#member: lyb

[daechwitatamicrecs]

Okay FIRSTLY everything about this is so cool. The premise is so cool. The graphics are divine, down the dividers. I am all about this. I am so ready.

I would die for Han. The end. He can do nothing wrong, including make my car smell like vom. “Basking like a little lizard in the sunlight” no literally I love him. If you’re a lizard, I’m a lizard.

“your mother taught you better than to do the things you’re good at for free.” this is an amazing sentence and it does so much heavy lifting. You’re so good at this sometimes it makes me mad lmao

“And if they did — well, maybe they saw things for what they were: shitty, same as anywhere else.” This is like. Such an allegory to so much of real history that its uncomfortable and I mean that as SUCH a compliment.

“outlawing the provision and receipt of medical care outside of authorized Thanotech facilities.” Yo. YO.

Still would die for Han. Screamed at the Scooper sighting. Furious that we didn���t get to stop and talk to him.

 “Do you think he was running to something, or running away from something?” RRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr the brain likes this.

Oh they’re idiots!!! I love this. I am on board.

‘Whispering, you repeat, “You’re dead.”’ – LITERALLY I AM SO EMOTIONAL RIGHT NOW OH I DON’T EVEN KNOW THE STORY YET AND MY CHEST HURTS OH THIS IS GOOD

“Just to emphasize his point, he looks over his shoulder at you and grins with all thirty-two of them.” GDI WHY ARE YOU SO GOOD AT THIS FIUAHFIUAHFIUAEGHIAUGHIUA

“It’s beyond the realm of possibility that a corporation like that has no turnover, so where do people go when their turn is over?” JADE EOIEOPDA. OH MY GOD.

“You look at him out of the corner of your eye and find him staring up at the ceiling, like his life depends on it.” !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“So, you can either eat, or you can keep pretending you’re not trying to flirt with me.” BITCH OH MY GOD??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????//

OKAY OH MY GOD THIS IS LITERALLY EVERYTHING MY BRAIN HAS EVER WANTED. TAKE THIS OFF THE INTERNET AND SEND IT TO A PUBLISHING HOUSE IMMEDIATELY. WHEN WILL HBO DO THE SERIES. AISFJAOSIFJAISJFIF

I stg if you kill off felix in a later part I will LITERALLY weep and then I will be MAD at myself for crying over fanfiction AGAIN!!!!!!

FORCE QUIT // EPISODE I: SCRAPS

you didn't have "anti-capitalist revolution" on this year's bingo card, but you never turn down a good time.

pairing: lee felix x reader | series masterlist (1/4) | next episode series summary: it's 2077, and life's a fucking nightmare. corporate titans ate the state and shat it back out, leaving citizens of the new republic to fall in line, or fall to their knees. a reckoning is coming — where will you fall? au: series — dystopian, cyberpunk; episode — childhood friends to strangers to something ➢insp. by: cyberpunk 2077 + the true lives of the fabulous killjoys genre: smut + angst + some fluff word count: 15.4k rating: 18+— minors do not have my consent to interact. series warnings: violence (hand-to-hand, firearms, explosives), depictions of injuries (blood/bruising/burns), some characters have cybernetic modifications, class conflict + poverty, surprise - corporations are bad!, unethical medical/tech experimentation, self-indulgent references to non-skz idols, reader is afab and uses she/her pronouns. episode warnings: above + trainer!felix, edgerunner!reader, pov switches, time skips, reference to food insecurity + reader living check to check, reader has cybernetic retinal mods + one in her hand, reader experiences temporary vision loss after being knocked out, oral sex (f receiving), unprotected p in v penetration. a/n: each episode features a different member x reader pairing, but the plot is linear, so you'd need to read them (in order) to get the full picture! you can sign up for the taglist to be notified of the next uploads. thank you to my beloved @sailoryooons for beta'ing this and @jihopesjoint for being my emotional support internet wife even though she doesn't stan skz. ily both endlessly!

You don’t deal in absolutes, but you know two things for sure: vending-machine burritos are a crime against humanity; and Han Jisung is a dirty, rotten bastard.

The firm stance you’ve taken on the latter may or may not have something to do with the former, but you can’t draw that conclusion now — not with the abuse your taste buds are currently suffering, anyway.

“Who the fuck —” 

You cut yourself off to spit a mouthful at the ground. Notably, the remnants of that half-chewed abomination look just as awful on the way out as they did on the way in.

