuzzy. It’s green, and looks like it has brown splotches like branches. Maybe a tree falls on her or something. Anyway, you take one look at him and bite her. She goes limp... After that? Fuzzy scenes of her waking up and you taking her running. Like, really running. Vampire running.”

Jaemin took a shaky breath. “Okay, I don’t know why our conversation would have caused a tree to fall on her in the future. We were talking about, like, Earth and art and stuff. Oh, and my witchcraft book.”

Ten’s eyes refocused on him, narrowing slightly. “You’re going to give her your witchcraft book after not letting me touch it? That’s a little underhanded.” His eyes narrow briefly before looking at you. “But maybe that’s it. You’ll just have to make sure that she doesn’t practice any witchcraft under the cover of trees. Otherwise I think you’ll be fine. I’ll keep you updated.”

“Thanks Ten,” you murmured. “For warning us and stuff.”

“Of course. Now I need to go back to the Pacific. Ta ta!” Ten waved to you and walked out the door.

“Well,” Jaemin said, “that’s some news, huh?”

“Yeah. Do you think that it’s okay for me to practice witchcraft with this in my future?”

“I do. I think you’ll be fine. We’ll keep you as safe as we possibly can, and if you become a vampire… at least it won’t be because I gave in. I’ll still be strong.”

“Jaem, I don’t think that was ever in question.”

“It was for me.” His voice went dark momentarily, then he brightened up again. “At any rate, I think we can safely teach you some things that’ll keep life interesting.”

You grinned. “Then let’s get started.”

☽༓☾

You were surprised at how easily witchcraft came to you, in the beginning. Jaemin insisted that you had some sort of gift with it, and as much as you told him that was silly, it seemed possible. You could easily understand instructions on Jaemin’s careful translations that even he couldn’t decipher. You gave up on Gaelic after a while, focused more on learning the original Egyptian Hieroglyphs of the spells and potions. You trusted Jaemin’s precise translation, but there was something unique about seeing an instruction in a new language and being able to understand it.

Days turned to weeks as you experimented with the materials growing in and around Vahmpyr. Taeil, who you eventually met, turned out to be a valuable resource. He was an avid collector of ancient written works, including but not limited to an original Greek copy of The Odyssey, Chinese bamboo books saved from the book burnings of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, and an exact replica of the Rosetta Stone. Taeil must have been ancient himself to have all of these valuables, but he still had the energy of the far younger members of their coven, which amazed you. He showed you different specialties of different cultures within witchcraft, ideas born from scrolls and tablets, bamboo strips and wax blocks. It was far more information than you could ever decipher or use during your short human life, but every day you got better, starting out small with poultices that you had to injure yourself to try and ward spells that exhausted you but could make your home more secure than any in Vahmpyr (or on Earth).

At one point Chenle gifted you a book covered in old stains and strangely familiar drawings that you started to use before abruptly realizing that it was an old chemistry textbook. You invited him over that afternoon and whacked him over the head with the thick pages. He told you with a disgruntled look that he put a lot of effort into that, thank you very much. And besides, chemistry was a magic in itself. (His words, not yours.) After that you made sure to thoroughly inspect any gifts you received from the more mischievous family members.

Lucas came over and helped you set up more complicated equipment that you couldn’t lift, like a big cauldron, which you actually did use on the regular after you learned how to use it, and after some consideration you set up a chemistry station for the odd experiment. At this point your house was more magical items than actual living space, something that Kun was quick to point out when he came over.

“You know, you should really be more careful about having all of these powders and dusts and-” He cut himself off with a distasteful wrinkle of his nose. “Things.” He pursed his lips, looking at you. “We don’t really know what these things will do to you in the long run. You have to be careful.”

“Yeah, yeah,” you responded distractedly, making his coffee and a drink for yourself. “Maybe I’ll clean it all up sometime, but you know I’m awfully busy these days.” You used a spoon to stir in the milk and sugar, tapping the metal against the china in a soft clink.

He sighed tiredly. “Your health is less important than staying busy?”

You gave him a look that you hoped conveyed your need to stay busy, to continuously learn and improve. “Keeping my schedule full keeps me healthy, Kun. At least mentally.”

Kun didn’t look impressed by your reasoning. “I think your mental health will go down pretty quickly if you get sick and can’t do anything because you’re stuck in bed twenty-four-seven.”

You gave a sigh of your own at that. “And as always,” you announced to the room at large, “Doctor Kun gives amazing advice that I shouldn’t ignore but probably will.”

Y/n,” he said in a warning tone. “Seriously. You need to be careful! No human has ever lived here for so long, and I worry about you catching some mysterious illness that nobody has ever heard of!”

“Kun, I will do my best to keep myself healthy. I’ve put every kind of ward that I can around my house to protect me, I have magically circulated and cleaned air, I have literal superhumans to protect me from anything else, and I’m happy here! I finally have something to contribute. Maybe someday I’ll find some concoction or enchantment that will let me visit Earth, even. I just don’t know. But I’m going to keep trying.”

He took his coffee out of your grasp and walked back into the living room, which housed your indoor plants, magical and earthly. “That’s all I can ask,” he said, voice betraying his disappointment in that fact. “I’ll still give you monthly checkups for a while though, just to make sure.

“Can’t Jaemin take care of me?” you asked, thinking of Jaemin with his warm smile and caring words and the smell of sun on dirt and- well. Jaemin felt like safety in a person. Kun was wonderful, but Jaemin was just that little bit better, that little bit more comfortable to be around.

“He could,” Kun replied after taking a sip of coffee. “But I know he’s been busy lately though, he’s been on Earth for a few days checking on all of his businesses and stocks and his human personas. On the other hand, I hardly go back to Earth for more than a twelve hour shift here and there.”

“I understand.”

“Plus, I’m about two thousand years older than Jaemin, I have a lot of experience.”

“How old are you?” Two thousand years older than Jaemin would make Kun… pretty darn old.

Kun grinned. “I was around before and after Jesus came to Earth. I was around before the Terracotta Army was built. I was born in China circa when the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are said to have been built. Taeil-hyung turned me into a vampire when I was twenty five, and I’ve been twenty five ever since. None of us know when he was born. When you’re as old as he is, even with a vampire’s memory, history starts to blend together. He says he remembers the Pyramids at Giza going up, though, and that was after he had been a vampire for what he thinks was a few hundred years. He’s literally prehistoric.”

“Wow,” was all you could think to say. No wonder Taeil had so many artifacts. He was one. Kun was too, for that matter. And Jaemin… Jaemin would have been born AD, but how far into it? You asked Kun this question and he chuckled.

“Jaemin was born in fourteen forty two. He was twenty when Jeno turned him, and he’s still twenty, five hundred years later.”

“Who turned Taeil, then? I can hardly imagine a vampire older than him, even.”

“We’re not sure. Whoever it was is so unimaginably old now that even I can’t comprehend it. But whoever the original vampire was must have turned a whole lot of people. There are dozens more vampires just within our small community, and an entire plane full of them. From what I can tell, Taeil isn’t even the oldest. There’s this man who lives in the mountains by himself, and from what I hear, he hasn’t been seen by another vampire in nearly three thousand years. He’s almost a myth around here anymore. Taeil knew him back when Vahmpyr was sparsely populated, and he told us that the man - his name is Jinyoung Park - is older than him by so many years that he is to Taeil as Taeil is to me. He probably lived before Mesopotamia existed, even, or was right at the beginning of it. Before him, we have no idea who the first vampire was. If that vampire is still alive, he she or they hasn't been seen since, well, before living memory. If they still exist that would mean that vampires have been around since before modern humanity. I really wish we knew.”

“I wish you knew too,” you breathed. You had never really considered that immortality meant that the same vampires who existed before the Pyramids at Giza still lived among humanity today. It was mind boggling. The history in just their brains alone could fill thousands of textbooks and solve history’s greatest mysteries. But they couldn’t show themselves to the humans without risk. Even the people that they bit and sent back to Earth wouldn’t dare talk about their experiences, for fear of sounding crazy. Their gift to the world would never be wrapped up in gold tissue paper and presented with the proper awe, but here you were, in this modern metropolis of history. It truly hurt your brain to consider everything that came with that sort of age.

Just then a yell came from outside. “Kun-ge! Are you with Y/N?!” It sounded suspiciously like a panicked Yangyang. He never got panicked.

Kun stood up and hurried over to the front door, blurring in his hurry. “What happened?” he demanded.

“Well, uh, we may or may not have set Yuta’s house on fire…” Yangyang’s voice trailed off as Kun’s face reacted. First his eyebrows raised, then his mouth dropped open, and finally his eyes squeezed shut before reopening after a moment.

“You did what?”

Yangyang’s voice was small. “We set Yuta’s house on fire?” His voice was so high and squeaky that it sounded more like a question than a statement.

“Who is ‘we’?”

“Me, and Hyuck, and Taemin-hyung.”

“Oh my,” Kun said, running a hand over his face and through his hair. “I am going to murder Taemin-hyung.” He turned to Yangyang. “I might murder you and Donghyuck too.”

“We didn’t mean to,” Yangyang said. “It just happened.”

“You didn’t mean to set Yuta’s house on fire? How do you accidentally set someone’s house on fire?”

“You put on an impromptu fire show right next to the house, mess up a trick, and accidentally throw a flaming baton on their house. It was surprisingly easy. Anyway, I know that you would know what to do. You and Y/N both.”

Kun ran his hand through his hair again. You watched as a few light brown strands flew to the carpet with the force of it. “Y/N, do you have anything for flaming houses?”

You looked around your living room as though that would help you remember whether you did or not. “I think so, let me check my storage room,” you muttered, already dashing away. You did, in fact, have something that you loosely translated from the Egyptian spell scroll as “Fire Away Goop,” or something similar. It was a green, nearly transparent goop that sloshed in its bottle but it was too thick to really flow. It oozed more than anything. When it hit heat, it tended to solidify into a more solid green that would be easily removable from Yuta’s house, if said house was still there by the time you got to wherever it was. You grabbed the bottle and rushed back to the living room, panting. Kun turned to you.

“Is it okay if I carry you, to make sure we get there in time?”

“Won’t I be too heavy?”

He gave you an unimpressed look. “We’re literally the strongest things known to man. I’ll be fine.”

“Then sure. Let’s go save Yuta’s house!”

Kun carried you piggyback as fast as he could, your face tucked into his shoulder to avert most of the vertigo induced by such high speeds. Trees flashed by in browns and greens, and then you were going through the city, past the city, through more trees, in a rush that you couldn’t quite comprehend but which caused a sinking feeling to settle in your gut. Yuta’s house was far away. By the time you got there, the house was fully consumed by the flames, the fire burning merrily without knowledge that it was ruining a man’s home.

A man, presumably Yuta, stood out front, another man on his knees next to him. Once you were next to them, you realized that the standing man had the kneeling man’s ear in a tight grip. You figured that the man on his knees must have been the infamous Donghyuck.

“Yuta-hyung, Hyuck,” Kun greeted them as he set you on the ground.

“Yangyang,” said Yuta, turning around, “You’re a bit late.” He nodded at you and Kun in acknowledgement, as Donghyuck yelped at the tug on his ear. Yuta had black hair streaked through with neon green, and it framed a narrow face and startlingly pink lips. You wondered, in the back of your head, if he used lip tint. You also briefly entertained the idea that he contoured his face, because there was no way that he looked that good without makeup. He’s a vampire, your consciousness provided. All of them look that good.

“Sorry hyung,” Yangyang murmured. “We came as fast as we could!”

Kun stepped forward. “We brought Y/N, as you can see, and she has something to put the fire out.” Something like hope sparked in Yuta’s eyes as he looked over you again, taking in details of your appearance.

“Do you really? Well, go ahead.” He gestured to the house and the flames danced in your face, leaving you to hope that this gloop worked for fires this big. You took a deep breath and poured the goop onto the grass, where it oozed between the blades of grass like a big blob of snot on the lawn.

“Atlaq alnaar,” you murmured to it, and it rose into the air, following your mental directions toward the fire. The moment they made contact, the goop started to solidify and expand, covering the fire rapidly. Green overtook bright reds and oranges as you focused on the fire and made the goop cover it.

“Y/N!” Someone was calling to you, their voice out of focus as though you heard them from underwater. “You’ll get covered!” You were vaguely aware of a hand trying to lead you away, but the spell kept you rooted in place, your feet seemingly super glued to the lawn. You kept focus on the fire as the last flames were overtaken and put out. Yuta’s house was now a giant green blob. From what you could see through the jello-like goop, it had sustained a minimal amount of damage considering the amount of flames you had seen. You were so engrossed in the green substance that you missed the warning signs before it swallowed you up too, ever expanding.

It took your outstretched hands first, pulling you forward into it. Through your panic you had just enough brain power left to be amazed at how thick it was before your feet and legs were covered too, nearly encased in the goop. You leaned your head back as far as you could, trying to keep yourself in the open air, but the goop kept expanding. You felt more than saw the vampires try to dig you out, but while the spell still fueled it, the goop was surprisingly strong. A hand grasped your elbow as the goop grasped your neck and chin, keeping you completely still as it covered more of you. The hand let go. It couldn’t do anything now.

You took a deep breath just before the goop covered your mouth, nose, and eyes. You thought you felt something on the back of your neck but didn’t think much of it until it started burning. Any strength you had left crumbled as your eyes started stinging and your oxygen ran out. You couldn't see, but it felt as though the world was spinning around you, as though you had been disconnected from everything but the pain. Even through your lightheadedness the pain persisted. It had spread now, from your neck over your shoulders like the creeping vines on the back wall of Jaemin’s cottage.

Jaemin.

You realized through your hazy thoughts that you would never see him again. Your eyes and nose burned now, from tears you couldn’t cry and the pain slowly enveloping you.

You couldn’t hold on any longer.

Black.

☽༓☾

Across a forest and a small town, Jaemin was working on his Hindi pronunciation when Ten burst into his home for the second time in what seemed like a very short period. He wasn’t dripping this time, just looked thoroughly terrified of something.

“Jaemin! She needs help!”

“What? Who?” Jaemin stood up and walked over to his friend. Ten’s tentacles curled and uncurled repeatedly as he spoke.

“Y/N! The vision got sharper, which usually means it’s happening. The green blob wasn’t a tree, it was some sort of spell! She’s going to die if we don’t get there fast.”

“Where are we going?” Jaemin demanded as they ran through the trees around his cabin.

“Yuta’s house. Or, at least, where it used to be.”

“What happened to Yuta’s house?”

“Yangyang and Hyuck burned it down.”

“Ah.”

Ten was panting as he continued speaking. “I think that must be what the spell was for. Some sort of fire putter-outer.”

Jaemin tried to think back to all of the books he had given you, recalling a spell that sounded suspiciously like what Ten described. “If the one I think you’re talking about is the spell she used,” he told Ten, “we might not be able to save her by the time we get there.” A pang echoed through his chest. An empty feeling, as though your small human life had affected his own so strongly as to make him miss you without knowing that you were gone. Jaemin ran on, leaving Ten behind when he paused to rest, sprinting at his highest speed towards where you were.

When he arrived on Yuta’s plot, most of his vision turned green, not because things were actually green, but from the sheer size of the lime coloured stuff all over Yuta’s house. He had been correct when he guessed at which spell you had used. His gaze fell on Kun, Yangyang, Yuta, and Donghyuck, who stood at the still-expanding base of the blob, seemingly trying to get something out. He gasped. You were in the thing. He ran up and tried to help the others dig you out, to no avail. They couldn't do anything against the spell so long as you were alive, and he wasn’t about to kill the person he had worked so hard to protect. He tried to hold onto your elbow as it was swallowed, but was afraid of hurting you. They all watched as you took a deep breath and the gloop covered your face.

Jaemin slumped, out of ideas. There was no way to save you that he knew of. Then he thought back to Ten’s vision. He had to change you. It was the only way. You wouldn’t need to breathe, wouldn’t need to do anything. You could still be here with him. It was with that in mind that he lunged forward at the last moment and latched onto your neck, stretching his jar as wide as it would go. His fangs, already dripping uncomfortably with venom in your presence, sank into your veins, and he felt it as you stiffened slightly. You couldn’t move much in your current situation, but your muscles seized all the same. He stayed next to you as long as he could, until he was in danger of being swallowed into the goop as well. He licked the wounds closed as efficiently as possible and stepped back with the others to see what happened.

It was obvious that you had gone unconscious. The goop stopped moving so rapidly and seemed to pause in its conquest of the front yard. It started oozing slowly around again, creating something of a reverse muffin top as the top shell hardened and the bottom bits leaked out. They backed up to the edge of the yard and Jaemin used his (admittedly small) knowledge of spellcraft to create wards that would protect the house down the street and hopefully contain the goo. They watched in silence as the green kept expanding. Then Yangyang spoke.

“Will Y/N die?”

“I don’t think so,” said Jaemin slowly. “She shouldn’t, at any rate. I bit her.”

A collective tremor went around the group, as though none of them wanted to appear surprised but they all were.

“It was the only thing I could think of that gave Y/N a chance, so I had to try it,” Jaemin continued. “But Kun-hyung knows more than me on that subject.”

Kun looked pensive as he considered what Jaemin had said. “It should work, in theory. But between the wards always up around Y/N’s house, this spell, and the venom in his system, her body might now be able to take it. It’s just a game of chance, unless we can find some way to take some stress off of her body.”

They all looked to Jaemin again.

“Is there some way to break the wards that she has up?” Yuta asked.

“I don’t think so,” Jaemin said, frowning. “Not without taxing her further. We definitely can’t affect this spell without killing her, and as far as the transformation goes, we’d need to be able to get to her body in there. That’s obviously not happening either.”

“So what can we do?” Donghyuck’s voice was small and he sounded almost repentant, as though he thought this whole thing was his fault. It sort of was, but it was odd to hear that tone from him.

“We ask Ten what he can see of the future and go from there,” Jaemin said. “There’s not much else that we can do, unless anyone knows someone better with spells than Y/N.”

The whole group shook their heads. Spells could be cast by any human variant creature that they knew of, but spellcraft was a human specialty. You in particular were gifted beyond what they had seen in a very long while.

While they thought about it, Ten burst forth from the trees down the street and ran towards their group. He slowed down as he took in the blob, now pressing against the wards that contained it. Jaemin could feel a subtle sort of pressure in his head as his spells kept the goop within Yuta’s plot.

“So?” Ten asked Jaemin as he walked up. “Did it work?”

“We’re not sure. She’s not dead, or the Fire Away spell would have gone small and liquidy again. On the other hand, none of us know any way to get her out, and Kun-hyung’s worried about the toll that all of this” - he waved his hands at the blob - “will kill her while he turns. We wanted to ask what you were seeing as of now.”

Ten closed his eyes, most of his tentacles going still as he focused. There was one that whacked anxiously against the dirt beneath him, beating a steady rhythm against the earth. After a few minutes, his eyes opened and he refocused his eyes on the group around him.

“Well?” Yangyang prompted when he didn’t speak. Ten sighed.

“Good news is that she’s probably not going to die.”

“And the bad news?”

“She might die.”

“What do you mean, Ten-hyung?”

“I can’t… I can’t tell which future is the one that will come true. It’s like there are two possible ways for the future to go, and neither of them is solid. Either she makes it through, or she dies. The worst part is that I can’t tell what causes her death. It could happen two seconds from now, or two hours, or two days. I just don’t know.”

“I don’t remember your visions ever having two outcomes,” Kun said, brows furrowed.

“I haven’t ever had one like this.”

“Well,” Jaemin said, “I’ll just stay here until she wakes up.”

“And where should I go?” asked Yuta. “Maybe nobody told you, but this is my house that just got burned down.” He threw a glare at Hyuck and Yangyang.

“Go stay with Mark-hyung or something. You sleep over with him all the time anyway,” Donghyuck suggested, and Yuta grinned, a complete change from two seconds before.

“He’ll hate that. See you guys later!” He skipped a few steps before running full tilt, phone in his hands and fingers tapping. The glow of the screen disappeared quickly from Jaemin’s view, and he turned back to their now-smaller group.

“Are you sure that you want to stay here until Y/N wakes up?” Kun asked Jaemin. “I know that you don’t need sleep or anything, but that seems like a waste of time.”

“I have eternity,” Jaemin told him. “I just need to be here to watch it deflate, whether it’s because she’s turned or because…” His voice went weak. He couldn't see you die. He just couldn’t. Kun patted him on the shoulder.

“Okay. We’ll come check on you tomorrow.” As he walked away with Yangyang and Donghyuck, Jaemin heard Kun’s ‘mom voice’ come out as he lectured on the dangers of playing with fire. It made Jaemin smile a little.

His head was starting to feel uncomfortable with the pressure of his wards, so he carefully widened them, centimeter by centimeter, until there was less gloop on them. He couldn’t keep this up until you completed the transformation, he knew, but it would work for now. Maybe he could call Kibum-hyung tomorrow for help.

Until then all he had to do was sit and wait, and look at your form encased in neo pearl champagne colored jello.

☽༓☾

It was exactly twenty five hours, forty minutes, and nine seconds since Jaemin had first settled in when the goop started deflating. The hard casing that had developed collapsed in on itself when the slightly softer insides began to shrink, reminding Jaemin slightly of Honey Lemon and her chemical reactions in Big Hero 6. He sprang to his feet, rushing forward to where he could see the outline of your body inside the collapsing bubble, grabbing the empty decanter that the goop had once been held in. He scooped up the small oozing goop that remained from the spell and plugged the decanter, turning around slowly to look at your body once more.

As your still-limp body collapsed to the ground, Jaemin felt his unbeating heart sink. You didn’t move, there was no rise and fall to your chest. There was no sound of your breath in the air. Your eyes didn’t roll around under your eyelids. You seemed… corpselike. Dead. But it couldn’t be. Ten had said that you would probably survive! Jaemin opened his phone and pressed Ten’s contact to call it. He answered on the third ring.

“Jaemin? What’s up?”

“Ten-hyung,” Jaemin said, and his voice cracked. He cleared his throat before continuing. “Y/N… I think, is dead?”

Ten sucked in a breath, audible even through the phone. “Jaemin I’m so sorry-”

Jaemin cut him off. “Hyung, you said she would make it!”

