#main enemy has always been anxiety

[celestie0]

gojo satoru x reader | fake marriage au [18+]

in holy matriphony ch8. two steps back

ᰔ pairing. fake marriage au - neighbor&realtor!gojo x nurse!reader (ft. choso x reader & suguru x reader)

ᰔ summary. gojo satoru is your extremely annoying next-door-neighbor who you're pretty sure is the most insufferable man you've ever met. given the fact that you exclusively work the night shift at a chaotic emergency department, just got broken up with your boyfriend of 7 years, and have been taking care of your sick mother ever since her multitude of diagnoses, yet somehow your neighbor is the main source of stress in your life should speak volumes. but when your mother's medical bills start to skyrocket to more than you can manage, and you learn that said neighbor of yours has the best private health insurance plan in the country, you ask him to enter a matrimonial agreement with you for the spousal benefits all in the name of saving a few hundred thousand dollars. but you'll have to see if suffering cohabitation with him is worth any amount of money.

ᰔ genre/tags. fluff, smut, angst, enemies to lovers (sort of), annoyances to lovers (that's more like it), small town romance, fake marriage, next door neighbors, lots of bickering, suburban shenanigans, slow burn, mutual pining, gojo likes to play house but you don't, hatred for the american healthcare system, gojo always forgets to mow the lawn, jealousy, an insane amount of profanity, mentions of cigarettes, depression/anxiety; btw slight age gap bc gojo in this fic is 34 n reader is 29

ᰔ warnings. reader in this fic has a sick mother w alzheimer's & cancer so there is secondary medical angst!!

ᰔ chapter. 8/x

ᰔ words. 10.2k

a/n. hellooo my ihm loves! i missed you all very much. i don't have much to say here lolol but i'll see you at the end!!! hope you enjoy the first gojo pov chapter!!

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“Now see this? The little bunny ears?” Gojo says from where he’s crouched down towards the freshly-sprinkle-wet pavement of the sidewalk, his fingers pinching sparkly pink shoelace together, his view of the children’s size seven shoe obscured by his tie dangling from his neck. He would flip it over his shoulder and out of the way, but he had not one second to spare when it comes to keeping the attention of a five-year-old. 

“Mhm…” Juno mumbles, nodding her head slowly as she tucks her chin to look down at the tutorial.

“Okay,” Gojo says, “just like I taught you last time, you take the bunny ears…and then cross them over like this…” He does it slowly enough to where she can follow along. And then threads one loop through the other to form a knot.

“They’re friends! The bunnies!” Juno chirps, squealing at the possibility. 

“Yes, Juno, the bunnies are friends,” Gojo says.

“Are they best friends?”

“They can be whatever you want, kiddo.”

He finishes tying the shoe, and the second that he does, Juno stomps her other foot in front of him, the lining of her sole flashing bright with lights from the contact. Pink sparkly shoelace is now splayed out on the pavement once more.

Gojo levels his gaze with her, resting his elbows on his knees. “No, Juno. That’s why I showed you how to do it. You have to do the other one.”

“But! Uncle Toru! You’re faster at it.”

He sighs, hanging his head a little in defeat, some of his fringe he had slicked back for the purpose of his 12PM house showing falls over his forehead from the movement. He looks back up at Juno and she looks entirely thrilled to be stressing him out like this. “I can’t do this for you every time, kid. Your uncle’s getting old. My back hurts, and my vestibular system is degrading. I’m gonna start looking like Grandpa Lou Pickles real soon.”

She slaps her hands to her mouth, one over the other, to try and stifle that full-of-glee giggle that bubbles from her throat. 

There was nothing like making a kid laugh at your own expense. 

Gojo smiles at her then pushes up on his knees to stand up straight with a small huff. He smooths down his tie to lay it flat with his grey suit jacket and corrects any creases. “You’ve got it?”

She nods enthusiastically, kneeling down quickly to tie her own shoes. She makes the little bunny loops, gets confused when she crosses them over, her pinky finger somehow getting caught in the knot, but she manages to pull the laces through and makes a very uneven bow. But at least a bow, it was. 

She stands up, jumps up and down with happiness, clapping her hands together saying, “yay!! I did it!!”

“Good jooooob, Juno,” Gojo says, ruffling her curly hair until she’s annoyed by it and pushes his hand away to smooth down the frizz he just created. “Now, let’s get going. You’re going to be late.”

Gojo doesn’t need to park ten minutes away from Juno’s elementary school, and force her to walk all the way to the entrance, since in theory, he could wait in the agonizing line of parent drop-offs that’ll get her off right at the gate. But some of his favorite memories when he was a kid was when his dad would walk him to school. They’d count every Volkswagen beetle that would drive by, or slugbugs as his dad used to call them, and he’d get a free pass to punch his old man in the hip every single time he saw one. Either that, or a dollar towards ice cream after school at the end of the week. He outgrew the violence by the time he got to third grade. And curiously, that’s also when he developed a sweet tooth.

The nice thing about being a realtor is that Gojo had a pretty decently flexible schedule. And although he found himself working on most weekends, since that’s when he’s able to book showings for the most part, it at least means that he has the capacity to drop his niece off at school at 10am on a random Tuesday when her parents can’t. Because he has no place he’s expected to clock in or show up to that’s against his will. But, of course, that means he’s basically their go-to contact for moments like this. Where they can’t drop her off at dance practice, pick her up from school, or keep an eye on her when she’s at home. He would never complain about it, though. Not with the way Juno blabbers his ear off during the ten-minute walks to school about all the latest happenings of Sophia the First like there was no other person in the world she’d rather share all the drama too. And also the fact that, instead of punching his hip whenever she sees a slugbug, she opts to hug his leg instead. 

“Are those kids still bothering you at school?” Gojo asks her when she hops over a tiny rock.

She glances down at her shoes, the grip of her hand wrapped around Gojo’s finger weakening slightly. “No…”

“Juno, are you lying to me?”

“No!” she yells, loudly, as if she was offended by the assumption.

“You let me know if they are, okay?” Gojo says. He stops walking and pulls his finger from her grip so that she’ll stop kicking rocks and actually pay attention to what he says. She looks up at him and blinks. “I need you to know that no matter what, family will always have your back. Understood?”

Her lip quivers a little. “Yes Uncle Toru.”

Gojo takes Juno’s tiny hand in his again as the two of them continue to walk down the sidewalk and finally pass the noisy cross-section of Juno’s elementary school. 

“Uh-oh…” Juno stops in her tracks suddenly once they’ve reached the courtyard in front of the main entrance where there are bustling children making their way inside the gates. She pulls her hand from Gojo’s grip before glancing up at him and twiddles with a coil of her hair. Parents are walking their children up to the walk-in zone, some giving their kids hugs and kisses goodbye. The colors all around are nauseating, with bright neons and blue and pinks and, quite frankly, hues that not a single person in the world has any business meshing together. Like barf green and mustard yellow. But chaos was comfort to the undeveloped brain.

“What’s up, kiddo?” Gojo says as he looks down at a doe-eyed Juno, turning his ear towards her because it was hard to hear her meek voice over the teachers yelling as they try to round the kids up before first period starts.

“Um…” she blinks, “I forgot my lunch moneys.”

“Oh,” Gojo says, his shoulders relaxing, then he reaches into his pocket for his wallet, pulls out a twenty dollar bill, then hands it to her, “here you go. No problem.”

Juno glances down at it, her tiny hand gentle with the paper, careful not to crease it. She looks up again. “Um. Uncle Toru.”

“Uh huh?”

“Lunch is three dollars.”

“I don’t have any ones on me, sweetheart. Just keep it. Buy one of those books from the book fair.”

Her eyes light up at that before the excitement stifles with some realization. “Oh. Um. It’s,” she counts on her fingers, “twenty-six dollars for book and my lunch.”

He fishes out another twenty, but squats down again to level his gaze with her before he hands it to her. “Your mommy didn’t give you money for the book fair?”

Juno gets shy, averting her gaze to the ground as she rubs her ankle with her other foot. “No…I wanted, um, the fairy book.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But mommy said no. That there is no money.”

“No money?”

She nods. “Mhm.”

“Okay…” He frowns. “That’s all she said to you?”

Juno nods.

“Are–” Gojo starts, but then the loud-pitched shrieking of a couple of girls towards the right cuts him off.

“Juno!!! Juno!!!” they yell, skipping up to Juno with excitement before squeezing her into a bear hug, looking like a huddle of pigtails and sparkly backpacks. Gojo stands up straight again and watches the scene unfold. 

Juno, her cheeks as red as beet, smiles when they pull away from the hug and jumps up and down with them. 

“She’s here! She’s here!” one of her friends exclaims.

“Hey, hey, hey, wanna trade silly bands?” the other one chirps.

Gojo lets out a slow exhale, waving a hand back to Juno when she bashfully glances over her shoulder at him as she walks towards the school entryway with her friends. He makes sure to keep an eye on her all the way until she gets through the gates, into the sea of students. He pushes his hands into his pockets, his gaze set straight ahead at the green paint outside the school, still watching Juno as she approaches the heavy double doors. There is some unsettling feeling at the base of his ribs, as if to warn about unfinished business. The feeling doesn’t pass, even when he’s satisfied at the sight of Juno making it inside school. His brow furrows slightly in concentration, but his train of thought is interrupted by a feminine voice that calls out from behind him.

“Is she yours?” he hears the voice call out, and when he turns his head to the side, he sees a woman dressed in faded mom jeans, a striped long sleeve, and black leather boots approaching him from the side.

“Oh, no,” Gojo pulls a hand out of his pocket to shake his palm in front of him, “she’s my niece.”

“Ahhh,” the woman smiles, “she’s adorable.”

“Right? Super smart, too.”

She lets out a small exhale through her nose, one that’s reminiscent of a laugh, before turning her head to look over her shoulder towards the playground where the preschoolers next door were still preoccupied by their playtime. Gojo trails her gaze to a small group of boys by the monkey bars, and he sees one of them making snow angels face-down in wet dirt. When he glances back at the woman’s face, she looks affectionately disturbed. 

“That’s my Timmy,” she says, “and I really can’t say the same about him.”

He laughs. “It’s fine. I was just like that when I was a kid. He’ll grow out of it.”

“Do you have any of your own?” she asks.

“Not that I know of,” he responds. 

She laughs at that. He had half expected her to roll her eyes. 

“I’m Mari, by the way,” she says with a smile, smoothing her palms down the fabric over her thighs.

“Satoru,” he responds, and he doesn’t pass over the gesture of a handshake, which she seems taken aback by, but still accepts when she squeezes his hand.

“I feel like I’ve seen you somewhere before…” she trails off.

He squints his eyes a little to see if he can place her face too. Or maybe come up with places she may have seen him. When he runs a blank, he says, “I’m here often to drop my niece off. My sister and her husband are–” he feels that same sensation in his ribs, “pretty busy these days.” They’ve asked him to drop Juno off at school so many times by now that the moms around the place are starting to recognize him.

“That’s sweet,” she says, crossing her arms and rubbing at her elbow as she glances over at her son again. “I wish I could have help like that. They're so lucky to have you around.”

“Yeah…I should really hold it against them more often.”

She laughs. “Seriously though!” She sighs, and when he remains quiet because he can tell she’s building up to something more vulnerable, she takes the invitation to vent. “Just–...you know, it’s so hard to juggle everything. Work, the kid–”

“Yeahhh.”

“It’s like there’s just never enough hours in a day–”

“Definitely.”

“Some days it just gets so overwhelming to the point where I’m, like…like not even really a person anymore–”

“I can imagine.”

“And–” she stops to look at him, suddenly embarrassed, “I’m sorry, I think I’m just venting.”

He shakes his head at her. “You’re all good.”

She purses her lips together in thought, squinting her eyes slightly at him, before her shoulders relax. “Would you…” she starts, “like to get coffee sometime?”

“Oh, no, sorry, I’m–” he pulls his left hand up out of his pocket to hold it up in the air, but then stiffens entirely when a chill runs down his spine.

Because it wasn’t a reflex of recent events, 

It was a reflex from years ago. 

“You’re…?” she says, tilting her head to the side curiously as if to feign innocence of the fact that there’s a ring on his finger until she hears the words from him personally. As if the ring would vanish with enough wishful thinking.

His shoulders, tense and rigid, slowly drop back down before he breathes in deep and says, “I’m married.”

. . .

As Gojo makes his way back to the neighborhood where he parked his car, he pulls his phone out of his pocket, scrolls through his recent calls, and is surprised to find that his brother-in-law’s name is a bit higher up on the list than he thought it would be. Or wanted it to be.

He lifts the phone to his ear when he presses dial, and the phone almost rings through four times before someone finally picks it up. 

“Yo! The man! The bro-in-law! What’s goin’ on, dude!” he hears Jun’s rather chirpy voice on the other line.

“Hey Jun,” Gojo says into his phone, walking down onto the residential street, “Just calling to let you know Juno’s been dropped off. I found out from one of the teachers that it’s only a half day today, though. So you’ll have to pick her up earlier.”

“Oh shoot…” Jun trails off, and Gojo can already tell what he’s about to ask of him.

Gojo likes Jun. He’s always liked the guy, actually. Although he always thought Sana would end up with someone Gojo didn’t like, as some act of defiance. But Jun was a lot different than the waste-of-space high school boyfriends Sana brought home during her teenage years (sorry if that sounds rude, it’s just that, once upon a time, Gojo used to be a waste-of-space high school boyfriend, as most teenage boys are, so he knows how awful they are and eventually grew into the conscious reasoning of loathing them). But anyway, Jun was a reliable guy. Hard-working, always seemed like he was on the hustle with his business, but he was a little unsettlingly cheerful all the time. The first expression of his that comes to mind whenever one thinks of him is a smile full of pearly white teeth and eyes squinted shut from the curve of his cheeks, but Gojo always figured it was some businessman tactic that eventually integrated into his personality as a whole. 

“Do you think you could—” Jun starts.

“No, Jun, I can’t,” Gojo cuts him off, “I’m closing a sale today.”

He knows he said he could never complain about looking after Juno, but in a sense, forcing her dad to ditch a measly hour of work to show up and pick her up from school is in a way looking after her. Kids need their dads, and it’s a little sad that even just showing up is something not a lot of them care to honor.

“Ayyy that’s okay then, I’ll just figure it out,” he says, “but thanks for dropping her off this morning!”

“Sure thing.” Gojo’s phone starts ringing, and he sees he has an incoming call from one of his clients. “Hey, I’ve gotta go. But remember, her school gets out at 1:30.” And he barely hears the acknowledgement from Jun before he switches calls.

By the time Gojo wraps up his afternoon showing, and spends a couple hours putting together all the paperwork for the sale he’s closing later today, he’s starving. And he considers picking up some Thai food on his way home but then he gets a text from you.

|| 1:04PM Neighbor HerbGarden: hey I made chicken parm. would you like me to set aside a plate for you

He can’t help the smile on his face from the message, and how strangely polite it is. He’s usually the type to call someone to respond to a question they ask him through text (the worst kind of person), but instead he finds him typing back.

|| 1:05PM Gojo: Sure although I’d prefer mine without any poison please

He sees the little three dots as you type.

|| 1:06PM Neighbor HerbGarden: unfortunately I cannot make any such accommodations 

And there it is again, that amused grin he can’t help. It’s uncannily similar to his days of being a waste-of-space high school boyfriend, except now he’s texting on iOS 18 instead of a Nokia brick. But also, he’s not seventeen anymore. It’s kind of dangerous that you make him feel like he is, though.

He hears his phone ping again.

|| 1:08PM Neighbor HerbGarden: also can you please pick up some orange juice from the store

|| 1:08PM Neighbor HerbGarden: without pulp

He blinks at the screen, before responding with,

|| 1:08PM Gojo: 👍👍👍

He stares at the messages for a few more seconds, then up at the blank grey contact number and your name Neighbor HerbGarden. He has a lot of numbers in his phone, from years and years of building clientele both in one of the biggest Metropolitan cities in the country, and also here in Dayton County within the past year that he’s lived here. Sometimes it was just easier and more efficient to save people in his phone as something that’ll make him remember who they actually are rather than just an arbitrary name. In one of the first times he met you, you brought him two bunches of dried oregano from your herb garden, and so he saved you in his phone as Neighbor HerbGarden to differentiate you from Neighbor BasketballHoop to his right.

Gojo presses his lips into a thin line then glances up to the sky as he stands outside of the vacant home he’s about to make major bank on today, and then clicks edit on your contact name.

He backspaces Neighbor HerbGarden then types,

Wife

He exhales slowly, then adds,

… (?)

To the end of the word.

Then shoves his phone in his pocket.

.

.

.

—

“God, that was delicious,” Gojo sighs as he sets the plates in the dishwasher, “I mean, seriously, you could open a restaurant. Er, actually, on second thought, probably not. Considering the natural disaster level of a mess you’ve left the kitchen in after making just one meal.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” you say, and he turns around to see you standing behind him still clad in your marinara-stained apron and your hair that was once pulled taut up into a ponytail now falling loose over your shoulders. The only thing that could make the sight even sexier is if you were topless. “Now sign this,” you say, holding up a sheet of paper to his face and placing a stern fist to your hip.

He blinks at you and slowly turns the faucet off before drying his hands off on the towel while still facing you. His eyes briefly skim the top of the page which says Contract.

“Uh, what’s this?” he asks.

“Our rules.”

He doesn’t even take a second to read another single word before his eyes flit up to yours, his brow quirking. “Rules?”

“Yes,” you say, and blow a puff of air up your cheek to get the hair out of your face, “remember? No touching, no sex, no sneaking into my room, no peeping in on me in the shower, and—” You point a finger up, “New one. No. Flirting.”

His mind fixates on the word sex. “No sex? Didn’t you ask me to fuck you the other day?” he says as he leans back on the counter, an amused look on his face as he crosses his arms over his chest. 

“That—” you stiffen then relax your shoulders before pinching the bridge of your nose in frustration of yourself, “I don’t recall such an event occurring.”

“Really? Well thank god I’ve got a ring camera set up in the living room.” He pretends to pull the app up on his phone.

“No!” you yell, reaching out to hold his forearm to stop him, likely through a way of distraction as his eyes flit to the curl of your fingers as you sink your nails into his skin. He quietly sucks a breath in through his teeth. “….stupid ring camera,” you mumble dejectedly, “I hate it.”

He sighs. “Baby. You’re the one that demanded I get it installed.” He clicks his tongue and shakes his head. “You and your strange fear of home invasion.”

“Don’t call me baby,” you hiss at him, and it’s rather easy to see the flush to your cheeks, “that counts as flirting.” You slam the paper down onto the counter. “Now sign this.”

“Nuh-uh,” he shakes his head, “don’t wanna.”

“Sign. It.”

“Nope, not without my lawyer present.”

“Ouuuuuu that really handsome one with the tight trousers and the sexy Benz?” you swoon cartoonishly.

He glances up at the ceiling in thought, then takes the bait. “Who needs lawyers, anyway.”

“Mhmmmmm exactly,” you hum in satisfactory agreement then wave the paper in front of his face again like he’s a dog. “So sign it.”

He hesitantly takes the sheet from you. “What good is signing a makeshift contract going to do?”

“I’m sick of people pretending like they don’t know that they’ve wronged me. So, with this contract, when you eventually wrong me, I’ll have it in writing that I specifically asked you not to.”

God damn you were kinda crazy. It was simultaneously hot and scary at the same time. I mean, he’s always known that about you; that you’re a bit differently strung than most people he’s ever met, even more so compared to the women he’s met, but there was something oddly charming and redeeming about it all too. It’s hard to explain. In the city, people are nice to your face but then fuck you over behind your back. Like, invite you over for dinner when their family is in town but then tell the principal that your kid shoved their kid at school just so that their kid gets the last spot on the T-ball team. But here in small Dayton County, people care less of the small gesture frivolities and would rather go straight into repairing your flat tire on the side of the road no questions asked, and no thanks needed, but God forbid you expect them to flash you a smile when you pass by them on the street. He kinda liked the latter, preferred the latter, and considering that you were born-and-raised here, you’re a woman who was as close to that Dayton County sentiment as anyone here could get.

He liked it though. Sure, you cuss him out often and act in ways that confuse the ever living hell out of him, but something told him that when it came down to it, and I mean really came down to it, you were someone he could trust. And trust is a feeling that’s hardly given out carelessly in this day and age.

He finally takes a better look at this contract of yours. Just a few lines of size 12pt font of Times New Roman and a numbered list with rules on it. It was a poorly put together contract of contingencies of which he knew he’d have no business following. Sure, he’s exercised self restraint up until this point, perhaps his biggest challenge thus far having been captured in 720p resolution on that Ring camera over in the other room that faces the couch, but if you kept wearing those prudish nightgowns all over the house and asked him to fuck you in the middle of a weekday one more time, he’s ninety-nine-point-nine percent sure he’d have no willpower left at that point.

He sighs and pretends to fully read all the words typed out on your contract, then flips it around so the contents face you as he holds it up. “Cross out the no flirting and we’re good.”

“I am not crossing that out.”

“If you live with me, I’m going to flirt with you. That’s just how it’s going to be.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Baby. This ask of yours is what’s borderline ridiculous.”

“Stop with the ‘baby!!!” you sneer at him and he can’t help but laugh.

He places the paper down on the surface of the island and clicks the pen, crosses out no, writes in occasional and adds is okay after the word flirting so that it reads: occasional flirting is okay. Then scribbles his signature on it.

“Here you go,” he says as he hands it back to you.

“I did not permit any addendums.”

“Look, honey, it’s the best you’re gonna get.”

He sees you scribble something down onto the page and then you hold it up for him to see.

No pet names.

“Do you agree?” you ask in a way that suggests you won’t take no for an answer.

He sighs. “Sure.”

“Good,” you say, satisfied as you stare down at the contract with approval before looking up at him again with a narrow, almost pissed-off gaze. It gets him borderline excited. “Now, are you a man of your word?”

“I hope so.”

“That’s not very reassuring. Try again.”

“It’s hard for me to say.”

“Why?”

“Well, with you, it’s hard for me to say.”

“That makes me self conscious.”

“Don’t be,” he says.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” you respond, then shuffle across the hardwood floors of the kitchen into the dining room where you sit down there along with all the hospital bills you’ve had scattered there since you moved in.

He sighs, watching as you grab a stack of all your envelopes and papers and manila folders then dump them all on the kitchen island.

“Sorry,” you say, “I’m running out of space.” You turn on your heel to head back to the dining table but then spin to face him again. “And please don’t look at the bills. I’d rather pretend they don’t exist.” Then you turn the corner back to where you came from.

Gojo sighs to himself, his eyes briefly flitting down to the stack of unsorted papers you’ve left on the table. He sees scribbles of paid and to be paid and ask for itemized bill and has already been sent to collections and repeat charge all over them, wondering how in hell you manage to keep track of all this. He feels stressed on your behalf.

Something catches his eye, among all the paperwork. A tiny corner poking out from under a bill for a thirty-four-hundred dollar chemotherapy infusion. The finely printed black ink on it is hard to read, but Gojo tugs it out and holds it up at eye level.

Carevest Capital est. 2024

Invest in a healthier you!

And when he skims to the bottom, he sees CEO Jun Miller, phone: (851)-334-5555 for the contact.

His brow furrows together. He inhales deeply before shuffling his feet over to the dining hall.

“Hey,” he says, pinching the card between his index and middle finger then holding it up, “what’s this?”

You turn over to look at him, eyes wide and blinking innocently before you squint at the card. “Huh? Oh. That’s your brother-in-law’s business card. For his healthcare cost relief company.”

“He gave it to you?”

“Mhm.”

Gojo frowns. He brings the card down to look at it again. Last time he checked, Jun ran a small local auto parts repair shop. Routine stuff like cracked windshields and tinted windows, with the hopes of expanding business to a couple more places within the zip code. Gojo had never heard of any healthcare cost relief company. And he figured Jun would’ve provided some sort of proof of pay for it when Gojo helped him process the loan for their new house. It doesn’t make sense.

Gojo sighs, and chalks it up to ambition. He knows how businessmen are. A lot of his clients are like that. They always think they’ve caught the next-best-thing and want to chase it before anyone else can.

You’re still blinking at him with a mildly confused face.

He shakes his head. “It’s nothing. I wouldn’t put any money into this if I were you, though.”

You sigh and slump your shoulders. “As if I even could.” But then you turn to look at him again. “Why? You don’t think it’s a good idea?”

“What? Entrusting large sums of your money to some company that promises to somehow double it and give it back? Of fucking course not.”

“You don’t trust your own brother-in-law?”

“It—” He’s a little taken aback by the question. “It’s not that I don’t. It’s just that I don’t really trust businessmen at large.”

“Aren’t you…technically a businessman?”

“What?”

You put your elbow up on the chair’s backrest and twist your torso more to look at him. “Last time I checked, you sell houses.”

“That—…that’s different.”

“Is it?”

“I’m a realtor. Not a businessman. Business people, you know, they play dirty to get what they want. I’m just helping people with a task that they don’t always have the time or resources to do.”

“You literally make up contrived skit scenarios so that your clients find houses more memorable, and also pimp yourself out to divorced housewives so they’ll follow through on a return offer. That’s no better than the way a businessman manipulates.”

“Is your opinion of me really that low?”

And he asks it with genuinity. Not laced with mirth, or faux arrogance, or a childlike desire for banter. He genuinely wants to know, after the past few weeks of getting to know each other a little bit better, if you really think of him as someone like that.

As if you felt the way his tone cut through air, setting precedent for what had otherwise felt like a neutral conversation tethering on an edge of hostility, you sit up a little straighter in your chair and your eyes are wide again as you blink at him, and he sees the shallow rise of your chest as you breathe through the movement of your marinara-stained apron. 

“No,” you say, your expression softening, “it’s not.”

He’s not sure what exactly your words accomplish in him, or what reward he gained for seeking them out, if any, but he just lets out a huff of an exhale and grabs his suit jacket off the back of the chair at the head of the table, pulling his arms through the sleeves before shrugging it into place. Then he grabs his keys off the wooden surface and glances at his watch. “Alright,” he says, “that’s good to know.” Then heads towards the door.

.

.

.

—

“You know, Satoru, I met my wife on a military excursion to Thailand. It’s precisely why I’m ruined for all American women. The women over there, they just move with this sort of sensual grace that the women here can’t compete with.”

“Uh-huh,” Gojo barely nods in acknowledgment of his client’s words as he sits at the lonesome dining table located in the otherwise chilling vacancy of this house he’s about to hand over. “So, did you two have a chance to take a look at the walkthrough report?”

The wife curls her arm around her husband’s bicep, and from an outsider’s perspective, it would look awfully inappropriate given she looks at least twenty years younger than him, but to Gojo, it’s something he tends to see pretty often when he makes sales up in the neighborhoods of this part of town.

“Yes,” she says, smiling up at her husband, and the action alone ages her ten years from the ripples of botox visible in her cheeks, “Len and I are so ready to call this home our own.”

“What do you think of Thai women, Satoru,” Len asks him, completely ignoring any and all tasks at hand because he’s not satisfied with the low level of interest his realtor is taking to his fruitless words.

“Never been with one,” Gojo comments flatly as he flips through the closing documents and highlights whatever needs to be signed.