 “— Replaced this queso with battery acid?”

Chipmunk cheeks stuffed to bursting, Jisung blinks back at you. He says nothing — suddenly too polite to speak with his mouth full — and shrugs, unbothered. That’s when the realization hits you like a boot to the skull. Drenched in disbelief, your muttering comes out in slow-motion: 

“You spent the last of our cash on these.”

He swallows, though you don’t know how he could bring himself to do it. That act alone makes the rage you’re simmering in bubble over. 

You repeat yourself through gritted teeth, pausing emphatically between every word, “The — last — of — our — cash!”

“My bad?” He eventually offers. Tongue flicking out, he tries to gather the unidentified sauce that clings to the corner of his mouth. He fails. “Not sure what else I was supposed to find with that little money in this part of town, but go off, I guess.”

You bite your lips together to hold back the guttural yell you’re seconds from releasing. At your sides, your empty hands clench tightly. Instead of snapping — with your words or your fists — you close your eyes, inhaling slowly through your nose. Deep breaths won’t do you any fucking good in this smog, but your brain tends to work a little bit better without visual interference.

I can go another twenty-four hours, you think. Maybe.

It’s been a while since you’ve last eaten and even longer since your last job. This isn’t out of the ordinary; gaps are to be expected when you live on the fringe, jumping from thread to thread. Still, it isn’t like Changbin to leave you hanging the way he has been lately. It sure as shit isn’t like him to dodge your calls, either.

So, you figure, if you make an unsolicited visit to his office — the stock room of a bar you know better than to frequent — he won’t have a choice. He’ll have to look you in the eye and explain the dry spell, personally. He owes you at least that much.

With your plan finalized, you hold out your left hand to Jisung. In the few moments you’d taken your eyes off him, he’d apparently gone from sitting on the hood of your car to reclining fully with his own eyes closed. Basking like a little lizard in the sunlight, it’s a miracle the hot metal hasn’t burned a hole in his shirt.

“Come on.” You nudge his bent knee with your knuckles to no avail.

As Jisung is wont to do, he pouts. “But it’s so nice out �� and your car still reeks, by the way.”

The absolute, rakish audacity.

If you didn’t love him, you’d probably kill him. 

Strike that. 

Love is irrelevant. You wouldn’t kill him unless and until there was a price on his head. After all, your mother taught you better than to do the things you’re good at for free.

“Do we want to talk about whose fault that is?” You ask with a roll of your eyes. The affection’s still there; you know he sees it. “If I recall correctly — and I think I do, having been the only sober person present — you were the one who got blasted and barfed on everything I love in this world.”

“I got blasted and barfed exclusively on the floor of your car.”

It’s your turn to shrug. “Exactly. End of list.”

Groaning, Jisung rolls his eyes as far back as they’ll go, but he still takes your hand. He always does, always has. With your help, he scoots his ass down the hood and lands with both boots — precisely where your ejected burrito bite did, not five minutes earlier. You can’t stop the satisfied grin from spreading when he whines again, this time louder and with twice as much despair.

After playfully shoving your passenger towards his door, you unlock your own. You don’t dump yourself into the seat, however; not yet. A wall of horrible heat is waiting for you the second the door opens, and you know better than to run into it, headlong.

Jisung is less patient. He’s also more regretful, face twisting in self-imposed anguish when he drops down onto the sun-scorched leather seat. And, to your delight, the hits keep coming. You watch with a smile when the consequences of last weekend’s actions hit his nostrils. The look he gives you falls somewhere between humbled, apologetic, and absolutely dead inside.

“Not one of my finer moments, I’ll admit it.” He acknowledges with a wave of his hand. Resigned, he sighs, “I’ll scrub the shit out of the floor mats the next time we can afford a wash.”

Satisfied, you finally climb behind the wheel. Pushing through the slightly-muted sting of the seat against the backs of your bare thighs, you put your foot on the brake and lift your right hand to press your thumb to the ignition port. The roar of the engine covers the way your breath hitches, but Jisung doesn’t have to hear it to notice the grimace that accompanies it.

“Still sore?” He asks. 

To his credit, he looks genuinely concerned as he reaches across the center console and takes your hand in his. It’s gentle, the way he tilts your palm up, but the movement burns in every single one of your tendons. This time, you know you have a captive audience, so you don’t flinch. 