“There was always that chance that she wouldn’t-”

“But you said-” Jaemin’s voice cracked again and he fell into silence. He couldn’t cry, and he had never wished he could until now. Tears might convey the hole in his chest, the emptiness of his existence without your life to partner him.

“Jaemin,” came Ten’s voice, and it was soft, delicate. “I’m so so sorry. I thought that she would make it, but there was always that second path. I can’t-” He took a deep breath. “I can’t see her anymore. I think… I think she might be gone.”

“No!” Jaemin exclaimed hotly. “She can’t be!”

“Jaemin-”

He hung up. Whatever Ten-hyung had to say wouldn’t help. It wouldn’t bring you back. He was along now, with your body and this stupid Flame Away Goop that had managed to take your life despite Ten’s prophecies and Jaemin’s best efforts. The person that you were was gone. Now you were just a still corpse, a painful reminder of what could have been and what should have been and what couldn’t be.

“I’ll give you a proper funeral,” Jaemin told your body as he lifted it into his arms gently. “I promise.”

For the next three days, Jaemin worked non-stop. He prepared a funeral for you, ignored everyone except to invite them to the event. He could still picture your smile, the way he had to support you those first few steps. He remembered how you had called him gorgeous, how you had said I love you in Gaelic to him without knowing what it meant. He recalled the trust you had for him despite his own occasional self-loathing, the way you had reminded him of his worth every time you were around him.

He missed you. He missed you a lot.

People had called him, came knocking once an hour. He eventually just shut off his phone so he didn’t have to hear their pleas for him to let them in. All of his hyungs and all of his noonas came to make sure he was okay, but would he ever be? There was a Y/N shaped hole in him that he didn’t think could ever be filled up again. Jeno came around three times a day with hug offerings, but Jaemin shut him out. He knew it hurt his friends, knew they only wanted to help, but you were gone and nobody understood. Nobody had loved you the way he had. Nobody had your blood quite literally on their hands, flowing through their veins.

It hurt to think about that. He “lived” while you were dead; he had gained life through your death and that was the most ironic thing. In his attempt to save you, he may have killed you.

He hurt.

On the fourth day since your death, Jaemin gently dressed your body in the best clothes he could find, brushed your hair, and put you in a casket, standing you in an open clearing, the one where he had tried to send you back to Earth. It was the largest clearing nearby, and all of the vampires that had met you plus Ten came to pay their respects. They spoke about the short time they had known you, and the strong impact you had made despite that. They told of how you had gone back to Earth and suffered until you had returned. They told of your feats practicing witchcraft and most of all they spoke of your kindness, the lack of repulsion towards them. They spoke of your kind smile and the way you had fit in so nicely with their community.

Jaemin started not-crying, as vampires did, and he thought he would be alone, but Jeno joined him. Lucas joined him. Jisung and Chenle joined him. Ten and Johnny joined him. He was not the only one who had loved you. Donghyuck joined him. Yangyang and Yuta and Kun joined him. He was not the only one who felt that your death was his fault.

Jaemin was not the only person who choked out their words in an imitation of crying. Jaemin was not the only person who missed you. Jaemin was not the only one who wanted you back. Jaemin was not the only one.

He hadn’t realized how much he missed his friends until they surrounded him in a huge hug. It wasn’t a warm hug, necessarily, but it was a hug nonetheless and made him feel better. He was not the only one.

He was still dealing with the hole in his chest, but he had others to patch himself up with now. Like each person who had known you could bring a part of you back through their memories of you. It was nice, almost.

☽༓☾

The first thing you realized was that you could hear again. Your ears were uncovered, and you vaguely registered words being choked out somewhere near you. It sounded like a large number of people were very sad about something. You wondered what it could be. The second thing you realized was that you were laying down on some sort of padded… thing. It felt like too much work to open your eyes, so you felt around and realized that you were in a padded box. A padded box? That was new.

You tried to sniff the air and were met with the smell of cologne, not too strong but apparently on enough people that it permeated the air. You got hints of perfume too, but it was far less strong. Something in the box shifted and you felt breaths on your face. Were people looking at you in your sleep? Come to think of it, why were these many people around you while you slept at all? That seemed sort of rude. You tried to remember getting here but came up blank. Your last memories were of the pain before you passed out. You shivered at the memory.

“She’s awake!” someone shouted. The noise hurt your ears after the deafening silence of your previous state, and you itched to get away from them. A murmur of sound rolled through the room and then a familiar scent invaded your senses, that of sun-warmed earth.

“Y- Y/N?” Jaemin asked hesitantly. “Can you hear me? Are you in there?”

He sounded absolutely wrecked, like his voice had been stripped of his usual honey and sunshine. You tried to open your eyes, but it was too bright and you just couldn’t, so you nodded slightly.

“Oh my- Y/N,” he continued. “Can’t you open your eyes for me, please?”

You shook your head no.

“Okay, that’s fine, sweetheart. Let me get you out of there.” There was the sound of something wooden being bonked against a wall, but that faded in comparison to the name. Sweetheart. Sweetheart.

You were lifted gently from your padded box and carried somewhere shady and cold. It felt nice against your skin. He felt nice against your skin. He carried you gently, like you were made of glass, but you felt surprisingly strong, just out of sorts. As though while your mind struggled to catch up, your body had strengthened. It was a very different sensation to that of your first time waking up in Jaemin’s house. He walked you through what you thought must be the forest for a bit before he sat down and nestled you into his side. You felt as though some muscles should be unhappy about the position, but you felt completely comfortable.

“Y/N.” Jaemin’s voice came to you, soft and warm and familiar. It was shaking slightly. “Can you open your eyes for me now?”

You focused on your eyelids, raising them slowly until you could see Jaemin. He had on a suit; black jacket over a white shirt, accented by a thin black ribbon tied loosely around his neck. His pink hair fell neatly in waves over his forehead and you reached up to brush away a piece that had fallen over his eyes, smiling.

“Hey Jaem. What happened?” Your voice wasn’t weak, like you supposed it should have been. It came out like a melody into the air, and you marvelled internally at the sound of it, how smooth it was. It felt nice.

“You-” Jaemin broke off for a second, rearranging your limbs next to him. “You were trying to save Yuta’s house. We had to rebuild part, but it’s fine. He stayed with Mark for a few days. For the most part, your spell worked. But then, it- it swallowed you. I got there in time to watch as you were absorbed by this green goop and I thought I was too late. I bit you, back here.” He brushed his fingers gently over the sides of your neck and you shivered. “But you didn’t wake up… I thought I was too late. You weren’t breathing, and you weren’t awake… I have no idea how you managed to cancel the spell without waking up or dying. So I-” He made a choked up sound and tightened his arm around your shoulders. “We’re at your funeral. Ten couldn’t see your future anymore, so we thought you were dead…” He trailed off.

“Wow,” you said. “I died? Then how am I here now? I feel alive?”

“It worked. It must have. You don’t have a heartbeat, but you’re awake. I don’t know what happened exactly, but you must be a vampire now.”

“Huh. I thought I’d feel more… hungry.”

He laughed. It glittered over your ears and you smiled, an involuntary reaction to him. “It’ll kick in, don’t worry.”

“What about the others? I mean, Lucas and Kun and everyone? Are they just at my funeral right now? Without me?”

“Oh.” Jaemin looked as though he had forgotten about them. “I guess they are. Let’s go see them?”

“Let’s.”

☽༓☾

After that day, it didn’t take you long to realize that the other vampires were purposefully putting you with Jaemin for just about everything. On days where you went to hang out with Lucas, he would ask you how Jaemin was doing. If you didn’t know, he would suggest that you go and visit him. Kun asked you to make sure that Jaemin was feeling okay. Yuta, who you were finally allowed to meet and hang out with, constantly suggested that you should spend more time with him. It was strange. Nobody had seemed to mind that you had your own hobbies before your transformation, but now that you were a vampire, it was as though you were meant to be with Jaemin all of the time. You asked Lucas about it once you got sick of the mysterious treatment and he looked at you heavily.

“When you got trapped in that goopy stuff, Jaemin went all weird. He didn’t move for, like, more than 24 hours, and once he thought you were dead… he didn’t talk to any of us until the funeral. We worry about him, and you seem to make him really happy, so we’re trying to keep you two around each other.”

You didn’t really know what to say to that, so you chose the very eloquent “oh,” as your response. Lucas chuckled.

“I know. It was really weird, I’ve never seen him like that. I think we’ve seen a lot of new sides of Jaemin since you came along.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“It’s… well, I don’t think it’s bad or good. It just is. You affect him differently than anyone else we know.”

“Why is that, do you think?”

“Y/N, you idiot, he’s in love with you.”

“He’s what?”

Lucas sighed. “He’s in love with you.”

“Why do you think that? This is Jaemin we’re talking about here. Jaemin. He’s, like, beauty incarnate and he’s smart and kind and wonderful in every aspect of everything. He just can’t be in love with me.”

“He’s in love with you.”

“He’s not.”

“He is.”

“He can't be.”

“Why not?”

“I just told you why.”

Lucas sighed again, more deeply. “But you’re in love with him.”

“I-” You consider that. “I guess?”

“That wasn’t a question.” He rolled his eyes.

“Do you think it’s possible that he actually does like me back?”

“Yes.”

Somehow, after that, Lucas managed to steer the conversation onto other subjects and you refocused on those things, but it echoed in your head. He’s in love with you.

☽༓☾

Even with this new information bouncing around the forefront of your brain, you still had to go and spend time with Jaemin. Maybe it was a little strange for your thoughts to short circuit when you saw him, the little whisper of what if in your head. Maybe it was a little peculiar for a vampire such as yourself to stutter through sentences because you were busy thinking about what life would be like if he really did like you back. Maybe you spent less time talking on your walks together because you wanted to lay next to him in a clearing and watch the clouds instead. Just maybe.

If Jaemin noticed any of your strange behaviour, he didn’t call you out on it. He either really wasn’t paying all that much attention, or he knew enough about you to know that you wouldn’t want him to pry. It was strange, really, how well you knew each other in such a short time. You supposed that since you spent so much time together it wasn’t improbable, but he knew you nearly as well as your old human friends back home.

Thinking about your old memories was a strange experience. You could remember everything as clearly as your human self could, but you noticed more the lack of detail within the images, the way your human eyes couldn’t move as fast as your vampire ones, and your reflexes weren’t as fast, and the way you fixated on one part of the picture without taking in the details of the rest of your vision. You had entirely blocked out memories of driving, they were too harrowing. You recalled more easily now all of the times you had nearly hit something or someone, and while you couldn't die now, at least not that easily, you could have easily fallen prey to the fatal blind spot more times than you’d care to admit.

When you told Jaemin about that, he laughed that laugh you loved so much. “I was born in fourteen forty-two, Y/N. We didn’t have cars back then. The only thing on the street that would run me over was a horse-drawn carriage.”

“Well,” you retorted, “you should consider yourself lucky then. Carriages and horses don’t sound half so bad as giant hunks of metal flying at each other at eighty miles per hour.”

“Maybe you’re right,” he mused, stroking an imaginary beard. “Maybe I was lucky to be born in Korea during the 1400s. You may have heard of the emperor Sejong the Great? I was born during his rule. He was one of the best emperors Korea ever had, he introduced hangul and united the country under Confucian principles so that there was more love for the country and the people living in it. Peaceful few years we had there, from what little I remember. After that, though? Lots of killing, children on the throne, et cetera et cetera. Not so fun. And I was actually able to die through all of that, so that wasn’t pleasant. But then King Sejo, the one who did the killing, actually did a pretty okay job of ruling the country and we had a few more years of prosperity. He died six years after my transformation. I missed that event because I was here in Vahmpyr getting to know Jeno, who turned me.”

“How much of the group was around, at that point?”

“Well…” Jaemin closed his eyes briefly in thought. “Here, let me draw you a family tree.” He grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil and wrote ‘Moon Taeil’ at the top. “Okay so as you know, Taeil is here as the first of us. He turned Yuta-hyung, Kun-hyung, Johnny-hyung, and Taeyong-hyung.” He wrote in their names under Taeil’s, spacing them out across the paper.

“Yuta-hyung turned Sicheng-hyung and Shotaro; Kun-hyung turned Dejun-hyung and Lucas-hyung; Johnny-hyung turned Jungwoo-hyung and Mark, and Taeyongie-hyung turned Hyuck, Doyoung-hyung, and Jaehyun hyung.” He labeled all of these names, then drew more stems leading from Jaehyun, Lucas, and Dejun.

“Jaehyun-hyung turned Sungchan, Lucas-hyung turned Hendery-hyung and Yangyang, and Dejun-hyung turned Renjun.” He drew all of these connections and stemmed Renjun’s name down even farther.

“Renjun turned Jeno and Chenle, then Jeno turned me, and I turned Jisung and now you.” He finished the tree with a flourish, black ink stark against the creamy paper. They were all connected, in some way, to Taeil’s venom. And there was you, at the very bottom, your name small next to Jisung’s.

“You guys are all so… connected.”

“Yep! We’re all one big family.”

“Do you guys have, like, family reunions? And who changed Joy and her friends? Or what’s-his-face? Taemin?”

“We don’t really all get together a lot, just because most of us have jobs on Earth or spend our days doing stuff on our own. Some of them like having flings all the time. Obviously none of us can get STDs or get pregnant, so they can do that, no strings attached. We sort of hang out in our individual groups for the most part, and then hang out every once in a while. As far as the others, we think that they must have come from the same person as Taeil-hyung, a very very old vampire. There are other stories like ours across Vahmpyr, where one vampire created one member of each coven and let us grow from there. The difference is that some of them actually have good relationships with those older vampires, whereas I’ve never met ours. I’ve heard that there’s a man called Park Jae-sang who actually comes around to spend time with the vampires he’s changed. The closest we have to an old vampire is Leeteuk-hyung, and he isn’t really around much, plus he’s not that much older than Taeil-hyung.

“Anyway, to answer your question, when I was turned, nearly everyone was around already. Only Yangyang, Sungchan, Shotaro, Chenle, and Jisung are younger than me. And now you.”

“Wow, so you had to meet everyone right after your transformation? I bet that was chaotic.”

“It was, but it was also fun. I got to be the baby for a while. Then the others came around and I somehow became a mother figure.”

You laughed. Jaemin was a mother figure, for sure. He liked to take care of the people around him, including humans that his brothers had brought home for him to patch up. “That doesn’t surprise me one bit.”

He giggled along with you, that laugh you adored so much, and grinned. “I guess it sort of fits me, doesn’t it? Mother Jaem.” He rolled the name over his tongue and you collapsed into laughter again. “I think that works well, yep.”

The next few days, you called him Mother Jaem, and everyone gave you weird looks, but it made Jaemin laugh hard enough that it was worth it.

☽༓☾

One day after this, Chenle pulled Jaemin aside to ask him what on Earth was going on with this whole “Mother Jaem” thing. Jaemin explained happily how it had come about. Chenle rolled his eyes dramatically.

“When are you two getting married?”

Jaemin just gave him a blank stare. ��What?”

“It’s so disgusting how much you guys love each other! When can we shove you two together in a house and call it a day?”

“Um, okay, first of all, that is not how you get rid of somebody. Second, she doesn't love me? And third, there is definitely not enough space in her house for me, even if she did.”

Chenle pinched the bridge of his nose. “Lucas was right, you guys are blind fools. Of course she loves you! She goes to see you all the time! And enjoys it! You’re both in love with each other and both of you are cowards.” He ran his hand through his hair, knocking a piece into his eye. He squinted unhappily but didn’t try to move it.

Jaemin sighed as he got the chunk of hair away from Chenle’s eye. “This is Y/N we’re talking about though! She might hate me for everything I put her through and only stick around because I turned her or something. Plus, she spends as much time with Lucas as with me.”

“My God, your logic is terrible. You love her, she loves you, you need to get together. Watch some dramas and kiss her in the rain or something. Lucas even told me that she loves you!”

“That’s astonishingly specific for someone who doesn’t have a romance under their belt.”

“That’s besides the point!” Chenle grabbed the sides of Jaemin’s face and held him still while he spoke. “You need to confess sometime or another before the rest of us go crazy watching you run in circles around each other.”

With that he stalked away, leaving Jaemin rubbing his face where Chenle’s fingertips had pressed into the skin. It didn’t hurt, but the echoes of his voice and his fingers held Jaemin still for a long time afterwards.

☽༓☾

The next week, Kun and Taeil invited the whole coven to a reunion at Kun’s country estate. Having never been, you looked forward to seeing the giant house as much as meeting the rest of the family. It didn’t disappoint, it was absolutely massive, at least four or five floors and extensive gardens in front. Kun gave you free run of the place, asking you to please not enter rooms marked with a “Do Not Enter” sign. Simple rule to follow. You entered the main hall first, feeling like royalty in such an elegant room. Twin staircases led from the upstairs, leading your eyes to an extravagant chandelier covered in hundreds of crystals, and a mint green ceiling. From either side of the large room extended hallways with lush pale blue rugs and endless vases on platforms. It felt as though you had entered the past, or maybe a very expensive movie set. You moved through hallways and rooms, gazing at velvet chairs and old paintings that screamed money. You wondered if someone in Vahmpyr painted them, or if they were from Earth. You found only two rooms marked “Do Not Enter,” one of which was in a long hallway of bedrooms, so you assumed it was Kun’s.

The other was in the back of a positively colossal library. The library caught your eye because of the sheer size of it. Rows upon rows of books lined the walls and seemingly endless freestanding shelves. It was as large as the main public library back home, taking up at least four average rooms worth of space per floor. Not to mention the height. You estimated that it was at least three floors high, perhaps four. An entire long wall was devoted to Kun’s studies in medicine, dating back to leeches and poultices on open wounds through Magnetic Resonance Imaging and the most advanced of current surgeries. He had records of patients stacked by century, and a desk that popped out of the wall to reveal his own notes on developing vaccines and other medicines. Had you still been human, you were certain that a room like this would have given you a headache, from the size and the amount of books to look at.

From the medicine section you moved to other sciences like forensics, geology (although that section was considerably smaller), and astronomy. You also discovered an entire section on aviation. In the astronomy section, you found cork boards with maps pinned to them, stars drawn in detail, space stations built for both humans and vampires, and more drawings you didn't know how to interpret. You pulled out a few books at random and flipped through them, smiling at the notes in the margins. Past those sections were books on every type of science you had ever heard of, and some you hadn’t.

Beyond those were histories, and Kun’s travel section. He had bins filled with brochures, maps, and travel magazines and accounts of, from what you could tell, every war known to have occurred past Kun’s turning. That blended into social studies, and you found books on language next to copies of the Bible in seemingly every version, translations of the Quran, and more religious texts. Stock market trends were recorded and stored next to books on how to hire smart and anthropology. Cultural studies were stored with ethics and political records. Newspapers appeared as well, although those were fewer than the books by far. They appeared to be from a singular area, a place called Taining County, in China. Kun must have some sort of tie to it. You made a mental note to ask him when you rejoined the others.

You climbed a staircase to the second floor, where you found a fireplace and sitting area within the books. It appeared that the entire second floor was books organized by language, starting each section with children’s books and working their way up to novels. You found all of the Romance Languages, German, Hindi, Greek, Tagalog, Russian, Dutch, Japanese, Cantonese, Thai, Korean, Arabic, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Urdu, Latin and more that you didn’t know. In the back was a small compilation of different countries’ sign languages, as well.

You climbed the next flight of stairs to the third floor, finding the fiction section. These were organized by genre, with horror on one shelf, science fiction hogging four shelves on the opposite walls, romance taking up a large section next to that, et cetera. You spotted a section marked “Transcribed” and walked over to it, finding books handwritten by Kun, presumably taken from other forms and written over to fit in his library. You imagined the wax tablets and stone slabs of old books and shuddered. Even as a vampire, transporting those wouldn’t be easy. This floor was open in the middle, looking down at the second. Above you, the next floor was open as well and housed more shelves.

You walked up the last staircase and came upon a musical archive. There were phonographs on tables next to more recent record turntables, followed by cassette players and CD players. Each one was in impeccable condition, and behind them were shelves of every format that would work with those machines. These were shorter shelves, since the music was thinner than books, but there were still many many of them. You saw cassette boxes labeled with the albums contained within, records in yellowed sleeves, and CDs in thick storage cases. They were organized by decade, with the earliest dating back to the late nineteenth century. You guessed that was when recorded music had been invented. Perhaps Kun could still remember older pieces though; something else you would have to ask him about. You were looking through the most recent music to see what he liked and if you had heard of it when you heard someone calling your name.

“Y/N? Where are you?”

“In the library, fourth floor!” you yelled back.

“Will you come back to the kitchen and help me with this?”

“Sure!”

You weren’t sure who was calling you, but it sounded like Lucas, so you ran towards the kitchen. You weren’t sure entirely why there was a kitchen, since you all drank blood anyway, but you figured there was a good reason. You added that to your growing list of things to ask Kun. You understood why you had a kitchen in your house since you had lived in it while you were still human, but Kun hadn’t been to Vahmpyr before he was turned as far as you knew. Besides, he usually lived in his apartment next to the other guys. Maybe it was just necessary to have a kitchen in a house, you didn’t know. It would have felt weird, you guessed, to live in a house without one.

When you arrived, Lucas was outside as you had guessed.

“Will you run in and grab these things for me?” he asked, handing you a sticky note. “I’ve been tasked with rounding up everyone else.”

“Yeah, no problem,” you replied, walking through the doors into the room. It was industrial, like Kun cooked for dozens of people at a time, and there was a surprising amount of cooking utensils that wouldn’t work on raw bodies, like spatulas. You looked down at the sticky note for the first time. If you don’t confess, it read, I will smack you when you come back out. And you know how big my hands are, I will make it hurt.

“What?” you murmured to yourself as Jaemin walked into the room.

“Oh hey Y/N, did Chenle send you?”

“No, Lucas did. But did Chenle perhaps give you a sticky note with things to get for him on it?”

Jaemin glanced down at a hot pink slip of paper in his hand. “Yeah.” He looked back up at you before his brow furrowed and he looked more thoroughly at the writing on it. He groaned. “I am going to kill Chenle.” He ran a hand through his cotton candy pink hair. “I guess I should just get it over with then.”