There’s a bitter taste in his mouth, and maybe it’s because he remembers your words from earlier. About pimping himself out or playing dirty like a businessman. Gojo’s brow furrows slightly as he stares a little excessively too long at a simple key release form. But he just feels annoyed. So what if he pretends to get along with guys like Len up until that 6% commission hits his bank account? What’s so wrong about making a living? Not everyone has to be sacred about what they do for work. 

“You’re missin’ outtttt, man,” Len comments as Gojo passes all the papers over to the two of them. He only takes a quick glance at the papers before saying. Gojo taps his pen on the table as an annoyed tick, looking at the documents sitting in front of Len and thinking just sign the fuckin’ papers already, but instead, Len sets his pen down to further stall. “Why don’t we head out to lunch after this? To celebrate. I’m craving some Tom Kha Soup,” he says with an exaggerated accent, then points the pen at Gojo. “And we’ll hook you up with a nice Thai lady while we’re there.”

“I already had lunch,” he says, not even bothering to say and I’m also married because he knows the ‘already having had lunch’ excuse would hold more weight to Len than any declaration of lifelong romantic commitment.

“Bummer,” Len says, “you ate at home?”

“Yup.”

“I gotta start doing that, too, you know, eating healthier,” Len says before leaning back into his chair with a grunt. “Doctor said somethin’ to me about my cholesterol gettin’ too high and that even the statins won’t be able to save me.”

His wife looks like she’s just heard the most fantastic news ever, but conceals it with a frown, then swats a playful hand towards Gojo.

“Does your wife cook for you?” she asks cheerfully.

Technically, you’ve only offered to include him in your lunch plans two or three times so far, and coincidentally only on the days he mowed the lawn in the morning like you asked him to, but he says, “yeah, she does.” To keep things simple. But he also comes to the realization that you’re trying to Pavlov him into doing more chores around the house by feeding him ridiculously good food.

“See, Len? Some men actually appreciate their wives’ cooking.” She pretends to appear offended as she playfully smacks at her husband's chest.

“Sweetheart, you know I didn’t marry you for your cooking,” he drawls, saying it near her ear as if it were meant to be said in secret and she bashfully giggles.

For fucks sake he’s not sure how much longer of this he can take. The feeling of awkwardness as he sits on the other end of the most classic stereotypical conversation he would ever have the displeasure of hearing between a boomer and his too-young-for-him foreign wife. He wonders what you’d say if he bitched about this conversation to you. He could picture you yelling in passion about the perpetuation of the patriarchy with the disgraceful existence of predatory men like Len. 

In the midst of his borderline cognitive crisis, his phone starts buzzing in his pocket.

The number looks vaguely familiar, but it’s unsaved.

“Hey, sorry you two,” he says to the couple seated across from him before he gets up out of his chair, “I’ve gotta take this.” Then excuses himself into the hallway and brings his phone to his ear. “Hello?”

“Hello, this is Marium calling from Rockwell Elementary, I’m looking for Mr. Gojo Satoru?”

“Yeah, speaking.”

“Oh, wonderful, thank you for taking my call. I’m just reaching out because we’re getting close to closing up the gates for school now.”

Gojo glances at his watch. 2:57PM.

“The kids got out of school about an hour and a half ago but no one has come to pick Juno up yet. She’s the last one here. We tried contacting her parents, but no one answered, so we had to reach out to her emergency contacts. Mrs. Shapiro is waiting with her, but if someone isn’t able to take her home soon, we’ll have to send her to the KinderCare on Ventura Street once the last bus comes by.”

Gojo pinches the bridge of his nose and shuts his eyes tightly. “No, I'll come pick her up. I’ll be there in ten.”

Gojo now finds himself back at his niece’s elementary school, waiting at the gate for the teacher to being her around to the courtyard. No major sale closed. His clients are going out of town tomorrow, so they had to sell today, and he’s now obligated to share some portion of his eighty-thousand dollar commission with his colleague who’s doing the favor of wrapping things up for the sale in his absence. All because Jun couldn’t even remember the time he was supposed to pick Juno up from school, even after Gojo told him twice when she’d get off. And it was safe to say he was a bit pissed. 

“Uncle Toru!!!” he hears Juno’s voice chirp from a distance, and when he turns his head, he sees her running towards him, her backpack bouncing up and down in her sprint, before she crashes into Gojo’s arms as he kneels down towards the ground and wraps her arms around her.

“Hey, kiddo,” he says, then picks her up, “you ready to head home?”

Before Juno can respond, Gojo hears a man shout from the drop-off zone. He turns his head towards that direction, squints his eyes and makes out Jun’s silhouette approaching from a car that has its hazard lights turned on and he’s hastily making his way over.

“Juno!!” he waves his hand up in the air, the sound of his keys that hang from his thumb jingling as he gets closer. Gojo sets Juno down and is surprised that she doesn’t immediately run to her dad, but instead grips onto Gojo’s index finger with her whole hand and itches her ankle with the tip of her other shoe.

“Hi daddy,” she says, peering up at him underneath the roof of her baseball cap.

Jun crouches down to eye-level with her, and holds his arms out. “Hey sweetheart, how was school?”

She’s hesitant before she slowly releases her tight grip on Gojo’s finger and walks towards Jun, and accepts his embrace. “Good,” she says shallowly.

Jun sneaks a glance up at Gojo’s face, and Gojo couldn’t even hide the disappointment if he tried.

“Hey, Juno, why don’t you go sit in the car? I have Frozen playing,” he says to her, placing a kiss on her temple, and that news entirely excites Juno as she squeals with happiness then runs toward the car. Both Gojo and Jun watch her climb into the car and close the door before properly regarding each other. 

“Listen, Jun, I’m just going to give it to you straight because I’m not in the mood to bullshit,” Gojo says, “I get that you’re busy, but you can’t just forget your own kid at school and leave her stranded to the point where admin have to call her emergency contacts just to get her home safely.”

“I know, I know, it’s just that—”

“I mean, last weekend you forgot what time her dance recital was and completely missed it. The one she had been practicing towards for weeks. You’ve basically asked me to drop her off at school every day for the past week and a half with no good excuse as to why. And then you do this. Like, what’s gotten into you, man?” He takes a breath to prevent his tone from turning too sharp, but when he thinks about Juno sitting all alone in a classroom with her teacher after watching all her friends get picked up with love and taken home on what was supposed to be a fun half-day for her, he feels pissed off at the negligence. “She’s a smart kid. And as proud of that as you should be, it does mean that she’s smart enough to notice these things. And it’s going to make her feel like her own dad doesn’t care about her.”

“I know, and I’m so sorry,” he says, panic on his face as the mistake settles in, “it’s just, you know, with Sana going back to work, her being occupied with the new job and everything, I dunno, I’m so used to her taking care of Juno but now that more responsibility has fallen on me, it’s really hard to manage with my businesses—” he catches himself, his eyes widening, and Gojo narrows his, “…my business.” He corrects himself.

“What could be more important than your own kid?” Gojo asks.

“Nothing. At least there shouldn’t be. You’re right.”

But even after Jun gave him the answer he expected to hear, the question still lingers in his head. Businesses. Jun is running more than just the auto parts company, at least one other one that he knows of based on what you told him regarding the business card. He just found out right now that Sana is going back to work, after about six years of being out of the workforce.

And then he recalls what Juno said to him this morning.

But mommy said no. That there is no money.

Gojo’s brows furrow, and he blinks at a very guilty-looking Jun in front of him, before his expression relaxes and the stiffness in his shoulders relax.

“Is—” Gojo starts, unsure on how to tread the question, “is everything okay?”

Jun stands up a little straighter. “Yeah. Yeah, of course,” he chirps rather unconvincingly, with that same level of faux cheerfulness he often displays.

Gojo sighs, glances over to the right. He sees the preschool next door, with its playground completely deserted, then he glances back at Jun. 

“If you need help,” Gojo starts, “with anything at all,” and he sees the way Jun’s posture dampens slightly, “don’t hesitate to ask.”

“Will do, man,” Jun said, “but I’ll make sure I’ve got Juno’s school schedule in my phone so you won’t have to do this again.” And something tells Gojo that Jun is purposefully pretending as if he didn’t catch onto the fact that Gojo was referring to finances as some preservation of his pride in front of another man.

Gojo gives himself a couple seconds to consider if he should push the subject any further, but just respects the deflection, and says, “alright.”

.

.

.

—

God forbid a man has a drink or two during happy hour at his favorite bar to get over a rather stressful day, just to end up running into his fake wife’s ex boyfriend before he can even catch a little bit of a buzz.

Wait, that’s a lie, the first single malt was starting to flow through his veins.

And he knows you told him that he didn’t need to bother trying to make the guy jealous anymore,

But god, it was just so fun. And he could really use the entertainment right now.

“Oh every position possible, pal. Doggy, prone bone, cowgirl, reverse cowgirl. Anything from the Kama Sutra. You name it, we do it,” Gojo says.

He’s seated at the far end of the high-top, his preferable location as it was away from the bustling tables and gigantic TV on top of all the kegs that’s playing the Seahawks vs 49ers semifinals game, but it’s still close enough to the bartender to make small talk when he wanted it. Up until he was interrupted by the guy to his right who’s standing with fists clenched tightly at his sides from hearing Gojo flaunt of this allegedly stellar sex life he’s got with the guy’s ex girlfriend. Truth be told, Gojo forgot his name. He tries to place it as he looks the man up and down from where he’s seated. Nappy black hair, long enough to curl at the back of his neck, wearing an obnoxiously tight black shirt, along with black leather pants.

“She doesn’t even like cowgirl,” he says defensively, “always used to say it hurts her knees.”

Fuck. Of course you have knee problems. Think, Gojo, think. “Uh, she likes it with me,” he comes up with, “she likes anything with me.”

Gojo glances up at the guy once again when he doesn’t respond back fast enough, seeing the way his jaw clenches and his hands further condense into fists at his side. The amusement of making him get all riled up quickly dissipates, as he imagined it would anyways, and instead, he almost feels sorry for him. Gojo knows exactly what he must be thinking right now. Memories of you naked that he’s preserved like holy water after the end of a seven year relationship, now morphing into visuals of you getting railed by your new husband instead, and that sweet image he has of you in his head will never be the same. Forever being ruined by another guy’s dick. It’s an intrusive thought that every man on the planet has experienced at some point or another, himself included. He’s already fucked you more in this guy’s imagination than he’s even remotely gotten close to doing in real life (well, he was partially to blame for that) but Leather Pants over here isn’t going to know that when he’s losing sleep over it at night. And now Gojo’s got guilt on his conscience. His least favorite feeling.

Ah.

Choso.

Choso Kamo.

That was his name. 

Gojo glances down at his glass of scotch, trailing the line of the rim with the pad of his index finger, feeling more heat radiating off of the rage from Choso’s body than the woodfire flame of the heaters behind the high-top counter.

He sighs then glances over at Choso again, eyeing him in dim lighting. “You’ll find someone else, man,” he says, “don’t get hung up on just one person. It’s a useless kind of torture.” 

He speaks as if he’s entirely detached from the sentiment.

Choso crosses his arms. “So it’s not just some scam, then? You two really are married?” He grits his teeth. “In good faith?” He mocks the law in his tone as if he doesn’t defend it. 

Gojo stares blankly at the surface of wood in front of him, the color charred with black and faded with use, his expression sobering for a moment as he lets out a deep breath. His stare turns shallow, like he’s about to dissociate, and for some reason, the lie doesn’t come as easy to him this time. “You were there in the courtroom. You know the answer to that question.”

Choso huffs, and as if he couldn’t help going against his own oath to secrecy, he declares, “I’m investigating, you know. At least I will be. Collecting evidence.”

Gojo exhales, staring down at the amber liquid in his glass, before bringing the rim to his mouth and tipping some of it back. 

He’s familiar with US federal law regarding marital insurance fraud. 8 U.S.C. 1033 and 18 U.S.C. 371 provide for a penalty of up to ten years in prison for it. And under that statute, perpetrators can also be expected to be fined up to $250,000. And although millions of people everyday get away with all sorts of illegal activity, he knows that there’s also millions of people everyday that don’t. That was the problem with the law in an otherwise tumultuous country. You never know how much you need to truly fear it. As if it were up to personal choice rather than any real social stature.

Truthfully, Gojo isn’t really the type to not think things through before going through with them. He’s fiscally responsible (minus his boat), tries not to get attached to places or people a little too easily, and always makes sure he knows the traffic situation ahead of time before going down Interstate 10. On the outside, he lived a rather simple life. Getting tied up into an insurance scam was certainly not the first thing he pictured for himself when he left New York City for little old Dayton County without anything other than a cabin suitcase that was mostly empty anyways. But he got invested in his rather strange neighbor who’s going through a tough time, and suddenly he’s going against everything that’s inherent to him. As previously mentioned, there is a part of him that finds it exciting. Y’know, that part that enjoys a little bit of chaos and uncertainty, that part of him that chases a thrill. That tendency to think first, act later, the one that gets people into a lot of trouble. But it’s almost like he’s been subconsciously itching for it this entire time. And maybe even for his entire life, now that he (and the alcohol) thinks about it.

But going to jail is definitely where he draws the line on adrenaline seeking.

And besides. He doesn’t want to see you fail.

He knows that to people who aren’t American, the whole idea seems so strange.

Why risk time in prison and the potential to be fined upwards of a quarter million dollars just to get healthcare for you and your loved ones?

But it’s only because that risk of consequence hardly rivals the reality of the situation anyways.

He saw your bills. He knows you told him not to look, because he knows the only way you keep your sanity and keep your head above water is by allowing a part of yourself to ignore the existence of your suffering.

But for fucks sake, forty-two-thousand-dollars out of pocket just for your mom’s two-day hospitalization? And that was just one of the outstanding bills? With big bold letters IF YOU DO NOT PAY THIS WITHIN THE NEXT 5-7 BUSINESS DAYS, WE WILL SEND THIS BILL TO COLLECTIONS.

You put any layman in a situation like that, and he couldn’t imagine suicide wouldn’t cross their mind at least once.

Gojo glances over at Choso’s jacket. The Club at Snoqualmie Ridge. 

As the saying goes, keep your friends close, and keep cops who threaten to perform a full blown investigation of the legitimacy of your marriage even closer.

“You play golf, Kamo?”

“What–” Choso stutters, a little surprised by the question, but his fists relax slowly, “yeah?”

“We should go for a swing sometime.”

“Huh? But—”

Gojo pushes his empty glass of scotch up the table a few inches then gets up out of the chair, standing in front of Choso, gaze leveling before he pats him on the shoulder, and says, “Just to see who’s the better shot.” Then brushes past him to go close out his tab.

.

.

.

—

It’s late in the evening by the time Gojo finishes running some errands and can finally unwind on the couch. A crisp cold can of diet coke in hand…impractical jokers playing for background noise from his 86 inch OLED smart TV, his legs stretched out in front of him onto the coffee table he made himself, and sunk deep into his favorite corner of the couch. The one he’s broken in over the years into that just perfect amount of give to sink ratio. It truly was the simple things in life.

He picks up the book he had left off reading from the coffee table. A white cover with bolded red letters that read Crucial Conversation: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. It was some self-help book one of his partners at the brokerage firm recommended to him that apparently revolutionized the way he sells houses.

“Hm,” Gojo hums to himself, flipping the pages of the book, that freshly-printed-processed-wood smell hitting his senses satisfactorily. He gets to the part he had left off on.

He squints at the pages, hard to read with contacts that are half a step below his prescription, but he at least tries to skim for the buzzwords.

The pool of shared meaning is the birthplace of synergy.

Okay, whatever the fuck that means.

He skims some more.

People don’t get defensive because of what you’re saying; they get defensive because of why they think you’re saying it.

He skims more. 

If you don’t talk it out, you’ll act it out through passive aggression.

He skims more.

The key to building safety is to step out of the content and address the conditions.

He doesn’t really know what exactly this all means but he feels like he should be taking notes.

Right when he leans over to open one of the drawers of the coffee table to fish for a pen, he hears keys jingling by the front door, somewhat frantically, before finally pushing into the lock and then the door flies open. He sits back, slightly startled, as he takes in the image of you storming inside the house looking angry as hell when you slam the door behind you.

“Hey,” he scolds, “easy on the doors, please.”

You’re pacing back and forth in front of the foyer table, clenching and unclenching your fists, mumbling what sounds like profanities to yourself over and over again, cheeks flush with rage, face scrunched up like a prune, and huffing and puffing so fast that he’s astonished he can still make out some of the words that you’re spewing.

“That…little…mother…–” You shuffle back and forth on the hardwood floor, “fucker. What a fucking–” You’re borderline hyperventilating, “JERK!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Gojo rests his book splayed open in his lap and blinks at you. “Uh. Is everything alright?”

“No!!!!” You immediately snap at him, turning to face him, and he flinches from where he’s sat. “No, it’s not!”

He’s too scared to move at this point, let alone breathe.

You breathe in deep then let out an exhale. “That–” You close your eyes from pure fury. “That motherfucking Choso Kamo,” you struggle to even say the words without gritting your teeth, “told the entire Dayton County police department that he’s the one that broke up with me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

“Wow,” Gojo says.

You glare at him. “I don’t need your fake sympathy.”

“All I said was wow?”

“Well, it felt very disingenuine.”

“But–”

He blinks at a fuming you, who has your arms crossed over your chest tightly, tapping your foot on the ground impatiently, expression narrow. 

He glances down at the page that was open in his book.

“Uh,” he clears his throat, quickly skimming the words, then glances up at you, “Sorry. I acknowledge that my words, er, word, may have been careless, and I apologize.”

Your expression morphs into one of surprise and barebone confusion. “O-Oh…that’s okay. I guess I was just assuming things.” You glance off towards the left, worrying your bottom lip between your teeth. “I’m just pissed off right now.”

“Because of what your ex said?”

“Yes. It’s annoying because now all of our local law enforcement thinks that I’m the one more affected by all of this.”

He watches you pace back and forth again, steam rolling out of your ears, face scrunched up with anger again, looking like you’re about to rip your hair off as you mumble more profanities to yourself.

He looks at you skeptically. “Are you…not?” He knows the second he says it that it was the wrong thing to say.

“I’M NOT!!!” you scream at him defensively. 

“Sorry, sorry, I–” He glances down at his book again discreetly, then says rather stiffly, “...I just want you to know that I am here for you.” 

You blink at him. “Oh…well, that’s—” You scratch at your elbow gently and then tuck strands of your hair behind your ear, “that’s very sweet of you, thank you.”

Hmmmmmmmm. 

He steals another quick glance at the page. “What’s been the hardest part to deal with in this situation?” he asks, crossing his outstretched legs at the ankle and placing his elbow up on the armrest to set his chin down on the knuckles of his fist inquisitively.

You turn to face him again, expression softening pleasantly but there’s still a bit of surprise on your face. “Oh, it–...I don’t know, I think just…it’s a misunderstanding that he’s willingly spreading.”

“And how does that make you feel?”

You let out a hefty exhale, loosely crossing your arms over your chest as you lean back onto the Foyer table. You glance at the floor deep in thought. “Mm…angry. Frustrated. Embarrassed.” You glance up at the high ceiling. “I just hate feeling misunderstood.”

“Mhm…I see,” he nods inquisitively, then glances down at the chart in the book again, “And can you pinpoint when these feelings started?”

You look up at the chandelier, expression curling into one of melancholy. “I think I’ve always just had a hard time expressing myself emotionally, where what I do kind of comes off as different from how I really feel…and so when people take things the wrong way, it just…I don’t know, it makes me upset.”

“I hear you.” He’s running a blank so he haphazardly flips the pages of the book to a whole other chapter and glances down at words that read always gather more information when necessary. Then he looks back up at you. “And what exactly did this guy do to you that’s got you so—” he pauses when you narrow your eyes at him, “…er, that made you,” he watches you nod your head encouragingly as if waiting for him to validate the reality of this situation, “…break up with him.”

You nod, satisfied by his depiction of events, but cross your arms over your chest somewhat stubbornly. When your eyes pass over to him again, your expression softens slightly, as if contemplating something, but then it becomes rigid again.

“It’s…I don’t know. It’s whatever.”

“Did he murder a family member?”

“No.”

“Did he steal money from you?”

“No.”

“Did he cheat on you?”

You avert your gaze towards the kitchen. “…no.”

“Then what?”

You exhale deeply, still avoiding eye contact with him. “The why doesn’t matter. Just know that he failed me and subsequently lost me.”

“Well,” Gojo says, “then he’s an idiot.” And he didn’t need the book to come up with that.

You look back at him with a gentle ease, and your arms drop from their crossed position before you smooth your palms down the fabric of your jeans. You try to maintain eye contact with him but not without blinking your lashes a few more times than usual. “Thanks for, um…letting me vent. I actually feel a lot better after…talking about it.”

“Sure,” he closes the book in his lap, “same time next week?”

“What?”

“—What?”

You squint your eyes at him suspiciously, but then drop it when you let out a hefty sigh and pinch the bridge of your nose in exhaustion. “I’m going to go take a shower.”

He’s not sure if it’s appropriate for a therapist to make a without me? joke in response to one of their clients announcing that they’re going to go take a shower, but he holds back regardless. 

He watches you shuffle across the hardwood floors towards the stairs, mumbling a few more remnant profanities as if you still had a couple left in you to spill. And just when he sees you lift one foot up on the first step, he remember that he should probably—

“Oh, uh, sorry, while we’re on the topic of your ex,” he says, “is now a bad time to tell you that I’m going golfing with him on Sunday?”

Your jaw drops.

The argument that ensues after was less of an argument and more you yelling at him for about ten minutes straight while he’s unable to get a single word in and has no choice but to just take it. Which even he’s self aware enough to know he deserves, regardless of whatever scheming good intentions he may seem to have. And when you storm away upstairs, slam the door to your bedroom with a force that would suggest he’ll have to repair it in the morning, he knows that he’s back to square one with you now. And if this was a real marriage, with a couple of kids running around the house, and a lack of spare bedrooms, he knows that he’d have been sleeping on the couch tonight.

One step forward, two steps back. 

.

.

.

.

.

[end of ch.8, ‘two steps back’]

song(s) of the chapter: woman by harry styles

a/n. hiii loves!! thanks so much for tuning into another chapter of ihm :'') it means a lot to meee. yeah this was the first gojo pov which had me sooooo nervous because like tbh before i wrote this chapter i kinda had no idea who ihm gojo was. because reader's pov chapters are sooo heavily skewed to her pov and she's kind of an unreliable narrator, i never really had to sit down n force myself to confront how ihm gojo feels about things personally. there were lots of times where i was hitting roadblocks in my writing of this chapter because i simply was like "...wait how would he feel about this. i don't even know" hahah idk if that makes sense but yeah i definitely had to search within myself to kinda bring more of his character traits to life and balance his good qualities against his flaws. i hope you enjoyeeddd. once again my classic ihm apology that there's so many random side plots lolol i really am trying to keep the romance at the center of the story but then i get a little carried away xd i promise there will be chapters where there are bigger developments though!! but there may also be some other ones that kinda serve for set-up :''0 i try to make each chapter engaging though at the very least. but speaking of....... i am SOOOOOO excited for chapters 9 & 10 HEHEHEHEHEHEH let's just saaayyyyy we get introduced to a character that many of my readers have been curious about :)))) but yeah chapter 9 is already one of my favorite chapters of ihm so far i've only written like maybe 4.5k words for it and i'm so pumped to finish it and post it!! and then ch10 is...also one of my faves ahhhhh huuuuuuge thank you to my beta reader leni she singlehandedly gave me the confidence to post certain scenes in this chapter that i was planning to cut out but now i'm soooo happy that i kept them in!!! she's a real one fr. and thank you to another one of my beta readers josie who really forced me to think a lot ab ihm gojo's character before i went into writing this chapter lmfaooo she made me realize i didn't know shit about him HAHAH. and ofc thank you to mirl and ayelin too for helping me figure out some of the plot intricacies and providing me w support :'''') i really appreciate it i hope you guys enjoyed!! thank you to everyone who reads and interacts and leaves love for me. i'm so happy to i'm still able to make time for writing and that there are people who look forward to my updates. love you all very much!! hope to see you in the next one <3

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[lost-and-ephemeral]

Could you please do LDS boys +

Caleb reacting to reader being injured/severely injured?<3

HCs: You're Injured (ft. main trio + Caleb)

Pairing: Xavier x reader, Zayne x reader, Rafayel x reader, Caleb x reader (seperate)

Tags: hurt/comfort, reader is injured but won't die

A/N: Thanks for your request! First time writing for Caleb, yay. Sorry if it isn't good enough, I'm not feeling so good since morning.

-`♡´- MASTERLIST -`♡´- 

Caleb

"Hold on, pip-squeak, I'm right here."

Your exhausted body, covered in wounds from the battle with Wanderer, was ready to collapse to the ground if Caleb hadn't caught you in time.

He knew how dangerous your job was, but that didn't make him any less worried.

You protected him but got hurt in the process.

He's frustrated and angry because there's no way he could've protected you in that situation.

And Caleb just hates this feeling, but trying to stay calm for your sake. His emotions could only make everything worse.

"Sometimes even big girls need someone else's help. Right? And I'm here for you."

Concern was written all over his face, he couldn't hide it even if he really tried. The last thing he wanted was to see you hurt, especially like this.

He was supposed to be your main protector back then. But now things have changed.

You had really grown a lot, not just physically, but mentally too.

It was just hard to accept you're no longer a little girl.

Yes, you are strong and mature. But Caleb kept holding you like you were the most fragile being in the world.

He will give you first aid as quickly as he can, while calling an ambulance. Caleb is not the kind of person who would risk your life trying to handle this situation on his own.

Definitely going to the hospital with you while holding your hand and talking to you. He'll be around as long as it takes.

Probably will fall asleep on the chair near your hospital bed.

No doubt he'll continue to look after you like he did when you both were younger.

Rafayel

"No, no, no. Don't even think about leaving me like this!"

Maybe sometimes Rafayel was overly dramatic, but he's actually afraid of losing you again.

When he saw that you were injured after not-so-pleasant encounter with Wanderers, his facade of self-confidence instantly cracked.

Rafayel started panicking and it was clear from the look on his face as he crouched beside you, seeing how you trying to cover the wound by your bloody hands.

Not again. No.

All these years he had to watch you die over and over again, losing all memories of him.

Rafayel instantly began to examine your wounds, holding you close. He didn't care if his perfectly white shirt will be covered in blood as well.

He needed to be sure you won't die this time.

And his playful attitude is gone completely.

"Don't you dare to die on me, you hear? I won't forgive you. Ever. Promise me. Promise me you won't die."

He tried to remain calm and ignore the suffocating feeling of anxiety that has been slowly rising in his chest. But he couldn't.

Will do everything to stop the bleeding while help is on it's way. You can feel his hands trembling.

He'd better die for you himself, not vice versa.

I swear, this man is gonna get the whole hospital on alert. Nurses and doctors can be mad at him as much as they want. It doesn't matter to him.

Rafayel won't rest and eat properly until you get better. He just physically can't.

"Don't scare me like this ever again, please."

Xavier

"I failed you."

You accidentaly got injured during your mission. And poor Xavier decided it was totally his fault.

You both found yourself surrounded by enemies and before he could even react, one of them attacked you, leaving a deep wound on your side.