Despite the trouble it’s giving you, you have to admit that the new enhancement looks beautiful in the sunlight. In the center of your palm, two rectangular, silver brackets refract iridescence. Their shine contrasts sharply with the matte, midnight black cybernetic plating that now covers the majority of your palm, spreading to the first knuckle of your fingers but coating the length of your thumb in its entirety. 

More than beautiful, it’s deadly — and it aches like a motherfucker.

“I read a study about these ballistic co-processors last night while you were knocked out,” he hums. 

Classic Jisung. 

He has no medical or academic background whatsoever but wastes his time reading crank doctors’ research for fun. And, of course, he makes sure to mention it — casually and apropos of mostly nothing — in order to impress.

Gingerly, he runs his finger along the edge of the cyberware, mumbling, “It usually takes five days from installation for the musculoskeletal inflammation to chill.”

Your fingers twitch of their own volition, which prompts him to look up at you curiously. 

“Yeah, well…” You grunt.

Less carefully than you should, you pull your hand from his, tap the gear shift, and throw the car into reverse. Peeling out of the lot, you scoff without even bothering to look his way:

“It’s been ten.”

When the War came and went, it took the old way of life with it on its way out. You might’ve been late to the party by fifty or so years, but you’ve got the gist now. It goes something like this:

Korea, as it was once known, crumpled like a beer can in the face of a corporate uprising and was quickly kicked curbside with the trash. In its place came the New Republic — in all its stolen, neon glory — promising technological revolution, profit in excess. Although the world’s eyes were trained on the peninsula then, not everyone stuck around to watch democracy die in real time. 

Not up close, anyway.

Some people had enough cash to run but not enough to make staying worthwhile. With their tails between their legs and their life savings in hand, they left before the capitalist rot could set in fully; chose willful blindness and headed for countries where corporations rule from the shadows rather than broad daylight.

Most people, however, didn’t leave. People like your grandparents, who hadn’t looked up long enough to notice things going to hell in a hurry. And if they did — well, maybe they saw things for what they were: shitty, same as anywhere else. 

Five decades later, that fact hasn’t changed much.

Regardless of why a person opts to stay in the New Republic, their options for survival are effectively limited to two. Simply put, a person can sell their soul to the very corporations that strangled the state, or they can starve.

Nobody ever chooses the latter.

You can safely assume everything you need to know about a person based on where their next steps take them.

For example, those who crave both chic, penthouse apartments and blood-soaked streets are most likely to fall in line with WraithCo.. The name suggests that it’s a criminal enterprise run by fucking ghouls because that’s essentially what it is. More than that, it’s the arms manufacturer monopoly that out-manned and out-gunned the national military without breaking a sweat. 

The high-powered, highly-paid WraithCo. executives find joy in three things and three things only: designer suits; missiles that explode into clouds of fiberglass upon impact; and testing said missiles out on non-violent nomad encampments outside city limits.

Fucking ghouls.

Despite being the most openly violent of the major players, you find WraithCo. to be the most boring. They lack nuance, don’t bother with a false front or a positive PR spin — it’s all a little too predictable. Thanotech, on the other hand, is subtle; the perfect  cover for those who like to convince themselves they’re doing more good than harm.

In furtherance of that delusion, Thanotech replaced all public hospitals with state-of-the-art, for-profit rejuvenation centers. Worse, their lobbyists ensured that medical licensure was limited to employees of those centers, outlawing the provision and receipt of medical care outside of authorized Thanotech facilities. 

In short, those who can’t afford Thanotech’s astronomical rates — specifically, poor fucks like you — are left to fend for themselves in back alley clinics; to pray that they don’t wind up worse-off than they started, that the police don’t sniff them out, and that their new modifications aren’t just garbage-tier knock-offs.

Of course, some people give more of a shit about these designer mods than the patients who may or may not wind up with them. In that case, the last of the three titans has them covered.

It’s no fucking surprise that the Ulsan Corporation is the crown-jewel of the New Republic — it’s primarily responsible for killing the old one. As the world’s premier technology and cybernetics conglomerate, Ulsan is also primarily responsible for the research, development, and distribution of cybernetic enhancements.

Like the one your body is currently acclimating to.

No such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism, right?