He walked closer to you, setting the sticky note on the counter as he came. “I’m kind of in love with you? And I have been for a while? I mean I get if you hate me after everything I put you through, but according to Chenle you like me back? And… yeah?”

You were left speechless. Hate Jaemin? Never. And he… loved… you?

“Y/N? Are you okay?” Jaemin waved a hand in front of your face. “I’m sorry, I’ll go, Chenle must have set up a prank.” He started walking away and you grabbed his wrist.

“Jaem, hold on. I’m just in shock. I thought there was no way you could like me back…” Your voice got steadily smaller until it trailed off at the end of your sentence as a whisper.

His entire face lit up like a Christmas tree plugged in for the first time, glowing and cheerful. “It’s not a prank?”

You rubbed a hand over your face. “No, it’s not a prank. I thought Lucas was kidding when he said you liked me back. Or at least that he was wrong. You- you’re actually telling me that you’re in love with me?”

“I am.”

“Holy shit.”

He laughed, a ringing sound in the quiet of the kitchen. It echoed back at you as though the happiness of the laugh had been multiplied. “They’re going to be so smug,” he muttered.

“Oh yes they are. We’re going to have to get back at them someday.”

“Well, we have forever,” he reminded you. You grinned and held out your hand. He took it.

“Let’s go get the teasing over with then.”

You walked out of the kitchen and down the hall. “What did Chenle threaten you with if you didn’t confess?” you asked.

“Oh, he was going to tell the group about the fling I had with Jeno when we were younger.”

You looked at him in shock. “You had a fling with Jeno? Why would you choose me over him?”

“It was just sexual attraction. While that works for some people, both of us were happier just being friends, so we ended it. I actually am in love with you, which makes all the difference. Anyway, Chenle got that story out of me on a dare once and has held it over my head ever since.”

“I wonder if he’s told Jeno he knows?”

“Probably.”

You had reached the front room, and you took a deep breath as you walked forward, though it did nothing for your undead body. “Let’s throw ourselves to the wolves.”

As you walked out into the sunlight, a cheer rose up that would have sent birds flapping away, had there been any. You heard Chenle’s unique laugh paired with Lucas’ happy shouts of “yes!” and the voices of the other men you had gotten to know, paired with ones you didn’t. They stood in a group in the garden, whooping and throwing up hats if they had any. Lucas was the first to reach you.

“I can’t believe you actually did it! I thought I’d have to smack you!” He sounded far too happy at the prospect for your liking.

The rest of the boys ran over. There was a repeating round of “finally” until someone mentioned the food getting warm and there was a great rush to get back to the patio in the garden. You sat next to Jaemin in patio chairs as the sun slowly sank past the tree line and talked with friends old and new.

There was something new, something warm inside of you. A feeling of belonging more than ever when Jaemin fed you a little and the rest of the guys booed jokingly. Under the rising stars you kissed him for the first time, a quick peck at the behest of Yangyang. There were more cheers and hugs and someone had a polaroid camera out, the flash lighting up the scene as everyone laughed.

This was where you were meant to be.

End.

!!reblogs and feedback are much appreciated!!

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blockgamepirate · 4 years ago

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Guys guys guys

The three lives thing can't be just about any deaths that are plot related, not even dramatic ones. The canon deaths have to actually have a plot function as a loss.

(ftr I've seen multiple people suggest all of these, I'm not just vagueblogging about anyone specific. Also I haven’t actually seen the clip of Wilbur talking about it yet, I just saw the original reddit post.)

So, Tommy and Techno fist fighting in the pit is plot relevant and dramatic but Tommy dying just signified him losing the fight. That can't be a canon death, that makes no sense. It was clearly just Techno knocking Tommy out. He didn't literally murder the kid with his fists in a fight that was mainly for letting Tommy let out some steam, Niki and Tubbo at least would have had a bigger reaction if so because that would just be super fucked up.

It also wouldn’t make sense for Techno to do since he was trying to stop the in-fighting (I say “trying” because he clearly doesn’t actually know how to do that like a reasonable person.)

Wilbur getting shot while escaping L'Manberg after being exiled happened during a dramatic, plot heavy scene but him dying wasn't plot relevant and it sure as hell wasn't dramatic enough in itself to count as a canon death. The scene was dramatic, Wilbur getting shot was dramatic, but the actual death was just treated as a temporary setback, not an actual loss of life. IIRC nobody even said Wilbur died, nobody reacted like he'd died. I'd interpret it as him getting shot and being badly wounded, which actually works really well in the scene, especially how he ends up hiding in a hole waiting for Tommy to come pick him up. That makes sense if he’s too weak from bloodloss to walk by himself.

I also think you could easily see the scene where the walls are torn down happening the next day when he's recovered a bit so he's able to walk back to L'Manberg on his own.

(This is getting long, time for a cut)

I'd even argue that Tubbo was the only one to die at the festival, everybody else was only wounded. Potentially horrifically so but still not dead. Schlatt and Quackity got hit by the rockets and maybe Techno even thought he'd killed them but I don't think he did, they didn't react to their deaths almost at all. Imagine if he'd actually killed them, you'd think they'd at least be like what the fuck Technoblade. Also Niki got shot in the crossfire too but nobody said anything about Techno killing her. I think she got hit but survived. I think the people in the audience who died were all actually just incapacitated. Otherwise there should have been consequences, people should be actually angry or grieving the fact that they’re a step closer to death.

You can tell that Tubbo's death was canonical by how it was taken so seriously, much more so than anyone else's deaths.

Similarly Tommy's death in the duel against Dream: Wilbur said to him before the duel that independence wasn't worth him losing his life or something along those lines: that made his death actually impactful, the narrative weight put on his decision to challenge Dream.

I don't know what the other canon deaths would be, besides Wilbur and Jschlatt's permanent ones obv. Eret's betrayal is a good candidate, although I don't think it necessarily has to be since the betrayal itself was the focus of the scene and was impactful enough as is even if all that happened was that they were beaten up and had their gear taken. Techno assassinating Tubbo after the revolution also could be one but doesn't necessarily have to be, it was definitely a JFK moment but the scene would still work if it was just a Reagan moment (bc Reagan was shot and severely injured but survived, you know). In any case it can't be both since Tubbo would be properly dead. (It could also be neither.)

My point is, it's kind of driving me nuts seeing people just count everything plot related or dramatic as a canon death. You can have dramatic moments where nobody dies. In fact that could even make them more dramatic in some cases:

Imagine a wounded Wilbur leaning on Tommy as they struggle through the wilderness. Imagine Tommy lying on the ground, gasping, his vision still blurry from the punches as Techno calmly climbs out of the pit to talk to a satisfied Wilbur. How would either of those scenes be more dramatic if they'd died and respawned instead? They'd just lose a sense of groundedness in my opinion. And it would just be unsatisfying because nobody reacted to the fact that a character just lost a life.

The point of canon deaths, as far as I see it, is to give an in-universe reason for why some deaths have weight to them. It gives death consequences. But for that to work, the canon deaths have to be seen by the characters as deaths, as something being irreparably lost. And it has to be rare to keep its effect.

#dream smp #dreamsmp #tommyinnit #technoblade #tubbo #wilbur soot

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sixeyesgojo · 4 years ago

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Pictures of You

Summary: prequel to I’ll Be Your Enemy - fluffy!

Characters: IBYE!Reader, Gojo, Yuji, Megumi, Nobara

Word count: 2,3k

Content warning: none

A/N: requested by @thecaptainsbride

If anybody got the reference Gojo made when he was late; congratulations, you have been successfully hurt (but this time it was not me).

Since I left the relationship between Gojo and the reader up for interpretation in IBYE, I will do the same here! Consider this piece me trying to mend your hearts <3

Taglist applications open for anyone who is interested!

“A trip to an amusement park or something like that doesn’t sound so bad,” you mused in front of Satoru. “It serves as relaxation and maybe the first-years can get closer to each other, you know, bonding and so on. They will see each other many times from now on, so getting along with each other is important,” you reasoned, your eyes almost sparkling from the thought of a day off.

“But Jujutsu Sorcery is an individual–” he began.

“Satoru, I think you should see this as vacation. A vacation where you can eat sweets until your teeth rot and absolutely nobody will hold you back,” you interrupted him.

“Okay, I am sold. Am listening now.” You just knew how to convince him. Sweets.

So that was exactly how the first-year students and you ended up at a fairground somewhere in Tokyo; it was quite neat, not too small but not too spacious either. None of you could get lost in it. Still, it was buzzing with life and all kinds of people mingled. The colorfulness was a refreshing sight to take in, compared to the dark world of Jujutsu Sorcery where seeing people suffer was your daily routine. The pleasant smell of food wafted through the air, making your mouth water, as you walked past the different booths with them. Waffles sounded like absolute heaven on earth right now.

Jujutsu Sorcery certainly was a draining sport, mentally as well as physically. Therefore it was only right to take a break at times, right? Self-care days were just as important as working.

In order to wind down a bit, you had suggested a one-day trip – just you, Satoru and the three first-year students you had adopted in your mind right away after meeting them several times.

“Sensei, you look very pretty today!” Yuji complimented you. Even Megumi noticed: “Did you have a haircut? Your hair seems a little bit shorter.”

“Yeah, Nobara had a field day with me. Cutting my hair.. or more like trimming the ends, choosing my outfit, doing my make-up and so on just for today,” you gushed as if you were a high school girl again. “Leave it to master stylist Kugisaki Nobara and nobody will ever look bad,” the brunette girl commended herself. Yuji was affectionately patting her on the back.

Undoubtedly, Satoru was late – nobody was surprised about that. You already went ahead and generously treated the trio of students you loved dearly to some food.

“Thank you for the food, sensei!” As usual, Yuji and Nobara were in perfect harmony with each other, seemingly sharing a brain.

“Thank you very much,” Megumi also expressed his thanks sweetly. If you hadn’t known better, you would have thought the way his lips seemed to twitch was unintentional. “Absolutely no problem, kiddos. You guys enjoy it while I try to contact Gojo-sensei, yeah?” you shot them an apologetic smile, already fishing out your phone. The three of them nodded in perfect synchronization. They’re as cute as little ducklings, you thought.

You didn’t even need to bother calling.

You were about to dial Satoru’s number on your smartphone when Yuji’s voice boomed, “Oh! There he is! Gojo-sensei, we are here!!”

The boy waved at his teacher.

Satoru immediately spotted the pink-haired student and skipped over to where you all were standing. “Sorry for the wait! I’m afraid I got lost on the path of life!!”

“Nice of you to finally join us, but sadly, the fun is already over and we decided to go home. Just wanted to call you to let you know! We’ve been here since morning,” you deadpanned as the white-haired man arrived, looking Satoru dead in the eye – if they weren’t covered. “Wait, wha– Hold on, I am very sure I am not that late. MY MOCHI?” Satoru sounded frantic, facing his students who just shrugged their shoulders. “Serves you right,” Megumi stated calmly. Nobara, being the sassy girl she was, also joined in, “Losers don’t get to have fun and that’s a fact.”

It was such a wholesome and funny moment for you to see the students playing along with your prank without being told beforehand.

You broke out in laughter, not being able to contain it any longer, “You should have seen your face, dumbass! I was just joking!”

“Phew, I almost thought I had to kiss the idea of eating sweets today goodbye. What a horror that would be, my day would be OVER this instant,” the blindfolded man pouted, “so where should I buy my sweets? I’m gonna buy the entire place anyway, but where do I start? Any suggestions for Great Teacher Gojo?”

“Hold up, Satoru! We gotta take a picture together to commemorate this special day!” you suggested, bouncing up and down with enthusiasm. “I swear I just saw sensei’s eyes sparkle but I might be wrong,” Yuji remarked, looking at his dark-haired friend for confirmation.

“Sensei, if you want to take a picture, we have to take it at the right angle!” Nobara chimed in, the secret Instagram influencer in her on full display. She continued to explain, “It would come out great if Gojo-sensei took the pic, long arms privilege and so on.”

The female student almost seemed more into it than you were, it was adorable to you to see the usually bold student be this into taking pictures.

You hand the tall man your phone, but not without shooting him a “if you drop my phone, I’ll make you drop dead” look.

“Okay, ladies, now let’s get in formation,” the male teacher commanded loudly. Upon hearing that, Megumi immediately slapped his hand in his face and turned away in embarrassment. Why was this man like this?

“...Ladies?” Yuji asked, the expression on his face screaming ‘confusion’ “Gojo-sensei just referenced a Beyoncé song, Itadori,” the dark-haired boy explained in a hushed tone, turning back slightly as if he did not want to get caught.

“And it’s not just any song!” Satoru happily chimed in. “Yes, yes, the good old Formation,” you added, nodding in satisfaction. You remember how you showed him the album when it dropped.

“Can we all just ignore Gojo-sensei and take our pic?” Nobara inquired as she shoved everybody into their respective spots. “Alright, everybody, smiiiiile for the camera. Say cheese!”

Click, click, click, click.

Finally, Satoru had gotten his share of sweets. Complying with his sweet tooth was always an effective way to calm him for some time. Almost like feeding a baby, in a way.

Now it was time for fun rides!

...or at least that was what you thought… until Satoru dragged you along to ride a freaking pendulum ride with him. The three students had managed to talk themselves out of stepping foot on that monster of a ride but Satoru didn’t even give you a chance to refuse, he simply gripped your arm and walked towards it.

Stopping only when you were already standing in line, you nervously eyed the metallic behemoth with its iron arm. The monstrosity was seemingly ready to make you throw up from the way it would spin you through the air repeatedly, going back and forth and back and forth again. Why did you have to do this?

“Satoru,” you called his name timidly and tugged at his sleeve, the strange feeling not leaving your gut, “do I really, really have to do this?”

“Absolutely! I promise it will be very fun,” Satoru replied with a signature grin you wanted to wipe off of his face at that moment.

No, it was not fun. At all. You were dizzy and your fear of height was kicking. The blasts of air hitting your face left, right and center were not helping at all and you were sure, if anybody took a picture of you right now, you would look horribly green.

“I– can’t do this anymore!” you shouted mid-air, right before the ride swung to the other side. The force knocked the air out of you once again.

“SATORU, PLEASE GET US OUT OF HERE!” you begged and squeezed his arm with an iron grip. The height was too overwhelming. “Mid-ride?” Satoru asked and you nodded frantically. “Now that’s what I call reckless! Sounds like fun. I’m in!” he declared with a grin.

“Domain Expansion: Infinite Void.”

That was the last thing you heard the tall man say before he touched your head with his large palm.

Your eyes widened in horror as you realized this man used his domain this recklessly, for fun. Maybe it was a side effect of being able to use it multiple times a day.

The infinity gently wrapped itself around Satoru and you. Almost movie-like, you watched as the entire, vast universe beautifully unfolded in front of your eyes. Each star being created separately, then abruptly flashing by as a sea of stars – as if you were in a wormhole. You perceived the entire domain within a flash of a moment, yet tasted eternity in it. Everything but nothing at once.

Despite being touched by Satoru himself, the sensations weren’t without merit. If this was how it felt to be in the safe space of Satoru’s touch within his inner world of Limitless, you would rather not fathom how it felt to be the one hit by this powerful domain.

It took you some time to process things and recollect.

“When I said I wanted you to get the two of us out of that thing, I didn’t mean ‘send me to your domain’,” you scolded him.

“Well, it was convenient,” he defended himself and you could almost hear the grin on his face, “Bet you’ll hate me after this though.”

“Hating you was never really an option I’d ever consider but okay, we’ll run with it this time. Now undo your domain, please, while I am asking nicely.”

“Your wish is my command! This time at least.”

“Satoru.” A stern last warning fell from your lips.

“Yes, yes, boss. On it.”

“I thought you said it’ll be fun but I am absolutely not riding that thing ever again,” you took deep breaths to calm down as your feet securely touched the ground again. Your legs were still trembling a bit.

“And it was fun! At least for me! I like seeing you struggle – it’s so funny – and the way you clung to my arm? Adorable! You are so tiny compared to me, like a bug I could crush between my fingers!” The annoying sorcerer laughed merrily.

“Gojo fucking Satoru, the only thing that is about to be crushed here are your balls. With my leg. You are very lucky to have that damn Infinity of yours or else,” you threatened.

“Ouch, you really do know how to hurt an invincible man,” he snickered and flicked your forehead lightly.

Rejoining with the students was easy as they all saw the barrier Satoru’s domain created.

“You are lucky there was some kind of show going on down here. That barrier above would have freaked people out if they weren’t distracted,” Nobara said, looks shooting daggers at her weird teacher. Innocent and as nice as ever, Yuji pitched in as well: “Yeah, Fushiguro also tried to distract children with their wandering eyes! I think he did a good job.”

“Okay but what did he do though?” you asked curiously and looked at the boy in question.

“...Shadow puppets,” Megumi slowly admitted, looking anywhere but at the people in front of him.

“Oh? You love your foster-dad-turned-great-teacher this much to embarrass yourself out in public? That’s new!” Satoru teased the poor boy. “Someone has to be the voice of reason around here or you’d all be in jail. That includes preventing civilians who are able to see curses from seeing you use Jujutsu while floating mid-air,” he justified, ignoring the tall teacher’s mockery completely.

“As much as I love slandering Gojo-sensei, I’d rather spend my day actually having fun,” Nobara pitched in, reminding everybody of why you were here in the first place.

“So, let’s go ride the ferris wheel!” she added excitedly.

More fun rides.

Before you knew it, the day passed by. You could already feel the heaviness in your legs from walking. The swirling feeling from all the rides boded in your chest – you probably would not be able to sleep well tonight. It was definitely worth it though, you thought.

You had already brought the students back to their dorm – Satoru had ran off to the school because he remembered he had to do something – and were on the way home yourself.

You were in some sort of trance, completely immersed in your phone, so you hadn’t registered when Satoru called your name until he gently tapped your shoulder, falling into step with you.

“Yeah?” you looked up to Satoru, snapping out of your train of thought.

“Just wanted to tell you; ‘Operation: Relaxation Day’ was a great success.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Satoru.” A genuine smile graced your lips and for a moment, he softened at the sight.

“You know what? It was amazing, I really should start listening to you more often,” he confessed with a smirk.

“Well, it’s thanks to your amazing power of persuasion that we got to spend it like this, so thanks for today,” you half-heartedly complimented him.

“You do know I only said we’d not be available today and then dashed, right?” he asked you, the usual playful tone lacing his voice. “Exactly what I meant by saying ‘your amazing power of persuasion’.”

“I think I’ll frame the picture we took,” you murmured softly, fondly looking at the screen of your phone. The picture from earlier was displayed on your homescreen.

Surely, you would hang it on the blank wall in your home as well. It was a personal treasure now.

Taglist (dm me if you wanna be added): @assbuttbaek @megumifushi @bleueluna @gojos-mochi @delammi

#gojo x reader #gojo satoru x reader #jujutsu kaisen x reader #jjk x reader #jujutsu kaisen x you #gojo x y/n #domain expansion #infinite void #ibye series

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pynkhues · 3 years ago

Note

Please recommend some of your fav Rio fics!

Of course, anon! Since you asked for Rio fics, I'm going to guess you meant Rio POV fics? If not, I'm sorry, haha, because that's what I've collated, but I hope you give these a shot regardless! They're all fics I think are pretty great. ;-)

Below a cut, because this got long.

But when he does reappear at the store—she still doesn't hear him coming, she needs to work on that—she's wearing a fuckin' dress, and he's glad she hasn't seen him yet because he can't stop himself from grinning.

Maybe it ain't for him, but given the fact that he doesn't think he's seen her legs since he came back—aside from that one night at the bar when she was definitely feeling herself—it seems like this is an intentional break in the pattern. Either way, he fuckin' loves the idea that she's been dressing up all week, not sure if he's coming but wanting to be ready if he does.

Now Use Both Hands by ms_scarlet / @mego42 6k words. Explicit. Beth x Rio. S3 canon divergence.

Ooooof, this fic causes me physical pain, but I love it a whole lot. Meg really captures Beth and Rio at their most acidic, their most sharp edged, while also managing to balance that with the feelings they desperately don’t want to have. It’s a bit magic, and the fact that she follows this up with another fave, Listening Through the Air Shaft is *chef’s kiss*.

- - - -

When he wakes, he's in a hospital bed, mouth dry as bone and he can taste blood, stale and metallic, on his tongue. The pain in his chest has been dulled by the drugs, but it still lingers, a persistent ache that spikes with every breath.

By all rights, he's a dead man walking.

Ten hours, they had him in surgery. From the look of his chart, he'd flatlined twice, and he can feel the consequences of that, see it in the bruises on his chest, the exhaustion lining the faces of his family. He'd woken to a little hand in his, Pop's cheeks damp with tears, and shit, it'd been close. Too close.

Bury a Friend by @ejunkiet >1k words. Mature. Beth x Rio S3 canon divergence.

Pivoting from 3.01, this fic is a wonderful, quiet character study that looks at Rio in the aftermath of the shooting before he explodes back into Beth’s life. It pulses with emotion and with the promise of catharsis, and it’s just a really special little fic. The Rio voice is terrific too.

- - - -

He finally gets what he needs one day when Elizabeth’s wearing this tight black sweater with a keyhole that shows off just enough to make Rio’s jaw rock. It’s so out of the ordinary, so unlike her ugly li’l sweaters or her surburban mama button-ups, he does a double take, head whippin’ around so fast that she catches it immediately. Then she catches where his gaze lands, where it keeps landin’ through their whole stilted, irritated conversation, and he sees her chest pinken til he can count her freckles. He sucks his lower lip into his mouth, and her lips fall open just the smallest bit, and then she looks up at him.

Eyes locked on each other, Rio takes a step closer. Elizabeth doesn’t back away.

I Will Collect You and Capture You by @foxmagpie 17k words. Explicit. Beth x Rio S3 canon divergence.

I feel like I've recced this fic 1,200 times at this point, haha, but it really is one of my favourite fics in the fandom. It has this sort of grip on you as a reader that almost embodies Beth's grip on Rio in the story, and the way it builds and builds and releases only to build and build again is really delicious, affecting writing.

- - - -

“Com’n her and her lady friends were shakin’”

“Shakin’ about the lemon on the fuckin’ granite, sure.”