Needless to say, in the next couple of seconds all Wanderers were completely destroyed, and Xavier was fully focused on you.

This isn't the first time you've been injured during a mission. But each time Xavier is as worried as always.

Especially when your injuries are so severe.

Will administer first aid on the spot, even the bare minimum, before carrying you to safety.

With Wanderers around, it's not going to be easy to get you out of this dangerous zone. So Xavier needs to stabilize you a little at first.

"I won't let you get hurt again. I promise."

He is already experienced in these situations, so he's able to keep his emotions under control. But that doesn't mean that deep inside he isn't worried sick about you.

Will be looking for anything to treat your wound and avoid infection.

Guilt will slowly eat him up from the inside no matter what. He had to protect you, but he failed to do so.

Even if you assure him it's just an accident, Xavier just shakes his head in response.

As soon as you can get out, he'll take you to the hospital. It is unlikely that his skills will be enough to make your wound heal properly.

Better safe than sorry.

He still has a lot of work to do, but he'll come to you whenever he has a spare minute.

Will probably act like a guilty puppy for a long time.

Zayne

"You're constantly putting yourself in danger."

Zayne has a hard time showing his feelings openly, especially when it comes to you, so it's no surprise that his display of concern felt like he was scolding you.

But in reality he's really, really worried about you every time.

He knew right away that you were in the hospital after another accident.

And as soon as Zayne had some time off between surgeries, he came to you.

Looking at you in the hospital bed, he felt his heart ache.

While he was desperately searching for a cure for your heart, you kept getting hurt again and again.

Even when you smiled, like if trying to reassure him everything's fine, Zayne only sighed and shook his head. You have no idea how hard it was to see you hurt and vulnerable like this.

He's already been informed of the severity of your wounds and how much blood you've lost.

And he could've lost you.

But Zayne can't let his emotions take over. There are still a few more difficult surgeries ahead where he cannot afford to make a mistake.

And if he starts panicking right in front of you, it's not going to speed up the healing process.

"I'd be happy if you took a more responsible approach to your health. Then I wouldn't have to be so worried."

He moved his chair closer to your bed and sat in silence for a while, squeezing your hand.

Zayne will stay around as long as his job lets him.

Don't be surprised to find candies or plushies you wanted on your nightstand.

You can ask him about these little gifts.

And watch carefully as a faint smile appears on his lips.

"Usually only children get so excited about toys. So it turns out you're not that far from being a child?"

[narcjsistx]

"𝐒𝐀𝐍𝐓𝐀, 𝐅𝐎𝐑 𝐂𝐇𝐑𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐌𝐀𝐒 𝐈 𝐖𝐀𝐍𝐓... 𝐀 𝐎𝐒!" | bllk os event ⛄

christmas is near, and why not spend the week before the big day reading oneshots about the characters from the blue lock animanga?

EVENT FROM 18 TO 25 DECEMBER!! every day, a new os with a different romantic trope

I asked chatgpt this question for all the characters in the list: if you think of the character (name), what song comes to mind? with what trope?

I chose the characters I write about the most, plus some I've never written anything about, but who interest me. I hope to satisfy you!

— 18/12: rin itoshi

— 19/12: sae itoshi

— 20/12: isagi yoichi

— 21/12: shidou ryusei

— 22/12: karasu tabito

— 23/12: nagi seishiro

— 24/12: bachira meguru

— 25/12: kaiser micheal

— rin itoshi 18/12 — RIGHT CHOICHE

song: "Homewrecker" by Marina

trope: Forbidden Love. the song explores themes of attraction that may be complicated, reflecting the idea of falling for someone who is already involved with someone else

plot: falling in love with Rin Itoshi, the captain of the national team, was not in your plans, it never had been. you hadn't done it, or at least you had hidden it well, when you were a child, but doing it now that he was about to get married? damn

——— 🎄

— sae itoshi 19/12 — ANNIVERSARY GIFT

song: "Numb" by Linkin Park

trope: The Weight of Expectations. the pressure to meet societal or familial expectations can create tension in a romantic relationship, leading to misunderstandings and emotional distance

plot: that your boyfriend was sometimes distant was not a new thing. he often needed his space, both physical and mental, and you accepted this. but you did not expect him to put a match in the first place of the list on the day of your wedding anniversary

——— 🎄

— isagi yoichi 20/12 — OCCUPY EVERYTHING

song: "Hall of Fame" by The Script featuring will.i.am

trope: Supportive Partner. the idea of having a partner who encourages and believes in you can be a central theme. this trope highlights how love can motivate individuals to pursue their dreams and overcome obstacles

plot: today is an important day, very important, maybe the most important of your boyfriend's life, the dream of a lifetime finally realized: the soccer world cup. last minutes, the ball ends up in the net thanks to him. the crowd tries to win the heart of the japanese boy, but he already has your heart that has always supported him

——— 🎄

— shidou ryusei 21/12 — BEAST AND ANGEL

song: "Bad Guy" by Billie Eilish

trope: Opposites Attract. the song's edgy vibe can represent a relationship where two very different personalities are drawn to each other. one partner may be more wild and carefree, while the other is more grounded, creating a dynamic tension that can lead to romance

plot: during the christmas period it was normal for the association to invite the players, and their girlfriends, to organized dinners. shidou loves to show up at these dinners with you, where everyone asks you how you can be together even though you are so different

——— 🎄

— karasu tabito 22/12 — THE FEAR OF BEING

song: "Crawling" by Linkin Park

trope: Rescue Romance. in this trope, one character is drawn to another who is struggling with their inner demons. the relationship becomes a journey of support and healing, where one partner helps the other confront their issues, leading to a deep emotional bond

plot: the pact had been clear from the beginning: only needy kisses when the situation called for it, but no relationships. everything had been going smoothly up until that point, but the main problem was that now you were falling for your enemy's best friend. does tabito not want relationships because he doesn't want to set up seriously or just because he's afraid of ruining everything by being mediocre?

——— 🎄

— nagi seishiro 23/12 — GET USED TO

song: "Young and Beatiful" by Lana del Rey

trope: The Fear of Losing Love. this trope revolves around the anxiety of whether love will endure as time passes. the song's lyrics express a longing for reassurance that love will remain, even as youth and beauty fade

plot: nagi thinks everything is a hassle, but you're the last thing he thinks is. the only drag here is how he's starting to think the chemistry between you is running out

——— 🎄

— bachira meguru 24/12 — RUN AWAY

song: "Feel Good Inc" by Gorillaz

trope: The Escape from Reality. the song's themes of breaking free and seeking happiness can align with a romance where the couple finds solace in each other, escaping the pressures of the outside world. this trope emphasizes the idea of love as a refuge

plot: running away from the cameras was the favorite thing you and meguru did every chance you got. your love was yours alone, why give the world just a small slice of everything you felt for each other? it would be a waste

——— 🎄

— micheal kaiser 25/12 — LAST CHANCE

song: "Stronger" by Kanye West

trope: The Second Chance Romance. the idea of coming back stronger after a setback can represent a relationship that has faced challenges but is given a second chance. this trope explores themes of forgiveness, growth, and the rekindling of love

plot: why kaiser was at your door the night between christmas eve and christmas day? why did he have a red package, even though you had broken up last month?

——— 🎄

if you want to be tagged say it! I will add you to the list without problems 💗

[caoimhewrites]

Missing

how TF 141 + König react to you, their daughter going missing. Read Pt 2 here and Pt 3 here

CW: Mentions of kidnapping, surveillance (kinda), canon typical violence (mentions). Nothing crazy really but reader beware obvi

WC: 791

moved to @caoimhewritesfics

Ghost does not play about the people he cares about... especially you. It's been just you and him for years and when you disappear he absolutely loses it. He is DETERMINED to hunt down whoever took you. Doesn't matter how far they've taken you because he will be there the instant he figures out where you've gone. Gets the 141 to help him look and he spends day in and day out pouring over files and ANY information that could give him a clue on where you are. The other 141 boys try to keep him out of it, telling him this is too personal for him but he doesn't care at all. He will be leading this mission if it's the last thing he does.

König has had cameras in and out of the house for YEARS. He's been a soldier for a very long time and has seen A LOT so he's very very very serious about your constant safety. He regularly checks your phone and keeps tabs on who you interact with. Which is why he's so surprised when you disappear without a trace one day. He came home and you were just... gone. His first instinct was panic. He tore the house apart looking for you, leaving no place unchecked. When that proved useless he called EVERY contact in your phone. Yes he kept a list. He's right back to panic when no one knows where you are. He wastes no time searching through your room and all electronics. He'll take whatever clue he can when it comes to finding you. Just like Simon, he will be up 24/7 looking for you. Sleep means nothing to him until you are back home safe. When he finds you, trust he will be ruthless to anyone who tries to stop him or hurt you. He's carrying you out of there himself and he won't let you go until you're back home.

Price, when he sees your empty bedroom and phone on your nightstand he's immediately ready to do something crazy. Price is dad of the year... obviously, so protecting you is his main job. Forget being a soldier, you're priority #1 always. He blames himself at first, thinking he never should have left you alone, should have been even more involved than he already is, if that's even possible. He's banned from leading the search for you which eats him alive. He knows he's too close to all of this and being involved could end badly but he can't handle not knowing anything. He has the 141 boys secretly give him any updates on you. Is it allowed? Fuck no. Does he care? Absolutely not, not even a little bit. He hardly eats or sleeps at all, so consumed by his worry and lingering guilt. It's obviously not his fault but he can't help but feel like it is. His brain runs in circles, creating all sorts of horrible scenarios that make him physically sick. Were you taken by someone he knows? Did they take you to get back at him? Did he accidentally reveal something about you to an enemy?

Gaz has Price in speed dial the second you don't get home. Curfew is 10, by 10:05 the entire 141 is on the search. It's like Kyle has become a different person without you. He's usually pretty collected but he's absolutely out of his mind with worry. He's impulsive and angry. Price has to rein him in several times every day until you're found. He's ready to run in, guns blazing when they finally get your location. He's snappy and impatient, lashing out when there's a dead end in their search. He's on the edge of his seat when they finally track you down and go to get you out of there. He's like a man possessed when he gets his hands on your captors.

Soap is completely devastated when you don't come home. He's always been a bit less strict than the others but when you go out with your friends and don't come home even by the next morning he's absolutely riddled with anxiety. He calls your friend but she says you never had plans with her last night and hasn't seen you in days. This sends him into a horrible dread. He feels like he's suffocating not knowing where you are. Like Price, his mind creates horrible worst case scenarios. Simon tries to remind him that they are on it and the chance of whoever took you getting very far is low but Soap is completely lost in his own head. He can't shake the feeling that he'll never see you again. Of course he will, but not even Simon can convince him.

[tfp-is-my-lifeblood-lol]

Reasons Why I Think TFP Jack is Underrated:

Welcome to my organized bullet list of why I think Jack is cool. I used to think he was boring too, but now I think he's the goat and here's why:

-He has Main Character Energy, but he's more snarky than most cliche main characters

In fact, he is a petty king:

-He doesn't wanna be on Team Prime at first, but eventually accepts it...

...He then proceeds to BURN Airachnid's ship to the GROUND with a stupid survival kit for babies

-HE DEFEATED THE ALIEN SPIDER QUEEN WITH NOTHING BUT A LIGHTER AND A POCKET KNIFE, BRO

-HE WAS DONE WITH HER BULLSHIT LOL

-Plus he tricked Silas by pretending to beg for mercy, when really, he was stealing his walkie talkie.

-Jack is boring, BUT the fact that Jack has nothing special about him IS his superpower; Miko has the Apex Armor and her brave personality, Raf has genius level computer smarts, and Jack has PURE SPITE. It's beautiful.

-He has zero skills, but he'll figure out how to defeat his enemies anyway, SOLEY because he's tired and doesn't get paid enough for this shit.

-For example, in one of the Titan Magazine comics, Jack literally kicks Silus in the balls

Evidence:

Iconic✨

Apex armor? Cybertronian technology?

Screw that. How about I KICK you in the balls?l

-A true legend

-He's also a mess though, and I relate so hard

-He's so petty he talked two aliens into helping him cheat at street racing to piss off his classmate

-His romantic subplot is treated like a complete joke, and I love that. Normally, the Main Character✨ is awkward, but gets the girl in the end. Not Jack, though. Nope. He just constantly looks stupid in front of Sierra, nothing ever happens between them, and Arcee is just watching with popcorn as his life falls apart. It's hilarious.

Also, if I'm correct, isn't the last time we see Sierra when she sees Arcee's homoform, and thinks Jack has a girlfriend, and then Jack is like "She's my mom😅." And Sierra's all like: "Your mom looks good in leather😐...on your bike😐😐😐😐..." Maybe I'm wrong, but if that's the case, it's funny. Jack is a simp and it gets him nowhere.

-His sarcasm works perfectly with Arcee's sarcastic attitude.

-Also Tailgate is voiced by Josh Keaton (Jack's voice actor) in the flashbacks, so I headcanon that Jack reminds Arcee of Tailgate, and that's why she has such a soft spot for him.

Tailgate and Arcee's dialogue had the same vibe as her and Jack's

Also, it gives more context to why she was so scared to lose him when Airachnid showed up. It would've literally been like losing Tailgate all over again.

-Jack is Team Prime's designated Good Ideas Guy

It was Jack's idea to hijack the spacebridge to send him to Cybertron

It was also his idea to drain the dark energon out of The Nemesis when it came alive and froze everyone

-I'm probably just projecting, he has generalized anxiety disorder vibes

-I feel like he prefers a comfortable, predictable life because he gets nervous easily

-He's always the first to freak out, and overthink, and Arcee always has to calm him down

-And she's so patient with him it's so sweet😱

-I agree the writing behind his existence is meh, and a lot of the cool stuff about him is probably unintentional, but I don't care, so take that!

Anyway, the moral of the story is:

Jack is just an angry little harmonica boy. Leave him alone. He's trying his best😭

Thank you for coming to my TedTalk.

[wannab-urs]

Scandal

Pairing: Dieter Bravo x f!reader

Prompt: Forced Proximity + “You’re going to get us arrested” / “I always wanted to see you in handcuffs.”

Summary: You get locked in a closet with Dieter at the Oscars

Warnings: semi public smut; forced proximity; reader has hair that can have bobby pins in it, is able bodied, is wearing a dress, and is an actress; the barest hint of enemies to lovers, but not really. WC: 1.6k

A/N: Written for a Dieter Bravo Brainrot Server event. Thanks to @ramblers-lets-get-ramblin, @atinylittlepain, and @pr0ximamidnight for reading it for me <3

Dieter Bravo Masterlist | Main Masterlist | AO3 | Kofi

You just need to take a breather, that’s all. The Oscars can be a lot for an actress with social anxiety – there’s a million directors, former costars, and producers all vying for a conversation with you, not to mention the cameras catching you from every angle. And to make matters worse, they’ve allowed paparazzi into the lobby this year. 

There’s a coat closet just down this hallway, if you can just remember which door it is. You walk down the ornate hallway and find a door cracked open just slightly, the smell of weed emanating from the gap. You push the door open and step in, closing it tightly behind you. And you should have known from the smell alone who you’d find on the other side. 

None other than Dieter Bravo. 

“Shouldn’t have closed the door.” 

“And you shouldn’t be smoking in here. You’re stinking up everyone’s coats.”

“No, you really shouldn’t have closed the door. We’re locked in now.” 

“What?” Your voice hits a high frequency. You do not want to be locked in a closet with this particular former costar. You try the door anyway and find that he’s telling the truth. 

“I told you.” 

“Fuck, Dieter. You could have warned me!”

He chooses not to respond, taking another hit of his joint instead. He holds his hand out in offering, but you shake your head. Being high and trapped sounds like a recipe for paranoid disaster. 

You slump to the floor, pouting, but grateful they gave you a dress you can actually move around in this year. Dieter sits cross legged across the closet from you. There are coats lining either side of the walls. 

His usually fluffy curls are slicked back and styled to perfection. His nasty green bathrobe and pajama pants have been replaced by a billowing white shirt and fitted black pants. He’s even wearing real shoes. He looks… good. And he’s surprisingly clear eyed for someone smoking an entire joint. 

“You look nice,” Dieter comments. You look down at your dress – the color was chosen specifically to contrast well with your skin tone. The cut shows just enough bust and highlights your body shape. It’s a good dress. 

“Thanks, Dee. I was just thinking the same about you.”

“Oh were you now?” 

You roll your eyes. “Not like that, Dieter. You just clean up nice, is all.”

“I’m not um…” he trails off. 

“Not on coke anymore? I can tell.”

You and Dieter had worked on a project together a couple years ago. It was in the height of his coke addiction and working with him had been an absolute nightmare. He’d show up for work absolutely out of his mind, having screaming matches with the director, the producers, you. And that was if he showed up at all. The project had never even made it to production, leaving you worried your career was ruined. You fucking hated Dieter Bravo. 

But you could never deny how adorable he is. 

“Yeah. Cleaned up. Went to rehab. The whole shebang.”

“That’s good, Dee. Really.” 

You let your head fall back against the door, exposing the line of your throat to possibly the world's horniest man.

“You look really good in that dress.”

“I’m not going to have sex with you.”

You peek an eye open and see Dieter is already halfway across the floor, crawling to you on his hands and knees. He’s pouting at you. 

“What else do we have to do right now?”

You sigh and try the door one more time for good measure, reaching up behind you and tugging on the door handle. Still locked tight. Dieter grins and crawls even closer, settling between your thighs. He reaches out and strokes his thumb across your cheek. You can’t help but lean into it. 

“Always thought you were so beautiful.”

“Sure, Dee,” you scoff 

“I did. I do. Can I kiss you?” 

“Sure, Dee,” you whisper breathlessly. 

He presses his lips to yours gently at first. His lips are soft and plush against yours and you can’t help but deepen the kiss. You open your mouth and his tongue meets yours, hot and wet. Arousal sweeps through you and you bury your hands in his gorgeous curls, holding him against you. He wraps his arms around you and pulls you into his lap. You gasp, causing the kiss to break as your core comes into contact with the hard line of his cock in his trousers. 

“So fucking beautiful,” Dieter mutters into your throat, pressing kisses down into your cleavage. 

He lays you flat on the floor and scoots back, settling on his belly in between your thighs and rucking your dress up to your hips. 

“Dieter, you’re going to get us arrested for public indecency.”

“First of all, I’ve always wanted to see you in handcuffs,” he presses a kiss to your left thigh. “And secondly, I don’t see anyone here to catch us,” he kisses your right thigh, higher up this time. 

He hooks his thumb in the gusset of your panties, stroking your already soaked folds. You moan as quietly as you can. 

“So wet for me, already.” 

You groan as he pulls your panties to the side and buries his face in your cunt. There’s no build up, he eats you like he’s ravenous, like he hasn’t eaten in days. His curved nose grinds into your clit as he laps at your hole. His tongue plunges inside you over and over and you can already feel your core tightening. He slips two fingers in to replace his tongue, drawing circles on your clit with the point of it now. You cry out, much louder than you mean to be, than you need to be. His left hand comes up to cover your mouth, his face now hovering above yours as he curls his fingers perfectly inside you. 

“Quiet now, love. Wouldn’t want to get arrested for public indecency.”

The bastard. He thrusts his fingers into you a few more times and you’re coming all over his hand. You bite down on his palm to keep from screaming. He draws his fingers out of you slowly and rights your panties for you. He sucks your come off his fingers like it’s cake batter, letting out a little moan of his own at the taste. 

The door handle jiggles and you both freeze. Just as the lock turns, Dieter grabs you and rolls you both under the lowest level of coats on the side of the closet. You’re on top of him, breathing heavily into his neck. Someone comes in, grabs their coat, and leaves the room, pulling the door closed behind them. 

Dieter goes to roll you both back out but you stop him. You press a kiss to his very exposed throat. 

“I love this shirt. Very Mr. Darcy.”

“It is romantic isn’t it?” 

You drag your lips down his throat to his chest, pressing a kiss to the lowest bit of exposed skin. Your hands find the clasp on his fancy black pants, but you can’t quite get them open.

“The one time you don’t wear easy access pants…” 

“Here, let me.”

You both fumble for a moment before the clasp finally comes open and his cock springs out. 

“No underwear?”

“The lines were showing too bad.”

“Mmhmm,” you quirk an eyebrow at him. 

You wrap his cock in your hand. It’s long, curved a little, and not terribly thick. 

“Pretty,” you mutter before taking the tip in your mouth. He gasps as you suck him down. You swirl your tongue around his head, then flatten it out and let him fill your mouth. He hits the back of your throat and you suppress a cough, pushing him further down. His hands flutter into your hair as you start bobbing your head, sucking him down over and over again. He doesn’t push or pull you, simply rests his hands on the back of your head. 

You pull off him and lick a stripe up the seam of his balls as you stroke his cock. You suck one into your mouth, rolling it gently on your tongue, then switch to the other. 

“I’m gonna–”

You take his cock down your throat again, wanting to swallow his cum. You suck hard on the tip and then drop your lips down to the base as he comes in your mouth. His hips stutter beneath you and he groans. 

You let his softening cock fall out of your mouth and press a kiss to his hip bone. He strokes the back of your head reverently. 

“We should get cleaned up,” you whisper, your voice rough. 

Dieter sighs, but helps you get back to your feet. You take in his rumpled appearance and know you can’t look much better. His chest is covered in lipstick, as is his face. His hair is an absolute mess. His outfit is askew and wrinkled to hell. 

You help him fix his outfit, rub the lipstick off his skin, and finger comb his hair back into some semblance of a style. He pulls bobby pins out of your hair and stows them in his pockets, letting your hair down from the hours of work the stylist did. He smooths out your dress as best as he can. 

“We look…”

“Like we just fucked on the floor of a closet?”

“Yeah.”

He takes a bobby pin from his pocket and picks the lock on the door. 

“You could have done that the whole time?” 

Dieter doesn’t answer. He stands and takes your hand in his and pulls the door open. You’re immediately inundated with camera flashes. The paparazzi have found you. Your agent is going to kill you. 

“I fucking hate you,” you halfheartedly fuss at Dieter. This scandal will be fun to deal with... 

[grapejuicebrat]

“Was it real or just for show?” TEASER

PAIRING: famous!harry x famous!y/n

SYNOPSIS: baby i just gotta know how long has this been going on?

NOTES: be nice english isn’t my first language and this is my first work! I personally recommend listening to this song while reading “How long” by Charlie Puth. If you have any thoughts or ideas, I'm waiting for you in the inbox. or just to talk because I'm bored. feel free to do whatever you want x

WARNINGS: smut but not really (maybe some hints, but nothing like that will happen cause i’m not in the right mood), swearing, flirting, kinda friends to enemies to lovers, kissing, harry and reader being stubborn. i think that’s all if you found something else comment please.

“Harry, how do you feel about miss Y/n?”

Harry already knew how to answer. In fact, it had been the first question asked at almost every interview Harry had attended for the past few months. Jeff always said it's good for PR because all the fans are sure you're dating. I mean, isn't it? You flirt with each other on social media, write comments to each other on Instagram and hint at some kind of relationship on Twitter. Sometimes it seemed to him that it was so. You're just playing the game, waiting for the other person to give in and confess their feelings. Harry remembers the first time he mentioned you in an interview talking about celebrity crushes. Fans literally went crazy when they heard your name. For another week, the Internet was buzzing with rumors that the famous singer was dating an actress Y/N.

Of course, he didn't mention your name for nothing. By this point, you've been talking for a few months, almost immediately starting flirting via text. Surprisingly, it never devolved into anything more than just sex jokes.

“I mean she’s an incredible actress, you know? Have you seen her new movie? It’s amazing. I already told her that I wouldn't mind playing with her in the remake of "The Notebook". Personally, I think that we would be perfect for the main roles.” he laughs.

“So we should wait to see your chemistry on screen, am I right?” asks the interviewer and Harry shrugs.

“We’ll see”

“Y/n, please tell us more about Mr. Styles”.

You laugh and playfully roll your eyes. It seems to you that you will never get tired of playing this game. You flirt with each other in public and in private when no one is looking. At the same time, you have never been caught by the paparazzi together somewhere in a restaurant or on vacation. In fact, it's because you never went anywhere together. Harry never asked you out and you didn't have the guts to even ask him out for coffee. You didn't have any contact that required you to play couple in public. Personally, you did it because it was fun. It's fun to read some news about yourself, where you are married or pregnant. It's fun to watch fan speculation that isn't true. It's fun to pretend you don't understand anything at an interview and talk in riddles.

“I have no idea who are you talking about”

“Oh come on! You do know who is Harry Styles. In his last interview he told us that he wants to do a movie with you”

“Ok, I'm just kidding. Harry is a cool actor and singer. He is very talented. Have you seen his latest movies? To be honest, I watched "My Policeman" three times. It's not every day you see Harry shirtless, you know. Therefore, I would also not mind playing in the same movie with Mr. Styles. If anyone is looking for actors for the main roles, give us a call!” you smiled, looking at the people in the hall. Apparently, many of them are fans of your couple, because when they heard the name Harry, they literally went crazy.

What you didn't know was that this innocent game of flirting would turn into a race of hate and love. Both of you will have to come face to face with your fears and anxieties. You will have to learn to live with mistakes and without people with whom you planned your old age. You will have to meet again someone who was once everything to you. And will you be able to say "Goodbye" again?

Patiently waiting for your thoughts

[myfictionaldreams]

Everyone Is Breakable // Mafia!Stucky x Fem!Reader

Summary: Steve and Bucky were invincible in your eyes. They'd never been injured or in a situation where you thought they weren't the ones in control. That is until one day Bucky doesn't return from meeting with a client.

Tags: 18+ readers only, smut, polyamory, threesome (F/M/M), angst, fluff, anxiety, death scare, Bucky goes missing, feelings realised, kissing, oral (F & M receiving), handjob, gay sex, vagina sex, fingering, multiple orgasms, size difference, sir kink, creampie, begging, edging, everyone has sex together (finally), not beta read

Words: 7.2k

my masterlist 📚 AO3 Link 

Steve Rogers and James Buchanan Barnes were invincible.

Well, they were in your opinion anyway.

For the years that you’d been dating the two of them, they had done feats that were seen to be impossible to the normal person. But then again, they weren’t exactly normal.

There were secrets and rumours throughout Brooklyn that helped to create notorious reputations for the Rogers Mafia’s boss and Deputy that left people scared and yet curious at the same time. The main rumour that was derived from the truth was that Steve and Bucky had been involved in barbaric and ruthless experiments that altered their DNA’s to become the ultimate weapons. Stronger, faster, agility and stamina were all affected and had the enemies running in fear with the inhuman feats that could be achieved. Whenever the two of them were confronted and questioned, the men simply shrug their broad shoulders and smirked arrogantly at the opposer.

The rumours and intimidation only increased with the looming fear of Bucky’s unique metal arm that was made from the world’s strongest metal and liked to be his first weapon used where threats were involved. The enemies were quick to retreat when his leather glove was removed and his fingers clenched into a fist.

Their reputation was not the only reason why you believed them to be invincible but also because as of yet, there had never been a reason to be remotely frightened for their safety. Aside from the swaggering confidence they lived and breathed on a daily basis, other than the busted knuckles from the punishments delivered to the people who deserved it, they had never been injured, not even a black eye or busted nose. Nothing.