Ulsan may be less obvious with its bastardry than its counterparts, but as far as you can tell, it’s not good guy behavior to eat an established state and shit it back out. Even if you can’t tie any specific, ongoing atrocities back to them, you have no qualms about adding the desperate state of the union to their indictment.

You can blame them for the desperate measures they’ve necessitated, although you won’t give them an ounce of credit for the spark of resistance they so recklessly lit.

Despite it all, there are still people out there who refuse to accept things for what they are. They find an alternative to the comply or die ultimatum — run along the razor’s edge, taking what they can get, whenever they can get it.

Like Changbin, one of Seoul’s best-connected fixers.

Like you, a gun for hire. 

Like Jisung, sitting in your passenger seat as you drive across town, who’s just happy to be included.

Generally speaking, piss and vinegar don’t mix well with club security.

If you were anyone else, rolling up to The Crypt like you own the place would be ill-advised. More than that, it would be asking to get your teeth kicked in faster than you could say, “I’m on the list.”

Thankfully, as it often does, your reputation precedes you. Nobody in the block-long line bats an eye when you cut right to the front, a fact that has Jisung smirking in a way that might otherwise get him killed. Still, the bouncer shoots you a look that says you’re more trouble than you’re worth; and you agree.

Before your friend can change the muscle’s mind, you grab Jisung by the wrist and tug him through the front entrance. You don’t let go when the door shuts behind you, although it’s more for convenience than concern for his safety. He has a tendency to wander, and you don’t have the patience.

“Haven’t been here in a while,” he muses as you drag him towards the main bar, head turning to look in every direction except the one you’re moving in.

You don’t slow down.

Winding your way through the drunks at the counter, you inch closer to the large booths along the far wall. Inside, draped nonchalantly over the plush benches, sit the big guns — mercenaries with far more sway than you, far fatter wallets. They’re living the high life you’ve always dreamed of, and they don’t even notice you staring as you pass.

“Oh, shit!” Jisung waves overhead to one of them, reminding you without trying that he — unlike you — has other friends.“S.Coups, where have the fuck have you been, man?”

You still don’t slow down.

Not when you reach the stairwell at the far side of the main floor. Not when you shuffle down the steps to the employees only section. Not even when the security camera overhead silently demands that you do.

There’s only one locked door amongst the few; you fly to it like a homing pigeon and beat against the metal with your free hand. It isn’t until the burning ache sets in that you realize you chose your right.

“Goddamn it.” You growl down at it, as if your hand will apologize for hurting. Turning your vitriol towards the door, you kick it hard, steel-toed boot forcing out a thud. “Changbin, open this shit up!”

Jisung glares as he scolds you, “Manners, maybe?”

You roll your eyes, but his expectant expression doesn’t budge.

“Fucking — fine, okay? Fine.” Hands thrown up in defeat, you take a deep breath. Your next words come out saccharine, accompanied by fluttering lashes that can’t even be seen. “Changbin, darling, could you please open this shit up?”

The two of you wait in dead silence for several seconds before Jisung’s hands fly up to your hair, unprompted. Your surprised yelp doesn’t faze him. He grabs the bobby-pin from where you’ve stashed it under your ponytail, drops to his knees, and starts to work.

You snort, “Well, damn. Look at you!”

Truly, you’re impressed. Jisung normally leaves the dirty work to you, yet here he is — breaking and entering.

They grow up so fast.

He tries not to look proud of himself, but his cheeks blush a shade of sakura and rat him right out. Though you’re sure he’d love to, he can’t even lift a hand to wave you off before the lock clicks. With a quick twist of the knob, he pushes the door open.

Changbin’s office looks close to normal, with a few notable exceptions. For starters, he’s not in it. The man you’re dealing with never sees the light of day if he can help it.

Jisung pipes up first: “Okay, what the fuck?”

The office chair Changbin normally occupies is spun to the side, as if his ass left it in a hurry. Even odder than that is the small, green light which indicates that he didn’t shut off his computer before leaving it unattended. It’s not a decision someone like Changbin — neurotic and paranoid to a borderline clinical degree — makes on his own.

That, you know outright, is a problem.

Cautiously, you slip past Jisung and walk on eggshells towards Changbin’s desk. You know it’s stupid, that no one would bother rigging the floor tiles to blow under the weight of your boots, but you can’t ignore the way your gut twists with every step. That dread only gets worse, the closer you get.