They chuckled as the car rolled on, the suburbs slipping away with the sun.

“Think they’ll pay up?”

There was a groan as Rio shifted in his seat, flexing his fingers along the dash.

“Neighborhood like this? Everybody knows someone who knows someone with a trust fund.”

Mick’s lighter flickered, followed by long, rasping inhale. “And a boat.”

Smoke swirled lazily through the open window up into the purple sky.

“And a boat.” Echoed Rio.

Drivin' through the Suburbs by gangfriend / @00gangfriend00 5k words. Teen+. Mick + Rio friendship, Beth x Rio. Canon compliant.

It takes a lot to make me laugh out loud in a fic, but this one does multiple times. It's just insanely fun, and captures Rio and Mick at their most boyish in a way I find utterly charming. It's really, really delightful.

- - - -

She’s got her crimes wrapped up and categorized in folders with labels and post-its. Wrapped up in gift paper with a big blue bow on it. And she’ll probably ask Turner do you want freshly baked cookies or some shit when they go raiding her kitchen.

Rio should really get it under control. Her, get her under control.

She opens the door and slumps onto the front seat, her eyes set angrily on him. Nineteen voicemails and she’s still got things to say: he sees it in the twitch of her hand, the restless, frustrated pattern. Any minute now she’s going to settle on new words to voice her complaints like he’s here to listen. Like he’s got the time— like he cares. Like he’d better.

It’s a Work Thing by isoldewas >1k words. Mature. Beth x Rio. 2.12 canon divergent.

I'm a bit of a sucker for a good canon divergent fic, and this one pivots the car break up in 2.12 in a smutty way that just works unfairly well. It's such a great little fic that really settles well into Rio's headspace during the messiness of s2, and I love it.

- - - -

They settle in their respective places and Rio takes the opportunity to give Elizabeth the same once over that asshole did. Her ass really does look great in those pants and she could fill out any shirt. Her eyes linger over him too, tracing his skin, the bar tattoos peeking out from under his t-shirt that she’s seen a million times but she devours at every opportunity. Then her eyes meet his and she gives him that small, crooked lil’ smile.

He’s not one for religion, but every so often he takes his mom to Spanish mass. All the viejitos and pious Catholic types think he’s a banger but his ma’s still excited to show him off. He sits with her in the pew and when the priest asks for the congregation to give thanks to God, he says a prayer for the riches that have come to him, the health and brilliance of his son, the vitality of the other little ones in his life now, and Elizabeth. And when he thinks of her in those moments, he sees her in his mind’s eye with this exact look on her face.

A Bit of a Stretch by @septiembrre 5k words. Teen+. Beth x Rio. Established relationship.

Beth and Rio do a yoga class together! There’s such a lived-in feel to this fic that it feels impossible not to fall a bit in love with it – their relationship is explored in a way that feels true to who the characters are, while sanding down the edges to create something that feels sweet in the way they usually aren’t in canon. It's a great fic, but more than that, it really just works in a way that's a lot more complicated than it looks, and it’s all the more charming for it.

- - - -

He’s happy to keep kissing her like this. To savour it. Realises she’s undone the last few buttons of his shirt at some point as she shoves it down his shoulders. Doesn’t have a second to think about his ugly scars pressed to her skin. Can just feel her little hot palms snaking up his back and grippin’ him tight. Refusing to let any light between them as they kiss for what feels like hours.

He realises these are the lips he’s been tasting. Searching for in other women when his night’s got too unbearably quiet, hunting for an echo of the thing he really wanted. Comin’ up short every damn time. Sweet and soft and lethal. Unique to her.

It’s longing in a way he’s never felt. This is the taste of it.

As Good as This by @riosnecktattoo 5k words. Explicit. Beth x Rio. 4.05 canon divergence.

Okay, I know I just said how much I loved canon divergence fics, but it bears repeating – I love canon divergence fics, haha. This is such a great alternate take on how the wire scene in 4.05 goes down, and it simmers with tension from the opening line. The way it escalates as Rio navigates this newest betrayal works really well too, and it results in a pretty sexy and surprisingly emotional sequence. Magic!

- - - -

“Do we have a deal?” She asks.

When he turns to look at her she’s smiling, and that’s when he realizes he’s absolutely fucked. He’d just fucked himself out of almost a quarter of a million dollars. He lets his eyes drop down her body, licks his lips and nods.

“I choose the place,” he says and turns on his side to face her. “You owe me half - with interest,” he says and slides a hand into her hair. She’s damp, the sweat slowly cooling.

“That’s not what - “ she opens her mouth to protest and he takes that opportunity to slide his mouth across hers and lick into her mouth.

Long Nights by zetuslapetus / @querenaxx 2k words. Explicit. Beth x Rio. S3 canon divergence.

Rio and Beth bone while negotiating a deal! What's not to love, haha. This has such a fun checks and balances feel to it which just makes me want to peel my skin off, it's so good. It's exactly the way I like my Beth and Rio - hot and snarky and constantly trying to get a leg over the other, literally and figuratively. It's the best.

- - - -

He should go out and find someone to fuck. Maybe text one of his hookups. See if Jen’s working. He has options.

He knows what he should do.

But it turns out fucking other people is a worse hell than the one they create when they’re together.

And now that he’s yielded to this wicked ecstasy, he knows he’ll do anything to keep sitting in the fire with her.

To Sit in Hell with You by @daydreamstew 2k words. Beth x Rio. Explicit. s4 canon divergence.

Canon-divergent from 4.06 – Beth and Rio keep hooking up after the time at his grandma’s place. It’s fun and sexy while also keeping the complicated push-pull and lack of communication at the heart of them. Deeelightful.

- - - -

“Does it make it easier?” Maddie asks him once they’re spent, maybe emboldened because he has already brought her into their bed. Which may be unfair, because Lee had been in their bed from the beginning.

“What?” He seems lost in his thoughts, his arm behind his head. In a few minutes he’ll get up and get ready to get back to the factory. Like always, she’ll be looking for her keys so she won’t be late for work.

“Getting it out of your system before you see her.”

Rio glances at her. “I don’t always see you when I see her.”

It’s so rare for him to explicitly mention this woman, however tenuously, and Maddie waits for more. Rio’s gotten like this about a few women in his life but it doesn’t happen often.

Sure am Using You by aniara 2k words. Explicit. Rio x OC, Rio x Beth.

It's not for everyone, but I absolutely love fics that feature characters with other people in ways that tell you something about the characters' feelings about somebody else. In this fic, Rio's fucking one of his childhood friends, but it's all about Beth really, and the way both Rio and the OC negotiate that is really compelling writing, and feels so in character for Rio. I really love it.

- - - -

Rio dreams of her that night, again. It’s irritatingly pedestrian – Elizabeth’s kissing him deep and then, ah, suddenly his gun’s in her hand and she shoots him, with a double encore. It’s always variations on the same futile theme. When he wakes it’s not that he’s freaked, unaware of reality or his whereabouts. But he’s been soaked in anger for so long. He can’t think straight, not on her. It’s honestly terrifying. Cos stubbornly keeping his head on right is – that’s him. Maybe her entire raison d’etre is destroying every single one of his attributes though.

He ain’t sure if his subconscious is desperately screaming that he’s made the wrong move, letting her live. Or if it’s the total opposite. Could be fucking neither. It’s not – it’s not getting any easier. And that main reason for not biting the bullet, that he’d be mad as hell for being mad as hell at himself over killing her, it's not smelling any less idiotic.

Climbing up the Walls by s_t_c_s / @sothischickshe 8k words. Explicit. Beth x Rio. S3 canon divergence.

Another canon divergence from 2.13 and an interpretation of how s3 could've gone, and another one I really love. There's a throughline of chaotic frustration to this fic that rings true to Rio's character for me, and the way that that reverberates through his moments not just with Beth, but alone and with other women, feels really textured and interesting and real. It's pretty great.

#this was fun to put together #so many good fiicccss #truly a blessed fandom #beth x rio #beth boland #rio #nbc good girls #gg fic #fic recs #welcome to my ama

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lilyharvord · 3 years ago

Text

Meet Me at Our Spot

HELLO EVERYONE!! Vet school turned its back for a day and I was able to finish this one for you all. ((: Here is a lovely little one shot that is rated M people, so please read responsibly. Office AU because someone asked for it once upon a time and the image of Cal in one of those well tailored shirts/suits with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows has lived in my head rent free since then. So enjoy!!! ((:

also, I’m obsessed with that song Meet Me at Our Spot by Willow and The Anxiety (specifically the live version). So that’s the vibe were going for. (:

find it on Ao3 too: link

Mare Barrow always felt underdressed when she entered the massive glass and steel structure that housed the Calore enterprises. Even when she put on her only pair on heels, and a nice outfit, she felt like a smudge of dirt on the pristine floors. Today though, she was determined to not feel that way. She had a plan, a vision, and she was not about to let some socially constructed idea like dress code ruin it for her.

Striding up to the main desk before the elevators that lead to the corporate side of the building, she planted herself firmly before Tiria and cleared her throat to announce her presence.

The young woman looked up from the book she was scribbling things in and held up a finger as she spoke into the receiver cradled in her other hand.

“Of course sir. Yes, two on Friday.”

With a sigh, Mare braced her forearms on the counter and glanced out at the massive atrium next to her. Multiple people strolled by in their nice suits and tight business dresses, carrying portfolios and briefcases and talking heatedly about a number of things. She got a few looks from them for her baggy sweatpants, oversized jacket, and faded ugly sneakers. She simply smirked back at them in response, a glint in her eye that dared them to talk about her after they had passed.

No one had ever really gotten a good look at her here, and if they had, it was when she was quickly being ushered past this front desk and into the elevators behind it. She was, for all intents and purposes, a very well-kept secret. One that was mandatory to remain a secret, given her position and her affiliation with this place.

Never in her wildest dreams had she thought she would ever set foot in a place like this, let alone be associated with the circle she now tenuously walked through. It had its perks though, like getting to give a bright shiny middle finger smile to the people Farley would have spit at. Mare couldn’t exactly spit like she wanted to though, because she happened to enjoy being around one of them. And she was supposed to be on her best behavior when she was in this building. It was part of the stupid rules she had been forced to agree to a year ago.

Rule number one: No one can know your name, where you are from, and who you are.

Rule Number two: best behavior at all times when you are in the building or near him. No exceptions.

Rule number three: You are not allowed to show up unannounced or uninvited.

Well rule number three could just go fuck itself today, and rule number two could join it. The rules were just a way of making sure that the pristine reputation of this place didn’t get tarnished in the tabloids. She had laughed herself hoarse when they brought her into that dim conference room and dropped the pile of papers with the rules outlining everything in front of her. She never thought getting into a relationship would feel like a contract or a business deal but somehow this was made into one. Then again, the Calore family could make a business deal out of a child’s pretend game.

“Yes sir, I will let them know. Thank you for confirming, we will see you then.”

Tiria snapped the receiver back into the cradle and turning a scrutinizing eye to Mare she quirked a perfectly manicured brow. Every front desk girl in the world honestly looked the same to Mare, and in this place, there was no exceptions.

“Can I help you?”

“I have an appointment.” Mare said as she pressed onto her toes and pointed with a finger randomly into Tiria’s book.

The girl looked down at the line Mare pointed to with a frown while Mare swiped the key card Tiria always kept just under the ledge with her other hand. Tucking it into her pocket, she forced her eyes wide in a fake showing of bewilderment as Tiria gave her a contempt glare when there was nothing on the line.

“I could have sworn I called!” Mare gasped as she pressed herself up onto the counter to teeter further over it while her feet dangled. Damn these stupid things were high. She should have worn heels just so she could actually see over the top of the counter. “Maybe I should have called to confirm.”

“Miss Barrow, please stay on that side of the counter.” Tiria sighed as she leaned back in her chair.

Sliding down and dropping with a huff, Mare crossed her arms, trying to mimic the expression she saw most of these people give when they didn’t get what they wanted. “I want to go up.”

Forcing her sigh through her nose so it wasn’t as obvious, Tiria shook her head and adjusted a pen that had moved out of its perfectly straight line. “You’re not supposed to be here today. Don’t make me call security.”

“Well that would announce my presence.” Mare argued before picking up her backpack. “Besides, I’ll only be ten minutes.”

“Miss Barrow, I like my job and want to keep it. Leave.”

Letting out her own exaggerated sigh, Mare threw her hands up and spun on her heel to leave. “Honestly, you’d think I’d get a free pass giving who I’m dating in this place.”

Peeking over her shoulder to see if Tiria was still paying attention, she smirked as the girl dropped her head to write something down. One of the benefits of everyone looking down on her here was that as soon as she turned around, she was out of sight and out of mind. It made sneaking around easier.

Spinning back around, she scurried over to the elevators, ducking below the ledge of the counter slightly in case Tiria looked up again. Humming a song she heard on the radio to herself, she swiped the card and pushed the button to call the elevator. She had joked once this place was locked up tighter than a military institution, only to learn there was a reason for that. She doubted she could just swipe a key card and sneak into the Pentagon though.

The doors opened with a little ding, and she glanced over her shoulder once before darting in and pressing the button for the top floor. She had to swipe the key card again and punch in a four digit code she memorized weeks ago, but the doors still slid shut and the massive glass box rose.

Grinning like a fiend, Mare glanced over her shoulder at the green land stretching out behind her. She had to borrow Bree’s car to drive out to this place, and it almost didn’t make it. Her brother’s check engine light had been on since he bought the car, but he assured her it could make it the fifty mile trip and back. It had coughed the whole way, but it got her here. Beyond the trees she could just make out the highway she took with cars rushing along it.

The first time she saw this place, she was afraid of it. Why was it so far away from everything, why was it so tucked away? What were they trying to hide behind the wall of trees? She hadn’t entire believed the excuses they gave, but she was at least certain they weren’t building nuclear weapons at this place.

The doors slid open silently to a long hallway with dark floors and another bank of windows for a wall. Stepping out into the sunshine, Mare strolled forward, adjusting her hair and jacket as she went. Turning a corner, she passed a few smaller offices that belonged to some of the board members that held staff positions. The only one that was closed belonged to one of the only people she really, really didn’t want to see.

Volo Samos made her nervous. If there was anyone who might be trying to make a nuclear weapon in this place, it was that man. She edged by his office, glancing through the swaying vertical shades to see if he was actually there or he had left for lunch. He was sitting at his desk on the phone.

Scurrying past him, Mare quickened her pace. If he was here, then the rest of the board might be too. Which meant she might be walking in on a meeting. Not exactly the best option, and neither was sitting outside in the hall and waiting.

She had been so certain that there was nothing happening this week. She had planned everything around that fact. Maybe she should have called… just to make sure before she drove all the way out here.

Before she knew it though, she was standing before the heavy dark wood doors at the end of that hall. She had never been nervous to open them. They were intimidating with an exterior that was meant to deter people, but once you opened them and peeked inside there was nothing to fear, just like with the man behind them. She knew that, and yet, she had to squash the shake in her hand as she nudge the door open a fraction.

The office was empty.

Throwing the door open all the way, she stepped inside and glanced awkwardly around the space. She had spent enough time in here that she knew there were very few places to hide. Not that Cal would have any reason to hide in his own office. Pursing her lips she pushed the door closed and stormed over to the desk before throwing her bag down behind it and tossing herself into the chair. It spun in a slow circle with her momentum until she faced the back windows. Slouching down she tried to determine her next move with a pout. Maybe he had left for lunch. It wouldn’t surprise her. If the board members were here, then he might have had to play the good CEO and daddy’s boy he was supposed to be and taken them all to lunch to placate them. But Volo was here… so maybe they hadn’t gone to lunch?

She had put makeup on for this surprise. Honestly, was it so hard for him to be in the place he was supposed to be at this time?

Forcing out a sigh, she crossed her arms and spun the chair back around with her toes to look at the papers scattered around the desk. Cal was perhaps one of the most messily organized people she had ever met. He was an oxymoron himself though, so it only made sense. She picked up a thick stack of papers that were clipped together and lifted one of the corners between her finger and thumb like it was radioactive. She didn’t understand a word on the next page or the numbers scribbled in the margins. Putting it back in its place she glanced at the few pictures he kept on his desk.

The first time she had been in his office he had been on a phone call, and she had to entertain herself. She had picked up the pictures and made up the stories behind them while he watched her out of the corner of his eye. The picture of the two little boys crouched and playing in the mud on the edge of a lake was her favorite. She had been confused by it at first, until she saw the one next to it, with the same two boys almost a decade later in front of the Roman Coliseum.

Cal and his brother vaguely looked like brothers. They had similar features, but they wore them very differently. Where Cal was tall and broad, his younger brother was lean and sharp. Their eyes were strikingly different, but it was to be expected. She’d met Maven twice in the year she’d dated Cal. The first time was when he flew home for their father’s retirement party. He’d been quiet and reserved the whole evening until Cal dragged him out for a drink with her after to introduce them, properly as Cal had teased. When the brothers were alone and not around their father, they were different people. Maven especially. He seemed to soften, to melt a little bit. It had surprised her that someone could be so different just because the personnel around them changed. But Maven was a master of it.

The second time she’d seen him, Cal dragged her halfway across the world to Scotland to surprise Maven on his birthday. Cal’s brother lived as far from their father as possible, and honestly, Mare didn’t blame him. Unfortunately, Cal wasn’t afforded that luxury. Hence the rule book she had to follow.

He had a picture with his uncle next to that. The man was a few years younger than her father, but he caried those years poorly. Still, he adored Mare, and she didn’t have to pretend to tolerate him, unlike most of the other people that surrounded Cal at a given time.

A picture with his father was next to that one. It was a close second favorite of Mare’s. She couldn’t stand his father, the man was insufferable, but she loved to look at the younger version of Cal. He looked impossibly different as a kid, so different she almost hadn’t recognized him in the picture. She had told him that he reminded her of a taffy piece that was pulled too long in that picture. He was only ten in it, but his legs were already too long for him, and he was thin as a pole. He certainly had grown into his body, but the smile he gave to the camera there… he only gave it to her now. Or at least, she thought he did. She’d never seen him smile that brightly at anyone else.

Next to that, tucked almost behind the other pictures was a photograph of a young woman in a window box with a toddler resting on her legs. She smiled at him, clutching his hands in hers, completely unaware of the camera trained on her. Cal didn’t talk about it, or the woman in it, but Mare wormed it out of Julian that Cal’s mother was a sore subject with everyone. Even though she was smiling in the picture, Mare could almost sense the sadness that radiated from her. She didn’t look much older than Mare in that picture. No doubt she had been tied up with the same strings and restrictions Mare faced now. If that were the case, Mare wasn’t surprised she had been so sad. The rules and regulations that came with dating a powerful person were like a cage. It worried Mare some days. She didn’t like being confined, but when she was with Cal away from all of this, she didn’t feel that way. It was only when they were together around other people that she did. More oxymorons where the man was concerned.

The door into the office opened and Mare snapped to attention as Cal stepped in. His hands were full with papers he shuffled through while balancing his phone on his shoulder and speaking with someone. He’d nudged the door open with his hip and because of that, he had yet to turn and face her.

Even though she hated all the restrictions she had to face while she dated him, she knew they didn’t truly bother her because he was hers. All of him carefully folded into a suit that hugged every muscle made her stomach tighten and other parts flutter. And all of it was hers, some nobody from a backwater city block. She sometimes felt like a tiny dragon hording a single coin when she was with him. She didn’t have much to her name, never had and probably never would, but he was hers. She wasn’t sure if she would get to keep him, but she planned to enjoy every last second that she could with him.

Her lips curled into a smile as she leaned back in the chair and crossed her leg over the other, trying to paint a picture of coyness. It was probably not the best showing of it, but Cal was a miserable good boy who couldn’t handle anything remotely teasing.

The papers ended up on the other side of the desk from her, while he shifted to hold the phone and rest his other fist on the table. The muscle in his jaw that always twitched when he was irritated fluttered like a bird’s wing now. He pressed his fingers into his closed eyes as if he could force whatever headache was probably there away with just that touch.

“We didn’t agree to that when we signed the papers. They can’t come back and impose that restriction on us now.” She squirmed in the chair at the tone in his voice. There were multiple sides to Cal that she had seen. There was her Cal, who had no idea how to dance, and who blushed whenever she teased him. Then there was the Cal she sometimes got at one in the morning who would grab the inside of her leg while he whispered in her ear exactly what he was going to do. Then there was this Cal. The one who had been heir to an empire company since the day he was born, and who could command a room like it was any other Tuesday. Sometimes it was hot to watch him do it. Right now though, it was the opposite. He wasn’t happy with something, and it honestly sounded like the last thing he needed was her here.

She decided she definitely should have called before coming.

Edging the chair back with her toes, it squeaked as it went over the floor, and his eyes darted up to her before widening.

With an awkward smile, she wiggled her fingers in greeting before spinning the chair to face the back windows. Her cheeks were burning, and there were other parts that had melted to a very dangerous temperature. The look he gave her as he looked up at been fleeting, but it had been enough to put her on the teetering edge of deciding to grab him and pin him to the desk, or ask him to do just that with her.

“Deal with this. Don’t call back until you have.”

The silence following his words told her, that she was now the singular focus of his attention. His gaze was like a brand even through the leather of the chair. Crossing her arms and adjusting her posture accordingly, she went to spin the chair back around. He beat her to it though, spinning it to face him and tipping it back slightly so she had an easier time looking up at him.

“I don’t believe I left anything at the apartment.”

“You left me.” Mare pouted with a withering stare in his direction.

“Very funny. Now how did you even get up here?”

With a smirk, Mare fished the ID card out of her pocket and flashed it before him proudly. He snatched it from her hand with a startled gasp.

“Mare… what the… what are you a thief now?”

“Obviously.” She waved her hand to dismiss his comment before gesturing to the card. “You should really get lanyards to put those on by the way. I just kinda grabbed that off her desk. And if I got it anyone else could have—”

“You can’t go around stealing people’s ID cards. She needs this to get around the building.” He gestured at her with it, his eyes narrowing dangerously.

“Well I needed it more in the moment.” Mare reasoned with a smile before leaning back in the chair. She didn’t really feel that bad, but the worry starting to etch itself into Cal’s brows did make her feel a little guilty.