They were both so highly trained from their time in the military that they were able to hold their own more significantly than the other people in the same line of work as them.

In the past, there had been injuries and near-death experiences by both Steve and Bucky, before, during and after the military and enough to leave daunting silver scars from stab wounds, gunshots or injuries from other weapons. Especially Bucky and losing his arm during his capture within Hydra, the thick scars that encompassed the area between his shoulder and metal joining, he could hardly even discuss the brutal events that led to his arm injury, not without falling into a headspace that left him worried for everyone's wellbeing but again, that was because of Hydra and the fucked up experiments they performed on him.

Regardless of this, the rest of the events of near-death experiences would have left any normal person to lose their life, but not Steve and Bucky. They always bounced back, leaving you and your relationship feeling secure, safe and never-ending. 

One day, one of them was not safe, and life was threatened so you didn’t know if they were alive or dead.

It was supposed to be a simple visit for Bucky, so simple in fact that he had decided to go by himself, leaving his bodyguard Natasha behind to look after Steve as he remained behind at the office. This was where you also remained with your guard Sam, sitting at the oak table, large enough to sit 10 people and usually reserved for important meetings but today had papers and laptops lazily scattered across as orders were processed. Unphased and unbothered, Bucky left with a quick wave and kiss on the cheek for you as he visited a client unaffectionately nicknamed Ross the Coward, for some undelivered money.

From your right, Steve watched Bucky closely as he left, fingers drumming on the surface of the table as he contemplated letting Bucky go by himself but the second in command was all smiles and confidence as he left to the meeting point. As soon as the office door closed, you were swift with unlocking your phone and clicking on the ‘find my friends’ app, watching the blue dot that represented Bucky’s location closely, a habit that everyone within the gang seemed to do to follow each other's locations and last whereabouts if anything were to go wrong.

From the corner of your eye, Steve also monitored the screen as well whilst continuing with the monotonous choirs of running a mafia gang by responding to queries and emails. It had been a long day for all of you, the type of boring work that had your eyelids heavy and body drained without so much as lifting a finger. Bucky had been almost bouncing off of the walls with boredom and when the opportunity to meet with Ross was discussed, he almost ran from the room in eagerness.

“He’s arrived”, you audibly confirmed to the group as Bucky’s dot slowed to a halt in a back alley somewhere in Brooklyn. Steve physically shuffled closer, his chair creaking under his heavy muscles as his arm slide around your back and rested against your hip, so he could move closer and watch the phone for a couple of minutes over your shoulder but soon became preoccupied by the bare skin exposed in front of him. You knew he was trying to distract you from obsessively watching Bucky’s dot as his lips danced across your sensitive skin, the fine hairs on your arms standing on end as a shiver brushed over your body as he reached behind your ear.

Your eyes closed to concentrate on the delicate touches of his full lips and the light scratch of his stubble but the pleasured moan that was teasing to escape on the tip of your tongue was soon replaced by a frustrated groan as Steve’s phone began to vibrate. The blonde gave an apologetic peck on your shoulder before returning his body to the work he was doing and your eyes continued to momentarily glance at Bucky’s location.

Half an hour passed and Bucky’s location hadn’t shifted, even by a single step the entire time. An unsettled heaviness rested in your stomach, but you tried to shake it off, Bucky was fine, it was only 30 minutes. However, those minutes ticked by and turned into an hour, by which point you were anxiously chewing on the skin surrounding your thumbnail which caught the eye of Steve.

Hanging up the phone, he turned his chair back towards you, knees knocking into yours as he wrapped his fingers around your wrist to ease the thumb from your mouth, “what is it?”

Nodding your head towards your phone you explained, “Bucky’s dot hasn’t moved in over an hour”.

Steve’s crystal blue eyes snapped to the phone at a sickening speed, the grip on your hand tightening by the slightest amount of force, not enough to hurt but enough to show his worries. “Are you sure?” he asked, voice low as leaned closer to the phone, studying the location.

“Yes, I’m sure”, you confirmed, trying to ignore the way your throat felt as if it was closing as you noticed Sam and Natasha now taking note of the situation as well. “It’s not moved at all, not even to show him pacing, I’ve used the app enough to know that it moves as you’re walking”.

Steve’s jaw clenched beneath his beard as lines formed between his eyebrows as they furrowed trying to decide the next steps. Releasing your hands, he turned towards Natasha, opening his mouth to order her to go to the location and see what was happening but the red-haired woman was already standing from her chair, shrugging on his leather jacket and confidently strutting towards the door, “Already on it, Boss”.

Steve tried to remain calm, for your sake anyway but you could tell but the ever so slight twitch of his hand that now rested on your exposed thigh, that he was unnerved by the situation. Sam had also tried to help your nerve by distracting you by making you laugh which worked for a whole minute before you returned to wringing your fingers in your lap, a movement that you usually did when nervous. “It’ll be ok Boss Lady, Bucky’s a big boy, he’ll be ok”.

Even with the heavy weight of Steve’s hand, your leg couldn’t keep still as you had the overwhelming urge to bounce your knee up and down to try and release some pent-up energy. Watching the phone closely, the dot that represented Natasha approached Bucky’s location and only then did his dot begins to move before Steve’s phone rang with Natasha's face and name appearing on the screen.

“He’s not here, his phone was in a trash can”, Natasha informed as Steve placed the phone on speaker so you could all hear.

You were out of your seat before either Steve or Sam. However, just as swiftly as you’d made it to your feet, a rough hand was just as quick to grasp your wrist in a gentle but firm hold, halting your plan to rush to the door. Frowning with a glare, you turned to look at Steve as he stood, not releasing your wrist. The expression on his face had your glare faltering as he looked at you in the way that you liked to call ‘Work Steve’. Jaw clenched and set, lines etched around his eyes with sternness and lips thinned into a tight line.

“You’re staying here”, Steve demanded without leaving any time to argue. No laughter or love in his voice like he usually reserved for when he spoke to you. There was only a strict command that was not meant to be argued against but you were simply not in the mood to sit around waiting for news, feeling unhelpful.

“Absolutely not, I’m coming with you”, your tone attempted to sound as stern as his but your voice wavered with the increasingly nauseating sensation blooming in your stomach.

Steve finally dropped your wrist but that was only because he had forced his chair back and was walking over to his desk at the furthest away point in the room, shoulders broad and muscles straining beneath the tight white shirt as he began to strap his guns to multiple locations across his body. As you watched Steve dismiss you without a single word, your hands began to shake with the adrenaline pounding through your body, and taking lesson than a second to decide between dealing with his wrath or continuing with your plan to help find where Bucky had gone.

You were halfway across the room before Steve suddenly shouted, “Sam!”, without even looking over his shoulders, his enhanced hearing meaning that he heard your footsteps rushing across the room. Your friend and bodyguard stepped into your line of sight at Steve’s command, his hands raised, palms facing you in an apologetic stance.

“Come on Sweetheart, let’s go back to our seat, I’ll get you a coffee or something-”. Without waiting for him to finish the sentence, you efficiently ducked under his arm and continued on your journey.

“I’m not waiting here, neither of you can stop me”. This was very much untrue as Sam’s arm circled your waist and easily trapped your arms to your side in the process as he overpowered you easily. “Sam, get off me!”

“I’m sorry, but orders are orders”, Sam to his credit, did sound apologetic as he held you firmly to his chest. This didn’t stop you from trying to wiggle your way out of his arms, even when it began to hurt with the amount of force you were putting into it, especially as Steve walked in front of you, now wearing his jacket to hide the multiple weapons he had strapped to his shirt.

“Steve please don’t go without me, I want to help! I need to help find him, please let me come with you!”

Your boyfriend had the decency to at least soften his eyes as he gripped your jaw firmly to keep you from moving and hold your attention. His voice was low and steady as he addressed you, his head dipped to try and hold your eye contact. “You will stay here, safe with Sam. I will go and find Bucky and I’m taking everyone with me to search for him and if we find-”. Steve’s confidence faltered enough that he had to shake his head to try and compose himself, returning to the same stern expression. “We will find him, I promise”. With that, he lowered his lips down to gently kiss your temple, breathing in the comforting scents of shampoo, before turning away.

A thousand thoughts were spirling through your mind as Steve turned away from you. Bucky was missing and without his phone. He could be hurt… or worse than hurt and now you had to stand there and watch as Steve went to the same location, leaving you behind to do nothing.

You began to fight harder against Sam’s hold, not caring that it might bruise your arms as you thrashed and twisted your body in an attempt to get free, needing to be there, hating the thought of waiting around helplessly. “Steve!” you shouted enough that it echoed around the room, please don’t leave me here!”

Your boyfriend didn’t acknowledge your pleas as he continued towards the door, shoulders hunched and heavy with worry and the need for vengeance seething through his boiling blood. Lifting his hand to turn the door handle, he was shocked as it twisted before he could even touch it, his hand instinctively reaching for the gun clasped to the holster on his belt as the door opened with a burst.

A dishevelled Bucky rushed into the room having heard your shouts from the end of the corridor, his chest rising and falling with hurried breaths, his jacked was ripped revealing his crisp white shirt to be stained with deep red blood that also crusted over the knuckles on both of his hands. “What’s going on?” he demanded, eyes darting wide and vividly blue as he took in the scene before him of Sam holding you back as tears had begun to flow down your cheeks.

“Bucky!” you screamed in relief, heavily tugging yourself out of Sam’s hold which loosened enough that you fell forward, stumbling slightly before brushing past Steve and into the arms of Bucky who was still confused as to what was going on. Your trembling hands wrapped around your boyfriend's neck as you cried into his shoulders, heart thumping hard in your chest as you felt his arms hug you close.” You’re ok! Thank god you’re ok”.

“What’s wrong? What is it? What the fuck is happening in here?” Bucky frantically asked in confusion, attempting to pull back from the bone-crushing hug so that he could inspect your face but you continued to hold onto him tight, scared that if you let go, he might disappear. When you didn’t answer, his eyes wandered to Steve and then Sam before looking back to his boss and best friend who finally stepped closer.

The mafia boss's eyes were unblinking as he did his own visual assessment, searching Bucky from head to toe and back up again and lingering on the red patches of his shirt. “Are you ok? Are you hurt? Do you need an ambulance? Where have you been?” Steve asked, one worst stumbling into another as placed a trembling hand on Bucky’s shoulder, just to touch him and make sure that he was here and real.

Bucky continued to look confused between Steve and the top of your head from where you still clung to his chest. “Ye-yeah, I’m fine, what’s happened?” Bucky answered more firmly this time.

Taking a deep breath and smelling Bucky to try and ground yourself, noting the way the iron scent overwhelmed his expensive cologne. Trying to compose yourself, you quickly stepped back, releasing your hold on his neck to wipe the wetness on your cheeks from the tears that slowly came to a stop as you truly realised he was ok. As you backed up, you bumped into Steve’s chest and instinctively reached behind for his other hand that was hanging at his side and squeezed it, a silent conversation that was needed between the two as his thumb brushed against the back of your hand.

His other hand remained on Bucky’s shoulder, you could see that he was gripping the man firmly, not wanting to let go as he explained what had happened. “We thought you were missing, I mean - you were missing. The location of your phone hadn’t moved for an hour and when Natasha went to investigate she found it in a trash can. We thought something had happened to you”.

Bucky nodded slowly, processing the information as his eyes flicked between you and Steve. “A trash can? Those assholes…” Bucky muttered under his breath before he clarified what had happened. “Ross the Coward lives up to his nickname as he hired a team of security. They thought they had me cornered at one point but it was easy work to dispose of them but one of the little pricks stole my phone. Probably to stop me from calling for back up but I don’t need backup”, he shrugged confidently. “It’s sorted, their bodies won’t be found it just took some time to clean up the mess before I drove straight here”.

Steve’s chest relaxed against your back as he released a sigh, the tension easing from his body as he needed to clarify one more thing. “So the blood… it’s not yours?” he asked, nodding to the specks of blood on his shirt.

Bucky gave an arrogant, deadpan look. “Come on, do you have such little faith in me?” he pinched the shirt to emphasise, “all their blood, no injuries except a couple of split knuckles but even they are mostly healed”. Lifting his warm hand he wiggled his fingers and proved that there were no lingering cuts, only pink lines left breath all of the dried blood.

When neither you nor Steve responded as you processed the news and that he was ok and not dead in some hidden alleyway, Bucky had his own questions. “So what was all the shouting about? Why did Doll look like she was about to beat up ol’ Sammy boy over there?”

“Steve tried to be heroic and make me stay behind whilst he searched for you, even though it would have been better to have more people searching for you. I wasn’t going to just sit here and wait for everyone to come back”, you explained whilst still squeezing Steve’s hand.

Bucky’s eyes widen slightly before he tried to compose himself by straightening his spine, shoulders rolling back as he addressed Steve. “Oh? So you were going to come and save me? My wonderful knight in shining armour”, Bucky teased with a smirk, taking a towering step closer as you moved gently out of the way, sensing that the two men needed a moment.

Steve’s face was stoic and serious as he simply whispered, “Yes, you know I would”.

Bucky hummed, head tilting to look at you, contemplating for a second, opening his mouth with the plan to continue the flirtatious teasing but the words were lost in thought as Steve’s hand that you’d been holding lifted to cup Bucky’s cheek. He forced Bucky to look at him, his thumb pad stroking across the stubble covering his cheek, in an intimate way that had a warm feeling spreading through your heart.

Steve’s eyes were darting between Bucky’s, then continued on their own journey across the rest of his face, lingering for a second too long on his friend's plump lips as he needed to clarify one more time, “Are you sure you’re ok Buck?”

“Yeah, I’m fine Stevie”, Bucky confirmed, his voice barely audible with how softly he responded, no longer teasing or sarcastic.

“Good”, Steve trailed off for a moment, eyes watching his thumbs exploration across Bucky’s cheek. Your heart was pounding as you watched the interaction, the sincerity on the mafia boss’ face as he struggled with his emotions. “I thought you were hurt, I thought-”, he wasn’t able to finish his sentence as he took the final step closer, using the hand on Bucky’s face to pull him closer so that he could kiss his forehead tenderly and wrapping his arm around his shoulders in a tight hug, releasing a deep breath.

Your cheeks ached with how widely you smiled, your hands grasping together as you rocked on your feet, finding the moment endearing and intimate and clearly needed between the two of them. Over Steve’s shoulder, you caught Sam’s eye as he gave you a little wave before making a swift and quiet exit through the door, giving the three of you some much-needed time alone and so that he could call Natasha and give her an update.

Returning your eyes to Steve and Bucky, they were just relaxing their holds on one another but only so that they could gaze into each other's eyes one more. Steve finally took closed those last inches, making a decision he’d wanted to do for a while but was frightened of the dynamics shifting between them but those minutes of thinking Bucky was hurt, he wouldn’t waste another minute again.

Both seemed to relax and feel whole all at once as Steve tilted his head and kiss Bucky’s lips. Gently, their lips caressed together, taking a second just to taste one another, feel another pair of lips that weren’t yours, both thinking it would feel strange to kiss their best friend but it felt right like they were meant to be.

Biting your lip to hold back the gleeful gasp, you watched in wonder as your boyfriends became more heated, heads tilting and hands grasping onto each other's shirts, crinkling the material as their desperation increased to try and feel more of one another. You watched with increasing fascination and a powerful wave of arousal in your core that had your cunt pulsing with need but this wasn’t about you, it was about Steve and Bucky. The two had been more intimate over the last couple of months but neither made any move to take that step, even with your meddling and interfering so it was a relief to finally see them snap and be together.

Steve pulled back first but only as he grasped Bucky’s bottom lip between his lip, tugging on it until it snapped back to place with a pop. The two men rested their foreheads together, still sharing breaths with how close their faces were. “Don’t ever do something to scare me like that again, Buck”, Steve demanded softly under his breath.

“Yes, Boss”, Bucky quipped before leaning in again for a calmer, softer kiss.

For a moment, you contemplated leaving them to explore one another and have the alone time they both desperately needed but Steve seemed to sense your step towards the door as he released his grip on Bucky’s jaw to point towards you and then crooking his index finger in a ‘come here’ gesture. When he couldn’t hear you make your approach, he pulled away from the brunette with glassy eyes and puffy lips from the kissing as he tilted his head in your direction. “Room for one more, Baby”.

You shifted your weight from one foot to the other, not making any effort to join the two, “are you sure? You two look like you need some alone time and having enough time without me-”.

“Oh get over here already”, Bucky joked, with his signature chirpy smile on his handsome face, his dimples deepening as he reached over to you, taking your hand and pulling you closer.

The smile on your own face only stretched as you were pulled flush again Bucky’s chest as Steve moved around the man to his back, looking at you over Bucky’s shoulder with a flirty eyebrow raised before he was continuing his exploration of Bucky by kissing along his neck.

Grasping onto Bucky’s ripped jacket, you reached up on your tip toes and your lips finally stroked against Bucky’s. The two of you moaned, you even more so at tasting the hints of Steve on your boyfriend's lips, your tongue instantly easing out to taste more of him which Bucky was more than happy to open his mouth and accept the invasion.

Your fingers shook slightly with how firmly you were holding onto Bucky, the relief hitting you all over again that he was ok and really safe between you and Steve. You wanted to taste all of Bucky, needed to feel all of his body and even though you were used to being the centre of attention concerning the intimate moments between the three of you, at that moment, you and Steve needed Bucky to be looked after and praised.

So as Steve continued to tease Bucky’s throat, nipping and sucking on the sensitive flesh just below his ear, your hands loosened their grip but only so that the material could be pushed over his shoulders and allowed to be dropped to the floor. Your nibble fingers rushed to start unbuttoning his bloodied shirts but due to the emotions and adrenaline, it was a difficult and slow job so Steve took a handful of either side of the shirt and pulled, ripping the buttons easily and the material opening so that it too could be pushed over his shoulders and onto the floor, the buttons dropping and scattering all over the floor.

Not a single word was said at the action, other than a deep groan from Bucky as your nails scratched down his torso, feeling the bare, hot flesh beneath, the muscles tensing under your touch. Pulling back from the kiss, you desperately sucked in the air but only for a second as you left open-mouth kisses down his chest, feeling the light sprinkling of dark brunette hair that covered his chest, covering the previously mentioned scars from past injuries.

With his lips now free, Bucky had the freedom to tip his head back and to the side, giving Steve more room to tease and suck purple marks between his throat and shoulder, earning more desperate moans from the man.

Reaching around Bucky, you grasped onto Steve’s hands and pulled them around his front, helping the man to know where to touch the other, knowing that even though they had seen you fuck both of them, it was different having to do it themselves. Steve pulled back from dominating Bucky’s neck to cast his lust-filled eyes on you, smirking as he followed your lead as you moved Steve’s hands over Bucky’s abs and lower still until they landed on top of his belt.

Just before undoing it, Steve moved his lips to Bucky’s ear lobe, nipping with his sharp teeth before asking, “What do you say Bucky? Do you want this?”

Steve needed to hear him say it, that he wanted both yours and his touch. He was thankfully answered with a deep, aroused groan as Bucky huskily grunted, “fuck yes, don’t you dare stop”.

You and Steve shared an equally relieved grin before you dropped to your knees as the mafia boss continued to skillfully undo Bucky’s belt, clasp and zipper. This was where you took over, pushing the material over his firm arse until his trousers rested midthigh and you were eye level with his boxers-covered cock that was straining beneath the material.

“My favourite sight”, Bucky complimented, looking down at you and resting his hand on the back of your head as you smiled deviously up at him with wide eyes. With your hands resting on his toned, hairy thighs, you left the next step to Steve who thankfully continued undressing Bucky as he pulled the waistband of his boxers down, letting them join his trousers.

Now you were staring at the beautiful sight of Bucky’s thick, red cock that was already leaking beads of precum causing the tip to glisten. Glancing back up at Steve over Bucky’s shoulder, you raised an eyebrow to notify them that he should have the first touch.

With one large hand resting on Bucky’s abs, Steve’s other hand lowered and wrapped around the middle of Bucky’s cock. Bucky’s hips instantly thrust forward at the touch, his mouth dropping open as he looked at where he was being touched by his best friend, feeling the difference between having your smaller, softer hand and Steve’s big rough hand, deciding then and there that both were perfect.

SteveBucky'sd Bucky's cock a few times, spreading the precum and just trying to get used to touching another man's cock, noting the pressure he enjoyed and areas to give every attention to. Then, Steve held the base of it so that he stayed still and proud standing for you to inch forward and lick the tip.

“Fuck, both of you feel so good”. Bucky praised as he watched you as took more of his cock into your mouth Steve continued to hold it for you to suck as he subtly thrust his own clothed cock into Bucky’s back.

You thoroughly worshipped Bucky, loving the feeling for that moment of being in control with Steve, having Bucky between the two of you, moaning and losing his cool as you both pleasured him. His cock was salty and perfect as it lay heavy against your tongue as you attempted to take more of it into your mouth until it stroked the back of your throat, causing your eyes to water slightly.

You were so thoroughly aroused by the sight of Bucky rosy-cheeked and looking at you in awe with Steve still teasing him over his shoulder. Your thighs clenched closed, needing to feel some relief but nothing was what you needed so pulling off the tip of the cock with an audible pop, you nuzzled into his thigh with wide, hopeful eyes as you asked, “Please may I touch myself, sir?”

Bucky’s hand cradled against your cheek, thumb playing with your bottom lip that was already puffy from the blowjob you were giving. “Oh darlin’, you can do whatever you want when you’re looking so pretty like that for me”.

You grinned in relief up at him, turning to kiss his palm before straightening your stance on your knees once more but spread your legs, giving yourself room to drop a hand from his thigh to beneath your dress, pulling up the material until it bunched at your waist. You sighed in relief as you began to pleasure Bucky with your mouth once more but now your fingers could circle your clit over your soaked underwear.

“Doesn’t our girl look good for us, on her knees like that”, Steve joined the praises for you as he began to tweak one of Bucky’s nipples, causing the man to thrust deeper into your throat.

Bucky turned his head to make out with Steve over his shoulder, the two of them groaning as their tongues brushed together, tasting one another as you tasted Bucky’s cock. However, eventually, as Bucky’s cock began to throb harder in your mouth, did he ease your face away from him with a curse under his breath. “Shit, if you keep that up I’m going to cum already and I think… I think I want more, need to feel more”, he stated with a sense of uncertainty in his eyes with what it was exactly that he was asking.

You tried to decipher what it was that Bucky was asking as you asked him, “What do you say, Buckaroo? Think you can take Steve’s fingers better than I can? Is that what you want?” The throaty groan that Bucky released as he closed his eyes and cock visibly throbbed with more precum dripping from the end was answer enough before he nodded his head.

“Why don’t you take off the rest of your clothes Buck and help baby girl onto the table”. Bucky’s eyes lit up as he caught onto Steve’s idea but you weren’t sure why you needed to be on the table for Bucky to be fingers but either way, you accepted Bucky's helping hand to stand.

Bucky kicked off his shoes and remaining clothes, leaving him beautiful and naked. Then he helped you over to the edge of the table, hands resting on your hips to lift you up and onto it, making sure your dress was still clumped around your waist. With a simple snap of his metal fingers, the flimsy material of your lace underwear was destroyed and floating to the floor as he bent over, licking his lips with hunger devouring his eyes as witnessed your soaked pussy.

Without wasting another second his tongue was stroking between your pussy lips, sucking and licking your juices before circling your throbbing clit in slow, calculated circles. All you could do was cry out, using one hand to hold the back of his hair and the other to rest against the table behind you to keep you upright. Bucky didn’t stop with his pleasure, even as he lifted one of your legs and eased it over his shoulder, giving him more room to ease two fingers into your desperately clenching hole.

As you succumbed to the pleasure, you half noticed Steve walking over to his main desk across the room, rifling through his draws before returning with the emergency bottle of lube that was usually saved for you. But now, as you watched over Bucky’s shoulder, you finally realised what their plan was.

With the height of the table, Bucky had to bend over to attach his mouth to your cunt, leaving his ass bare and ready for whatever Steve had planned. The blonde muscular man admired the view for a moment, grasping the globes of Bucky's firm cheeks and spreading them slightly and biting his lip as he saw his target.

Steve liberally coated his fingers in lube, thoroughly spreading the gel everywhere and then also squirting some onto the hole directly. During the experimental times during hundreds of sexual encounters between the three of you, you’d been able to see just what Steve and Bucky liked being done to them. Bucky, much to his surprise, absolutely loved to have his prostate milked as you sucked him off and even though the last few times and contemplated using something bigger as sometimes your fingers just weren’t big enough however never got to the point of something bigger as he’d usually cum by the time Steve had found a reasonable size dildo for him to use.

Steve had been just as reluctant but seeing the way Bucky responded to your fingers had wanted to try it as well had found that he liked a rimjob and a couple of fingers to stroke his prostate and had thought about asking Bucky to fuck him multiple times but once again, never made the move to do so with the fear of the relationships changing. Now however, there was no stopping him from asking but that would be for a later date, today was just about Bucky’s pleasure and giving him exactly what he wanted.

“We are still using the traffic light system, Buck, if you need to stop or pause it's yellow or red, understand?” Steve stated in as serious of a tone as he could muster as he watched Bucky continue to eat you out.

“Mmm, understood”, Bucky agreed, nodding his head which only stimulated your clit further as he mumbled around it.

Steve nodded and began to press his thick, rough and thoroughly lubed finger against Bucky’s hole, being careful to rock it in and stretch the muscle, not wanting to hurt him but Bucky wasn’t having any of the teasing today. With a throaty grunt, he pushed his hips back and took the entire length of Steve’s index finger, loving the hinting of the stretching burn.

He fully removed his face from your cunt to praise Steve, “fuck that feels so good, please Stevie, give me more, I need more”. Then he was right back on you again, fingers curling right against your spot and lips sealed around your clit, sucking it into his mouth. Your moans of pleasure were driving him insane and his cock was continuously leaking drips of precum, he didn’t have much longer before he came and wanted to still make it long enough to soak your pussy with his seed.

Steve gawked at the sight of his finger disappearing inside his best friend's asshole. His own cock was painfully hard and het to feel any relief but he didn’t care, needing to see just how far Bucky could go before even beginning to think about himself. Feeling the muscle beginning to relax and adjust to the side of his finger, he began to inch it in and out, ignoring Bucky’s pleas for more, and instead going deciding for himself when Bucky felt relaxed enough.

Steve finally added another finger, spending some time working the hole wide and teasing his prostate within, feeling Bucky shivering and gasping with how good it felt. Even having to stop on occasions as Bucky frantically tried to calm himself down and not cum yet.

You, on the other hand, had already came twice on Bucky’s mouth and fingers. You were so sensitive and so thoroughly aroused by Bucky's skilful body but hearing and seeing just how much Steve’s fingers were making him feel and especially knowing that Bucky was practically edging himself just sot hat he could cum in your pussy.

You were trying to catch your breath from the last orgasm, your back flush against the table as your arm couldn't hold your weight up anymore with your limbs now feeling like jelly. Bucky on the other hand was teasing and nipping your thighs, giving your sensitive pussy a moment to rest before he planned to fuck you.

Glancing over his shoulder, Bucky’s pupils were blown so wide that his eye colour looked black, your juices soaking his chin as he demanded, “Steve if you don’t fuck me right now, I can promise you right now that when we get home, I won’t suck your dick like I’ve been planning too since you ripped open my shirt”.