To the right of his primary screen, there’s a half-eaten vending-machine burrito that’s so covered with ants, you almost mistake them for pepper flakes. That sight makes bile rise in your throat, in and of itself, but it’s the untouched cup of coffee that sends a tingle of panic down your spine. Around the base of the glass, hardly visible on the sheet of paper underneath, is a water ring. 

That coffee — at one point, however long ago — was iced.

Changbin would kill you for it if he were here, but he isn’t, so you drop down into his chair. You pause as soon as your ass settles onto the leather, still not convinced that one wrong move won’t set off some sort of trap. The breath you’ve been holding leaks out slowly when your actions go without consequences.

A quick glance up at Jisung confirms that he looks exactly as spooked as you feel. You watch his Adam’s apple bob when he swallows hard. 

He knows the answer before he asks, but that doesn’t stop him. It comes out scratchy, riddled with hesitation that says he doesn’t really want to hear the response. “He hasn’t been here in days, has he?”

You shake your head, just barely, then turn to the desk. Bottom lip pinched between worried teeth, you scan the surface for anything you missed on your first pass.

Give me a hint, you motherfucker. All I need is a breadcrumb.

It’s the absence of something that grabs your attention. Eyes narrowing, you lean forward in your seat to get as close as possible to his monitors.

“Does that…?” You start to ask but your voice trails off before you finish; thoughts moving too quickly to inventory before the next one arrives.

Though black, the screens in front of you aren’t lifeless. If anything, they’re still backlit, glitching subtly in a way they shouldn’t — not if the system had been locked, powered off, or otherwise put to sleep. You don’t have to be a netrunner to know that someone is running an opp, fucking up the computer’s processing and leaving it brain dead.

It’s so small that you almost miss the minimized window at the bottom left-hand corner of his secondary monitor, screen otherwise barren. Hesitantly, you reach out your hand and press a trembling finger to it.

Jisung is hovering so closely over your shoulder that you can practically taste that burrito on his breath. You elbow him once in the chest, hard.

He coughs, pointing to the screen as he sputters, “What the hell are those?”

“Numbers, Jisung.” You deadpan. “They’re called numbers.”

Ignoring the way he grumbles in response, you grab your mobile from your pocket. It springs to life at your sudden touch and broadcasts a holographic home screen in the air just centimeters above the glass. Just as fast, it tracks the movement of your eyes flicking through the list of applications. With the faintest shudder, the GPS navigation consumes the screen.

You repeat what you hope are coordinates:

35.2029, 128.6001.

As the map loads, you and Jisung exchange glances that are underscored by tense swallows. He knows it, and so do you: 

No matter where that pin ends up dropping, you have no choice but to go.

It takes three hours to drive from Seoul to Changwon. Although it’s not a route you’ve taken in years, or one you ever expected to take again, you still know it like the back of your hand. You can still navigate every turn — every crater and curve — with your eyes closed, even now. 

Despite that fact, your decision to race to the southeast this time has nothing to do with sentimentality for the hometown you left five years ago. 

This is just for Changbin, you repeat like a mantra, pressing harder on the accelerator. 

With every stoplight and thought you race through, the background grows blurrier but the big picture gets clearer. Changbin himself has nothing to do with it; and you’re not as selfless as your inner monologue keeps claiming. You correct yourself:

This is for me and my empty bank account.

Really — who could blame you?

You need steady contracts in order to eat. Without Changbin, those get fewer and farther between. It’s the transitive property, or whatever; basic math. You might starve without him, and that is the one thing in this life that you’re unwilling to do.

In the passenger seat, Jisung stirs. When he speaks, his voice isn’t weighted down with exhaustion in the way it usually is, halfway through a car trip. For some reason, it makes your stomach turn to consider that — for what is probably the first time ever — he isn’t sleeping through a drive.

“He left in a hurry,” he quietly notes.

Out of the corner of your eye, you glance at him and confirm the presence of that worried crease between his eyebrows. It’s not accompanied by the usual, furiously-bouncing knee. That makes your stomach turn, too. Clearly, he’s vaulted over mere anxiety and landed somewhere close to shutting down.

You nod. “He did.”

It spooks him when you take your right hand off the steering wheel and give his elbow a brief squeeze. You’re not the affectionate type; you both know this. It always makes your rare touches more ominous than comforting.

“Do you think he was running to something, or running away from something?”

Leave it to Jisung to say the quiet part out loud. 