He tossed it unceremoniously onto the desk before sitting on the edge of it and massaging his face slowly with his hands.

“While I’m happy to see you, I don’t have time to deal with anything outside of work today.” His words were muffled by his palms but she could still hear every stressed syllable. Even when his work got stressful, which it undoubtably was at times, he still could push it aside whenever he saw her. Whatever he had been on the phone about had been serious, serious enough that he actually wasn’t all that happy to see her.

“What happened?” Mare asked, scooting the chair close enough for her to set her hands on his thighs and squeeze gently. Now was not the time to be thinking about just how well that suit fit, but the thought still crossed her mind. Along with a few choice other thoughts.

“Stupidity.”

Cocking her head to the side, she waited for him to elaborate. It took him a moment, but he eventually dropped his hands and let his head fall back to look to the ceiling.

“We signed papers on a deal a year ago. When that happens it’s done, the contract is sealed and stored away. In that contract, we agreed that should anything happen with a shipment, we were not liable. The group we shipped to doesn’t like that anymore, because a 30.5 million dollar shipment got lost.”

Now it made sense to her. This wasn’t anger, or frustration. This was stress. Stress she could handle.

“How does one misplace 30.5 million dollars?” She teased before running hers hand up and down his legs.

“I don’t know. But there are five different parties all in a screaming match over it, including us. And if the other four don’t back down anytime soon, I’m going to have to find 30.5 million dollars somewhere.” His eyes darted down to her as she brushed her thumbs along the inside of his thighs. Glancing up through her lashes at him then, she tilted her head ever so slightly.

“And that is hard because?”

“Does it look like I have 30.5 million dollars lying around to just throw at someone?” He reasons, and the dips in his cadence brought a smirk to her lips. Now she had his attention. Pushing up to her feet she slid between his knees until she could drape her arms around his neck. Immediately, his hands found her hips and hugged her closer still.

“I’m sure there are one or two things you could sell in this building to cover that cost.” She ran her thumb along the back of his neck, before tracing the spot at the base of his jaw. His head tilted in the opposite direction, trying to escape the feather light touch. Both of them knew exactly what it did after all. Smirking at his reaction, Mare ran her other hand along his shoulder, tracing the contours she knew by heart.

“I bet I could pick out one of two things.”

“I don’t need to find the thirty and a half because it’s not our fault what happened.” He squeezed her hips, and even though she could see the fight in his eyes, it was quickly guttering. The tension in his shoulders was still more than she would have liked, but that tended to be where he kept most of it.

“So stressed out over something that isn’t even your fault.” She teased as she pressed her thumb into the knot closest to his neck. He tensed under her, but didn’t speak. At this point, his voice had already dropped an octave, and Mare had known him long enough now to know that when he went silent like this, he was trying to hide just how far she had pushed him. “Do you want help releasing some of that?”

“Not unless you can get up in front of five different boards and convince them otherwise.” She had to admire how even he kept his voice. It still wavered in a few places as he tried to remain composed under her scrutiny. Dropping her hands from around his shoulders to land on his thighs again, she squeezed hard enough to emphasize her next point.

“That sounds like a challenge.” Mare actually witnessed his pupils dilate as she dropped her voice an octave too. “You and I both know it’s not much of one. I can be very persuasive.”

“You’re gonna get us both in more trouble than I can get us out of.” He whispered to her, a tiny smile lifting the edges of his lips. The glint in his eye made her stomach flutter, especially as he started to finger the waistband of her pants. She didn’t want him to put his hands under it just yet though, she still had one surprise she wanted to save.

Pulling back to slip out of his arms, she dropped back into the chair with a proud smirk. “Then I see no reason to not walk me down there, call up these assholes, and have me deal with them.”

His hands grasped the air where she had been a second ago as his mind failed to register her abrupt disappearance. Frowning, he leaned forward to grab the arms of the chair and pull her close again. Her heart pounded against her ribs as she watched him look her over and hold for a little too long on her lips.

“I’d love to see them try and deal with you.”

Oh she was going to make him sweat so very much.

Grabbing his face and yanking it down to hers, she crushed her lips against his. He tasted like mint toothpaste, and he smelled like that cologne she bought him for Christmas. Gisa said it was cheap, but he’s smiled and thanked her for it anyway. And now he was wearing it. The very idea sent a thrill through her.

With a groan, he slid his hands along her legs and then underneath them to grab her ass and hike her out of her chair until she was flush against his chest. Her lips curled into a smile as she took his lower lip between her teeth and pulled hard enough to draw a sound from the back of his throat. Knotting her fingers in his hair, she tugged and whispered, “You get to deal with me first.”

His eyes opened, barely an inch from hers, and the look in them sent a shiver down her spine. When he looked at her like that, it drove her half mad every time. “Put me down and I’ll show you just how persuasive I can be.”

He set her down with exaggerated stillness, making sure to drag her body along his so she could feel every inch of him. Smirking at getting her way, Mare nudged him back until he was sitting on his desk. Bracing her hands on either side of him, she asked, “Which do you want first? Surprise one, or surprise two?”

His brow quirked, and he slid a hand around her waist to pull her between his legs. “I want you, just you.”

When his voice dropped that deep, it made it very difficult to stay focused on what she had planned. But she wanted to see him squirm, and if there was anything Mare Barrow was, it was persistent.

“Surprise number two it is.” She grinned like a cat with a mouse as she hooked his belt with a finger and trailed it along the waistband of his pants to the buckle. Humming to herself, she undid it, sliding it through each loop like a needle with thread. When it was fully out, she held it up with a wink. “Give me your wrists.”

Even in the heat of it all, his cheeks burned. Immediately he put his hands behind his back. Pouting at his movement, she lowered the belt. “It’s no fun if you don’t play along.”

“Can’t be restrained. I may have to get to my phone.”

“Then I’ll answer it and tell them you’re busy.” She teased before cupping the back of his neck and pulling him close to ghost her lips across his. He sighed, and the tension in his shoulders melted as she ran her hand along one side. She loved when he scrambled in these moments. Locked between a rock and hard place, he was like turtle on its back. If all she had to do to knock him down was insinuate like this, she would do it every night.

When he pulled away with narrowed eyes, she released a mock exasperated sigh and tossed the belt away. “Fine, next time.” Without giving him a moment of relief, she unbuttoned his pants and tugged to start sliding them off. “But since it’s my job to help you relieve stress, here’s what I’m going to do.”

He visibly swallowed, even as he helped her slide his pants off. Running her hands up his legs after she dropped them, Mare chewed on her lip. “If you can keep it together for longer than ten minutes, I will let you do me from behind.”

His eyes widened, shock pouring out of every pore of his body. She hated that position, and always refused it. It was the most degrading thing, she insisted. If a man was going to fuck her, he should look her in the eye while he did it. She may be trash from the other side of the tracks, but she knew her worth.

“Ten?” He breathed, his eyes darting to the clock on the wall next to them.

“Ten.” She confirmed before crouching down. “But it has to be ten. If you cheat, I’ll know because I will be keeping track of the time.”

His mouth opened to refute before closing with a snap. She could see him working it over, trying to determine whether or not she would play fair. She never really did, but this time she made a promise to herself that she would. Besides, she trusted him to at least make the whole experience entertaining.

“Clock starts when I do.” She teased before tugging on the waistband of his boxers, making the elastic snap back. He tensed at the feeling, until she pulled them off too.

Perhaps it was the fact that she had snuck up here, or maybe it was the fact that anyone—including one of the most prestigious board members—could walk in on them at any second, but the sight of him sent electricity along every nerve in her body.

It was ten minutes. He wouldn’t make it to five, she told herself as she dragged her tongue along her lower lip. With that thought for reassurance, she gripped his thighs and closed her mouth over his cock. Immediately she felt the muscles in his legs tense, and his breathing hitched. She hummed, almost laughing at his reaction as he immediately grabbed the hair on the back of her head and pulled. She slid back an inch before diving back down, taking more than she had before. The groan he released was loud enough that she almost paused to make sure no one had heard. There was the fun in this, she supposed, getting caught might be exciting.

“Mare.” He gasped as she continued her ministrations, and began to trail her nails along his skin up to his hips. Forcing her head down further, he muttered a breathless apology when she gagged. Digging her nails and fingers into his skin, she smiled and hummed again.

“Fuck.” He spit the word like poison and bucked against her, earning another hum from her. “Not fair, that’s not fair.” He panted as she picked up the pace of her work.

His finger dug into her scalp as he pulled even harder on her hair. She stayed on like a leach though, stifling a laugh at his squirming. His other hand gripped the edge of the desk until his knuckles turned white, and his legs tensed in time with each of her movements. But the stubborn bastard kept it together, and no matter what she tried in her arsenal, he only cursed and gripped that desk until she thought it might splinter.

“Ten,” he crowed with a breathless laugh. “That’s ten.”

Mare snapped away with a grunt, swiping her hand along her mouth, smearing the lip gloss across her cheek. Glowering up at him, she grumbled a curse word that would have made her mother slap her across the mouth. A deal was a deal.

“Don’t look so bitter about it.” He teased, before cupping her face and lowering himself to capture her lips. His tongue darted along hers as his fingers gently pushed the hair he had pulled behind her ears.

When she pulled away for air, her chest ached and the space between her legs ached even more. “I’ve got one more surprise for you.” She rose to her full height, and had the pleasure of seeing a bead of sweat roll down from his hairline. He had barely made it. If she was being honest, she would say that she hadn’t been keeping track of the time. She’d lost all of it to the feeling of his hips rocking and the tension of his muscles.

Backing away a step, she winked at his confusion. “Remember a few weeks ago when I went to mall and made you go find something to do?” She fingered the zipper of her jacket, another bolt of electricity ran down her spine as he straightened up, completely attentive to her. “I was saving this for your birthday, but I got tired of waiting.”

As she went to unzip the jacket, he leaped, catching her hands almost knocking her over. Scrambling to stay on her feet, Mare let him take her whole weight as she gasped. “Fucking hell Cal—”

“Let me.” He smirked as he straightened her up and grabbed the zipper before she could. With a gentle tug, he unzipped it halfway, his eyes darkening again as he caught sight of the top half. She’d picked it carefully, the first time she’d ever done something like that honestly. Normally she grabbed things off the rack and hoped it matched. This though, she had taken her time selecting.

He had the jacket off in less than a heartbeat, and his fingers danced along the thin black lace of the corset. His eyes followed his hands as he searched the whole thing over, making her swallow in uncertainty. He trailed a knuckle along one of the many straps, his teeth obviously working at the inside of his cheek. Gently, he grabbed the waistband of her sweat pants and pulled them down as he dropped into a crouch before her. His eyes widened at the matching bottoms.

Immediately, his hands gripped the back of her legs as he glanced up at her. The weight of that stare could crush her if she didn’t realize that it was the most reverent of gazes. He looked at her like she had put the stars in the sky, and hung the moon too. It she was honest, she would admit that it might go to her head a little bit ans that the smile she gave him was mostly fed by that. She could bring this man to his knees by simply standing in a pair of lacy panties.

“Where,” he voice cracked on the word, and his fingers dug into her hamstrings a little more before he dragged his lips up the inside of her bare thigh. “Where did you keep this?”

Threading a hand through his hair, she exhaled in a sigh as his lips grazed the seam along the inside of her thigh. “You like it?”

“I’ll like it better when it’s on the floor.” He murmured before sliding his hand up to grip her ass again. She almost yelped, and grabbing his shoulders she let out a breathless laugh as he pressed more kisses along the inside of her thigh.

Standing up, he kept his hand on her as he lifted her off the ground. She wrapped her legs around his hips, and let him spin her around to the desk. With a quick sweep of his hand, he sent the papers all over it to the side before laying her down on it. With a tug, he dragged her back to the edge so she was still straddling him and braced his hands on either side of her head. She panted as she watched his lips curl into a hint of a smile.

“Forget fucking you from behind.” He murmured, before lowering himself to trail his nose along her sternum. “I want to see every inch of you in this.”

She grinned triumphantly as he slid a hand up her side to squeeze her breast, made far more generous with the help of the corset. It had been a good idea to listen to the pushy sales girl just because of that. “Good thing you don’t have to take it off.”

His brow quirked in confusion, and sliding her hand down her body, she opened her legs a little wider to brush her fingers along herself. “Made sure it would be easy for you. Didn’t want you to feel intimidated by all the straps and buckles.”

The snort he let out made her laugh, and she smiled as he stole the sound from her lips with a kiss. Rubbing his hips against hers, he lifted them off the table slightly until she was arched against him. Groaning when she felt how hard he was, she dug her nails into his arms, and said, “If I knew all it took to get you like this was wearing a pretty scrape of lace, I would buy sexier panties.”

“I happen to like the panties you already own.” He teased before reaching between her legs for the bundle of nerves there. Rubbing in a tortuously slow circle, he grinned down at her as she craned her head back so her hair spilled across the desk. Grabbing onto the edge above she tried to grind against his palm, seeking further friction.

Dropping his lips to her neck, he let his finger slide down to penetrate her. Groaning loud enough that she actually slapped her other hand over her mouth, Mare arched until her chest was smashed against his. He let out his own pleased sound at how wet he found her, and let her grind against his palm.

“Can you last ten minutes?” He whispered in her ear before catching her earlobe with his teeth and pulling lightly. Mare twitched in response to the movement of his finger inside of her, whimpering when he pressed a kiss to the point where her pulse pounded in her neck. And although this was heavenly, she’d be damned if he won at this.

Setting her jaw, she squeezed her legs together, earning a laugh from him as he withdrew his hand and brought his fingers to his lips. Sitting up quick enough to make herself dizzy, she grabbed his wrist to stop him from putting those fingers in his mouth. He froze as she closed her lips around his fingers and glanced up at him through her lashes. Releasing them with a pop, she watched his pupils dilate until they swallowed almost his entire iris.

Smirking when a blush exploded across his cheeks and neck, she licked her lips and said, “You won’t even last that long.”

Without speaking, he put a hand to her shoulder and slowly guided her back down to the desk as he stood over her. He pinned her hips down with his other hand as he tilted his head to the side ever so slightly and said, “I will take that as a challenge.”

Mare’s heart fluttered in her chest at the tone of his voice, and how deep it had dropped. Keeping her breathing as level as possible, she closed her eyes as he traced a hand along her side and cupped her breast before leaving open mouthed kissed along the column of her throat.

“Cal,” she breathed his name in a gentle exhale as she threaded her fingers into his hair at the same time that he slipped his hand to her entrance again and pressed his palm against her.

“Say my name like that again.” He whispered in her ear. “And I will do anything you want.”

“Anything?” Her voice hitched as she ground against his palm, her eyes fluttering as she sought out the friction he denied her as he teasingly pulled away.

His lips pulled up into a hint of a smile as he withdrew enough that she chased him with her lips. Their breath mixed as he rested his forehead against hers, and through her lightly fuzzy and crossed vision she could see the depths of his irises. Dark gold, and amber like honey. She could drown in them and be happy.

“Anything.” He answered her.

Lowering herself back to the desk, she pulled him with her while her other hand threaded between them to grab his hip and pull him closer. Without breaking eye contact, he let her guide him to her entrance. With a sigh, she tipped her head back and locked her ankles behind his hips as he pulled her completely to the edge of the desk.

“Cal.” She whispered as she grabbed the top of the desk again and squeezed her eyes shut.

“That’s my girl.” He replied before putting a hand on her hip to keep her pinned to the desk and pulled out before pushing in deeper. Mare bucked against him, gasping as she clenched her thighs together around his hips, pulling him closer. Bracing his other hand next to her head, he dropped his chin as he moved in and out. She only regretted doing this here for half a second, since she had to contain whatever sounds she made to minimal volumes. The last thing they needed was Volo Samos hearing something or coming to investigate what he was hearing. Although that might have been part of the thrill. If they were at her apartment, she could be as loud as she wanted, even with the window open. The traffic outside was loud enough to mask anything that happened in her shoebox apartment.

“Harder.” She panted as she dragged her nails down the side of his nice shirt. She wanted to tear it off of him, to get to his skin underneath. He caught her hand before she could do just that, and pinning that hand above her head he obliged her. She half yelped, half gasped as she slid along the desk until her head almost dangled off the edge.

Like a light switch flickering on and off, the light beyond her closed eyelids alternated with each meeting of their hips. She could feel the change in pace as he sensed her reaching her climax, and her lips curled into a pleased smile even as she arched slightly, hoping to escape him to last longer. He laughed softly at her attempt and pulled her toward him until she was dangling off the desk and had to grab on or risk falling to the floor. He caught her, but she still gasped as the change in angle pushed her completely over the edge so she shattered like glass. Every muscle in her legs contracted and her chest hitched on the rapid inhale she took. Curling around him as much as she could in her position, she stifled any other sound that wanted to come out.

The best part? She knew she had lasted longer than ten minutes. The worst part? She wanted him again. And there was no way that was going to happen because as she sat there panting after he put her back on the desk and bent over to kiss her lightly, she heard the subtle ringing from a cell phone.

“You’re getting a call.” She panted in his ear as she ran her fingers through his hair. It was damp now, and his chest pushed into hers with every inhale he took around his rapid heartbeat.

“It can wait.” He murmured in reply before pressing a kiss against her jaw again.

“I thought thirty and a half million dollars meant a lot right now.” She laughed as she traced a finger down the column of his spine from his neck to the middle of his back. He turned the full force of his gaze on her and she almost melted into a puddle in the heat of it.

“You’re worth more than that. More than any deal, any job.” He kissed the tip of her nose. It kept her from turning away to hide the blush that exploded across her cheeks. He traced a thumb along it, and smiling at her he continued, “Who’s blushing now?”

With an amused roll of her eyes, she traced a finger along his jaw in response to his light touches. This close to him, she realized he was beautiful, in the same way a marble statue in a museum was. She used to think he belonged in places like that, surrounded by priceless and irreplaceable objects that everyone paid to see.

“I love you.” She tilted her head to the side, testing the phrase again. It was only the third or fourth time she had used it seriously with him. The weight of it settled over him, and he brought her fingers to his lips to press a kiss to them.

“I love you.” He dropped the hand and pulled her into a sitting position so she could drop her legs from around his waist. Still connected with him, she trailed her fingers along his arms and drank her fill of him with her eyes. A part of her knew that someday she would lose him. Nothing in her life was ever truly hers and he luck had always been rotten, it was why she never bought a lottery ticket. And of course, his father did not like her. He wanted her gone because he saw her as an obstacle, or a hurdle his son would trip over. It took everything to not dig her fingers into Cal’s arm when they were around his father. Maybe if she did so, she could tattoo herself onto him and never lose him.

“What are you thinking so deeply about?” He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and pressed another kiss to the tip of her nose.

“Nothing important.” She lied effortlessly, the smile she conjured for him almost real. If he saw through it he didn’t comment. The phone rang again from its sad position on the floor where it had ended up, and this time they both looked at it. The screen was lit up and he grimaced at the number showing on it.

“I think you have to take that one.” Mare whispered before pressing a kiss to his cheek and sliding away from him to hop off the desk. He managed to catch her, and bring her to his chest before she could escape. Closing her eyes, she let herself melt against him for a second, inhaling the smell of his cologne and the smell of her that was now on him.

When he pulled away to grab the phone off the floor and his pants from their pile near it, she sank back into the chair and watched his back as he finally answered the call. Whatever he was saying was like a buzz against her ears. She could only see him right then: the man he was, and the one he could become. She hated what he was in a small part of herself. But he wasn’t… he wasn’t like the other people he had spent most of his life around. And neither was his brother. Maybe that’s what that life did to people like them. Pushed them so hard that they turned out the opposite of their parents.

He glanced at her with a smile as he managed to step into his pants with one hand and pull them up. She conjured up another smile for him and stood to fix his hair. He leaned down far enough that she could do that while he went about stringing his belt back into his pants. She trailed her fingers along his chest and down to the buckle and wrestled his fingers from it to clasp it shut herself.

By the time she had finished he was done with the call, and was sitting in silence watching her work. She glanced up at him through her lashes, but he cupped the back of her head so she tipped her head back completely to him. His thumb rubbed a soothing rhythm along the back of her skull as he whispered, “I have to go. They found a solution.”

She nodded. “So I guess you don’t have to bring out the big guns and put me in front of them.” Her smile was easy even as she prepared to pull away from him again. He held her steady, staring into her eyes for a long moment.

Just after the silence had stretched too far, he whispered, “Thank you.”

“For what?” She managed to disentangle herself from him, and turned to gather her clothes. If he was leaving she needed to disappear too. They couldn’t leave together though, or people might notice. And she did not need it getting back to his father that she had broken any of those stupid rules. Then she might as well consider this the last time she ever saw him. What a last time it would be though. It would live with her for the remainder of what she had heard his father call a measly insignificant little life.

“Everything. You… you make me impossibly happy Mare.” He threaded an arm around her waist before pulling her back against his chest and laying a kiss on top of her head. She finally melted completely into his arms. Wrapping his forearms with hers to trap him for a moment longer she closed her eyes. Suddenly, she didn’t care about the rules she had agreed to. Rules were meant to be broken, and she had always excelled at doing just that. With him, she would break every rule and scatter the ashes of them to the wind.

#(*ask lily*)#(*shut up lily*)#my writing #my fanfics #red queen #glass sword #kings cage #war storm #broken throne #post broken throne #marecal #office au #enjoy everyone!#rated M for MATURE please #thank you #also find on AO3

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sopxhiea · 4 years ago

Text

Scarce

Alfie Solomons X Reader

Summary: Alfie and the reader spend cozy days in Margate while Alfie remains his grumpy self.

Requested by @vieuwer <3

“Are you shivering?”

Winter had always been harsh.

The calendar that rested against the cold surface of the oak wall showed that the seasons were in fact changing and it would soon feel like the cold would be unbearable. The front door was locked while the seagulls cried out a familiar song, the rooms were warm due to the fireplaces in two ends of the house.

Margate was quiet, the only sound being the slow music of the seagulls and the sea. Most people were tucked inside the warmth of their homes, no kid was allowed to go outside and play in this weather.

It had been a while.

Although it had been just over two years since you had moved to Margate, it felt like you’d been there for longer than that. You had been seeing Alfie for about four years prior and even though there was no golden band around your finger, it felt as though you were married to the bear of a man.