Steve’s eyes darkened just as much as Bucky's as he pulled his fingers out of Bucky’s slightly gaping hole and began to undo his belt and zipper, reaching into trousers and boxers and easing out his aching cock. He didn’t bother with removing any other article of clothing as he helped Bucky to stand up, the two of them shuffling forward so that Bucky could line himself up at your dripping cunt.

You lazily opened your eyes, grinning at the sight of Bucky preparing to fuck you with Steve over his shoulder. Both of their cheeks were flushed pink and their bodies trembling with the anticipation of the fucking that was about to take place.

Bucky rested a hand next to your head, leaning down for a second to delicately kiss your lips, “colour?” he asked, noting how cock drunk you already looked.

“Very, very green”, you responded, lifting your hands to cup his cheeks, pulling him into one more kiss before you felt the tip of his cock at your entrance, He slowly entered you, your pussy stretching and pulsing around him as you tried to take his full size, thighs trembling with the exertion until the two of you were full fitted together.

Bucky kissed your exposed shoulder as he spread his stance slightly, making it easier for Steve to slide behind him and rock his cock between his arse cheeks, smearing the excessive amounts of extra lube over his shaft.

“I need to hear your colour too, Buck”, Steve demanded, one hand on the base of his cock and the other wrapped around the form of Bucky to grip his jaw, tilting his head so that his mouth was next to his ear.

“Very, very green”, he repeated your words back with a content smirk and you could feel his cock throb inside of you as Steve kissed his jaw.

All three of you seemed to hold your breath as Steve carefully slid his thick cock into Bucky's hole. A wonderful chorus of moans and groans filled the air. Steve couldn’t believe how good it felt to be inside of Bucky, finally doing something he had wished to do for so long. You were almost close to your third orgasm just from watching your boys fit together, and you could also feel just how much it was affecting Bucky with how hard his member was inside of your cunt.

Then there was Bucky, who had next felt such overwhelming pleasure before in his life. For his hole to be the most stretched and full he’d ever experienced, his prostrate being heavily jabbed by Steve’s cock and for Bucky’s own cock to be in his favourite place in the world: your warm, tight, wet pussy. He was in heaven. You all were.

Steve did most of the thrusting for all three of you. With a heavy hand resting on Bucky’s shoulder blades, he pushed the man forward and began to rock his hips back and forth. The momentum shifted Bucky's hips to them move in and out of you until all three of you were moving together.

Bucky was trembling with how much he was trying to hold back his orgasm, a constant stream of filthy moans floating from his mouth as he tried to get you to your third orgasm. However, because you were already so sensitive and overwhelmed with emotions, all it took was a couple of heavy-handed circles of Bucky metal fingers against your clit and you were arching your back, pussy fluttering and tightening in bursts around your boyfriend's cock.

“Holy fucking shit, Doll, feel so good, I - I think I’m going to cum already, fuck Steve don’t stop”. Bucky's gasps and pleas were just as desperate as his expression as he tried not to cum, tried his best to hold back his orgasm but it was no use.

Especially as you cupped his cheek and begged for him to find his own relief, “Please Bucky, want your cum in me so bad, need to feel you filling me up, cum for me”.

“Shit- Ah!”, he grunted, eyes clenching closed as he purposefully still his hips against Steve’s fucking, his mouth gaping open in a deep moan that you would remember for the rest of your life as one of the most beautiful sights you’d ever seen.

You could feel him, the pulsing of his cock, the thick load soaking your walls. Steve could too as Bucky’s hole clenched so hard his cock was suffocated and Steve joined the two of you in your erotic orgasms, his hips stuttering to a stop as his hot seed pumped into Bucky until finally he collapsed against Bucky’s back.

Bucky was half laying over your body against the table so you could easily run your fingers over the back of his head and also through Steve’s as you all tried to process what had just occurred and the relationship that had changed, and all for the better.

“So… how does it feel to be railed by Steve?” you asked innocently to Bucky. The man chuckled deeply, his chest vibrating against yours.

“Probably as good as it felt to be railing you”, he joked, causing you and Steve to laugh. Life was going to be very interesting between the three of you.

[caoimhewritesfics]

Missing

how TF 141 + König react to you, their daughter going missing. Read Pt 2 here and Pt 3 here

CW: Mentions of kidnapping, surveillance (kinda), canon typical violence (mentions). Nothing crazy really but reader beware obvi

WC: 791

Ghost does not play about the people he cares about... especially you. It's been just you and him for years and when you disappear he absolutely loses it. He is DETERMINED to hunt down whoever took you. Doesn't matter how far they've taken you because he will be there the instant he figures out where you've gone. Gets the 141 to help him look and he spends day in and day out pouring over files and ANY information that could give him a clue on where you are. The other 141 boys try to keep him out of it, telling him this is too personal for him but he doesn't care at all. He will be leading this mission if it's the last thing he does.

König has had cameras in and out of the house for YEARS. He's been a soldier for a very long time and has seen A LOT so he's very very very serious about your constant safety. He regularly checks your phone and keeps tabs on who you interact with. Which is why he's so surprised when you disappear without a trace one day. He came home and you were just... gone. His first instinct was panic. He tore the house apart looking for you, leaving no place unchecked. When that proved useless he called EVERY contact in your phone. Yes he kept a list. He's right back to panic when no one knows where you are. He wastes no time searching through your room and all electronics. He'll take whatever clue he can when it comes to finding you. Just like Simon, he will be up 24/7 looking for you. Sleep means nothing to him until you are back home safe. When he finds you, trust he will be ruthless to anyone who tries to stop him or hurt you. He's carrying you out of there himself and he won't let you go until you're back home.

Price, when he sees your empty bedroom and phone on your nightstand he's immediately ready to do something crazy. Price is dad of the year... obviously, so protecting you is his main job. Forget being a soldier, you're priority #1 always. He blames himself at first, thinking he never should have left you alone, should have been even more involved than he already is, if that's even possible. He's banned from leading the search for you which eats him alive. He knows he's too close to all of this and being involved could end badly but he can't handle not knowing anything. He has the 141 boys secretly give him any updates on you. Is it allowed? Fuck no. Does he care? Absolutely not, not even a little bit. He hardly eats or sleeps at all, so consumed by his worry and lingering guilt. It's obviously not his fault but he can't help but feel like it is. His brain runs in circles, creating all sorts of horrible scenarios that make him physically sick. Were you taken by someone he knows? Did they take you to get back at him? Did he accidentally reveal something about you to an enemy?

Gaz has Price in speed dial the second you don't get home. Curfew is 10, by 10:05 the entire 141 is on the search. It's like Kyle has become a different person without you. He's usually pretty collected but he's absolutely out of his mind with worry. He's impulsive and angry. Price has to rein him in several times every day until you're found. He's ready to run in, guns blazing when they finally get your location. He's snappy and impatient, lashing out when there's a dead end in their search. He's on the edge of his seat when they finally track you down and go to get you out of there. He's like a man possessed when he gets his hands on your captors.

Soap is completely devastated when you don't come home. He's always been a bit less strict than the others but when you go out with your friends and don't come home even by the next morning he's absolutely riddled with anxiety. He calls your friend but she says you never had plans with her last night and hasn't seen you in days. This sends him into a horrible dread. He feels like he's suffocating not knowing where you are. Like Price, his mind creates horrible worst case scenarios. Simon tries to remind him that they are on it and the chance of whoever took you getting very far is low but Soap is completely lost in his own head. He can't shake the feeling that he'll never see you again. Of course he will, but not even Simon can convince him.

[celestie0]

gojo satoru x reader | fake marriage au [18+]

in holy matriphony ch.4 in a mother’s eyes

ᰔ pairing. fake marriage au - neighbor&realtor!gojo x nurse!reader (ft. choso x reader & suguru x reader)

ᰔ summary. gojo satoru is your extremely annoying next-door-neighbor who you're pretty sure is the most insufferable man you've ever met. given the fact that you exclusively work the night shift at a chaotic emergency dept, just got broken up with your boyfriend of seven years, and have been taking care of your sick mother ever since her multitude of diagnoses, yet somehow your neighbor is the main source of stress in your life should speak volumes. but when your mother's medical bills start to skyrocket to more than you can manage, and you learn that said neighbor of yours has the best private health insurance plan in the country, you ask him to enter a matrimonial agreement with you for the spousal benefits all in the name of saving a few hundred thousand dollars. but you'll have to see if suffering cohabitation w him is worth any amount of money.

ᰔ genre/tags. fluff, smut, angst, enemies to lovers (sort of), annoyances to lovers (that's more like it), small town romance, fake marriage, next door neighbors, lots of bickering, suburban shenanigans, slow burn, mutual pining, gojo likes to play house but you don't, hatred for the american healthcare system, gojo always forgets to mow the lawn, jealousy, an insane amount of profanity, mentions of cigarettes, depression/anxiety; btw gojo in this fic is in his mid 30s n reader is in her late 20s

ᰔ warnings. reader in this fic has a sick mother w alzheimer's & cancer so there is secondary medical angst!!

ᰔ chapter. 4/x

ᰔ words. 10k (omg a whole number...very sexy)

a/n. hellooo my ihm friends! hope you're all doing well. ahh i'm glad to finally be posting this chapter lolol. it's a littleee off tangent from what happens in ch3, but still has some important plot developments. it does dive into feelings of depression & anxiety, so just wanted to give a warning on that! but yea other than that i hope you enjoy and see you at the bottom!! :) also so sorry if there are errors i only had time to skim through it once :((

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“Just go ahead and sign right here for me.”

You take the pen from the hospice nurse’s hand. It’s cheap black plastic with a pink fuzzy pom pom attached to the end of it with peeling glue. 

Your eyes briefly flit across the paragraphs detailed in printed ink until your gaze lands on the highlighted lines at the bottom of the page. Your signature. Spouse’s signature.

“We’ll need to have your husband come here to sign the paperwork as well, since he’ll have to add your mother on his list of dependents, but we can certainly get started on expediting this process for you since the insurance has already been pre-approved,” the nurse tells you as she accepts your signed paperwork and then neatly tucks it into one of the compartment holders. 

The afternoon goes by smoothly, with your mother surprisingly patient as she sits in the waiting room while you wait for the nurses to formally show you to her new room.

You thought that you could put off putting her in hospice for a little longer, because in all honesty, you weren’t prepared to let her go just yet. You weren’t prepared to not have her in the house anymore. But lately, she’s been putting herself in lots of danger, like attempting to take her own medications when she does not know the correct dosing, and forgetting things on the stove when she attempts to cook.

But the last straw was when you came home from a very brief run to the grocery store at night a couple days ago to see a handful of your neighbors out on the front lawn with your mother at their side. She had apparently gotten out of the house and walked down the neighborhood, then fallen on the sidewalk but was unable to get up. When your neighbors had found her, a miracle as they were just coming home from dinner and caught sight of her in the illumination of their headlights, they tried to help her get up but she couldn’t. She couldn’t even tell the firefighters that came by to help her what her name was, or what year it was, or where she lived.

It was when you realized you couldn’t even keep her safe anymore that you had to let go.

“Is that a wedding ring?” your mother asks, pointing a trembling finger to it as she lays tucked inside her new hospice bed, “are you married?”

You glance down at the ring Gojo gave you in the courthouse, almost surprised to find that you were still wearing it in good faith. “Yes, mom. I am.”

“Why am I here?” she asks you, “I don’t want to be here.”

You stiffen a little. Although you were mentally preparing yourself to answer these questions, the preparation didn’t make it any easier. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just for a little short while, okay? The doctors want to run some tests on you.”

“Who are you married to?” she asks.

“To Satoru,” you tell her, “our neighbor.”

She lets out a small gasp. “The sweet boy who fixed our A/C?”

You roll your eyes. not sure why your mother has hyper fixated on that memory with Gojo when most days she’ll look at you like you’re a stranger. “Yes mom.”

“Oh, I like him,” she tells you with an affectionate nod. She hesitates slightly, wearisome of some other thought that flashes through her mind. “How long have you been married?”

You let out a small sigh. This is already a conversation you had with her a couple days ago, and it doesn’t feel good to lie to her. It was hard enough to do once, but to have to constantly lie to her over and over again over all the smallest things just so that she stays calm and safe and happy seems to drain you of all your energy and happiness you had left in your bones.

Little white lies, that’s what they are. Harmless ones. That’s what you tell yourself to absolve yourself of the guilt.

“I’ll come back soon, okay? I’ll tell you more about him some other day,” you say to her, speaking gently in the way an adult would speak to a child. The way she used to speak to you. You could never exactly pinpoint when those roles became reversed.

You finish discussing some more insurance matters with the front-desk nurse as she puts together a small folder of documents for you. While she works, you glance at the little counter shelf that includes a plethora of pamphlets on how to deal with the complicated feelings that arise from putting a loved one in hospice care, and dealing with the emotions of having a relative with advanced stage dementia. They are pretty brochures, lovingly creased at the folds as if looked through multiple times by people who walk in and out of this facility, but seemingly only few take them home. You slip one of each into your folder when the nurse hands it to you, manage the best smile possible, and then turn on your heel to head out the hospice doors.

The sun is setting outside as you take the walk back to your car, which was purposefully parked a half mile away to afford you the luxury of a melancholic stroll. Somehow, you feel like you’ve left a piece of yourself back at the hospice. A feeling you can’t quite shake from your bones.

Your feet stop walking somewhere along the sidewalk on their own, the street lights above you flickering brighter into life as the sky is now a dusty gray with only streaks of purple. There’s a liquor store you spot across a small parking lot to your right, and you’re guided towards it, but not without a sickening feeling in your chest.

When you open the door, the bell at the top jingles, and you glance to the right where you see a lanky young man playing some sort of shooter game on his phone by the cash register. You grab a bottle of vodka, a bottle of white wine, some packs of skittles, one of the mini pizza boxes at the hot food station, and then dump it all onto the counter.

The young man scans all your items without even so much as sparing you a glance, but does take a look at your ID, then says, “Total’s $68.65, cash or card?”

“Card.”

Just before you tap your card, something displayed behind the cashier counter catches your eye. Something familiar, something tempting, something you weigh in your head about twenty times within one millisecond all due to the cortisol coursing through your veins and you eventually say, “Uh, and could I get one of those, too?”

The cashier looks behind himself to what you’re pointing at before turning around. “Sure.”

The same jingle is heard on top of your head as you leave the store, now with a burning hot mini pizza box in your hand as well as a plastic bag that carries your candy and the two clinking bottles of alcohol.

“Oh!! omg, y/n,” you hear a feminine voice call out and you’re instantly wincing. The last thing you wanted was to be bothered right now. You just wanted to go home and get drunk and then pass out on the floor of your living room. But alas, the world is small.

You turn around to see Hana come running across the sidewalk lot towards you, and when she’s about a few feet away, she glances down at your hands and all the things you were carrying. You quickly shove your last-minute purchase into your jacket pocket with a shameful conscience, and try to hide the plastic bag of liquor behind your calves. There was no hiding the pizza box, but at least that was the least incriminating.

“Oh, Hana, wow! What a coincidence seeing you here,” you say to her, pressing your lips into a small smile.

“Yeah, I um,” she points over her shoulder towards the hospice that’s standing tall in the darkness of night, cells with windows illuminated with light. If you didn’t know any better, you would think it was a prison. “Remember I told you my friend’s mom is sick and she’s at this hospice?”

“Yeah,” you say.

“I was just visiting her mom with her,” she tells you.

“Aw,” you comment, “I see, I see.”

You adore Hana, you really do. She was there for you when the whole Yuna and Choso thing went down, picking your shifts up for a good week when you couldn’t stomach going into work when your ex-best friend’s stupid face was gloating in the halls over how she stole your boyfriend. Hana was there for you when you were a new hire and all the doctors were being bitchy about a “newbie in the ED”, but she stood up for you, even cussed the fuck out of one of attendings for the whole hall to hear when you were being disrespected by one of them. She’s someone you can beam about how hot the EMT and Firefighter men that stroll into the ED are, too. A priceless companion.

And even though you two have hung out after hours sometimes, it was still always a little awkward to see a coworker outside of work.

“What are you doing here?” she asks.

“I actually, um, was going to tell you at our shift tomorrow, but I just admitted my mom to the hospice too,” you say, “and…thanks a lot for telling me about it. I really appreciate it. It seems like a wonderful facility.”

Her eyes briefly widen with surprise before they soften once again. “Oh, that’s wonderful, love. I hope all goes well. And your little insurance scam worked! Good for you!”

“Shhh,” you hiss at her, looking around yourself with paranoia, “the feds are everywhere.”

She laughs, sweet in the air, before the sound settles and she looks at you with something reminiscent of well-intentioned concern. Her eyes flit to the plastic bag you were still holding behind your legs. “Hey…um, if…if you ever want some company when you come to visit your mom, just let me know. I hope you know you don’t have to do everything alone.”

You blink at her, sucking in a short breath to respond, but it only leaves you as a slight puff of air. There’s a silent gratitude that you give her, because it’s hard for you to express any feelings with words, but you’ve found that the people in your life who know you best can always read you without them. 

“Thank you, Hana,” you manage to say with a slight croak to your voice because you were fighting back tears.

She smiles at you. “Take care, okay? And see ya tomorroooowwwwww,” she coos at you, coming up to you to give you a small hug, a squeeze of your upper arm, and then she heads back towards the direction of the hospice.

You watch her walk away until you can’t see her anymore. And then you head towards your car.

When you arrive at your neighborhood, you park in front of Gojo’s house. You have a feeling that you won’t be able to bear the vast emptiness of your home now that your mother is elsewhere, and so you drag your feet up the stone stairs of his house with a heavy heart instead.

The spare key that he gave you weakly pushes into the keyhole with about as much force as your fingers can manage, and you realize they almost feel atrophied. 

The house is dark when you step inside, spare for the ambient street lights shining through cracked open blinds on the windows, and the curtains rustle gently from the draft of the AC, a chill that reaches you too by the time you make it to the staircase.

It doesn’t seem like Gojo’s home. A glance at the clock tells you it’s close to 8pm. You briefly consider texting him to ask where he’s at, why he’s out so late, when he’ll be home, and what’s for dinner, but you can’t even bring yourself to pull your phone out of your coat pocket.

Weak legs manage to take you upstairs and you’re about to pass through to your room when the slightly open door to the master bedroom taunts you, like a peephole into some other wordly dimension. Like the wardrobe in the chronicles of Narnia. A portal into your fake husband’s life.

With a palm pushing on the door, you slowly crack it open, and you know the anxious voices in your head are getting worse by the day when the creaking of the door hinges sounds like a lullaby to you. 

Was this an invasion of privacy? And did you really care if it was?

The room is big, with a king sized bed off to the left, sheets neatly made and duvet primly tucked under, like the way hotel beds are set up. You feel a slight flush of embarrassment when you remember you haven’t been making your bed in the mornings for the past couple days you’ve been living here so far, and you wonder if Gojo would judge you for something like that. If he’d think you were a messy or undisciplined person. If he would think less of you.

Truthfully, in a lot of ways, you still felt like a child. You barely weathered a lot of your formative adolescent years when dealing with your parents’ divorce, and you’ve had to put so much of your life on pause to take care of your mom ever since she got diagnosed. So here you were, in the body of a 29-year-old woman, yet still feeling so painfully juvenile. One that forgets to make her bed in the mornings, and on most nights can’t seem to stomach anything other than cereal for dinner. It was like you were still at a party that everyone else had left, except all it ever was is hell. Your life was such a stark contrast to the lives of other adults you’ve come across. The ones that wake up at six to go on runs, the ones that have paid off mortgages with five figures in their retirement accounts, oh god, the ones that meal prep, and the ones that, all things considered, have their lives together. The ones that don’t spend at least an hour of every day, in fetal position on their bed, sobbing until tears soak through the sheets of the pillow down to the feathers like bone, because you’re so overwhelmed with stress and preparing yourself for the grief of losing your mother which you know that, no matter how hard you try to save her from, will inevitably one day come. 

You used to cook dinner every night, make your bed every morning, and go to pilates on the weekends. Back when you were a little younger and healed and excited to live life. But now, you barely get by. Your priorities are with your mother. You can’t remember the last time you did anything nice for yourself, including something as simple as the luxury of getting to come home to a clean house because you hardly ever had time to clean it, not with all the doctor’s appointments you were driving your mother to, not with all the extra shifts you were picking up at the hospital to pay off your debt, not with all the times you felt too depressed to even get out of bed. 

But your mother is in hospice now, so you’ve made time, right? You’ve made the decision that everyone in your life has been begging you to finally do. So why do you still feel so empty inside?

By a quick survey of the room, you notice Gojo doesn’t really have many framed photos hung up on the walls or perched up on surfaces. None, actually. Only a contemporary painting above his bed frame and then a faded vintage horror movie poster plastered up near his desk. Not terribly odd, since in your experience most men don’t really do the whole “cluttering the house with millions of photos of their family” thing until they at least have a couple of kids and some purebred dog. The thought of Gojo someday setting up a little portrait photo at his desk with his wife’s—his eventual real forever wife’s, pretty face in it, posing with their two beautiful kids, makes an oddly melancholic feeling waft through you. You wonder if he would keep a two-by-two in his wallet, too.

Your feet move one in front of the other as your finger traces the surface wood of a dresser cabinet, something that looks a little vintage and oaky, in stark contrast to the modern minimalist vibe Gojo has set up in the rest of the room. A family heirloom, maybe? There’s no dust that coats your finger, which surprises you. If you were to run your finger across your dresser at home you’d have collected enough dust to snort down your windpipes like a recreational drug. But Gojo’s a real estate agent, making a living off of dressing houses up in perfect cosplay so that monetarily stable middle class families feel inclined to buy them. So you’re not exactly surprised he’s invested in keeping his own house in pristine condition too. 

There is a little bit of chaos, though. Like the shirt he has haphazardly hung over his chair at his office space over to the right. There’s a coffee mug sitting there too, porcelain and reflecting the moon light off, but upon peering inside you see that it’s half empty with stale coffee. He’s got pens sprawled across the desk, in a fashion that suggests he accidentally knocked them over in a rush, and slowly, like some grounding exercise, you place them one by one back into the paper mache pencil holder. It briefly occurs to you that he has a lot of paper mache containers of sorts around the house. You lift up the pencil cup, turning it in your hand until your eyes catch something written on it with glittery pink gel pen.

i luv u unkle toru! -yur BEST FREND 4EVUR juno!!! :D

A small smile makes it onto your face. The handwriting was messy, more like scratches than smooth lines, and nothing less than what you would expect of a child. You remember making paper mache and clay trinkets at preschool for your mom and dad when you were younger. And you’re sure if you were brave enough to open the box of memorabilia that sits in your attic some day, you’d see your own scratchy scribbled handwriting on them. An innocence that is long gone and buried, never again to be delicately placed on desks or counters for all the living.

The draft from the AC reaches you once again, brushing over your skin and causing a chill to shiver down your spine. It kicks at the curtains as well, causing them to ruffle up towards you, baring the dark outside world into the streets. And you notice in that momentary glance that there’s a roof just outside the window that overlooks the backyard. A roof? Spotted by a depressed woman going through a quarter life crisis? There was nothing more tempting than that. 

The window was easy to open, which only caused unease over the revelation of how easy it would be for someone to rob this house. You make a mental note to tell Gojo to get a ring camera or security system of some sort since he doesn’t seem to have one, but you can already picture him telling you something about how statistically low the crime rates are in this neighborhood compared to all the other neighborhoods, and then you’d tell him that it’s just for your peace of mind. But whether he’d compromise or not after that, you’re really not sure.

You take a seat on the roof, a little scared as you sit because of the slight slope, but it’s comfortable once you’re settled. You sit criss-cross-apple-sauce, staring out into the neighborhood of perfectly lined up suburban houses. You’ve got a better view into some neighbors' backyards, noticing that a couple of them had pools while some of them have big gardens. There's a cat resting up on a fence in the distance. A car drives by with headlights illuminating everything in its proximity briefly before zooming off. You glance up at the sky, and notice the full moon, but it’s too cloudy to see any stars. Or perhaps it was just the light pollution from the lamps making it difficult to see.

On instinct, your hand reaches inside your coat pocket for your phone, but your knuckles hit something else instead. A moment of brief confusion flickers through your head, but then you immediately recall the last-minute purchase you made at the gas station.

Your hand pulls out the object, and then you stare down at it. Squinting your eyes a little, because it’s a sight that feels familiar but also one you haven’t seen in so long: a pack of twenty Marlboro red cigarettes. 

You’ve tried a lot of things to manage your stress over the years. Excessively working out, eating a lot of sugar, going on six hour hikes to touch grass, flirting with random men at bars, fucking Choso until he was rendered speechless, multiple types of antidepressants, you almost tried smoking weed once with your roommate in college but you wimped out last second. But the habit that had gotten you through the years of 21 to 24 is held loosely in your hand right now. It’s been five years since you quit, but resolve was often a fickle thing. As the saying goes, once an addict, always an addict. 

There’s a brief moment of hesitation as you slowly peel the plastic off of the back, but then it all comes back to you like a reflex you’ll never forget up to where you slide a cigar up out and then pinch it between your two fingers. Forgetting to buy a lighter with the cigarettes is definitely something you would do, but because you remembered it was something that you would do, you remembered not to do it. The flick of the flame coming to life is ASMR you didn’t know you were painfully nostalgic for, and you balance the cigarette between your lips in that sort of movie-star way people used to obsess over back in the day. But just as you bring the lighter up to the end of the cigarette, and just before you can light it—

A hand shoots out in your periphery, grabbing your wrist and entirely stalling the movement.

You gasp, lips parting enough for the cigarette to fall from them and into your lap. The hand wrapped around your wrist is large and masculine, and you briefly consider screaming, but when you snap your neck to look at the perpetrator, you see Gojo crouched down next to you on this roof. You notice he’s wearing a black suit, a tie that was loosely secure hanging from his neck into the space between his spread thighs as he’s crouched, and whatever gel he had in his hair from earlier only barely remains as strands fall over his forehead haphazardly. He looks like he’s on the other end of a long work day. 

You blink at him, expression plastered with surprise, but his is only earnest. With breathtaking blue eyes that you realize he could easily use to surrender a person just by looking at them, like the way he’s looking at you right now. His lips are pressed together into a firm line, as if to suppress some emotion, but the slight crease to his brow makes you feel like you’re in trouble somehow. Like he was silently scolding you for something.

“I—” you stutter.

He lets go of your wrist and discreetly pulls the lighter out of your hand. And then his hand reaches for the pack of cigarettes you were balancing on your knee, but on some reflex that you don’t even think about, you try to snatch them away from him, and now you’re both tugging at the same pack of cigarettes.

“y/n,” he says, “let go.”

“No,” you say stubbornly.

He sighs and tugs a little harder. “Give them to me.”

“But—” you stammer, voice becoming softer to see if that’d work on him, “I’m…” Your grip on them tightens. “I’m stressed.”

He raises an eyebrow at you, then finally loses his patience and snatches them right out of your hand. He stands up from his crouched down position to toss the pack off to the side onto the roof somewhere. You’re surprised when he lets out a sigh and sits down next to you on the roof, as if he felt the obligation to. His legs stretch out in front of him, but still bent slightly at the knees, and he leans backwards with his body weight braced on his palms laid flat on wood paneling behind him. “There are better ways to relieve stress,” he tells you candidly. 