Normally, you have an answer for his constant questions; and if you don’t, you resort to lying or guessing. This time, however, you don’t bother with either of those tactics because it doesn’t matter. Whatever the correct answer is, it’ll still feel wrong because Changbin doesn’t run.

Period.

Full stop.

So, the conclusion your brain keeps trying to come to is that he didn’t — he wouldn’t — if it came down to choice. The only reason Changbin would’ve disappeared like this, suddenly and wordlessly, is if he was taken.

Pulse hammering loudly in your ears, you don’t hear Jisung announce that your destination is only a few hundred meters down the road. Without his emphatic pointing out the windshield ahead, you simply would’ve continued racing forward, taking the speed limit as a suggestion to be ignored. Thankfully, your lead foot switches to the brake with enough time to make your turn. Tires hit dirt; your car fishtails as it transitions from the road to the worn-out path to your right.

“The fuck is this place?” You mutter, more to yourself than to Jisung.

It’s obsolete, you know that much. 

Something akin to an industrial park, but one that clearly hasn’t been used since before the War. There are electrical towers dotting a perimeter around the space, none of which are operational; the grid system was replaced by wind power, then by solar energy no fewer than fifty years ago. The driveway below is so cracked that patches of weeds have overtaken most of what remained of the pavement. All the rest is weathered, reduced to broken bits of cement and dirt.

Your car slows to a stop halfway down the parkway, surrounded on both sides by empty storage units with doors either broken or missing entirely. Hair raising on the back of your neck, you park but don’t kill the engine. Slowly, you rest your right hand over top of the holster strapped to your thigh and open your car door with your left.

The sun set a few hours into your drive. Its absence hasn’t done a damn thing to break the thick heat waiting for you outside. Humid air settles on your skin and leaves a sheen of sweat behind like a handprint, sticky.

“These were the coordinates,” Jisung affirms with a sigh. He stays seated inside the vehicle, leaving you to wonder why. He’s either too panicked to move, or correct in assuming you’d tell him to sit his unarmed ass back down before you made him.

You don’t respond. 

Instead, your eyes continue to scan the property for signs of — well, anything. Movement, a heat signature, whatever might register on your optical mods. There’s nothing, save for the stray tumbleweed somersaulting across the empty lot. You narrow your eyes to zoom in, heart pounding with anticipation.

You almost scream when you see it, but you swallow the urge. Fear won’t do you any good, but the semi-automatic strapped to your thigh might. It’s in your palm before you can blink, cocked and aimed at the figure ahead. At the bottom of your field of vision, your ammo count glows in translucent, block letters.

So, the ballistic co-processor is worth the pain.

Their posture is casual, legs dangling from the metal catwalk they sit on. Their elbows rest against the railing in front of them, as if they’re leaning on a counter in a bar and not spying on you from a scaffold four meters overhead. The way they’re watching in silence is unsettling enough; the wooden tal obscuring their face is fucking nightmare fuel, if you’ve ever seen it.

Head tilted curiously to the side, the stranger stares down at you through small eye holes, wooden mouth frozen in a hand-carved smile. Whoever they are, they’re immersed in the bit. They exaggerate every slow movement for their audience of two.

Good for them, you scoff to yourself.

Gloved hands come up to pantomime “don’t shoot” mere seconds before they grab hold of the railing in front of them. Just as quickly, they swing themselves underneath with a kick of their legs until they’re falling, falling, falling towards the ground below. They land easily on their feet without so much as a grunt. All the while, dust swirls in pirouettes around their ankles, spot-lit by your car’s headlamps.

“What — what the fuck?” Jisung squeaks. 

You don’t answer, but that doesn’t stop him from repeating his question, over and over.

Hands still raised, the stranger slowly closes the distance between you. Their fingers wiggle slightly in some demented version of a wave; they’re taunting you. The unhealed part of you wants to shoot those fingers off, one by one. 

You’ve never been fond of clowns.

“If you like having kneecaps without bullets in them, I suggest you stay still, chingu,” you scoff, now more annoyed than alarmed.

To your surprise, they listen. Their feet still, side by side; and their hands stay where you can see them. That is, until they curl all of their fingers into their palm, except for their right index finger. With it, they point silently over your shoulder.

As soon as you can whip your neck around, a gloved fist collides with your temple. The last thing you see before your vision goes black is a second, wooden smile looming over you.