There was no noise as you walked through the empty corridors. The house was usually like this, quiet and warm and that became the case in winter as well. Cyril was upstairs in the bedroom making noise as he chased something around the house but that was all the noise in the house.

Certain things had changed over the years.

Alfie had been shot and somehow survived it. He hadn’t let you see him for a couple months but he cracked quick. He couldn’t do it without you, this thing called life. He appeared in the shadows first, watching over you and decided that if you were to hate him because of all that had happened, he would be fine with it but he needed one last hug, a kiss goodbye and he’d be content.

But you hadn’t done that.

He was a silly man, your Alfie. It had taken you a long time to convince him that you loved him the way he was. He didn’t like the way he looked now, with the scar covering one side of his face. He realised though, after months of you reassuring him, that you didn’t care. If anything, it had given him a tougher look and that worked out for you.

“Alfie!” your voice was soft against the air around as you called for him. Maybe he was asleep somewhere in the house but due to the large size of it, it would take you a while to find him if he didn’t answer.

“In here!” he shouted. You shook your head with a smile, in where?

You felt yourself shiver a little while making your way towards the other end of the house where his study was. You didn’t go in there often, he was easily distracted and it was hard fucking against the cold wooden table. You knocked once, softly and didn’t wait for a proper answer before entering.

Unlike Alfie, you weren’t a very warm creature. He was your blanket during winters when you’d wear layers on top of other layers and still be cold. It was a problem with your blood, Alfie had said but your mother was the same way so you didn’t ponder on it. He would keep you warm anyway.

Walking in with the thick robe and the satin nightgown you had on, you smiled at him as he looked up from the book in his hands.Your slippers made soft sounds against the wooden flooring as you made your way towards him. He wasn’t working so you were allowed bother the grump bear.

“Hi.” you said, almost cooing as he opened his arms after putting the book back on his desk. He knew you were coming to sit on his lap and you were more than welcome in his eyes. He was obsessed with you doing that and you liked his warmth.

“‘ello, dove.” he spoke, voice gruff as he spoke.

You lifted one leg to straddle his thighs and sat down immediately. It was easy to ignore the way his eyes caught your bare legs under the nightgown but Alfie was always in the mood when it came to you. He brushed the thought away while you held onto his arms and sat down on his lap. The man was almost thrice your size but you made it work.

Feeling your cold fingertips against his inked arms, he grabbed them and brought them against his lips. He had disappeared after breakfast and you weren’t complaining but you needed your source of warmth during the colder months.

“Pet..” he spoke before his hands engulfed your much smaller ones. You blinked at him while feeling his warmth spread through your body. “Are you shivering?”

You shook your head immediately but your nails were slowly turning purple. The cold had never been good to you but you were content with the way things were at the given moment.

“It’s cold, you know.” you spoke, as a matter of factly. He smiled at the silly response before moving one of his hands to touch your neck. You were warm everywhere except your feet and hands. “It’s fine, Alfie.” you said and leaned in for a kiss but he wasn’t having it.

He stood up slowly, removing you from his lap but never letting go of your hand. If it was left to Alfie, he’d have you sleep, eat and basically do everything else against the fireplace, hence why there were multiple of them around the house. You knew he was taking you to the living room to make sure you were warm again and a sigh left your lips.

You started speaking as he led you through the long corridors of the house. “It’s okay, I can ju-”

“I don’t want ya’ to get sick.” he said, a cold hard fact before making you sit down in front of the fire place. He grabbed the blanket on one of the sofas and draped it over your shoulders before sitting on the comfy chair next to you. It was one of the moving chairs and it was Alfie’s except when cyril would get on it to rest for a while.

You stared at Alfie’s fingers that were holding yours, the gold on his fingers glistened as he stared at the fire place. He was a brazen gangster when you had met him. He didn’t flinch when faced with death or the barrel of a gun but he had become your very own teddy bear soon after.

He had changed in some ways. He was not so young anymore but just as full of life. There was a river of wisdom in his eyes, he was still as sharp and good looking but he was much calmer. He had invited you to live with him in the small mansion you were currently sitting in and you hadn’t thought about it twice before nodding frantically.

You’d be where he was.

Feeling you warm up against the fire, his hand came to tuck a strand of hair behind your ear. You smiled at the touch but your eyes remained glued to the fire and not his blue orbs. He wanted to sit next to you but his back wasn’t always feeling so good, especially during the colder months.

Sometimes, he thought, he wanted to die for you.

He had come close a couple times but they all been with the purpose of business or honour. He didn’t care that much for that stuff at all, not since when he’d met you. Women were sacred to him, they had always been but the only encounter he had with the fascinating beings had been in a brothel, up until he had met you.

You were young, far too innocent for him and he knew he had done some very bad things but maybe he’d saved someone important in his god’s eyes and he was given you as his reward. He wished to be the young brazen man he once was but he wasn’t sure if you’d fall for him back then, he was too reckless.

And that hadn’t changed.

“I’m warm now. Can I go?” you asked in a sweet voice but you had no intention of leaving him. You’s stay as long as he would.

He nodded once and smiled at you, but you didn’t move.

“It’s very cold.” you spoke, earning a nod from yourself as you drifted away and Alfie watched you in a daze before he spoke up, the conversation flowing easily between the two of you.

“Yer always fuckin’ freezin, luv.” he said, not letting go of your hand even though you were more than warm now. The fire place was cozy and it always made you want to sleep after sitting in front of it for an hour or so. There had been many times where you’d ended up on top of Alfie, curled around his body and taken a long mid-day nap. He didn’t mind, he’d usually join you.

“Yeah but that’s why you’re here.” you spoke with a childish smile on your lips. You were still a kid, especially compared to him and Alfie knew but you were his best girl too.

“Yer own fuckin’ fire place, eh?” he said, amusement dripping from his words and you caressed his hand with your thumb as much as you could, his hand was twice as big as yours. “That why you kept me around for this long, hm?” he asked and you giggled, he was being grumpy again but in the good sense.

“No.” you said, you knew he was joking but you didn’t want to take that one percent chance of him being serious somewhere along the line.

“Why then?” he asked, taking the serious route since you had just started it. You looked at him then

There were many reasons why.

You were much younger than the man, everyone around knew that and even if they didn’t, one glance at the both of you and it was easy to figure. That had meant different things for you, it meant maturity and the kind of love of someone who knew what they wanted from life and had it in their palms, unlike the lousy young men your parents seemed to find for you.

He had rescued you, as you saw it. You were going to school when you met him, to get a higher education so you didn’t end up becoming someone’s desk buddy like the other high school graduates you knew. He had seen you around Camden a few times when you’d visit the flower shop and the next thing you knew, he was leaving gifts and jewels for you.

But it wasn’t all that easy.

He’d chased you, through his dreams and many months until one day, he was confident enough to take you out. It had been a lovely dinner and a museum, you didn’t care much for pictures and it was mostly Alfie talking anyway. He rambled when he was nervous and that was all he had done for the first four dates.

Then, he’d taken you to his home, that one day where it was pouring rain and you had just gotten out of dinner with him. He had dried you and gave you a spare change of clothes. You’d kissed him passionately but he’d stopped you, you were in the daze of things, he knew that so he told you to wait until the morning and see if you’d still want him.

It was silly.

Because you did. You woke up and asked for the same thing you’d asked the day before and he willingly gave it to you. He was hooked after that, flowers and dates, countless phone calls that annoyed the hell out of your flatmate were made.

And he was shot soon after.

It was rocky then, it had taken him a few months to heal and a few more on top of that to open up to you. You had gone without seeing him for 6 months and when you couldn’t take it anymore, he realised he couldn’t either. So what if his face was a little different now? That wouldn’t change the love you had for him.

You kept him around because he was your first love.

“Alfie..” you said, in that soft tone you knew made him feel weak inside. “You know why.

He smiled at your words. Of course he knew, but he had wanted you to say it.

It was easy to love him, you thought but you had never been good at vocalising your feelings. It was said in the quiet mornings or the dreaded moments, you didn’t just tell him out of the blue but you knew it would be good if you did.

“I do, yeah.” he spoke and smiled fondly. He knew.

He took a good look at you as you rested your head against the side of the chair he was sitting on. You were glowing to him, you just always were. His finger caressed your cheek as your face rested facing the fire place, eyes closed because you knew you’d miss this someday.

With a final yet long sigh from you, you got rid of the robe and the blanket on top and remained only with the nightgown you had on. Standing up slowly, you let his eyes reek over your body as they usually did, he was a man after all. He didn’t understand what you were doing but at that moment, he thought it didn’t really matter as your hands gripped his arms like they had done in his office when he was sitting on his chair and you laid on top of him in one swift motion.

His chin rested on top of your head as he started speaking. He was saying something about the deals he was making and not too long after he jumped into something else, speaking about the way his mom used to scold him when he came home late. He chuckled as he talked the day away, the vibrations on his chest making their way to your ear and you sighed, happily this time.

“Luv..” he spoke, thinking you were asleep after a while and truth be told, the idea was tempting but just like how he would watch you fall asleep every night to savour the memories, you were keen on keeping your eyes open as well.

“Hm?” you said, hiding your face in his chest and a childish smile found Alfie’s lips.

“You wanna sleep?” he said, knowing the answer before he even thought of asking you the question.

You smiled and faced him this time, hands caressing his fuzzy cheeks as he looked at you, expectedly.

You nodded.

You didn’t know if Alfie would be letting you get any sleep since you were in a mere nightgown. He had marked the one you were wearing as ‘distracting’ a couple days before but it was the comfiest one you owned. He also wouldn’t let you go anywhere away from where he was sleeping since he knew you needed the warmth so he’d wrap himself around you to the point where your heartbeats would be against each other.

You watched as he got up after you did, too. A couple grunts here and there as you both made your way to the upstairs bedroom. It was usually kept warm during the winter time, by you or by him. Since the weather was freezing and there was no work today, you didn’t see a point of making the day productive. Spending time with Alfie was the most productive you could be anyway.

An hour later, you were laying on your side and facing Alfie as he told you a story about this kid he knew in grade school. You joked and said that it was miracle he remembered since it was a long time ago but he’d brushed it off with a hasty kiss and kept on telling the story. He’d watch you fall asleep that night much like he did on the other nights to make sure you didn’t have any trouble doing that. And he’d know that there was work to be done but he couldn’t get out of the warm bed covers with your hands hugging him the way they were.

You came first.

-----

Tagging: @clairecrive @parkbearum @sourirez @vetseras @mollybegger-blog @babylooneytoonz @peakascum

a/n: I hope you liked it!!! This is a very cute and chill imagine so it was very fun to write it and i hope it wasn’t too late <3

459 notes · View notes

mandoalorian · 4 years ago

Text

Pain Is For The Living [Javier Peña x F!Reader] - Chapter 2 (SMUT)

Summary: Sex work in the heat of 1980’s Colombia was never going to be a walk in the park. Especially not when you had a crush on your number one client, agent Javier Peña. You’d been warned about him and his reputation, but after one very specific incident that would change your life forever, you find yourself attached to him like never before and you’d do anything to make him yours. Even if it means endangering your own life.

Warnings: 18+ SMUT (protected p in v), allusions to sex, reader works in a brothel, PTSD, anxiety, panic attack, mention of drugs, guns, character death, typical Narcos themes.

Word count: 4000>

Pain Is For The Living Masterlist

*reblogs appreciated! Ko-Fi in bio if you want to support me!

The office was dead, like it had been for the last three weeks. No new leads. Nothing. The days dragged and honestly, it felt like the case was growing colder and colder. Escobar had gone completely off the grid, hiding out in La Catedral, his very own self-built prison in the depths of Medellín. But the DEA didn’t know that yet. So, they made an attempt to shift focus, at least just for now. After all, any narco they captured would be a win. They’d been tracing Juan Diego Diaz, otherwise known as La Quica, believing that the sicario would eventually lead them to Escobar himself. But La Quica was just as cunning as any other narco and following him was not an easy challenge. If it wasn’t for Steve Murphy, the DEA would’ve most likely shifted focus again - but Murphy and La Qucia went way back. In 1981, just a few years ago, La Quica shot dead Kevin Brady, Steve’s old partner back from Miami, and so to say that Steve had a personal feud against La Quica was an understatement.

Javier Peña didn’t realise he was about to gain a whole vendetta against him too.

Within a second, every phone in the damn embassy began to ring. Javier and his partner, Steve Murphy exchanged a glance, and their eyes trailed up to Horacio Carrillo who answered the call. “Colonel Carrillo,” he introduced himself. Javier and Steve watched as their colleague took in the information on the other end of the line. Carillo erratically gestured for a notepad and pen, and Steve quickly threw him one his way. “Wait, wait… are you sure? Are you sure you saw him? How many eyes? With another man? Who? Who?” Carillo pressed pencil to paper and began to scribble the details down. “How many dead?... Shit, okay. We’re on our way now.”

Carrillo slammed the phone down on the hook and took a deep breath, rubbing his hands over his face in dismay. “We got eyes on La Quica,” he announced, and Steve immediately grabbed the handgun from his desk drawer and shoved it into his jeans. The whole office cheered, apart from Javier and Steve. This was good news considering the DEA had no lead whatsoever for the past three weeks, but if Carrillo’s demeanor over the phone was anything to go by, Javier and Steve knew they shouldn’t be celebrating just yet. “No. No,” Carrillo chanted, raising his voice in order to silence the rest of the department. “Three hookers. Dead. Shot.”

Javier froze up completely as he processed the words.

“By La Quica?” Steve beckoned, his voice dripping with venom.

“We don’t know. But we have eyes on him. He was seen.”

“Where?” Javier asked finally, his face expression stone cold.

Carrillo eyed Javier up and down, swallowing a nervous lump in his throat. He knew it was the brothel that Javier frequented...and Javier Peña was quite unpredictable. So, after taking a brief moment to prepare for Javier’s reaction, Carrillo finally gave the name of the location. “Desiderio.”

Desiderio. It was the brothel where you worked. His eyes flicked over to the wallclock before his gaze met back with Carrillo’s dark eyes. He had literally been there, with you, two hours ago. If he had just gone two hours later… he could’ve put a stop to the attack. Hell, he could’ve been the one to find an arrest La Quica. But Javier’s hero complex was short lived when all he could think about was you.

“Do we have names?” Javier asked. “Who was killed?”

What if it had been you? What would Javier do then? You were younger than the other girls, polite and bright eyed. You were brand new to Colombia, and Javier swore you were too good for the dangerous life you had managed to get yourself caught up in. Being a sex worker in 1980’s Bogotá? It was only a matter of time something happened to you.

“No names,” Carrillo confirmed. “Peña, with all due respect, I ask that you go in and investigate the scene. You know the girls better than anyone else in the department. Maybe you could identify some of the bodies.”

It was like time was frozen, and Javier felt sick to his core. Javier was used to death and bloodshed; this was a war on drugs - however, it hit different when it was close to home. When it was a place he had been, or it was people who he knew.

Javier Peña was a complicated man. He didn’t talk about himself or his feelings. Truth be told, he didn’t even let himself feel. But right now, as anger swirled in his stomach, he decided he wasn’t going to waste anytime at all. He paced back over his desk and grabbed his handgun before bolting to the car that was already waiting outside for him. All eyes followed Javier’s movements but no one dared to make a comment. Apart from Bill Stechner, of course.

“Not everyday you see the department of drug enforcement’s noted womanizer get worked up over a whorehouse shooting,” Bill commented, a smug grin playing on his lips. “Didn’t think agent Peña had it in him.”

“Shut the fuck up Bill.” Steve rolled his eyes, not even bothering to humour the CIA agent’s out-of-pocket remark. Everyone in the district knew about Javier Peña’s reputation with the ladies. But of course, you were new.

“The Search Bloc and I will go after La Quica. Steve, you stay on the down low with agent Peña and investigate the crime scene. We’ll have guards protecting you from outside the brothel.”

“I want to go after La Quica.” Steve argued but Carrillo pointed a finger.

“No. You stay with Javi. Partners,” Carrillo reminded the blonde haired man. “Besides, you’re the DEA’s best photographer.” Carrillo smirked, thrusting a Polaroid camera into Steve’s chest. Steve let out a low grumble in response, before shaking his head and following Javier out of the office. Partners. And right now, Steve saw the primal glint in Javier’s eye. Agent Peña was seeing red.

As both Javier and Steve were being transported to Desiderio, Javier made an attempt to dial a number on the carphone multiple times. Your number. Of course it was a dead line. And that only worked up Javier more. The never ending ringing sound signified that you weren’t there, and Javier’s heart was pounding against his chest. It was the same kind of adrenaline as when he found Helena tortured by Gacha’s men in Medellín. Steve knew better than to ask his friend who he was so desperately trying to call, but it was the last of his instincts to assume it was one of the sex workers from the brothel. Because renowned womanizer Javier Peña didn’t form attachments, especially not to women, right?

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

At some point or another, you had passed out. Maybe you’d cried yourself to the point of exhaustion. Maybe the reality of what you had seen had hit you like a ton of bricks and you had fainted. How could you possibly know? But when Javier and Steve stormed the lobby of your workplace, you were laying on top of Rosa’s body, as still as could be. And that’s when Javier’s heart sank.

You weren’t moving, and his mind shot to the worst possible outcome. He raced over to you and fell on his knees, dragging your body off Rosa and cradling you in his arms. You were absolutely saturated in your best friends blood, and by holding you, now Javier was too. He briefly glanced down at Rosa and placed a hand on her forehead, trying to feel for any sign of warmth - any sign of life. Javi sighed and ran his hand through his dark locks of hair before bringing it back down to you. He cooed your name a few times, desperate to earn some sort of reaction. Thankfully, on the third calling, you stirred a little, indicating that you were in fact alive.

Your perfect eyes fluttered open and in that moment, Javi swore his heart stopped. Thank God you were breathing. “You’re safe now,” Javier whispered. “I’ve got you.”

“Javi?” you asked in disbelief. Surely not. The way he was holding you was the most affectionate he’d ever been with you, and it felt like a dream. Maybe it was a dream. Maybe you were dead and this was your journey to the afterlife. God was finally giving you a chance with the one you loved so much. You said his name again, raising a shaky hand to cup his cheek. You brushed your thumb over his jaw and along his mustache, and when you smelt his familiar musky cologne, you knew you were somehow going to be okay.

Javier picked you up and carried you back to the car. “We have a survivor!”

Steve replied but to you it was just a haze. You could hardly keep your eyes open and when you did, everything was a blur. Your clothes were stuck to your skin, due to the mixture of blood, sweat and tears. You knew the second you were outside because the orange setting son burned against your skin. You stirred and mumbled, but Javier smoothed out your hair and hushed you. He opened the back seat of the DEA car and lay you down.

“Hey, hey listen, I’m DEA,” Javier whispered. “I don’t talk about it, but I’m here to help you. I need to head back inside now and help my partner out, but I won’t be long. I promise.” As Javier turned to leave, you grabbed his hand and he looked back at you.

“Please don’t go.” you sniffed, tears free falling down your cheeks.

And normally, Javier would’ve shrugged it off. He had a job to do, and he couldn’t just stick around you because you felt unsafe. They had counsellor’s back at the embassy for that. All he had to do was use the carphone and call them out. It wouldn’t take him two minutes. The only problem was, Javier didn’t want to do that. He didn’t want anyone else to hold you and comfort you. He wanted it to be him.

So, he swallowed the nervous lump in his throat and slid into the back seat next to you. He maneuvered your body so your head was resting against his jean clad lap, and he continued to smooth out your hair. Despite your red puffy eyes and tear stained cheeks, you were still so beautiful.

“Hermosa, what happened back there?” he asked quietly after a moment. Between you and Javier, there was never an uncomfortable silence. It was his job to find out, but asking you straight up when you were so clearly traumatized, felt insensitive. Nevertheless, what else was there to say? He had to do it sooner rather than later.

“I’m sorry.” Javier mused, closing his dark brown eyes as he mourned.

“They killed Rosa,” you whispered shakily, doing your absolute best to remain composed and not fall back into an abundance of tears. Javier looked out the car window and held back a sigh. Well, he knew they killed Rosa already. “And Juliet and Martzia.”

Javier didn’t know who Juliet and Martzia were, but his heart sank at the revelation. Three deaths that could’ve been stopped.

“La Quica,” you croaked, and Javier’s head snapped to face you. “Was his name. But there were two, I think.”

La Quica… that was the name Carrillo had come up with. It was who the DEA had spent so much time looking for. But two? That was the first he’d heard of it. Carrillo and the cop department only had eyes on La Quica.

“Do you know the name of the other man? Or what he looked like?”

You did. At one point, his name rang like bells in your ears. He was friends with Rosa, or so you had thought. You knew his name… you knew his face until suddenly you didn’t. You couldn’t make sense of it or understand it, but it was like everything that happened back there had just become a fuzzy blur. It still hurt so much but… you couldn’t match actions to faces, or names to bodies. All you could see was Rosa and her sacrifice. All you could see was the way her body fell to the ground, crumpled up in a pool of her own blood. And then the screams and cries.

“Are you okay?” Javier asked due to the delay in communication. Your mouth felt dry and your fingers felt numb. He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Listen, I can take you home, but the embassy is gonna want to interview you at some point in the near future. La Quica is dangerous, and I don’t know who this other guy is but I wouldn’t feel good about bringing you back to your apartment and leaving you there. I can send over additional security measures but, listen. I know you. And,” Javier took a deep breath not sure if he was about to regret the proposal. “If you’d prefer, you can come back to my place. Stay there for a few days. High security and you’ll be with me. Someone you know. I know that, if I was you, I wouldn’t wanna be alone right now.”

And for the very first time, your pretty plush lips curled into a smile. “You’d really do that for me?” You whimpered, nuzzling your face into his shirt.

“Of course.” Javier hummed, pressing a soft kiss into your forehead.