“Like what?” you ask, and just when he opens his mouth to speak, you clarify, “and don’t say sex.”

He shuts his mouth and his eyes flit up to the sky for a brief second. “Damn. I didn’t have a back-up answer.” 

You roll your eyes, releasing a deep breath, then draw your knees to your chest before resting your chin on top of them. 

“I didn’t know you smoke,” he says after a century-long minute. 

You wince a little, because you were half hoping he was going to just drop the subject all together. 

You bite your lip nervously and hug your knees to your chest tighter as if to hide yourself from him. “I don’t. Well, I haven’t. Um, not for a while.”

“Huh. I see,” he says.

Another silence passes, and as he shuffles next to you, the fabric of his suit brushes against the fabric of your coat, and you’ve become entirely too aware of the feeling.

“So,” he says, breaking the awkward silence, “your mom’s in hospice now?”

You nod, enthusiastic enough to where you won’t look like you’re entirely depressed about it.

“That’s good,” he says, “no issues with the insurance?”

You shake your head. “They need you to sign some papers by the end of the week though,” you tell him. “We’ll have to go in person.”

He nods slowly to affirm he’ll make time for it. “I really hope things get better for your mom,” he says, voice soft as he stares off into neighbors homes like you had been doing ten minutes ago. You see the cat that was resting on the fence get up, do a big stretch, and start walking along the length of the fence. Your eyes briefly glance at Gojo, and you notice his gaze is tracing the cat’s path. 

“My—” you start, hesitant all of a sudden by the vulnerability you already feel swelling within you, most definitely due to sitting with someone on a rooftop late at night, but you decide that you’ll be nice to him for once, “…my mom seems to remember you a lot. More than she remembers me.” You let out a small humoring laugh, as if that fact doesn’t completely destroy you. “She was blabbering to me again for the seventh time about how you apparently fixed our AC.” You try to bite your tongue, but can’t help it when you say, “although I’m pretty sure you just pressed a bunch of buttons until it started working again.”

“Yup. That’s exactly what I did.”

You roll your eyes and sigh.

Another awkward silence.

“Can I ask you a question?” you say.

“Sure.” His voice sounds deeper, like he’s sleepy. 

“Why did you agree to marry me? That’s not something people just do out of nowhere.”

He glances over at you, and you flicker your eyes to him. “Why? Having regrets?” he teases, with a slight nudge of his elbow to your side. 

“Just answer me.”

He lifts his palms up from behind him and leans forward, placing his hands on his knees instead. “I don’t know. If something I could do would help someone out that much, I wasn’t going to say no.”

You hum quietly, still confused by his intentions. But you’re too jaded to question them.

“It costs nothing to be nice,” he adds. 

You run soothing circles over your thigh through the fabric of your jeans. For some reason, your mind wanders to Choso. Thinking of all the years you wasted staying with him even though you knew his affections were long gone, just because you didn’t want to break his heart. Only to realize that you never had that privilege in the first place. 

“I think,” you say, your voice barely above a whisper as you draw your knees closer to your chest, “that sometimes it does.”

A gust of autumn wind breezes by, ruffling the trees that the two of you are at eye-level with at the moment. You're pretty sure you’ve completely lost Gojo’s interest at this point, where he’s finally too tired to deal with your oddly cryptic attitudes and overall generally displeasing vibe, assuming this based solely on his prolonged silence beside you. You’re ready for him to get up and abandon you here on this roof, left to ponder every single thing you’ve done wrong in your life. It was any second now.

“Sometimes,” he instead speaks up, and it’s so surprising to you that you jolt a little bit, “you can do everything right, and people will still find a way to fuck you over. But I don’t think that’s any reason to stop being nice to others.”

You glance over at him, your eyes widening slightly, but he just continues to peer off straight into the night. His blinks are slow, lingering on being closed for a moment before he opens them again, and you’re mesmerized by the sight. The skin under his eyes is slightly dark from exhaustion, heavy with character that makes you aware that he’s just a person too. And for what feels like the tenth time this week, you realize that he’s—…handsome. And for what feels like the tenth time this week, your heart flutters in your chest.

He scoffs suddenly and dusts his hands off. “I sound like a fucking youth pastor.” He lets out an exhale before suddenly standing up onto his feet before you can think more on it. He looks off into the night again and lets out another exhale that sounds more like a sigh this time. “God, it’s getting a lot colder these days. Might have to start running the heater.”

You blink up at him with no commentary to add. 

He looks down at you. His face is relaxed, but you can tell those eyes are distracted. A shimmering blue ocean in its own world while he attempts to stay present in this one. 

He holds his hand out to you, and you stare at it blankly like you’ve got no clue what he intends for you to do with it. But you finally take the hint and curl your hand around his palm so that he can pull you up onto your feet too.

You stumble a little, falling forward from the sudden blood flow to your brain, but he holds you steady by the strong grip of his hands on your elbows. He’s close to you, close enough to where you can smell the faint lingering scent of his cologne. Something different than that expensive one he wore to the courthouse, but it’s comforting somehow. A fragrance that’s more him. And you feel nervous as you look up at him underneath pale moonlight. 

He lets go of your elbows. You feel cold from the loss of his touch. But his right hand moves to gently hold your left hand in his palm, holding it curled as his thumb barely grazes the stone you wear on your ring finger; the one he gave you.

The way his thumb prods at the silver band is like he’s inspecting its quality, as if it has to pass some test to be worthy of sitting on your finger. Or maybe just any finger, if you were to quell the delusion. You’re not sure if he’s satisfied with his inspection.

“Where did you get it—” you blurt out.

His gaze flickers up to your face briefly before he’s back to examining the ring. “It was my mom’s.”

Your mouth gapes slightly in shock, heart dropping a little in your chest, and all of a sudden you feel guilty. Guilty that he put his mother’s ring on your finger for something that was fake, something that was essentially a business deal, something exchanged to you out of fraud when it was a precious family heirloom that should be exchanged with love. And maybe he didn’t care about it much, some people don’t care about the sentiments of objects. But your mind thinks of the oaky vintage dresser in his room, so out of place in the aesthetic of its surroundings, a decision you can only imagine him of all people, mr. “everything in this house has to look like an IKEA catalog”, would do if the dresser held some importance to him that was more than meets the eye. And so you’re compelled to think that maybe this ring did, too. 

“Why would you give me this?! You could’ve just gotten a cheap fake diamond ring from a pawn shop and called it a day,” you ask him, suddenly feeling burdened by it.

“Well I wasn’t exactly given much time to think of other options.”

“But—” you start, only to realize you have no counter arguments for that.

He lets out a huh noise, like the sound someone makes when they’re pleasantly surprised by something, as he looks down at your hand that he still held in his. “It’s kinda crazy that it fits you perfectly. I wasn’t sure.”

Your mind wanders to when he slipped the ring onto your finger in the courtroom, followed by the kiss. Soft, sweet, the lingering warm sensation of his palm on your cheek as he cupped your face, the same way those heartthrob actors do in all those romance movies and kdramas that you watch on Friday nights while snuggled up in a blanket, wondering when anyone will ever kiss you like that. You remember the ghost sensation of his hand hovering over the small of your back, fingers lightly grazing the nape of your neck, his frame blocking out everything around you as he kissed you, just to pull away and for the two of you to then pretend like it never happened, as if it wasn’t one of the sweetest kisses you’ve ever known.

You slowly pull your hand out of his, the moment feeling too tender for your liking, and you clear your throat before flitting your eyes up to his. 

“Rule #1,” you remind him with a soft whisper, “no touching.”

You purse your lips, watching his round eyes blink once, then twice, before he shoves his hands in his suit pockets. He rocks back and forth on his heels for a few seconds, nodding slowly in submission, and then he turns on them to head back to the house. You’re standing a little stunned from the abrupt ending to this trance of a moment on the roof, and you’re also a little surprised with how your chest is heaving a little bit with fast breaths, but you eventually snap out of it to follow him inside too. 

You two make it back inside the house, with little words exchanged. You pretend to not notice the way Gojo tilts his head at his desk, like he’s confused about why it looks tidier than when he left it. You’re prepared to feign innocence or ignorance, but he doesn’t press you about it. 

“Y’know,” he says from behind you, his chest briefly brushing against the back of your head as he pushes the bedroom door in front of you open so that you can head out into the loft, “those oversized 1800s-esque nightgowns you’ve been wearing around the house kinda make you look like a less-hot version of Ebenezer Scrooge.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

•┈┈┈••✦☽✦••┈┈┈•

“Sign right here for me, sir.”

You watch as the nurse slides the papers across the high-raised counter of the hospice nursing desk towards Gojo, his eyebrows narrowing as his eyes skim the words on the paper and land at the highlighted lines where he’s been intended to sign. You feel nervous for some reason, as if he’d suddenly find something disagreeable and refuse to sign, then take you to the courthouse first thing to finalize a divorce and send you off to prison while claiming he was blackmailed into the whole marriage in the first place.

Instead, he pulls a pen from the chest pocket of his suit jacket, clicking the end of it and scribbling his signature onto the paper with some jet black ink that looks like it takes a second to dry. How pretentious of him. The pink pom-pom pen was right there.

The nurse behind the counter continues to chat with him about something, blah blah dependents, blah blah tax claims, blah blah you’ll receive an itemized bill in the mail. You’re trying your best to eavesdrop in on the conversation, but most of your senses are being occupied by examining all your surroundings. When you dropped your mother off at the hospice, your feelings were at the forefront of conscience, but now that you’ve had a couple days to come down from that overwhelming emotional high, you’re here to scope out the quality of this place you’ve just dumped your mom at.

The facility is clean and sleek, with a color theme of red and an ocean blue across the signs, the furniture, even with the paperwork they hand out. All the workers had color-coded scrubs based on their occupation or specialty, and none of them had stains on the fabric. You take a glance down at the modest leather pumps you were wearing past the creases of the long skirt, and notice that the floor was shimmering off their reflection in a perfect polish. It wasn’t bad, this place.

“Thanks, you too,” you hear Gojo say to the nurse behind the counter. He has a professional smile on his face, but still kind and genuine, which makes the woman at the computer something bashful and unable to make eye contact. He folds something that looks like a receipt into his chest pocket before tucking his pen back in there too and then turns to face you. You make a mental note to pay him back for whatever he just paid for, at least once you move some money around. 

Your eyebrows lift, feeling a little dazed as you blink at him blankly.

“Alright,” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets, the sound of his shoes on the polished hospital floors satisfactorily tapping in your ears as he took a couple steps towards you, “where’s your mom’s room?”

“Huh?”

“What’s her room number?” he asks you.

“Y-You wanna go see her??”

“Of course I want to,” he says, “she’s my mother-in-law.”

You roll your eyes and pet the fabric of your skirt to smooth the wrinkles out. “You’re getting a little too invested in this role of fake husband.”

“I get to annoy you all day and ride the adrenaline rush of committing a federal crime,” he says, “of fucking course I’d get invested.”

You sigh, tossing some of your hair to behind your shoulder before glancing up at the signs, squinting slightly to locate the ward where your mother’s room is, before you hear an extremely high-pitched and somewhat catty feminine voice call out from behind you. You glance at Gojo’s face as he peers off to whoever’s behind you, and you see him visibly stiffen a little.

“Is that Dayton county’s sexiest realtooorrr???” the voice purrs, and you turn on your heel to see a blonde bombshell of a woman clacking her kitten heels down the glistening floors of the hospice, with another brunette bombshell just a few paces behind her. Bombshell #2 sighs something like “it issss” before they walk right up to your fake husband and take turns at giving him a playful squeeze of his bicep. You have to physically stop your jaw from dropping at the sight. 

“Wow! Ladies, so–...so great to see you two,” he says out of polite obligation, and you immediately clock the fact that he doesn’t address them by name.

Bombshell #1 turns to look at you, all of her hair moving as one solid entity with the motion from all the hair spray that’s probably holding it up, and she points at you with a long slender finger that narrows into a french-tip. “Oh who’s this?? Another one of your clients??”

“Oh, no, she’s my–”

“I’m his wife,” you interrupt him, irritated for some reason. 

Both the women chirp something out like oh! before their faces twist with confusion. 

“I didn’t know you were married,” Bombshell #2 says in a thick New Jersey accent.

Gojo lifts his left hand up, the silver band on his hand glimmering under fluorescent hospice lighting. “Very happily,” he says, as if someone was holding a gun to his head.

Bombshell #1 crosses her arms, and you try not to stare at how nice her boobs look in the low scoop-neck jaguar print top she was wearing. You were no better than a man. And now you’re pissed off at the idea of Gojo glancing down too, but a flick of your gaze up to his face tells you he’s safe. For now. 

“You weren’t married when I asked you if you were a month ago,” Bombshell #1 sneers at him. It’s true, the math wouldn’t make sense, but in his defense, this marriage was a fraud.

“Or when you took me out for dinner last week after I bought my house,” Bombshell #2 snarls with an undertone of hurt. 

Gojo clears his throat beside you before pointing at Bombshell #2. “How is that, by the way?” he asks in an attempt to change the subject, “the half acre down on Maple Ave, right? You, uh, enjoying the pool?”

The woman let out an offended scoff and–were her eyes sheening with tears?? She puts her hands on her hips. “No. Mine is the three bedroom house with the cedar gazebo on 14th street.”

Her friend next to her rolls her eyes and smacks her gum between her cheek. “I’m the one that bought the half acre down on Maple Ave, jerk. Ugh!” She grabs her friend’s arm with a high-pitched hmph noise leaving her throat, and you can hear the other one sniffling subtly as she wobbles on her heels with her friend’s pull of her arm. 

Right before leaving the two of you alone, Bombshell #1 turns to you and says, “I hope you find someone who treats you better,” and then they storm off together down the hallway, their perfectly blow-dried hair bouncing in sync with each stomp.

You blink at the sight, a little flabbergasted from the interaction, and then flit your faze up to Gojo. You see him awkwardly scratching at the back of his head with a grimace on his stupidly handsome face. 

“That’s what you get for being a manwhore,” you tell him.

“I’m not a manwhor–”

“You went on a date with another woman while you were maaaaarrrieeeddd?!” you coo as you let out a fake gasp and slap your cheeks with your hands, “despicable, really.”

He lets out some disgruntled noise, the source coming from deep within his throat. “No. We weren’t fake-married yet,” he vindicates himself, “and it wasn’t a date. I just bought her dinner as a congrats for buying a house. Not a big deal. I do it for all my clients.”

“Satoru. You do realize you’re leading these women on, right? I mean, I’ve seen the way you talk to them. Even if you think you’re just being friendly, please know that your definition of friendly is most people’s definition of flirting.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s true.”

He raises an eyebrow as he glances down at you. “Alright, how come this flirting in disguise of friendliness hasn’t worked on you then?”

You scoff in disbelief before crossing your arms. Maybe you did deserve a better fake husband. “You’re never friendly with me. You’re always rude to me.”

“What? I’m not always rude to you.”

“Well, you’re certainly much more rude to me than you are to other women,” you say, tapping the tip of your shoe with irritation.

“Can we not do this right now? We’re in the middle of a hospice.” 

“God, you’re such a cop-out,” you mumble as you forcefully push past him towards the hallway that’ll lead you to your mother. You can hear that Gojo’s on your tail, following you down one of the more dimly lit hallways, and you can tell he needs to stall the strides of his Daddy Longlegs to not overtake your pace.

“What the fuck is a cop-out?” he asks you from behind.

“Look it up on urban dictionary, Grandpa. Unless you don’t know what the Internet is, either,” you spat. 

You waltz right up to your mother’s room just in time to see a nurse making her way out with a clipboard in her hands. She glances over to you when she sees you approaching in her periphery.

“Hi! How can I help you?” she asks.

“Is it alright if we visit my mother?” you ask her.

“Oh! Sure, let me just clean her bed pan really quick.”

Your brow furrows. “B-Bedpan?? Why is she using a bedpan??”

The nurse stops in her movements. “Well, yesterday and today, that’s just what she has decided to use.”

You immediately become hostile. “That’s not right. She never needed to use one at home. Why is she suddenly using one here? Is that not a clear sign of deterioration? The restrooms must not be kept well enough here if she doesn’t want to use them.”

The nurse becomes something meek, her eyes widening as her mouth gapes slightly. “Ma’am,” she squeaks out, “we see this commonly with patients as they begin to adjust to hospice life. We’ll urge her to use the restroom, but as of right now, we need to prioritize what she finds most comfortable.”

Your expression softens, your shoulders relaxing from their tense position, and you duck your head a little with guilt. “Right…I’m sorry.”

The nurse presses her lips together with a well-meaning smile before shuffling into the room and closing the door behind her. You sigh and lean your back against the wall next to the number plate, cheeks flushing slightly from the confrontation. You have no idea how loud your voice was or who heard you. But you try to convince yourself that you’re just stressed and trying to look out for your mother, although the guilt still sits.

You glance up to see Gojo staring at you with slightly wide eyes, his hands shoved into his pockets, and he tilts his head to study your expression.

“What?” you snap at him.

“Are you doing okay?”

“Just fine, thanks.”

“Are you sure?”

“Satoru,” you cut his questioning off by raising a palm into the air, “just—…just stop.”

His brow furrows together slightly, but before he can show any further concern, the nurse exits the room and holds the door open for the two of you. 

“All set!” she chirps, and Gojo moves to hold the door open in her stead, and then the nurse bolts down to disappear somewhere down the hallway.

You hear Gojo let out a small huff of a scoff as he stares down in the direction the nurse ran off in. “Glad to know I’m not the only one that’s scared of you.”

You roll your eyes and walk into the room through the open door.

Your mother lays in her bed, looking out the window with her hands resting on top of layers of white linen sheets, her skin looking slightly paler than usual. You approach her bedside slowly and she finally turns her head to look at you.

“Hi mom,” you gently greet her, sitting down on the stool beside her bed, “how are you doing?”

Her eyes dart across the features of your face, and you briefly glance towards the wall to the right where you see Gojo standing from a slight distance.

“Oh, hi dear,” she says with a smile, and relief washes over you.

You match her smile with your own. “Mom, I brought someone here to see you.” You glance over at Gojo, who starts to close distance now as he approaches the foot of the bed, “this is Satoru, my husband.”

Your mother’s eyes widen, “Oh! I know him,” she scoldingly swats a hand at you, like you’ve embarrassed her somehow by assuming that she doesn’t know who he is, “he’s my neighbor!”

You sigh, “yes mom, the one that fixed the A/C?” You attempt to finish her sentence for her.

She looks confused for a moment, but slightly nods as if to avoid any further confusion for herself. “But—…but, why…” she trails off and then looks at you, “I’m sorry, are you my nurse?”

Your shoulders drop slightly. “No, mom, it’s me. Your daughter. Do you remember?”

Her face scrunches before it entirely relaxes to keep some image of composure despite the haze you know she feels in her head. “Oh…yes, yes…my little girl. I remember you, of course!”

Your eyes become layered with a slight sheen of tears, “I’m glad.”

“Where’s your father?” she asks, “he said he’d bring me some…oh dear, what—…he said he’d bring me tea. I’ve been waiting.”

“Mom, dad is—” you pause for a moment to think on your feet. You could either tell the truth, or a little white lie. You never know what to do. And either one comes with either guilt or sorrow. “Well, he’ll be here soon, I just wanted to come see you.”

“Oh okay…” she trails off, her eyes squinting at you once more with that same look of confusion on it, but then they drift towards Gojo. “Oh you’re a very handsome young man! You look just like my neighbor.”

Your eyes flicker up to Gojo, and he walks up to your side by your mom’s bed. “Yes, Mrs. l/n, I am your neighbor.”

“With the lemon tree!”

“The avocado tree,” you correct her with a small sigh. “And he’s my husband mom. And also our neighbor.”

“Oh I see I see…” she says, looking up at him, and in a moment that shocks you, she holds her hand up for him to take.

There’s a slight moment of surprise on his face too, but he accepts her frail hand in his, and you glance over to your mom to see her look at him with some look of peace on her face.

“Oh, sit down here, won’t you?” she tells him, and you both blink at her in a moment of hesitation.

He pulls a stool up to the side of the bed right next to you and takes a seat down onto it. Your mother holds his hand with both of hers now, soothing her palm over the back of it before she taps on it lightly.

“Oh, my little girl is very sweet. She would bring me flowers from the garden when she was,” she glances at you, confused once more, “well I remember her when she was so little but she looks…a little older now. Ah, but she would bring me such pretty flowers.”

Your heart aches in your chest. You never knew what version of you your mother would remember. Some days, you’re still supposed to be an angsty teenager that shuts doors in her face, some days you were just as you are right now, and other days, you were just her little girl. And it confused her, the image of not seeing you in the way that she remembers. In the only way she knew how.

“You’ll take good care of my sweet girl, won’t you?” she asks him.

And it knocks the wind out of you.

It drops your heart to the center of the earth.

The thought that, after so many moments where she doesn’t remember you, she still knows that you’re someone she wants to keep safe.

Your mouth gapes slightly, tears welling in your eyes and you try your best to blink them away, but you see Gojo’s hand slip out from being held by your mother’s hands, to instead use both of his to hold hers. Your eyes snap to his face, and you see that same earnest expression you’ve been growing used to seeing these days. 

“Yes,” he responds, eye contact level with hers, “I will.”

A small puff of air leaves your lips, a single tear streaming down your cheek and you quickly swipe your trembling fingers to remove any evidence of it before you huff out a shaky, “excuse me.” And then you’re standing up off the stool, and in a few hurried steps across the room as more tears continue to stream down your face, you make it to the door to push out into the suffocating air of the hallway.

It’s hard to breathe, huffs and puffs barely leaving your lips as you struggle to pull air into your lungs while you storm down the hallway at a fast pace, your heels clicking underneath you in a way that only sets you off further. Suddenly, all the sounds around you make you sick to your stomach, a wave of nausea washing over you, and your nose burns with the intensity of the tears that continue to stream down your face. A few hospice staff look at you with concerned expressions, and you eventually reach a heavy-duty door that leads you out into a secluded staircase hallway where the dim lighting serves to relax at least some of your senses, but you still feel like you’re about to pass out.

Even in the haze of your emotions, there’s this glimmer of a memory that comes to mind. One from when you were younger and you were pushed on the playground at school. You cried and cried and cried in your mother’s arms, but even then, you didn’t want her to baby you. You would say to her, I’m a big girl now! in that same way a child knows nothing of what it truly means to brave the world. 

That little girl had no idea that one day, there would be moments where she wouldn’t be remembered as her mother’s little girl anymore. 

No matter how old you grow, you will always be my little girl, your mother’s voice echoes to you, the feeling of her squeezing you in her arms as she holds your sobbing little form in hers casting a ghost sensation across your skin.

In a mother’s eyes, you’ll always be her baby.

And that’s why it hurts.

Because it’s all fake.

It’s phony.

It’s not real.

This arrangement you have with Gojo.

And if your mother were to die tomorrow, there would be no one to take care of her little girl anymore.

Not in the way she believes there will be.

Of all the white lies, this one pierces you straight through your heart in a way that leaves you gasping for air.

Amidst your whirlwind of thoughts, you hear the door push open harshly, and when you glance over, you see Gojo standing in this dimly lit hallway as he turns his head quickly to the left and sees you standing there.

“Hey,” he says, catching his breath as he lightly jogs up to you, “hey, hey, hey,” he repeats with more concern now when he sees the state you’re in, and he seamlessly pulls you into a hug, your cheek pressing against his chest that feels warm even through the fabric of his suit jacket and shirt, and that familiar scent of him completely engulfs you.

You sob quietly, wiping your snot on his tie and your tears on the felt fabric beside it, your hands balled into tiny fists at your chest, squeezed between the two of you. You feel him tuck your head under his chin and his arms wrap around you tighter. You don’t even realize it at first, but suddenly, it has become easier to breathe.

Then, you wail, and you cry, and you sob, because you don’t have the words to even explain how you feel, about not just this, but with everything, a buildup of everything that has been suffocating you in your life that just comes crashing down on you all at once.

“I know,” he says, his palm resting on the back of your head as he holds your face to his chest, his voice soothing in your ears while you sob until there’s nothing left to cry. “I know.”

You two stay like this for another minute or so as you come down from the cries, your remnant sniffling echoing in the hallway while you wipe more of your snot on his jacket. You make the first move to pull your face away from his chest, but he still keeps his arms wrapped around you when you look up at him.

With your gaze darting across his face, you take in the blue in his eyes. Eyes that are looking at you so softly it’s suddenly hard to breathe once more. And when those eyes flit to your lips, your mouth parts slightly as you two breathe in unison.

It’s possible that you could have dreamed the moment you saw him lean down slightly towards you, his eyes still set on your lips, but it didn’t matter because you’re pushing him away with strong fists before you can even register the thought in your head.

He lets go of you entirely, his eyes wide once more, and you glance down at your feet. 

A tender moment, just like on the roof, broken just because you can’t handle that—…that way, that intense way that he looks at you. New rule, no looking at me longingly like you want to kiss me. I won’t allow it.

“I want to go home,” you whisper, still examining your shoes. And you suddenly feel embarrassed that he had to see you this way. He’s supposed to be scared and intimidated by you, not holding you in his arms while you cry. 

He’s silent for a moment, but you can tell he’s searching for things to say. “You don’t want to say bye to your mom before we go?”

You swipe your palm against the wetness on your cheek. “No. I just want to go home.”

“y/n,” he tried to convince you.

You finally look up at him. “Please.”

He breathes in a few breaths as he studies the features of your face in a way that makes you feel so seen that it’s frightening. But he slowly nods, then says,

“Okay.”

.

.

.

.

.

[end of chapter 4]

a/n. hi friendsss i hope you enjoyed :'') yea like i said at the a/n in the beginning, this chapter is a slight off-tangent from last chapter, but ch5 will continue with a lot of the stuffs that were brought up in ch3. but yea i wanted to explore the whole process of emotions reader would go through putting her mom in hospice, since it kinda felt like a big thing, hence why it got its own chapter. aaa i hope to see you in the next one!! much love from me :''0

➸ take me to chapter five!

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[nyarlathotep-thecrawlingchaos]

I am so happy you're back and seem to be doing even a little bit better! We missed you!

I wanted to send a little message, so you can ignore it if it sours your mood or you don't feel like dealing with it, feel no pressure at all! It's just this blog has been a safe space and the community has been so welcoming that I figured I could vent really quick

You know when sometimes the brain just has a really shitty day, like when you draw something and it screams at you that it's trash even though there's nothing wrong with it? I've been having a rough time with it deciding to scream that comfort characters would cheat, probably as an 'You are so unlovable not even fictional characters would be loyal' bullshit. Now, logically, I know this makes -67 sense. But, I was wondering if you could just reassure that like, Sanji, Mihawk, Buggy, Shanks, Crocodile, Blablablablabla long list of One Piece characters you write for, would not cheat? I'm sorry, this sounds lame to even write out but I'm trying to get my brain to stop thinking that asking for help is 'pathetic' because it is not and it only applies that logic to me, never to anyone else.

I dunno man. Brains and bring human ate both though af.