Was it unprofessional, inviting you over to live with him for the foreseeable future, the moment you had become an essential asset to the case? Yes. Fuck yes. But Javier Peña was not someone who played by the rules. He’d done this plenty of times before, when he shouldn’t have… but it was truly the right thing to do. Besides, you weren’t like any other informants. He knew you. He cared about you, more so than he’d like to admit.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

You were very sleepy, and you couldn’t bring yourself to talk all that much. Javier understood better than anyone. He helped you out the car, carried you through the embassy apartment complex, unlocked his door (albeit with great difficulty), threw his keys haphazardly on the kitchen counter and gently plopped you down on the brown leather couch. Pulled out a crocheted blanket, he wrapped it over you, ensuring your warmth. He padded into the kitchen and filled you a glass of tepid water before looking in the refrigerator. Empty. Javier didn’t cook. In fact, he rarely even ate. When he did eat, it was take-out or fast food. Something quick and easy that he didn’t have to bother with. But now he had company. He sighed, and closed the fridge, glancing back at your sleeping body. He figured he’d have to go grocery shopping.

He picked up the phone and dialled Steve’s number, but his wife, Connie was the one who picked up. “Hey Con, Steve there?”

“Yeah. But he’s pissed with you Javi.” Connie sighed on the other end of the line. Javier scowled. He understood. It seemed like he pissed off people quite easily.

“Could you put him on?”

Connie didn’t reply but judging from the scuffling, Javier assumed she was handing the phone to her husband.

“Javi,” (“Steve,”)

“What’s up?” (“I need to ask you a favour,”)

“After today’s stunt? Not a chance.” (“Y/N was a mess, Steve. One of her best friends died in the shoot-out. I wasn’t just going to leave her,”)

“Javier Peña. Ever the hero. What do you need?” (Groceries. She’s gonna be staying with me for a few days. I can use the time I spend with her to gain her trust. Try and work out what exactly went on,”)

“Javi, she’s vulnerable. She’ll need therapy. You really want to use her as an informant?” (We’ll get her therapy from the embassy. Steve, I don’t think we have any other choice.”)

“I just think it’s a bad idea, but, it’s your call Peña.” (“I’m going to head to the market before it closes. Can you or Connie come over to watch her? She’s asleep so she won’t be much trouble.”)

“We have Olivia.” (“So bring her. Or don’t. I don’t care. Steve, please.”)

Javier waited patiently through a silence followed by a long sigh. “Okay Jav, but you owe us. We’ll be over in five minutes.”

“Thanks Steve, I’ll see you soon.”

Javier put the phone down on the hook quietly and padded back over to the sofa where you slept, crouching down and taking your hand. You didn’t deserve this. You were so soft and full of life, and everytime Javier saw you at the brothel you were always beaming. You were too good for this life. He knew you’d get hurt, one of these days, but that didn’t mean it was right. And suddenly, Javier was filled with vengeance. He couldn’t bear to think how the shoot-out would come to affect you, but he knew, in that moment, he would seek justice. Too many deaths, too close to home. Javier whispered your name, his breath fanning over your ear. You were somewhere in between consciousness. You could feel his presence but everything felt so dream-like. “If you can hear me, I’m going to head to the store. Buy us some food, okay? I won’t be long, and I have friends who will be watching over you. You’ll be safe, I promise.” Javier said before pressing another kiss to your forehead. He just couldn’t resist it. You stirred upon feeling the bristle of his mustache graze your skin and he drew his face away, not wanting to wake you completely.

“Hi Liv,” Javi cooed, leaning down to Steve and Connie’s little girl and pulling a face.

“So that’s her?” Connie asked, putting Olivia down.

“Yeah,” Javier sighed, and began to introduce you.

“Why do I get the feeling that you know her?” Steve quirked an eyebrow and Javier felt his cheeks flush with heat. “Are you one of her regulars?”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but yeah, I suppose I am,” Javier retorted, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Con, if I’m gonna cook her dinner, what would you recommend?”

Connie stifled a laugh before turning to Steve. “Steve, you hungry? Javier’s offering to cook.”

“Hey that’s not what I meant--”

“He does owe us…” Steve smirked. “Paella sounds good.”

Fucking paella.

“I could just bring her Taco Bell,” Javier considered out loud.

“I like paella.” Steve reiterated.

“Me too,” Connie agreed. “Paella is delicious.”

“Everyone likes paella.” Steve commented.

“Oh my god would you shut the fuck up about paella?” Javier groaned, causing Connie and Steve to laugh in unison.

“Make her paella and bring us the leftovers,” Steve grinned, patting his friend on the shoulder. “And be quick about it.”

“Whatever, Murph.” Javier sighed, rolling his eyes before grabbing his wallet and car keys.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Seeing Nina working as the supermarket cashier was the last thing Javier expected.

“Javi?” she smiled that familiar gorgeous smile, her eyes sparkling as she scanned through the items of food. “It’s so good to see you. Been a while.” she commented, her gaze not leaving the agent’s once.

And for the first time in a long while, Javier smiled. The stress of the stake-out and investigating the brothel, and taking you home had been a lot on him, but seeing his ex-girlfriend helped bring him back down to earth. If Nina could even be called ‘ex-girlfriend’. It wasn’t ever official, but he and Nina had been fucking on and off for around 6 months last summer and Javier was actually committed to Nina during that time. She came into his life unexpectedly, to say the least.

“How long have you worked here?” Javier charmed as he bagged the groceries.

“Two months, it’s been good to get out of the house,” Nina grinned. “You're still working for the DEA I assume?”

“Yeah.” Javier hummed, quickly reminding himself of you and the way you were sleeping on his sofa. He looked back up from the bag of rice and at Nina. Come to think of it, she resembled you quite a bit. Same hair colour, eye colour, skin tone… only she wasn’t as distinct. She didn’t have that flare about her, like you did. Maybe Javier had a type after all.

“I get off work now,” Nina announced, flicking her wrist upright and checking the time on her watch. “Are you busy or? I was thinking… it would be nice to catch up, maybe, if you wanted.” Nina ducked her head down awkwardly.

Javier didn’t forget about you once. He didn’t forget about the fact he had a traumatized sex worker sleeping on his couch, or how he’d invited his partner and his partner’s family over to watch over you while he got ‘groceries’. But catching up with Nina would be nice. The right thing to do would be to reject Nina, and perhaps make plans to see her when Javier wasn’t so swamped with work commitments (if he could even call you that). But this was Javier Peña. He supposed Steve and Connie could wait just a little while longer, besides, they’d never find out. Javier was a good liar. He could make up some excuse about having to travel to a different grocery store or something. So, he agreed.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Nina’s apartment had barely changed since she and Javier had ended things. Still quaint, decorated with plants in every corner and full bookshelves. It was a clash of tongues and teeth as Nina navigated inside of her home, not pulling away from Javier once. She moaned against his lips and he grabbed onto her back, pinning her against the wall and knocking a few things off the coffee table.

“Missed this,” Javier confessed, nudging his nose against Nina. In the moment, he’d forgotten why he’d ended things in the first place. Nina wrapped her hands in Javi’s dark hair and tugged on the locks at the nape of his neck. Javier groaned wantonly and reattached his lips to hers as she let her hands maneuver down his body, unbuttoning his shirt and working at the zipper of his jeans. “Fuck Ni.”

She pulled off him and began to discard her clothes. “Bedroom Javi, I have condoms.” she hummed, taking Javier’s hand and guiding him through her apartment as if he didn’t already know the way. He’d never forgotten, really.

This was wrong. On so many levels, this was wrong. He should be back home, with you. If anyone was to find out about this… well, Steve would be furious, for a start. But Javier genuinely couldn’t stop thinking about you. He didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing, because if he wanted to be with you so bad he could easily just go back to his place and sit with you on the couch. The idea of that wasn’t the worst in the world. But also, he was about to get laid by Nina who looked so much like you… he couldn’t stop thinking about you.

He was whipped. Thinking about your lips on his… your hands caressing his muscles. She might have resembled you, but she tasted different, her voice was different, and her attitude. She just wasn’t you.

Once Javi was all wrapped up, he pushed into Nina, and settled deep, his movements rough and fast. He grabbed onto her tits and gave them a squeeze, but they just didn’t feel like yours. They’d do though, for now. His grunts and her moans filled the room as she chanted his name, and he could feel himself nearing orgasm. He dipped his head in the crook of her neck, biting down on her skin that just wasn’t as soft as yours, and as his dick throbbed inside of Nina, and when he reached his climax, he made the biggest mistake of all.

He gasped your name like it was the sweetest prayer to leave his lips. He was fucking Nina but shit, he said your name.

Javier Peña said your name.

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vibraniumwing · 4 years ago

Text

on the other side.

a fred weasley x reader wherein the reader deals with the effects of being in the only one who’s still holding on in a dying relationship.

WARNING: angst, mentions of cheating and just heartbreaking pain.

A/N: let me just channel my negative emotions through this angst,, , i hope you guys would like this,, ,

word count: 4.2k

---

Everyone knew you and Fred were inseparable (aside from him and his twin, of course). If Fred wasn’t with his twin, he was with you— same goes for George but more with the former. Despite being good friends with the twins, the connection you have with Fred was different. You were his equalizer— the calm one who made him relax when he gets too overwhelmed with energy and emotions.

So it became no surprise that the two of you started dating by the time you were in fourth year and he was in his fifth year. Everyone adored how the two of you complimented each other so much despite being quite the opposite.

You were more on the calm, soft-spoken and would rather stay in the shadows type of person while Fred was well… himself and you absolutely loved that about him. Besides, opposites attract, right?

---

It started from the way he would zone out when you would spend time with him, how he would stare off into the distance as you happily shared the happenings of your day, how he would just softly hum rather than tease you to no end and probe on the stories you’ve always been eager to share with him.

“And in Transfiguration today, some kid- Freddie, are you alright?” you asked the red head, his features looking quite somber against the light that the fireplace in the middle of the common room gave. It was a rather quiet night in the common room and you were cooped up on the couch with him, a daily ritual the both of you have been doing since first year.

“Oh- what, love?” Fred asked, looking at you with a curious gaze. ‘That’s the fourth time tonight,’ you thought. “I was telling a story about how this hufflepuff-” but before you could even continue the story, “Hmm yes, quite interesting darling. I’ll be going to bed though, it's been quite a rough day.” He cutted you off, gently placing you on the couch and away from his lap as he stood up. “Goodnight, love. Go to bed soon as well, I’ll see you in the morning.” Fred told you, pinching your cheek softly and headed off to the stair leaving you dumbfounded.

Then it moved on to him “forgetting” important dates, accompanied with forgetting his promises of taking you out to Hogsmeade and such. Making you wait long hours for a simple minute to talk with him and usually ended up with you in tears.

You were out by the courtyard, face buried deep into your scarf as you waited outside for Fred. He had promised to take you out on a date for this trip to Hogsmeade yet he was nowhere to be seen. Multiple students have passed by you and gave rather pitiful smiles that broke your heart even more.

You glanced at your watch, worrying that maybe you had gone a bit too late and he had just decided to go back to the common room, your thoughts were interrupted however when a voice spoke up. “Y/N, you’re still waiting?” the trio approached you, making you jump slightly as Hermione spoke. “How long have you been here?”

Shuddering lightly, you peeped out of the scarf, “A-about twenty minutes or so.” To which they gave you a sad glance. “Y/N… Fred’s gone with George and Lee to Hogsmeade.” Harry started, nudging Ron to continue, “They left earlier than us.” their younger brother continued.

“Oh is that so?” You asked, heart shattered at the fact that your own boyfriend stood you up to a date that HE promised to take you to. “I-I’ll be going up to the common room then. I’m not feeling all that good now.” You continued, tears now brimming your eyes. The three nodded quietly, noticing the change in your reaction.

You ended up with a very high fever that day, knowing that you weren’t all good with the cold, Madame Pomfrey gave you quite the lecture for standing out in the snow for too long. Yet you had no response from Fred, only having George to visit you that evening with a cup of hot chocolate he sneaked out from the kitchen.

Some would say it would be very foolish for a person to stay in a relationship with that kind of treatment and you were in no place to disagree with that sentiment, knowing how painful it is to be the one holding on to something that you weren’t so sure about yourself.

But whenever you tried to break it off, he would disagree and beg you for another chance— to which you always caved into. This was a routine that happened a lot, you would try to break things up, he would apologize, give you kisses and just like that everything was fine. He would be sweet to you for a couple of days and revert back to how he was.

It was a never ending cycle and you didn’t know how to break it.

T'was your 6th year and his 7th when the two of you somehow just stopped talking, leaving everything at an unknown state. Everyone questioned whether or not you two were still together, feeling quite odd that you and him weren’t together as often as before.

You didn’t know what to answer when people ask about you two since you yourself didn’t know. The other line however didn’t seem to share the same struggle as you since he seemed to be just fine on his own; it was like you guys didn’t even have a problem to fix.

Hermione and Ginny (who are good friends with you) noticed how this situation with Fred was draining the life out of you. Your aura was no longer the bright ball of sun that everyone loved, the spark in your eyes slowly losing its light as weeks continued to roll by without knowing if you should still hold on or just let go.

“Y/N/N, you need to eat, you know.” Hermione started off, taking the seat next to you inside the library where you hid, skipping dinner once again. “Yeah, you should at least have a snack or something.” Ginny said, resting against the window as she placed a hand on your shoulder. Even Ginny felt sad for you, since she witnessed how your friendship blossomed with her brother— how everything went south.

She tried to talk to Fred about it, asking about how things with you were going but all she got in return was a shrug and “It’s doing good.” She turned to George who was also caught in the middle of everything, to which he simply answered with, “It’s not my place to tell, Gin.”

You shot a sad smile to the both of them, placing the quill you have down as you hummed. “I’m alright, my loves. You don’t have to worry about me.” but they weren’t convinced. Even the most clueless person at Hogwarts could tell that you weren’t good at all.

Hermione’s expression of sadness was evident, to which you responded with a tight-lipped smile. “Mione, trust me. Please, I’m doing good. Now how about you, me and Ginny here go back to the dorms and catch up?” you offered, a bit desperate to have a distraction. They eagerly responded with a yes and linked arms with you, happy that you weren’t all that closed off.

---

Your feet silently trudged the halls on the way back to the common room, letting your hand bleed freely from Umbridge’s horrible punishment. The phrase “I shall not lie anymore” etched on your skin as you defended Harry and the rest of the people from the D.A, acting as if you didn’t even know of such a thing despite being a part of it.

You were almost by the moving stairs when you heard a small giggle of a girl and a very familiar chuckle resonate from down the hall. Your heart immediately sunk at the idea, immediately shaking it off as you quietly followed the sound, the adrenaline of not knowing what you’ll see coursing through your veins as the sound grew louder at your approach.

And that’s where you saw it, Fred laughing along with Angelina Johnson, his arms wrapped around her waist as they shared quick kisses and hushed stories. Your hand flew straight over your mouth as you backed away from the scene, not having the heart to interrupt the moment.

Fleeing away, your tears flowed freely as you desperately whispered the password to the common room, the Fat Lady not even mad at the fact you woke her up as she saw your disheartened state. You collapse on the couch, your sobs becoming louder as you were now somewhere a bit more private, the crackle of the fireplace being your only company in your despair.

---

You were thankful that it was a Saturday the next day, it meant that you could just stay inside and hide from Fred and Angelina. It meant that you would be able to guard your heart even just for a day. After all, you did spend the night quietly crying so you were more than sure that you looked far more worse than how you usually did.

Now wrapped in a blanket while reading a muggle book your aunt sent you, you were finally calm. It was a nice break from the crying that you’ve been doing for the last few hours. You felt numb and dead inside, not even sure on how you were actually feeling.

The door suddenly opened and you were greeted by Hermione and Ginny who had sad smiles on their faces. They were the only ones who knew about what you witnessed last night- well Hermione for that matter since she was the one that saw you crying silently on the couch. She must’ve told Ginny who had a guilty expression painted on her face.

“Mione told me, Y/N. How are you feeling?” Ginny asked, sitting down on the edge of the bed and placed a hand on your leg, to which you responded with a sad smile. “I didn’t think it would hurt this bad, Gin. All I did was love him and made sure I was good enough for him.” You managed to let out, your voice dripping with defeat at the realization.

She said nothing more and just pulled you into her arms, Hermione soon joining as you sobbed once more, “W-was I not enough? Was I too boring? Tell me, Hermione, Ginny. Tell me where I went wrong? What did she have that Fred didn’t see in me?” You cried out, heart hurting even more at the idea of him finding solace in another woman than you.

It was your fourth year and you were walking around the castle, enjoying the cool breeze that wafted through the hallway that was rather deserted of students since most of them were down at Hogsmeade. You were about to make a turn when a hand suddenly grasped onto your wrist, making you stop in your tracks.

Your head turned around and you were greeted with a bright smile from Fred. “Freddie? Why aren’t you with George down at Hogsmeade?” You asked him, raising an eyebrow as he shook his head in dismissal. “Told Georgie I had important business that has to do with you.” The red head answered, pulling you along with him.

“What kind of business is this, Fred?” You questioned, heart racing as he kept his hold on you. He kept quiet as he led out to the Black Lake, where a small blanket and basket was laid out. “Weasley, what is this?” You asked once more as he finally turned to you with a rather serious look despite his cheeks now sporting a rather light blush.

He took a deep breath in, “Y/N L/N, you’ve been the best gal in the world and I couldn’t express enough how fun it is to be around you. You balance me out, you know? I mean Forge does as well but it’s just different with you and it’s actually so amazing— oh shit i’m rambling aren’t i?” He asked, the blush on his cheeks now matching the fiery state of his hair. You laughed softly and nodded, your heart now jumping out of your chest as he took placed his hand against your cheek, thumb prodding the soft skin as he continued, “As I was saying, you have everything I ever wished for and I’d be a fool if I let this chance go and have another bloody git take you away. I love you, Y/N.” He ended his confession with a rather shy and soft smile.

It was unlike Fred to be so affectionate around you, knowing how the two of you would roughhouse from time to time that even George had to break you two up before either of you ended up in the hospital wing. So this was definitely something new; a memory you knew you would cherish forever. But besides the point, you were taken aback at the words he spoke, your long time crush had finally confessed that he loves you too. That you were all that he ever needed.

“I love you too, Fred.”

“Y/N, you should really talk to him. It’s time for you to focus on yourself.” Hermione’s voice broke you off from the memory. You looked at her with a sad smile, knowing that she was right. The more that you loved him, the more you broke yourself.

But of course, some things were easier said than done.

It’s been a week since Hermione slapped some sense into you and you still haven’t told him. You and Fred shared smiles when you see each other in the common room, he would randomly sit beside you in the common room and pull you close to him and it broke your heart even more. He thought you didn’t know about how he holds another girl like this in his arms, how he kissed another girl the way he did with you.

And something inside you finally snapped.

The fifth years were taking their OWLs so the school was rather quiet to give way to their exams. You were walking around the castle in hopes that you would see Fred and finally break things off— officially— and finally learn to love yourself again.

You were nearing the Great Hall when you heard fireworks go off, filled with curiosity, you ran towards the source of noise to see none other than George and Fred on their brooms as they wrecked havoc and casted a big fireworks charm that chased the pink toad out of the Great Hall, smashing the rules she had and surrounding her with the broken glass.

And as if on cue, the twins raced out of the hall and out to the courtyard, they passed you like a gust of wind as you ran out the courtyard that was now flooded with students as they watched the two throw two final firecrackers that left a big W on the sky as they flew up and away from Hogwarts.

Just like that, he left. Fred left without a word and you didn’t have the chance to even say goodbye. He left you alone and shattered, he left along with your heart.

---

Fred was frantic, he ran around the ruins of the castle as the war ensued around him. It was the Battle of Hogwarts and the only thing he wanted right now was to see if you were okay, that you were alive and well despite the chaos that surrounded him.

Fred knew he fucked up, he fucked up bad the moment he left Hogwarts without even seeing you. He knew well enough that the damage he caused to you was something not even the best of doctors at St. Mungo’s can repair. He broke your heart for the stupidest reason and now was suffering the consequences.

He spotted Ginny and ran towards her, hands grasping onto his sister as he asked— well shouted— “Where’s Y/N?! I need to see her!” and Ginny pushed him aside, casting a spell on a death eater who was about to attack the both of them. She knew where you were, she had spoken with you not even a minute ago before Fred had arrived, she shrugged at him and gave him a rather disappointed look.

“I don’t know where she is, Fred. Merlin, be careful and focus on yourself first!” She responded, attacking another person as she rolled her eyes, obviously angered that he only decided to act like this now.

Fred couldn’t even bring himself to be mad at Ginny for the way she acted with him, he was an asshole to the one person who loved him deeply and took her for granted.

---

His brown eyes were now scanning the Great Hall, orbs scanning through the hundreds of injured students who were grieving and were just thankful that they were spared from death yet he couldn’t even catch a glimpse of your H/C locks in the crowd.

“Georgie, I have to see her. I need to see her, talk to her. She has to be okay, right?” He asked his twin, making the younger one shrug and offer him a rather sad smile. “I don’t know, Fred. I haven’t seen her at all.” George lied, he had seen you in the battle, even saving his life after being cornered.

Like Ginny, he promised Y/N that he wouldn’t tell Fred about your whereabouts, not wanting to see the male who broke your heart many months ago.

You just weren’t ready to see him again.

---

Two years have passed since the war and Fred still can’t shake you off his mind. It was as if he knew you were out there, alive and well and all he had to do was find you. Yet he didn’t know where to start.

He wanted to see you again, to hold you and tell you that he still loved you. That what he did was foolish and all he wanted to do was to make you smile and create more memories with you.

Fred was in the back of his joke shop, checking up on the supplies they had and doing inventory when he heard the bell open. “George, can you check on the customer outside?” He called out to his brother, to which the twin responded with a soft “sure.”

“Georgie! It’s been too long!” A voice cried out, making him freeze in place. ‘No, it can’t be her…’ He thought to himself, his heartbeat quickening its pace at the thought that he could finally see you once more.

He slowly made his way back out to the shop, eyes easily finding the familiar H/C locks. Your back was facing him but Fred knew well enough that you were still the beautiful girl that he loved.

“Y-Y/N” He called out, making you turn around. His breath hitched at his throat at the sight of you, you were absolutely stunning, your features were more mature but you were definitely the same girl he knew back at Hogwarts.

“Fred.” You answered, giving him a small smile. Your heart ached at the sight of him, your younger self urging you to run up to him and slap him and make him pay for the pain he gave you but you stood your ground, knowing better not to.