I missed all of you as well. Really and sincerely. I have a tendency to go radio silent when I'm going through a difficult time and I hate it immensely, but hearing that I was missed to makes me all

And yes, oh gods, I know. My brain is frequently my worst enemy. Especially when I'm not writing. My anxiety starts working overtime and my creative drive becomes dedicated to coming up with problems that could potentially happen for me to worry about even more and it's an absolute bitch; or even when I am actively creating and a little voice insists that everything I make is stupid garbage.

This is still very much and always will be a safe space. It definitely is awful to feel that unworthy of love. Full disclosure, I've mentioned in passing before that I've been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder depressive type. My main issue is auditory hallucinations that like to insist that everyone I love and care about only tolerate me out of pity and secretly would rather I not be around, which leads to me isolating myself from people. Huge part of the reason I go silent when life decides to be a bitch. I know it's just as bad feeling that way about comfort characters, if not even worse, when we're supposed to have them to help us get through that kind of bullshit.

So let me provide a little drabble for the one comfort character I’m certain wouldn’t ever allow us to continue being so silly about our worthiness of love and affection, because we’re all worthy of such a basic human need. I may do more later, but one in particular jumped at the opportunity to provide this comfort, and I fear he may counter me with his dreaded puppy-dog-eyes should I even dare attempt to wait.

Good Enough

OPLA!Sanji x AFAB!Reader

Lil drabble thingy

SFW, Hurt/Comfort

Possible TRIGGER WARNINGS for depression, insecurity, self-worth

♫♬ Moonshine ♬♫ — The Fratellis (yes I’m STILL on my Fratellis BS leave me be)

"Never knowing is the most evil feeling, when every answer here is none too appealing"

Sanji had always been a flirt. You knew that from the moment you started working on the wait staff at Baratie. Your trust issues had made it a little difficult for you to open up around the young sous chef (and occasional waiter on the frequent occasion that Zeff kicked him out of the kitchen for insubordination), but it was his outgoing nature and perseverance that had ultimately won you over. He had a way of making you feel like you were the only girl in the world when you were together, doting upon you, all but worshipping the ground you walked on.

But when he was sent out to work the dining area, it always made you nervous. His innate charm, his handsome features—he was nearly always a hit with female customers. No matter how much you told yourself that he was only doing his job, there was always a nagging feeling that maybe there was more to it than that. Watching him interact with a table of pretty young women, who by their clothing and demeanor were obviously far more affluent and sophisticated than you, left you distracted in your own work.

Seeing how they giggled at everything he said, how they fluttered their eyelashes when he brought them their drinks.

How the pretty blonde at the table leaned so close to him while he pointed to something on the menu, close enough to brush her hand across his.

You managed to spill a tray of drinks all over yourself while you were watching, leading to a scolding from the front of house manager. You saw the table of girls from the corner of your eye, giggling at your clumsiness before you were sent off to clean yourself up and change your uniform.

No matter how much you told yourself you were being silly, there was nothing you could do to shake it. The doubts, the thoughts of how easily he could find someone better than you. You had your jaw clenched the entire time you were changing your shirt in the staff restroom, tossing the soiled one aside as you leaned against the sink in front of the mirror and forced yourself to take slow, level breaths.

You were still on the clock. You couldn’t break down. You had to get changed, had to get back to work, had to pretend everything was fine, if he found out you were being so stupid about this then he would definitely drop you like a bad habit, you had to compose yourself or—

Knock knock.

Your eyes darted to the bathroom door, your breath catching in your throat at the sound of the light knock.

“J—just a minute,” you forced out, flinching at the sound of your own voice breaking a little.

Stupid, you’re being stupid, stop it stop it stop it—

A brief silence followed your answer, a silence that seemed to stretch on for miles despite lasting only a few seconds. The familiar, gentle voice that answered after a moment made your hands clench around the porcelain of the sink.

“You alright, love?” You drew in a sharp breath, swallowing, clenching your eyes shut. Of course it was Sanji. You had almost hoped that the manager had come scold you for taking too long. That would have been easier to deal with right now. Your eyes darted to the locked doorknob as it rattled a little. “I heard—”

“I’m fine,” you said immediately, the strained quality of your own words as they met your ears making your hands tighten a little more on the edge of the sink. “I—I just tripped and spilled a few drinks, I’ll be out in a minute.”

“Are you sure you’re alright?” You gritted your teeth, laying your head back to stare up at the ceiling. Of course he wouldn’t let it go that easily. The doorknob rattled a little again, and you glanced at it as if it were a viper poised to strike out at you at any second.

Stupid, you’re being stupid, don’t—

“You sound—”

You reached out and turned the lock on the doorknob, and turned away from the door, crossing your arms over your half-buttoned shirt and stared down at your feet. After a long moment, you heard the door open behind you.

Evidently you didn’t look any less distressed than you felt. His quiet sigh met your ear as the door shut lightly and the lock turned. “Oh, love, it’s fine,” he said gently, his footfalls echoing quietly in the small bathroom, closing the short distance across the tile floor between the two of you. Your whole body tensed as he wrapped his arms around your waist from behind, resting his forehead over the crown of your hair with a quiet chuckle. “It’s only a few drinks, it could happen to anyone.”

You shook your head, your shoulders shaking a little. Stupid, it was so stupid, but the words were already leaving your mouth before you could stop them. “Oh, yeah, anyone.” You couldn’t stop. You couldn’t. He had a way of pulling all your insecurities to the surface that no one else did. You pulled your crossed arms tighter, staring down at the white floor tiles for a moment before shutting your eyes tightly, your voice shaking a little. “Especially a dumb screw-up like me—”

“Don’t do that.” His tone came out a little sharper with this, and your breath hitched audibly in your throat this time, your shoulders hunching as you clenched your eyes shut tighter, swallowing back the lump in your throat. As if to counter your stiff posture, he pulled his arms tighter around your waist, pulling you closer, his thumb rubbing lightly against your waist in a comforting manner. “Don’t, sweetheart. Please.”

The warmth of his embrace already had you relaxing a little. Your shoulders slumped, your body leaning back against him, but your eyes were still burning when you opened them to stare down at the toes of your shoes.

“Was it the manager?” he asked gently, shifting behind you to rest his chin on your shoulder. “If he was being an ass I’ll gladly kick his ass off the docks.” Your breath left your lungs in a slow, trembling sigh as you shook your head no, your gaze drifting down to his hand at your hip, still rubbing lightly against you, your lips curling into a fleeting smile at his offer. You knew you were being stupid, but… “Then what’s wrong, love?” he asked, his voice a soft, comforting murmur in your ear.

“I…” You drew in a deep breath, closing your eyes as he tilted his head so his cheek lay against your shoulder. “Y—you—“

You swallowed against the lump forming in your throat, drawing in a deep breath, trying and failing to steady the whirlwind of thoughts swirling through your mind, thoughts of how maybe this was all a lie, of how you weren’t anything more than a silly little fling to him, how you weren’t good enough, how easily you could be replaced.

You bit your lip, glancing down as his hand found yours, watching his fingers lace between your own…and the breath left you in a slow, resigned sigh.

“It’s stupid,” you said quietly.

“If it’s got you this upset, then it’s anything but stupid,” he countered, and you had to purse your lips tightly to keep them from curving into a small smile as you felt his press briefly against your cheek in a soft kiss. “And if it’s something I’ve done—”

“N—no, you haven’t—” But how quickly you shook your head, how your shoulders tensed, betrayed your worries. “I…I just…” You slowly relaxed once more as he squeezed you against him, his cheek nuzzling against your shoulder, his soft blonde hair tickling against your neck. Still unable to turn your head to meet his eyes, you bit the bullet and forced yourself to voice your worries. “You have beautiful women making goo-goo eyes at you all day,” you said, keeping your voice low in an attempt to keep it steady. “I—I don’t—I’m not—” You bit your lip, your heart racing as you clenched your eyes shut, cursing yourself internally as you felt the tickle of a tear leaving your eye to trail down one of your cheeks. “Y-you could have any girl you wanted. L—like that blonde that was hanging all over you while you were showing her the menu, or—or—”

“Oh, sweetheart…” You weren’t quite able to mask the small sob that hitched in your chest as Sanji loosened his embrace—only to gently place a hand on your hip, guiding you to turn around and face him, to pull you against his chest as you tried and failed to fight back tears. He gently shushed your quiet sobs and stammered apologies as he wrapped his arms around you fully, combing his fingers through your hair as he laid his head over yours. Your eyes remained clenched shut as you fought to control your breathing , as he pressed a tender, lingering kiss to your forehead.

Sanji lowered his head and nuzzled into your hair, holding you flush against him.

“I already have the girl I want. The perfect girl.” He pressed another tender kiss to your temple, murmuring against your skin, “I have her right here in my arms. And I hope,” he said, his tone turning a little playful as he shifted to rest his forehead against yours, “that I’ll still have her tonight after dinner shift is over.” He brushed your hair behind your ear, smiling as he tilted his head to meet your gaze, puling a small smile to your lips as your cheeks grew a little warmer. “So we can cuddle up together on the balcony…watch the stars…laugh at all the drunk idiots stumbling back to their boats…”

You could practically hear him smiling as a few soft giggles escaped you, as you finally leaned fully against him and returned his embrace, your arms wrapping around his torso as you buried your face against his chest.

“I’m sorry,” you sighed, relaxing against him. “I…I’m just…”

“I know, love.” The way he called you ‘love’ all but melted your heart now that you were calmed down, pulling a faint smile to your lips. “I know. You don’t have anything to be sorry for. And if it’s any consolation, I was in the middle of telling that self-righteous blonde bimbo how my sweet, adorable, beautiful girlfriend would wring her neck if she kept putting her hands on me—“ He chuckled as you whined in protest of his praise, tugging you closer and grinning, meeting your eyes without hesitation.

He lifted his hand to your face, his thumb brushing across your cheek, the warmth of his gaze holding yours.

“I—“

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.

You both jolted in alarm, your heads turning in unison toward the sound of the pounding on the bathroom door. Before you could so much as glance at each other, a gruff voice spoke up from behind the door.

“We’re in the weeds, Eggplant!” Zeff called . “Get your scrawny ass to the kitchen! And bring your damned girlfriend, we need all the help we can get.”

A long moment of silence stretched between the two of you as you both stared at the closed bathroom door, before your gazes drifted slowly toward each other.

Before you were both giggling under your breath, as you buried your forehead against his chest, a broad smile spreading across your lips as you clung to him.

“I suppose we’ve been summoned,” said Sanji, pulling back from you only enough to gaze down at you, still smiling. “Shall we, then?”

[asterias-record-shop]

Bingo Enemies to Lovers Ethan Landry prompt 3. 

Ethan and the reader have a bickering match every time the group is together. Mostly because he has a crush on her and in boy fashion he teases her instead of acting in his feeling but she’s not one to bite her tongue so they go back and forth. Anywho, he decides he’s going to do something more drastic and scare (or potentially kill. Wherever you want to take it honestly) her. But when he’s chasing her with the knife and he gets her he just can’t do it. She’s like pleading and he gets off on it. He doesn’t do anything at the moment. He leaves and the next couple of times they all hang out he’s more teasing than just arguing, trying to get her back to herself because she’s shaken up. He goes to her house to “check up” on her because she’s been less punchy lately. (In my head she can’t really tell her friends about the ghost face chase thing because they suspect her since she got away unharmed. So when he checks on her she just feels like he sees her and takes comfort in him.) she’s a bit vulnerable so she’s guarded at first. Prompt 3 around here I think. Ethan still either a virgin or has very little experience. I love his nerdy side in the movie. Wheew i nearly wrote it for you. I just want to see how you’d expand it. Love your work. Idk if this can fit in one part but I’d love to read how ever many this turns out to be ❤️

—𓆩[movie night]𓆪—

𓆩[main masterlist]𓆪 𓆩[request/ask me something!]𓆪 𓆩[updated bingo card!]𓆪 𓆩[bingo masterlist]𓆪 𓆩[join the bingo taglist!]𓆪

𓆩♡𓆪 CHARACTER - Ethan Landry x Fem! Reader

𓆩♡𓆪 TYPE - smut, fluff, angst maybe?

𓆩♡𓆪 WORD COUNT - 3.7K

𓆩♡𓆪 SUMMARY - Ethan had a school boy crush on you - it was the best way to explain how he felt about you. He loved the nights of bickering during movie nights, but when he gets told that he needs to kill you because you’re going to get in the way, he can’t. You get shaken up and aren’t your normal self so he goes to check on you, and one thing leads to something he truly didn’t expect to happen.

𓆩♡𓆪 STORY WARNINGS - cursing and foul language || fighting & teasing || attempted murder || slight dubcon(?) || Ethan pussies out || banter is his love language but it’s a bad love language || Dacryphilia || blood kink || blood eating || kind of mean/dom! reader || Ethan is a munch || unprotected sex || multiple orgasms || oral || face riding || creampie || definitely a breeding kink || size kink || SPIT ||

“It’s not me who’ll be dying a virgin.”

Those words wouldn’t have hurt him that much if they weren’t so true. He hated the fact that you had sex with men that weren’t him, good sex obviously from the way Tara always raved about how you and your nightly partner never let her sleep.

“Well… I think that’s it for movie night,” Chad had said as everyone stood up together. “Have a goodnight guys!”

You quickly stand, grabbing your bag and muttering things. “Tara, are you coming with me or are you staying?”

Tara nods, but then shakes her head. “I-I’m going to stay, if you don’t really mind?”

You smiled as you held up your bag. “No, I don’t mind. Got my buddy in here, I’ll see you later!”

You start to walk out, ignoring the buddy rule you and your friends had because at this point, you were truly going to snap and maybe murder one of them. Not in a Ghostface mask though.

You quickly went down the steps of the dorm, humming as you bounced on the sidewalk. As frustrated as you were with Ethan, you really needed to get back into your more happy mindset so your dog Cocoa would know you’re upset because dogs are basically superhuman.

You paused when you heard something clatter behind you, turning around in fear with a deep inhale. Almost on cue, a dark black cat jumped out from the alleyway making you sigh loudly, basically releasing a bit of the tension in your body before you turned back around and kept walking.

You didn’t feel it though, the release of fear, anxiety pooling at the pit of your flipping stomach. You inhaled shakily as you dug through your purse, gasping as you were pushed into an alleyway.

You screamed out, gasping as they forced you to turn around, the white mask making your heart stop. You could feel your knees go weak before they pushed a knee between your legs and pushed it upwards. “N-No, please don’t-”

You could hear him shush you, his gloved hand pressing to the lips of the mask as you looked away, whimpering when a knife pressed against your cheek. He pushed you to the side, forcing you to look at him as you tried to shake your head.

Ethan grinned under the mask, the sight of you whimpering and starting to sob from his blade, threatening to slice you up whenever he wanted. He inhaled deeply as you started to shake your head, his hand shaking against your jaw.

“Please… please don’t do this. Don’t do this, I’ll do whatever you want.”

Oh, whatever he wanted? The thought was appealing, the ability to just cut off all of your clothes, watch you crumble to your knees and force your mouth onto his cock to beg him not to kill you.

He inhaled deeply, attempting to press the blade harder into your skin but your tears made it slide. He flinched when it nipped at your skin, drawing the crimson liquid. He felt his eyes roll back as you sobbed loudly, his hand quickly going to your mouth, muffling your sounds.

You sobbed even louder, finally trying to fight against him before his knee pressed firmly into your pussy and a loud gasp falling from your lips.

“You better behave.” He growled out, his hand tightening around the hilt of the blade and pressing harder into your skin. “Behave!”

You sobbed loudly, shaky hands tugging on the black fabric of his robe. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll do anything you want me to, I promise! Please, please just don’t hurt me.”

He pressed it deeper into your skin, hand tightening around your mouth as he leaned forward. He ducked under the mask, being careful that you didn’t see him as he licked along your cheek, collecting your tears before dragging the tip of his tongue down to the nip he made, sucking on it to collect all the blood from the small cut.

You sobbed even harder as the knife slowly pushed into your collar bone, leaning close to your ear before forcing his voice deeper. “You tell anyone about this, I’ll come back and fuck you with the hilt of my knife, then I’ll kill you with a slit to your throat. You understand me?”

“Yes! Yes, I understand, I understand! I’m sorry!” You sobbed even harder but Ethan could hear voices and footsteps, quickly shushing you. “Kiss me. Kiss me and I won’t kill you.”

Quickly, you leaned up and pressed your lips to his as his hands caught both of your wrists before you could continue slamming your fists to his chest. He groans loudly into your mouth, knee shaking unconsciously making moans leave your mouth as you dig your nails into your palms.

“Just some horny kids. Get a damn room!”

They walked away, Ethan still not pulling back before your teeth tug on his lip hard enough to draw blood. He hissed loudly as he pulled away, laughing as he quickly pulled down his mask. Pressing the blade against your cheek, he tilts his head. “You’re mine, you got that? You belong… to me. Do you understand that? Don’t make me give you a real scar for you to understand that.”

You whined, eyes watering as your head bobbing. No tears were coming from your eyes, there was none left as he started to back away. “Don’t tell anyone, or I’ll come back!”

You weren’t the same. You never left game nights alone, you never argued with Ethan, you just sat there. Your hands were shaking, eyes darting everywhere every moment in time.

Tonight’s movie was It, a horror film Ethan didn’t really care for. In fact, no one really was keen on scary movies, but they wanted a bit of a change. You sat down next to Ethan, hugging a pillow tightly against your chest as he smirks down at you.

“If you get scared, you can hold my hand.”

You don’t respond, your hand quickly pushing into his, shaky fingers and sweaty palms tightly wrapped around his own hand as you inhale shakily. He looked over, raising a brow, but it made sense that you were so scared. He liked it, the thought of the fact that he scared you this much that you’re falling right into his arms.

“Y/N? You alright?” He whispers as you look up at him, gasping when you see the cut on his lip.

“Wh-What is that? On your lip?”

He felt panic settle in as he self consciously licked his lips, humming with a shake of his head. “I was sealing a letter for class,” he laughs awkwardly, shaking his head. “It was… it was stupid, I started bleeding all over the place. But you… you don’t seem okay.”

He was the first to notice, and oh did it make your heart swell and skip a few beats. Your other hand finds his as you lean into his chest, shakily exhaling a breath as he pulls you closer. “I’m not.”

Ethan smiled into your hair before standing up, everyone else easily falling asleep during the movie after surviving through a real life horror film. “Do you want to come to my room? Or go to your house?”

In all honesty, nothing sounded better than going to his room and being fucked so hard that you couldn’t even remember that night. Except, maybe, going to your apartment where you could get railed so hard you wouldn’t remember anything either. Besides, not everyone had to hear you begging for another round when Ethan would surely pass out after seeing your pussy.

“Can we go to my house?”

Ethan nods quickly, hiding his smile as he pulls you out of the apartment after you grab your bag. You held his hand tightly, jumping at every small sound before you both got to the street of your apartment and a black figure made you stop in your tracks.

A whimper fell from your mouth as Ethan rolled his eyes, of fucking course his sister wanted to get rid of you tonight. But, it’ll work in his favor anyway. “Y/N, get to your apartment.”

“What?” It was like you were frozen, your hands gripping his as Quinn starts to make her way toward the both of you and he starts to push you up the stairs.

“Go!”

You do as he said, quickly running up the stairs while calling 911, Quinn quickly stopping in front of Ethan. “What the hell are you doing here?!”

“I’m about to get fucking laid!”

Quinn pauses, taking off her mask. “So that’s why you couldn’t kill her? Because you’re pussy whipped?!”

“Would you shut up?!” Ethan groaned, straightening when he heard sirens coming. “You need to go, but do something so that it looks real.”

“I have no arguing with that, you pussy whipped mother fucker.”

It was just a small cut on his collarbone because Quinn would probably feel bad about it later, but after quick interviews with the police and your hands holding his tightly, it was almost done.

“Can we go now? Don’t you see that he’s injured?” You asked the barraging officers who sigh heavily.

“Is there really nothing else you can think of?”

“No, nothing,” Ethan says, inhaling sharply. “I don’t feel good, though, I want to leave.”

“The paramedics offered to take you to the hospital-”

“For a few stitches?” You scoffed. “I’m a med student, I can get that done here. We’re leaving.”

You were quick to pull him up the stairs and unlock your apartment door, pushing him down onto the couch. “Take off your shirt.”

He was quick to obey, taking off his shirt as you go to the restroom and bring out a large container of what seemed to be medical supplies. “Is it deep? Can you tell?” He looks down, attempting to stare at his collarbone making you giggle. “Not what I meant, honey.”

His cheeks get hot as you kneeled down in front of him between his legs, getting a good view of the cut before taking out a large wrapped gauze. “It’s not too deep, doesn’t need stitches. Let me just clean it up.”

“Y/N.”

“I mean, unless you want stitches I could probably-”

“Y/N.” You looked up, Ethan smiling down at you as he slowly pushed his hand through your hair, pushing it out of your hair. “Don’t worry about me. What’s wrong with you?”

You inhaled shakily as he smiled down at you, his perfect shining smile as you shook your head. “D-Don’t worry about it-”

“Y/N, I’m worried about you,” he says, shaking his head. “I want to know what is going on. You know that I’ll protect you.”

You stared up at him as you finished putting on the gauze, pushing your hands onto his bare shoulders and sitting in his lap. He swallowed as you hugged him tightly, inhaling shakily. “Promise?”

Ethan hugged you back tightly, nodding into your neck. “I won’t let anything happen to you, ever.”

It was a promise and he meant it. You pulled away with a smile, pushing back his hair. “Thank you, Ethan.”

He hummed, nodding as he leans into your touch with closed eyes, exhaling deeply. “I’ll do anything for you.”

“Oh yeah? We’ve gone from arguments to this, darling?” You teased him, curling your fingers in his hair as he nodded.

“Always wanted to be like this with you, just didn’t know how to.” He mumbles into your neck, Ethan’s hands pushing into your shirt as he tugged softly. “C-Can I take it off?”

You hummed, nodding before the words rang back in your head. You inhaled shakily, and it was as though Ethan knew what you were thinking. “Y/N, I promise, I’ll do anything… anything to protect you.”

You nodded, raising your arms so that he could pull off your shirt. His mouth pressed wet, open mouthed kisses to your skin, sucking and biting against your skin as you inhaled sharply, humming. “Are you sure you’ve never done this before?”

He pauses, smiling up at you. “I’m doing good then?”

“Well, you’re kissing really nice.” He laughed as he stood, going down the hall and attempting to open the door. “One more down!”

He quickly moved down again, opening the door before setting you on the bed. He watched as you quickly repositioned yourself, legs wide as you started stripping easily. Ethan quickly followed, his dick slapping against his lower stomach as he starts to crawl onto the bed before you press your foot onto his chest.

“You need to behave, Landry.”

“Behave? Baby, you don’t like it when I behave.”

You laugh as you let your leg fall against the bed, legs spread widely with a brow raised. “Well then, don’t. But you better be good at misbehaving, Ethan.”

He swallowed as you pushed him down so that his face was hovering over your pussy, your clenching cunt that was basically dripping with arousal. “Y-Y/N, I’ve never… I’ve never done this before.”

You tilted your head down at him. “You’ve never eaten someone out before?” You knew he was a virgin, but this much of a virgin?

He shook his head, making you giggle. “I-I can… I can try.”

“You’ve never seen a porno where the guy eats the girl out? Come on baby, I know you have.” You stroke his cheek before pulling him closer, dragging your thumb along your lips. “Or do you want me to do the work and you just take it? You seem like someone who’d like doing that.”

He swallowed as you raised a brow.

“Well, are you going to answer me?”

“I’ll sit back and take it, Y/N,” he leaned forward to lick a firm line against your aching cunt. “I’ll take everything you give me.”

You giggle as you help him lay back against the pillows, humming as you hovered over his face. “You’re going to lull out your tongue for me,” you say, watching as he does as you say with the slight tilt back of his head. “And then…” you move your body so that you could kiss him, sloppy and wet to make his mouth filled with your spit before pulling away. You giggle, kissing his nose before hovering over his mouth.

“You can use your fingers too. I’ll tell you if you’re too rough.”

He nodded, moving his hands to slowly press and rub against your cunt and clit, humming. “Y-You’re not going to sit down?”

You paused, giggling. “Are you… are you sure? I don’t… I don’t-”

He inhaled, shaking his head. “Y/N, darling, I might be a virgin, but I’m not a pussy. Sit down before I do it myself.”

You hummed, raising a brow. “Do what yourself?”

His hands go to your hips, forcing you down into his mouth as he lulled out his tongue. You gasped as he forced you to roll your hips into his mouth, eyes rolling back as you slowly humped against his face. You groaned out as one of his thumbs rubbed circles against your clit as his pointer finger slowly rubbed against your entrance, his tongue flickering and lapping.

You groaned loudly as you held onto the top of the bed frame, whining as you tried to go faster. It almost reminded you of humping your pillow when the thought of a dildo repulsed you, even this time riding his face was definitely better than that. You whimpered above him, throwing your head back. It was mind blurring, pleasure filling your body and making sparks run up your spine and your stomach twist.

You whimpered as he slowly pushed a finger into you, his other hand steadying your hips from shaking as you continued to thrust into his mouth.

He pushed another finger into you, his tongue pushing inside of you with another finger. His tongue laps and sucks against your clit, spit and your slick rubbing against his chin and around his mouth as he forces you to press lower against his mouth before giving a firm slap to your ass.

You yelped, releasing your weight onto him, making him pull you down closer and his teeth graze your clit. Your eyes rolled back as he lifted his head, attempting to get as close as he could to your cunt making a loud whine leave your lips.

Ethan couldn’t stop, not when your pussy was so fucking addicting. That’s probably what made you cum going on four times on his tongue, hips shaking as he forced you to stay on his tongue. His fingers didn’t stop thrusting into you, tongue flicking against your swollen clit as your eyes rolled back, tears falling down your cheeks. Your stomach was burning as Ethan humped the air, the hand on your hip leaving bruises against your skin.

“Ethan, Ethan! Ethan, please!” You were whimpering above him, imprints from the wood in your skin as he pulled away, his nose brushing against your clit before he pulled away.

“What? Do I stop? Am I not doing good?” He asked immediately, almost worried before you laughed, thighs shaking as you started to lift yourself up.

“Ethan, you’ve made me cum almost four times, and you think you’re doing bad?” You quickly flop onto your back, humming as you spread your shaky thighs. “Let’s see if you know how to make your dick work like your tongue.”

He gulped, taking his hand across his mouth to gather the wetness before looking down at his cock, cum dripping out of the tip. You looked down, letting out a soft giggle. “You came from eating me out?”

He smiled. “How could I not when your pussy is that fucking good?”

His words make you blush as he kneeled down in front of you, humming as he pressed his tip slowly into your entrance. Your eyes rolled back, whimpering from overstimulation as he rubbed his head up and down your slit. “Hm, when you want to be, you can be good.”

You gasped as he pushed into you, whining loudly as your hands held his shoulders before he bottomed out with a quick thrust. You were basically knocked out of breath, gasping for air as he leaned down to press a firm kiss to your lips. “Behave, my love, and I’ll give you what you want.”

You nodded, immediately arching your back as he started to push into you, head thrown back. “F-Fuck, I’m going to cum just like this, fucking hell Y/N. Y-You’re still so hot and w-warm, holy fuck!”