George sensed that his twin wanted some alone time with you and slipped away, patting you on the small of your back gently before hiding away in the back.

Silence now filled the floor as the both of you avoided each other's gaze, not knowing how to speak to the other. Fred took a step closer to you and shoved his hands inside his pockets offering you a rather sad and guilty smile.

“I’m sorry” “You don’t have to apologize.” the both of you said at the same time, now looking at each other before laughing. You motioned your hand for him to continue which Fred took as a good sign.

“Y/N, I- I’m sorry, alright? I’m sorry I left and became so distant. I- I didn’t know why I did that but I did and i’m really sorry.” Fred started off, his features visibly creasing as he stepped back to remember all the pain he made you go through.

You on the other hand suddenly had anger bubbling in you, all these years of wanting an apology and that’s the reason he gives you? “Is that all you have to say, Fred?” you asked him, slowly backing away to the door. Fred’s eyes widened and immediately shook his head, arm extending to hold your wrist.

“I-I’m sorry for being such an asshole. I threw all the memories we had together away and completely ruined what we had. I- I tried looking for you at the war but I couldn’t see you, even in the Great Hall. I tried to search for you but I was left defeated.” He continued, voice breaking as he spoke. “I didn’t want us to end like that.”

You gently scoffed at the end of his apology, tears brimming your eyes at the pent up anger suddenly showing itself once more after all this time, “But you made it happen like that, Weasley.” You told him, tone ice cold which made the latter wince. “You ended the things the moment you kissed Angelina Johnson that night.” You continued on, wiggling your way out of his grasp.

“You made it happen the moment you became so distant, Fred. It was a choice you made and you know that deep down into your soul.” You finally ended, wiping the tears that had escaped as a shaky sigh resonated from your chest.

“L-look, Y/N. Maybe we can restart? Right? Please don’t tell me this is the end of us.” Fred pleaded, eyes filled with desperation as his heart yearned for some sort of good sign. You shook your head firmly, not even wanting to look at him.

“I’m sorry Fred but you ended things this way. I held on for so long until I lost myself, that I feared to love anyone after all you’ve put me through.” You told him, arms crossed as you tried to keep a strong facade.

The taller one approached you once more, pulling you into his warm embrace and cradled you as tears escaped his own eyes. “Please baby, no. Not like this, I love you, Y/N. It’s always been you.” He begged, looking at you as he searched for a sign that you wanted him too, but to no avail.

You shook your head once more as you pushed him away, “Fred, stop it. I loved you too, but this is too much. I lost so much more than what I gained, I don’t want that anymore.” You said, his begging filling you up with indignation.

“Baby please, give me one more chance—”

“Fred Weasley! If you looked hard enough on how we were back in Hogwarts you would have known that I gave you so many chances! That I gave you so much more than what I could initially give! I loved you so much that I lost myself in the process. How can you not see that?!” You bursted out, finally tired of hearing his apology. He was reverting back to the apology he used to do when you tried to seal things off, and you weren’t going to fall for it this time. Not anymore.

You finally broke the cycle.

“I- I should get going, my fiancee is waiting for me.” You finally said, wiping the tears from your eyes, Fred now only realizing the engagement ring you had on.

“M-married? To who?” He asked, heart now broken in half as he looked at you.

“Oliver Wood. We bumped into each other during the war and he accepted me for who I was. He taught me how to love again.” You said proudly, giving him a smile. “That’s the reason why I came here in the first place, to invite George, Ginny and Ron to my wedding.”

Fred was shattered, not even comprehending the fact that he had now lost the one thing he wanted the most, the one thing he knew he should have taken care of. It was all gone now.

“I can’t lose you like this, Y/N, love. Please.” He begged one last time, now on his knees as he cried, his body weak from his emotions.

“I’m sorry Fred, you lost me the day you left Hogwarts without a single word.” You apologized, offering a tight lipped smile as you walked out of the shop with Fred looking at your retreating figure.

Just like how you watched him.

#fred weasley #fred weasley x reader #fred weasley imagine #fred weasley x y/n #fred weasley angst #tbh idk any more hashtags #harry potter #harry potter imagines #weasley twins

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shipping-receiving · 4 years ago

Text

“Is there a chance you won’t be okay?”

An Analysis of Hwang Si-mok and Han Yeo-jin’s Final Scene in Stranger/Secret Forest Season 2

Alright, it’s been almost a week, I’m still crying every time I re-watch this scene, and somehow I’ve written 3,500 words about five minutes of this damn show, so here we go:

As with Stranger/Secret Forest Season 1, Si-mok and Yeo-jin’s final scene in Season 2 ended with a farewell meal, complete with soju. On a very basic level, this meal felt significant in a season where Si-mok was subject, more than ever, to interrupted meals or meals he didn’t particularly want to be present for – at least until he was able to have a drink with Yeo-jin in 2x12, and then lunch with her in 2x13.

More importantly, though, this scene is the most loaded scene we’ve ever witnessed between these two characters. That’s saying something for such a nuanced, detail-oriented show, in which two people placing their phones in a storage locker at a detention centre can possess such emotional weight, particularly when played by two actors who make very subtle and sophisticated acting choices.

I’m struck particularly by the way this scene bursts with subtext – things unsaid and unresolved – when Lee Soo-yeon could just as easily have written a neater, more light-hearted exchange that reaffirmed their connection, more along the lines of their final scene in 1x16. There are a thousand other ways their farewell could have been presented to us that would have given a greater or at least a more comfortable sense of finality, even taking into account their character development over this season. This lack of resolution is evident not just from what happened during the scene, but also when the scene happened within the episode itself. The meal occurred after Yeo-jin had been bullied by her colleagues, but before she met her new boss – at this point, it seemed to the viewer that her promotion would likely bring not the pride she experienced in S1, but more challenges and isolation.

More so than the Seo Dong-jae cliffhanger, this scene makes me think that this was written with a future Season 3 arc in mind, one in which Si-mok and Yeo-jin’s relationship will continue to evolve and deepen substantially (whether that will be ‘romantic’ remains to be seen). Considering they’re the core partnership of this series, there was a deliberate withholding of stability in their farewell, rather than an affirmation of it. I won’t go so far as to say destabilisation – because despite their separation, I think their bond is more profound than ever – but at the bare minimum an absence of certainty, when it could have been written otherwise.

Anyway, on to the breakdown:

The scene opens with Si-mok carefully folding a napkin and placing cutlery on it for Yeo-jin, a simple gesture of care that Cho Seung-woo plays with a startlingly gentle attentiveness. Immediately, it signals that there’s been a shift in Si-mok – how he’s able, at least with Yeo-jin, to do something that isn’t just polite, but also thoughtful. The director even snuck in a little clue that Si-mok is thinking of Yeo-jin as he’s doing this – Yeo-jin actually appears at the left side of the frame from the start, as the camera pans over to Si-mok:

In this shot, Si-mok is visually separated from Yeo-jin by a pillar. This could be read on the one hand as a kind of sectioning out of his mental space – a visualisation of his thoughts of her as he prepares her cutlery – and on the other hand, as a foreshadowing of their impending separation. (I do, however, enjoy the first interpretation more. It reminds me a little bit of her sketch of the inside of his head from 1x06.)

Back to the napkin: if you look closer, Si-mok didn’t fold a napkin for himself – his spoon and chopsticks are on the table next to his bowl – so this isn’t just a matter of neatly setting the table for their meal. In a very small way, he’s anticipating her needs, just as she has done with him in much more demonstrative ways in both seasons (helping him with his headaches being the most obvious one). This isn’t something he’s necessarily actively worked on in the past two years; he’s still the person who doesn’t instinctively say ‘hello’ over the phone, or ask after someone’s kids without being reminded. Yet, it’s a capacity for care that has expanded significantly, at least where Yeo-jin is concerned.

Compare his behaviour with the equivalent scene in 1x16 – back then, he only ordered a bowl of noodles for himself and not for her. Interestingly, Yeo-jin’s comment to Si-mok during that part of the S1 scene was, “Gosh, you haven’t changed one bit,” suggesting that he was, by nature, somehow unable to be considerate to someone else. Just from the opening to the S2 scene, we see that that comment is not or no longer true, at least when it comes to the way he acts around her. In both the S1 and S2 scenes, he was the first person to arrive for their meal; in S1, the first thing he said was, “Why are you late?” and had already ordered his soju and noodles. This time, however, Yeo-jin asks him, “Why didn’t you order something first?” – implying that although she was late again, he was patiently waiting for her to arrive.

There’s also a difference in the way he responds to her appearance. Now, I personally don’t think we can frame Si-mok’s connection with and care for Yeo-jin in conventional understandings of romantic attraction (which is not to say romance isn’t possible for them canonically, I just think it will manifest differently). Nevertheless, I’d say that he responds to her haircut in a way that is probably as close to the mechanics of attraction as we could possibly expect from Si-mok – not just the shock of “oh, you cut your hair,” but lingering looks and nostalgia for when they first met; nothing at all like noticing that she’s wearing lipstick and saying, not so kindly, that it looks weird. In fact, in a direct parallel to this moment in 1x16, Yeo-jin asks him if her haircut is “weird”, and he says, “I just meant it’s different.”

(I think the way he stares at her is not wholly due to being ‘transfixed’, but also because he’s trying to figure out what such a drastic change means, and why now, and whether he has to worry. Basically, his brain is trying to compute; part of his stare is him trying to analyse her behaviour, just as part of it is him revisiting his memories of her from two years ago, and part of it might well be an attraction he doesn’t quite understand or know how to reel in. He does stare at her for an inordinately long time.)

Switching over to Yeo-jin, I really enjoy this little routine of hers when they have meals together – how she narrows down options for him to a series of questions, and even helps him decide on occasion. It never feels like she’s trying to speak for him, but rather that she knows his likes and dislikes. Her question in this scene – makgeolli or soju – is phrased like her question in 2x02, when she asks him to choose between stir-fried octopus and hot pot; when she specifically requests a lot of cabbages, she must be thinking of how he ate lots of them in 2x12. This kind of care comes naturally to Yeo-jin – we’re talking about the person who took in a murder victim’s mother in S1 – but it’s still a form of intimacy, and one that Si-mok is clearly used to as well.

Soon, though, we have our first indication that things might not be so comfortable – not in the sense that their bond has weakened, but that there are fundamental shifts occurring in both of their lives that affect this bond. Si-mok, after a lot more staring, points out that her short hair reminds him of when they first met. (He wouldn’t have needed to take that much time to come up with that simple observation, which makes me think he was trying to choose his words carefully.) With enthusiasm, Yeo-jin responds with, “I haven’t changed a bit, right?” – echoing her comment about Si-mok in 1x16.

Perhaps Yeo-jin had meant this comment sincerely in the moment, but given context, her cheerfulness feels performative. We’ve just witnessed her crying after being bullied by her colleagues, in contrast to the warmth that she enjoys with her old Yongsan team; we’ve observed her changes – a result of maturity, disillusionment, a loss of innocence – throughout the whole season. In fact, she seems to have cut her hair precisely because she feels weighed down by all that has unfolded, just as one might after a break-up or some kind of painful life event. It’s a decision that seems to say: I acknowledge that everything has changed around me, but maybe doing this will make me feel like myself again, or the ‘myself’ of two years ago.

Si-mok, of course, isn’t quite so able to agree that she hasn’t changed. Multiple times this season, he’s observed the changes in her – “You don’t draw these days?” in 2x06, “Didn’t you want to work in police administration?” in 2x08, “You weren’t the kind of person to postpone things.” in 2x12. Now, he doesn’t respond to her question, and instead looks at her in silence, smiling only ever so slightly when she shakes her head playfully (and we know that she can make him smile wider than that). Perhaps he’s even choosing to withhold any judgment of her. But this is a moment, I think, that factors into his decision to ask her that question at the end of this scene.

Next, we have confirmation that Si-mok was the one who asked Yeo-jin out for dinner, just as he had in 2x02 once he’d settled into his new posting. It isn’t clear in 1x16 if it was Yeo-jin who’d asked to meet Si-mok when she found out he was being posted to Namhae, but it’s been affirmed twice this season that he prioritises this time with her (even more so than meeting his own mother). Then, he breaks the news to her that he is leaving for Gangwon Province this weekend.

In 1x16, Yeo-jin finds out that Si-mok is leaving from the special investigation team, without Si-mok being present. At the time, they still think he’ll be sent to the US for training, and Yeo-jin is visibly disappointed. She has the same crestfallen look on her face in this scene, in front of Si-mok. She doesn’t want to be separated from him, and when she asks about his cases, it seems she’d expected him to stay for quite a while longer to see them through. Mind you, Wonju is only about 1.5 hours drive from Seoul (yes, I mapped it), but Yeo-jin still looks like she’s had the rug pulled from under her. Perhaps, in an uncertain time, she’d hoped that Si-mok would be in her life more than the few weeks he’d spent in Seoul.

Yeo-jin’s responses in both 1x16 and 2x16 are a pretty big indicator that she has feelings for Si-mok (whether she’s aware or willing to acknowledge those feelings is another matter). I suppose one could argue that her reaction is simply out of sadness at the thought of being separated from a friend, but based on certain events in S2 – for example, Choi Bit questioning Yeo-jin about her relationship with Si-mok, and Yeo-jin deflecting – I think the viewer is at the very least meant to question whether their bond is truly ‘platonic’. This isn’t the type of show to include superfluous details just to tease their viewers, and in any case, Si-mok and Yeo-jin’s connection has only deepened through the course of this season despite being on opposing sides of the council. It feels like the emotional stakes are much higher this time than back in S1.

As Yeo-jin is absorbing this news from Si-mok, there are a couple of little details here that feel significant to me, but could be nothing: first, the way Si-mok half-holds out his hand as Yeo-jin is pouring her soju, just as he’d held out his hand when she was pouring makgeolli in 2x13. Second, how she pours out a cup of soju for herself first, but not for Si-mok. In any other situation, it might seem impolite – after all, Si-mok is the one who’d chosen the drink – but here it seems that she’s pouring a drink to steady or busy herself more than anything, and she doesn’t drink from it till after their toast.

Following this, Yeo-jin confides in Si-mok that “I never thought the council would end like this. [...] Will the higher-ups be replaced with more honest people while I’m catching bad men out there?” When he replies with, “Why are you talking as if those two are the same?”, it’s yet another of his probing questions, questions she never seems to have an answer to. The Yeo-jin of old would never have assumed that all the higher-ups are dishonest – she has always seen the good in people – but she feels betrayed by Choi Bit, the one person she sincerely respected. Here, she changes the topic rather than opening up, reverting to her most comfortable mode of showing care for someone else by asking Si-mok why he looks so tired. It’s a guardedness that we’re not used to seeing from Yeo-jin; when Si-mok met with Choi Bit at the start of the episode, he describes Yeo-jin as someone who “opens up easily”, even if she doesn’t “blindly trust or respect just about anybody”.

While Yeo-jin is evasive, Si-mok is more willing to be vulnerable in comparison. His openness isn’t surprising, given that Si-mok has shared more about his life and thoughts with her than with anyone else, but it is still heartwarming to see. Instead of brushing off Yeo-jin’s comment, he tells her about his dream of the prosecutors from the Western Office. For anyone else, this might not seem like a significant conversation topic, but for someone who hardly ever dreams (which Si-mok mentioned in S1), it feels like he’s sharing something special with her. This dream, and his factual recounting of it, seems to be a means for his brain to process the traumatic events of two years ago.

Before Si-mok tells Yeo-jin about his dream, there’s a quick insertion here – a lament about seeing your boss in your dreams – that suggests that she is still troubled about Choi Bit, more than she’s letting on. Again, Si-mok doesn’t push her to elaborate, though I think he’s been absorbing all the things that seem off with Yeo-jin since she arrived. Yeo-jin proceeds to analyse his dream in her head, but doesn’t verbalise her interpretation (that Yoon Se-won might be considering suicide, since he went off in the same direction as two characters who have both passed). As she’s deep in thought, Si-mok tilts his head questioningly at her; she says that he probably won’t have time to go anywhere else this weekend, implying that she was thinking of bringing him with her to visit Yoon.

Knowing that Si-mok won’t be able to come with her, however, leaves Yeo-jin resigned. As she announces, “All right, then,” I wonder if this is the moment that she’s choosing to steel herself. The two people she treasures and respects most in her life (Si-mok and Choi Bit) are disappearing from it, and she will have to learn to move forward without them.

Now, we come to their toast. In the corresponding scene in S1, their toast is bittersweet, but has a sense of resolution; upbeat piano music plays in the background as Yeo-jin says, “Goodbye, I won’t be able to see you off,” while Si-mok echoes that with, “Good luck in your new position. Sorry I can’t attend the ceremony.” In S2, the music is quieter, and much more sombre – I’ve been describing it in my head as ‘breathy sad wooooo music’ – even as Yeo-jin laughs and says, a little helplessly: “It feels like we keep repeating this.”

Si-mok, on his part, doesn’t even echo her laugh with anything more than the barest smile. Instead, he says, with a deep sincerity: “Take care, Senior Inspector Han.” As I mentioned earlier, there are many ways that they could have written or played this scene to convey even a little more resolution – choosing different music, or having Si-mok smile along with Yeo-jin, or even giving Yeo-jin a bit more notice of his departure so that she can prepare a gift (as if to say, she doesn’t draw as much these days, but she would for his sake). But the viewer is made to feel all of their reluctance, even sadness at this separation, even if those feelings are hidden beneath pleasantries. “Well, I guess I’ll be okay,” Yeo-jin says, as if there’s a possibility that she won’t be – that this is something she has to recover from in the future.

Si-mok considers her words, her phrasing, her demeanour, tilts his head at her again and says: “Is there a chance you won’t be okay?”

This, above all other lines, shows how much Si-mok has grown in the past couple of years because of Yeo-jin’s influence. Whereas he started S1 cold, guarded, and isolated from the rest of his colleagues, he has arrived at a point where he has cultivated enough of an emotional sensitivity to ask her this question – to show her care, just as she has shown care to him and other people around her. I’d even venture to say that Si-mok feels, himself, that there’s a chance he won’t be as okay with their separation as he might have been two years ago. In 2x05, during the conversation with Seo Dong-jae outside the prison, Dong-jae asks Si-mok: “You don’t feel a tad bit sad even if you’re sent far away, do you?” Si-mok answers, “No.” That doesn’t feel so definitive anymore. There isn’t anything either Si-mok or Yeo-jin can do, given that they both prioritise their careers and understand that these careers follow a certain trajectory, but parting feels a little bit harder this time.

Yeo-jin answers Si-mok’s question as reassuringly as she can, with an adorable smile and shake of the head; she lets out an “ah” after she downs her soju, as if to reorient herself. Yet, her cheerfulness in the rest of the scene – her excitement at the food, her over-enthusiastic chewing – rings empty as the sombre music continues to play in the background. For perhaps the first time in the entire series, there is something about Yeo-jin that seems feigned. Strangely, it is Si-mok’s blank expression that represents the more authentic emotion in this scene – communicating the very resignation that Yeo-jin must be feeling inside, beneath a facade that might read as comical in any other context.

“Is there a chance you won’t be okay?” is, in fact, the last thing that Si-mok says in this whole scene, despite quite a few more lines of dialogue from Yeo-jin. The way he looks at her for the rest of the scene, though, is charged with meaning. It seems to say: ‘I don’t really believe that you’re okay, but I’m going to give you space because I can tell you don’t really want to talk right now.’ It’s not as if Yeo-jin hasn’t confided in him before – their phone call in 1x15 was especially intimate – so it’s not that Si-mok is incapable of listening to her. Still, he respects her choice to deflect, and continues to observe her closely while ignoring the pajeon, even leaning forward right at the end of the scene. This very overt concentration on her is something we’ve never really seen from Si-mok before; even in the rooftop scene in 2x06, which is probably the most loaded scene they share after this one, they’re standing beside each other and rarely make eye contact. Here, his focus on Yeo-jin is palpable.

As much as this scene felt heartbreaking to me (thanks breathy sad wooooo music), it actually left me with a lot of optimism for the development of their relationship in the future. Lee Soo-yeon has said that she has enough material for five seasons of the show, and while I’m not so sure we’ll get as many seasons as that, it feels like she’s pushed Si-mok and Yeo-jin out of their comfortable friendship – planting the question, “is there a chance we won’t be okay?” I wonder if we’ll see something quite different in the third season (which is apparently in discussion!), which surely won’t see them on opposing sides again.

I’ve been burned by enough ships that can potentially be read as ‘platonic’ to know that I shouldn’t hope for any overt romance, but Si-mok is such a unique character and has such a unique connection with Yeo-jin that I’m hopeful that their relationship could be deepened with nuance, even if it doesn’t become romantic in ‘recognisable’ ways. (I have other thoughts on his asexuality/aromanticism that I won’t get into here.) It’s precisely because their connection is built on mutual trust, respect, and understanding that it remains so compelling, and I think this scene promises growth, and some resolution, whenever we see them next.

#tvn stranger #secret forest 2 #stranger 2 #stranger #hwanghan

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kiri-ah · 4 years ago

Text

Something To Sink My Teeth Into || he/him pronouns version

Pairing: Vampire!Jaemin x Male Human!reader

Word Count: 26.4k

A/N: Okay so uh... this wasn't meant to be this long. I hate my brain sometimes. *sigh*

This has only been edited by myself and a friend of mine, please excuse any errors. I worked hard to make the best experience possible. For that reason, please note that this is the !he/him pronouns version! They/them pronouns may be found here, she/her pronouns here. Please enjoy!

He smiled then, a smirk that seemed far too self-assured for the situation, and leaned over towards your exposed ear. “I can feel you staring, baby,” he murmured. The top of your ear, which had been feeling rather numb, flamed hot at his words. It almost hurt, the sudden jump into heat. You turned towards him fully, only eyes exposed by the scarf mountain. Your hair whipped around as the wind shifted again, but he didn’t seem cold, although he was in only a pair of black skinny jeans, a white t-shirt, and a black jacket. The jacket caught your attention for a second - it was studded with thousands of little rhinestones, like a varsity jacket gone shiny. Then he shifted closer into your space and you were forced to look back at his eyes, glittering in a way that seemed almost predatory. You sucked in a breath through your mouth and started to back away.