Your eyes rolled back, legs wrapping around his waist as you pulled him down. “Holy fuck, are you sure you’re a virgin?” You whimpered into his ear, letting out a soft giggle as he laughed breathlessly.

“Guess it’s good that you’re asking that, right? I’m fucking you good?” He grunted, groaning loudly as his hips snapped forward, thrusts sloppy and rough.

“E-Ethan, stop,” you whimper, shaking your head. “We got time, baby, don’t rush it.”

“W-Was that not good? I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he mumbles before you shake your head, pushing back his hair.

“You don’t need to go rough right off the bat, ease into it,” you shakily roll your hips, moaning. “G-Go slow… then get faster.”

He whimpered, nodding. “B-But, what if it’s not enough? I-I want… I want more.”

You hummed, rolling your hips up into his own. “You can get faster, but don’t be sloppy, it hurts.”

He nodded, holding your hips, getting faster as he whined. The thrusts made your eyes roll back, mouth falling open as he kissed against your neck, whimpering. “Fuck, fuck! Fuck, it’s so good, your pussy is so perfect. A-Am I doing good, am I making you feel good? Fuck baby, I feel so fucking good, your pussy feels so good around me.”

You gasped, nails scratching down his back. “Yes, yes! Yes, I feel so good, fuck, I’m close! I’m close, Ethan!”

He grunted, his thrusts getting rougher in a way that wasn’t painful as he lifted up your hips to hit a whole new place inside of you that made your eyes roll back and a loud scream fall from your lips. Your mind blurred, vision going dark as he moaned loudly into your neck, gasping for air as his eyes rolled back.

You could feel his cum spurt inside of you, filling you up in the deepest spots inside of you before he pulled back a bit to watch your tummy start to bulge. He rubbed against your tummy, sitting back on his knees. “Can I go again?”

You laughed, nodding. “Yes, you can.”

He leaned down, pressing his lips against your neck before whispering, “I’m going to protect you with everything I have. No one will ever touch you, no one will ever take you from me baby.”

You whimpered, nodding against his neck. “Promise?”

“I promise.” And he will hold that until his death bed.

omg, I love fulfilling requests ♡ keep them coming for Bingo!!

Bingo tag 𓆩[@ennycutie]𓆪   𓆩[@yoongiwife23]𓆪

Regular taglist: 𓆩[@lem0ns77]𓆪   𓆩[@cecepop15]𓆪   𓆩[@memeorydotcom]𓆪   𓆩[@your-favorite-god]𓆪   𓆩[@xyzstar]𓆪  𓆩[@just-my-shit]𓆪   𓆩[@your-mom21]𓆪   𓆩[@c78r]𓆪   𓆩[@wenvierismycomfort]𓆪

© asterias-record-shop

[buckseb]

dating theo raeken includes

pairings — theo raeken x fem!reader

summary — how it would be to date theo raeken!

word count — i’ll do word count later (i’m so exhausted and drained but im posting this because i wanted to post SOMETHING since i haven’t been writing a lot on here for QUITE a while)

warnings — mentions of theo's past, both loads of angst and fluff (obviously), mentions of reader's grief / loss of losing allison and watching her die, mentions of stiles's trauma and past with the nogitune, love confessions, kisses, use of a pet-name [princess], mentions of anxiety and mental health, theo is very protective, mentions of the 'i hate everyone but you' trope, sort of enemies to lovers trope but it's really just hints at it, forehead kisses, cuddles.

notes — i hope this isn't rushed. i'm currently in the middle of TRYING to finish my eddie fic (which, i've decided is just going to be a short tooth-rotting fluff type instead of the complicated one i wanted to do, because i'm really struggling with both writer's block and my mental health and illnesses taking their tolls on me), so this is just me trying to get this done as soon as possible before work again tomorrow. so please bear with me! gif and divider creds to owner!

p.s., feedback is very much encouraged and appreciated </3.

main masterlist

-meeting this boy is certainly very confusing for [y/n], to say the least.

-not only because of the fact that she's like a little sister to both stiles and scott, but also because she doesn't know whether or not to listen to stiles when he says that his childhood friend is bad news.

-and especially, because of the fact that her best friend is simply just paranoid about literally everything, it's hard to believe him.

-though, this is why she takes his comment seriously when she first meets theo, because she knows that he has a right to be paranoid — after everything he went through with the nogitune and the torture and guilt of hurting innocent people when he was void and from his guilt over blaming himself for allison's death.

-also the fact that theo is so adamant to get her to believe that he's genuine to her just confuses her more.

-though, after finding out how theo's sister died — how he couldn't save her, much like how it felt with her losing allison — she began to second guess both herself and stiles.

-not only did she feel immensely guilty for not giving him a chance, but also for how stiles had treated him.

-though, did she really need to feel guilty when it ended up being true that stiles was telling the truth?

-nevermind this fact that it doesn't get revealed at this point in time yet. what does get revealed, is the fact that [y/n] begins to feel badly for not giving him the benefit of the doubt.

-also, the fact that she's the type of person to do exactly just that, made her feel even more guilty than before.

-because of the guilt and regret constantly affecting her, she eventually stopped listening to stiles' warnings and decided to give theo a chance.

-they bond over both of their own experiences of grief and loss.

-stiles doesn't like this so much — protective big brother mode activated!

-theo and [y/n] grow closer every day, despite how much stiles tries to get in the middle and ruin their semi-growing relationship.

-no matter how much he tries, stiles can't get in between the two traumatized teenagers.

-and despite her own very heavy trust issues, [y/n] is very quick to trust him.

-maybe it was just the fact that despite everything she's been through, she always believes in the best of people — theo himself being one of those people.

-though, stiles isn't too thrilled about this.

-but, despite how much everyone isn't too excited about them getting so close and connected, there's something about how much they've grown to care for each other that they're all grateful for — at least, until everyone finds out the truth.

-and let me tell you, the betrayal she feels when she finds out the truth? well, that's just a complete understatement.

-because the one time she finally decides to open up and let someone in, it not only happens to be theo, but he also ends up being a betraying, liar.

-but, let me tell you, when she finds out that he tried to kill scott and did all of the rest of the things that hurt the pack? well, that anger and heartbreak was something unlike anything she's ever experienced.

-sure, she went through many hurtful experiences — like losing her best friend, or being treated like she wasn't enough, and never would be. but, there was nothing like realizing the fact that she'd been tricked into falling in love with someone she'd been warned about in the first place.

-the second she found out about the betrayal, all she could think about and remember was the countless times stiles had kept telling her that theo was bad news, that there was something off about him.

-and all she could do was think about how wrong she was — how she couldn't have been more stupid for trusting him, especially over one of her best friends.

-needless to say, she spent most of her time avoiding him as much as possible.

-she didn't see him for most of the time he spent 'helping' their pack.

-though, when it came to where kira came to save the day and sent theo back to hell with his now tragically-dead sister, [y/n] had been quite literally right in the middle.

-although theo had kept [y/n] out of danger in his own discreet way, not even that could've made her change her mind about him and step in to protect him — or to at least try to save him.

-and trust me, in her head, she really wanted to. as mad as she was at him for using and betraying her, she knew couldn't do it.

-she'd already felt like she betrayed the pack when she found out that she had been hanging out with the actual enemy.

-how could she try to save him, especially after everything he put them all through?

-so, despite the clear connection between the both of them — even after the betrayal and heartbreak he just recently put her through — and the streaming tears on her face, she doesn't move.

-even when he begs her and scott for help, she still stays in her place — no matter how much it kills her to ignore his pleas for help.

-the months after he's gone, a new dark hole fills inside of her heart, and she quickly becomes distant and unwilling to ever let anyone else in.

-when everyone meets up for their normal meetings or when they're on one of their missions to save some people, [y/n] would obviously join.

-but, her heart would no longer be in it anymore. and the distance between all of their relationships with her is a total understatement.

-even the pack realizes how different she's become because of losing theo, no matter how many times she refuses to admit it to any of them.

-and when liam brings theo back, everything changes for her.

-theo tries to show her that he feels remorse for what he did to everyone, and especially to her.

-at first, she's not willing to listen to anything he wants to say or do for her.

-but, eventually when they have to work together against the ghost riders, [y/n] is forced to be civil with him. but, she does make it quite clear of how much she detests him in the beginning.

-and then, they're forced to work together and face the trauma and tension between them.

-with theo, he's both struggling with his trauma and ptsd and trying to prove to both the pack and [y/n] herself that he's really trying and trying to be better.

-the whole time, since he's gotten back, she's been hateful towards him, and rightfully so. but then, things change when she begins to notice the big change in him.

-seeing him try to constantly save liam, or trying to cover for the pack when they're supposed to be on the run from monroe and her hunters, she's forced to accept that he's changed.

-a part of her wishes that he could've changed for her. but, if only she knew that she's one of the reasons that he wanted to change.

-i mean, for sure, he definitely wanted to do it to be a part of the pack and for himself. but, also, it was for her too, because he wanted her to care about him.

one day, after things with monroe have settled — after scott and the pack have finally ended things with monroe and her hunters — theo and [y/n] finds themselves alone in her house, after a pack meeting and after everyone left.

“why haven't you kicked me out yet?” theo asks with a fake smirk and matter-of-fact tone of voice.

she gulps, turning to face him with nervous eyes.

he immediately notices the change in her behavior, but he can't call her out on it because she speaks before he can, “you've changed, theo.”

he's startled by her statement.

he opens his mouth to respond, but once again, she interrupts him, “ever since you got back — earlier this year — you've changed. you haven't been the same since.”

he shrugs, trying to act nonchalant and like this conversation isn't a big deal.

she inhales, preparing herself for what she's about to do and say.

“when you first got back,” she gulps, raking her fingers through her hair anxiously. “i...i didn't want to think about the possibility — i didn't even want to admit — that you changed. even when you sacrificed your life and freedom to save me and liam from the ghost riders.”

theo's eyebrows knit together in confusion. “okay... what does that have to do with anything?”

her breath hitches in her throat, moving to sit down at the kitchen counter, avoiding his eyes. “it's because i'm finally seeing it — the change.”

“okay... ” he trails off, moving to sit on the opposite side of her.

she sighs in defeat. “i feel like... things have changed between us. like recently.”

“what are you saying?” he asks.

this time, she looks up at him now with tears in her eyes. “i know we've both been acting like i hate you. but... ” she trails off, gulping. “i think we both know — maybe this whole time — that i never really hated you.”

“what's changed?” he asks, leaning his arms against the counter.

“i think maybe... ” she says, looking down again as she fidgets with her hands on the counter. “when you first got back, all you wanted was to live. and then, i think you saw some of that family bond that everyone in the pack has and you wanted it too — i think you realized how important it was and you felt like you owed it to scott and the others to protect them.”

he nods. “you're right.”

she inhales, once more. “a part of me...wishes you wanted to change for me too.”

she lets those words sink in, but then she starts to overthink what she said. “i—i don't mean like actually change for me, but that you wanted to, to prove how much you cared. about me, i mean.”

theo's face is unreadable.

because of this, she looks away. “but... the truth is, it hurts.”

the tears blind her vision this time, before they fall and her breath becomes shaky as she speaks again, “and well, the whole truth is that... when we first met and we became close in the way that we did, i felt like — for the first time in a long time — i felt hope that... ”

“i felt hope that maybe you'd be different this time — different than every other person that ever hurt me. i hoped that we could be something — more than just friends.”

she's left theo speechless, at this point.

“are... are you saying what i think you're saying?" he asks, tears in his own eyes — surprisingly.

wordlessly, she looks up at him and nods.

a shaky breath leaves his lips. “and you're not messing with me?”

she laughs. “messing with you? why would i be joking around about this?”

he clears his throat as she starts to feel anxious and nervous that she's really just screwed everything up.

sensing that she's about to shut down, he reaches across the counter to hold her hands in his own. “you're one of the reasons i did all of that in the first place.”

she looks up in shock. “what?”

“it's the truth,” he confirms, squeezing her hands gently. “i swear i've loved you from the moment i met you.”

she lets out a shocked and shaky breath. “really?”

he nods, smiling over at her.

“i... ” she trails off, finding the courage to tell him what she's known from the start too, “theo, i love you too.”

he sighs in relief as he takes his hands away from hers.

her eyebrows furrow together in confusion, almost missing the feeling of his hands over hers, but that feeling goes away when he walks around the counter and over to her.

"i love you so much that being away from you and thinking you hated me was killing me, princess..." he murmurs as he walks over to her and bends down, before lifting her chin up and kisses her softly.

-everything after that day changes for them.

-and everyone sees it.

-they spend a lot of their time with each other.

-to be completely honest, they make each other happy — they're so cute that the pack has to accept it.

-stiles is still extremely protective over her — he and theo had a very intense conversation about how if he ever hurts her again he would absolutely kill him for it.

-forehead kisses.

-the cutest cuddles.

-she's the only one that sees his soft side — he's all tough and reserved around everyone else, but with her, he shows that side only to her.

-his protective instincts are an understatement.

-if anyone hurts her — both physically or emotionally, and mentally — it's over for them because he would let the world burn to protect her.

-he becomes an even better person for her and the whole pack sees it.

-she helps him through his trauma and helps him get into therapy to work through it all.

-they're relationship works.

[itstivan]

I gotta say it.. yell at me all you want but truth hurts…

If Aiden and Ashlyn didn’t have as much chemistry with each other.. yall would’ve shipped Ashler/Tylyn..

For some odd reason a lot of sbg fans absolutely hate taylyn and I have no clue why.. I think people are just afraid of sapphics /j

But anyways, if Aiden wasn’t in the equation yall would ship Tyler and Ashlyn because 1. they’re a mlw ship and most people prefer hetero ships and 2. enemies/rivals to lovers.

People eat this trope up. And anyone who says they don’t is a liar.

Tyler and Ashlyn have SO much tension that you can’t help but ship them. People are always saying “they fight all the time and hate each other! They’re so toxic!” Mf you ship bakudeku you cannot be talking. (for the record your honor, that’s a joke.)

But in all seriousness..

Have you SEEN the shift in their relationship from the start to present? They go from bickering and hesitant with each other, to being close friends that care for each other.

LIKE HELLO?? Do you see how worried Ashlyn is? (Granted anyone would be worried to see their friend bleeding) But Tyler replies to Ashlyn saying he would want some words of encouragement FROM HER. You know.. LIKE THE TIME SHE WAS SAVING HIM FROM THE TREE??

Ashler is a CLASSIC enemies/rivals to lovers. Plus who doesn’t bicker with their partner from time to time over silly things?

One of the sole reasons Tyler freaked out at Ashlyn is because of anxiety and their whole situation. Who wouldn’t go crazy in a situation like that? But instead of expressing it in a healthy way, he took it out on Ashlyn because he couldn’t think of anything else. And yeah that’s shitty, but he learns his lesson.

Tyler has made so much progress and his character redemption was BEAUTIFUL. You have to remember, he’s just a 14 year old kid in his freshman year of high school, who wouldn’t be scared shitless? He wanted to make sure his sister was safe and didn’t know what to do.

Ashlyn puts him in his place though, and I think that’s where he starts to change for the better.

But you can see the gradual changes in their relationship as the comic progresses, going from tense to comfortable being near each other. FP SPOILERS: i mean hello they literally cuddle with each other in ep 75.

And don’t get me wrong, I can see why some people would be a little iffy, but the same people who are iffy are the same people who ship the most WILD ships..

So if you’re gonna hate on me for shipping something other than your main ship.. PACK IT UP 🗣️

But fr though, if Red didn’t unintentionally write so much chemistry with Aiden and Ashlyn, and you didn’t prefer taylyn, you would 100% ship Ashler. There’s this one blog on here that gives perfect reasons as to why you should ship Ashler as well and they say it PERFECTLY.

It’s insanity it took some of yall this long to finally start shipping them, as a person who’s been shipping them since the beginning of 2023 😭😭

anyways i’m super happy people are shipping ashler and YOU SHOULD TOO!!! /nf

[hermit-house]

I got bored and asked ChatGPT to describe the possible plot of Season 5 and wrap up the character arcs as if the Duffers were doing it. And to pay special attention to Mike and Will's "friendship".

And, holy shit, you have to read this! I laughed and screamed 👏😎

ChatGPT 👇

Creating the fifth season of Stranger Things is a challenging task, given the rich characters and plot lines accumulated over four seasons. Here's a possible plan that could logically conclude the main character arcs, in the style of the Duffer Brothers.

Main Concept of the Season:

Theme: The consequences of growing up, accepting one's identity, saying goodbye to the past, and the final battle for Hawkins.

Storylines and Character Arcs:

Will’s Return and Revelation of His True Nature:

At the end of Season 4, we see that Will still feels a connection to the Upside Down and Vecna. In Season 5, this connection becomes more intense, and Will starts seeing events occurring in the Upside Down, leading to troubling visions of an impending cataclysm.

Will realizes that his connection to the Upside Down is the key to defeating Vecna, but to do so, he must fully embrace this connection. This leads to an inner conflict: he fears becoming a puppet of the monster again but understands that without his involvement, they cannot win.

In the process, Will also continues to struggle with the realization of his sexual orientation and his feelings for Mike. These feelings cause him anxiety, especially considering that Mike is still connected to Eleven.

Gradually, through conversations with other characters, like Robin, Will finds the courage to confess his feelings to Mike, though he fears it might ruin their friendship.

Mike and the Conflict of Growing Up:

Mike faces the conflict between his childhood and the need to grow up. He feels that they are all drifting apart and tries to keep the group together.

His relationship with Eleven goes through trials. Ultimately, Mike realizes that his love for Eleven was an important part of his life, but their relationship can no longer remain the same. While he deeply cares for her, he begins to understand that their bond is more sibling-like than romantic.

At the same time, through a series of conversations and shared experiences, Mike starts to notice that his feelings for Will are more complicated than he thought. He realizes that Will has always been more important to him than he admitted, and that their friendship was always based on a deep emotional connection.

Mike becomes a pillar for Will, realizing that his role in this story is to be the one who unites the team and supports those in need.

Eleven and the Final Showdown:

Eleven continues to develop her powers, realizing that the key to defeating Vecna lies in uniting all her memories and experiences. She finds a way to use her pain and trauma to strengthen her abilities.

Eleven also helps Will confront his fears, and together they find a way to use his connection to the Upside Down as a weapon against Vecna.

In the final episode, Eleven and Vecna face off in a decisive battle, in which all the main characters participate. At the moment when victory seems impossible, Will and Eleven combine their powers to deliver the final blow.

Max, Lucas, and Saving Hawkins:

Max remains in a coma after the events of Season 4, but her consciousness is trapped in the Upside Down. Lucas and the other friends search for a way to bring her back, seeking help from new allies and old enemies.

Eventually, they find a way to enter the Upside Down and free Max, which becomes an important step toward defeating Vecna.

The Final Battle and Aftermath:

The final battle takes place in Hawkins itself, where the worlds of reality and the Upside Down begin to merge, threatening to destroy the town.

Each of the heroes contributes to the victory: Dustin, Lucas, Nancy, Jonathan, Robin, and others find their own ways to help in the fight. Each character's role will highlight the importance of their individual qualities and their unity as a team.

The finale shows that they can defeat Vecna, but it requires sacrifices. Perhaps one of the key characters (like Hopper or Joyce) sacrifices themselves to save the others.

Epilogue and Closing of the Arcs:

After the victory, Hawkins returns to normal life, but the heroes realize that their childhood is definitively over.

Will and Mike begin to explore their new relationship. They decide to take it slow, understanding that their journey is just beginning and that they need time to sort out their feelings.

Eleven and the other heroes begin a new life, leaving the past behind but with the assurance that their friendship and shared experiences will always stay with them.

At the end of the season, the audience sees the heroes going their separate ways but remaining close friends despite all the changes.

Conclusion:

Season 5 will be the culmination of the entire story that began in a small town and turned into an epic battle for the world. The heroes will face the consequences of their actions, complete their internal arcs, and take on new roles in life, leaving behind their childhood and past fears.

[domoz]

AU that’s been bouncing around in my head for a bit.

One day, at the end of fall, the Senju clan disappears.

Truth be told, they don't know long it's been before they realize. The Senju tend to go on the defensive when it's harvest season, and that usually extends into a quiet winter, at least for as long as Hashirama has been clan head. The lack of aggressive border patrols doesn't raise anyone's alarm.

No, the first word they get at something being wrong comes from a civilian woman, of all places. The kind that show up occasionally to beg the nearest shinobi clan for some charity.

Her village has been all but held hostage by bandits, she tells them, and she'd gone to the Senju who were closer, only --

Only no one had been there.

It seems like an obvious trap at first, and if not that, then perhaps the woman had just come across some abandoned place and mistaken it for the Senju village; Shinobi aren't so easy to find without a guide, after all, and the Senju especially keep themselves secreted away in the woods like animals.

Eventually they'd told her they'd look into it, just as soon as they'd figured out what had happened with the Senju.

Madara insisted on leading the scouting group himself, and he stopped in his tracks as soon as he stepped onto the other side of the river. Looked up and down the tree line with wild eyes, sharingan briefly spinning into a Mangekyo that set the rest of the squad on edge.

"There's…It's nothing. And that means something's wrong." Was all he explained before demanding they move onward.

Izuna didn't understand what he meant until they were much deeper into the forest. There is nothing wrong, no hairs on the back of his neck rising, no feeling of being watched -- and there always is, this deep in Senju territory. Related to the Mokuton, he thinks, so it was no wonder that Madara had noticed first.

So -- something happened to their clan head, Izuna reasons. Perhaps the Senju closed their compound in mourning and redirected the woman elsewhere. It's a reasonable enough explanation, but Madara won't settle until he knows for certain, so he stands by his brother's side and follows him deeper into the woods.

It wasn't as though he was wrong. Something had happened to Hashirama, and the rest of his clan with him.

The gates to the compound are closed, but there are no patrols on the walls, and no traps set on the perimeter to slow their approach. Izuna can't help the sick anxiety twisting up his throat. This has to be bait, something to lure them into a false sense of security and their eventual deaths. Nothing else makes sense.

But a glimpse over the wall show no signs of life inside. No people moving around, no laundry drying on the line, not even any noren fluttering in the wind -- for some reason they've all been taken down, leaving the compound dead and motionless.

The dread only mounts as they make their way over the wall and deeper inside. The houses are empty, stripped down to the floor mats. A few traps have been left behind, but not the dangerous ones Izuna had imagined. Just small scale things, meant to keep intruders out of the abandoned buildings. Easily disarmed, but that only adds to the unease.

They will go back and do a thorough search later, but the only clue, from out of every empty room, every cleared out cellar, every spot of turned dirt where it looked as though even some trees were taken, is in the main square. A circle of soot, smudged and stained deep into the stone. The remains of a seal that was used over and over again, already dissolved and unreadable.

The Senju must have used it. Or it must have done something to them. But what, no one has any idea. ---

The Uchiha never do quite manage to celebrate the disappearance of their enemy. Some do, and some are so clearly relived that the threat is gone, but as winter goes on the feeling that settles across the clan is one of dread. It is one part fear, not knowing what's happened to them, and one part worry about the future. Their entire lives and the lives of their ancestors are filled with memories of their war with the Senju. If they're gone, if it's over, what comes next?

Madara doesn't believe it is. Cannot accept that they are just -- gone. He gets more involved with their spy network than he ever has before hunting for a hint, and writes the daimyo informing him of the Senju's disappearance, hoping that he will get some answer when the thinly veiled request for dominion over those lands is inevitably rejected.

If your words and the rumors I have heard are true, the reply says, Then I see no reason not to accept the claim your clan has held on those lands.

Convenient, that he only acknowledges it now.

Izuna, for his part, settles on an anger that ebbs and flows between scalding rage and petty annoyance. How dare the Senju avoid the revenge that the Uchiha, that Izuna is owed.

He never lets himself slack off in training during the winter, and despite the circumstances this year is no exception. The Senju are tricky. If that mark was a seal, then Tobirama is no doubt responsible. They'll be back, probably at the most inopportune moment, but he'll be ready. ---

It hadn't been so bad, over the winter. There were normally less fights then, anyways, and they'd gotten by whole seasons without skirmishes before. But in the thaw of spring, somehow the anxiety only coils tighter.

Normally this was when they started finding Senju summons tracking their movements. When they'd inevitably get called into opposing sides under for some noble's border dispute and reignite conflict all over again.

Not this year. Somehow, the trees are quieter even on their side of the river. He shivers, when he realizes, but Izuna refuses to think about just how much of what he'd been used to had been the result of Hashirama's bloodline.

There are more missions than normal, true, but it hardly helps things. Their goal was the defeat the Senju, and denied that --

Some want to start picking new fights already, with old Senju allies. Izuna can't say he disagrees, though he knows it's unwise to do without good reason. Anyone who might have been easy to pick off has already scattered banded together with someone else.

Madara has started drinking more often. Izuna doesn't comment. He knows his brother is far from the only one.

(He's reviewed his memories, over and over, he tells Izuna, but the last time he'd seen them nothing had seemed different. It had been on a battlefield, and Hashirama had shouted for peace, had asked what he needed to do to convince him, and Madara had refused to answer, like always. If that had been an ultimatum, shouldn't there have been more?)

(Izuna has looked over his memories, too, but the only difference in Tobirama that day had been darker bags than usual under his eyes.)

Izuna can't stand the mood around the compound; half of his clan mates are acting more like their lover has died than their enemy. He takes those extra missions, and he goes. And keeps going, for days, for weeks,sometimes only staying home for hours at a time because as long as he's on a mission, he doesn't have to think about it. ---

It's a coastal town in Hot Water country, and Izuna spots a face that he attacks on instinct -- no care for the fact that they're in a public market -- his heart is busy singing not dead, not gone even as he lunges for the throat of the one who made him think it with a kunai.

It's a sloppy move, admittedly. One that Tobirama catches with an unimpressed glare.

"Must you?" He asks.

"Yes!" Izuna cries, dancing back from a returning blow that -- does not come. His breath is coming in heaves, though the fight is hardly started. He's too exited, and that means he'll get sloppy, but Tobirama isn't even in his armor right now, he's dressed down looking all the world like he's grocery shopping, so it might be even.

"You were fucking gone." Izuna accuses, "Don't think I'm about to let you get away without payback for all the lives you've taken."

Tobirama glances at the crowd that's started to form around them -- stupid move, but they haven't started pulling out flashy shinobi moves yet so they probably just think they're about to see a street fight.

"Figures." Tobirama mumbles. "It's been months already. Haven't you started to see the benefits of peace?"

Izuna sneers, draws his sword and lunges, but for some infuriating reason Tobirama is focused only on dodging, not fighting back. He seems -- disappointed, almost, which only makes it worse. How is he supposed to explain that he hasn't, that without the enemies they've all been born and raised to kill, his clan has started to stagnate into something hopeless and pathetic.

Tobirama catches sword against a sleeved kunai with a clang and holds it there.

"Consider that we've had to give up our vendettas against you, too, in doing this." He says, "Just… Move on. It'll be better for everyone."

An odd look passes over his face, one Izuna will replay in his memory over and over and still not understand.

"Goodbye, Izuna."

A crack of thunder breaks through the sunny afternoon air, and Tobirama Senju is gone, like the rest of his clan, without a trace.

As if Izuna intends on letting it stay that way.