A hushed tone manages to nudge you awake.

“You really can’t keep doing this. Seriously, your people skills are awful.”

The whole world’s blurry, and you can’t make out the source of the sound, but you’re coherent enough to know it when a second voice chimes in. It’s much less gentle than the first, higher in pitch and twice as exasperated. It snaps, “She was armed.”

“I had it under control,” the first voice huffs. 

The two seem to be too lost in their argument to notice your eyelids fluttering or your fingers twitching. Your wrists aren’t bound, you realize, but that fact doesn’t help you much in your current state. Back resting heavily against the thin nylon cloth of a cot, it’d take more energy than you have to spare in order to get to your feet. Worse, your eyes don’t seem interested in cooperating.

They should be by now. 

They’re open, you’re conscious, and —

Motherfucker.

The more awake you become, the more the ache in your temple reverberates down your jaw. You know without looking that the right side of your face is bruised to hell and back. Scraped up, too, if you had to guess; you hit the gravel like a bag of bricks.

They must’ve done it on purpose, hitting you exactly where they needed to in order to scramble your visual input. The most you get is shapes, black and white static. It wasn’t the hardest knock you’d ever taken to the head — not by a long shot — but it was perfectly targeted and timed. 

Clearly, they’re no amateurs.

One such shadow kneels down next to you. Gentle fingers tuck a strand of hair behind your ear while their other hand tilts your drooping head to the side. 

They tut, “Just look at what you did to her face.”

“From what I’ve heard, she’s been through worse,” the second voice scoffs. You watch the shadow’s shoulders as they shrug, wishing you could focus on their face well enough to bash it in.

The retort comes quickly, but it doesn’t come in Korean. 

“That doesn’t mean you can’t do better.”

The hands that gently cradle your face pull away, leaving you cold. The action itself isn’t as jarring as the sudden use of English, though — especially the accent it’s spoken with. You may not be fluent, but you can sense what’s missing: the consonant on the end of that last word.

You sense something else, too, but you’re still too disoriented to follow that thought from start to finish. It’s on the tip of your tongue, just out of reach.

Who — ?

The bastard that broke your brain must notice your face scrunching in confusion because their next words seem to be aimed at you. Clipped and unapologetic, they mutter, “Should be fine within the hour. Already been out for —” 

They suck in a breath through their teeth. You can’t tell if they’re stalling in order to toy with you, or if they’re genuinely doing the math. 

“— Seven hours or so, now.”

Fuck!

One of the two snorts out a laugh; it’s the only reason you piece it together that you spoke out loud. Emboldened by the confirmed functionality of your voice, you speak again without thinking it through first. 

You don’t care where you are or who you’re with. You only have one question:

“Is Changbin still alive? Because if he is, I’ll kill him myself.”

The man kneeling next to your cot chuckles, soft and low, but he doesn’t acknowledge your question beyond that. Instead, he addresses his hamfisted friend. “Can you please get her some water?”

“Am I a waiter now, Yongbok-ah?” The other snips, though his tone is devoid of any real heat. If his face wasn’t blurred out of existence, you’d likely find a sneer on it. “Should I roll some gimbap for her, too?”

“Actually, you should,” counters this Yongbok. His response is buried so deeply under his breath that his back talk may as well be a secret for your ears only. “Punched her clean into the next weekday — so, yeah. It’s the least you could do.”

It grows silent enough that you can hear every incredulous footstep as the waiter storms off.

The remainder says, “Sorry about him,” and for whatever little it’s worth, he sounds like he means it. You say nothing, simply marinating in your resentment. 

Meanwhile, he shifts from his knees in order to sit fully on the ground next to your cot. Elbows extended, he leans back onto his palms and sighs gently, “Minho’s not as bad as the first impressions he makes.”

You scoff so forcefully that you feel it in your sinuses. “This is the second. His first is the reason I can’t see who’s holding me hostage.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” The shape beside you sits up suddenly. He sputters, “You’re not a hostage, and this isn’t a kidnapping —”

“Then what the fuck is it?” You snap, “Huh, Yongbok?”

Blindly, you throw out a half-balled fist in a half-baked attempt to even the score. It misses by a mile, nearly knocking you off balance in the process. Your wrist is encircled by the same warm fingers you felt before, doubling over but exerting no force.

“We were scouting you. You know, like, soccer?” He chuckles sheepishly. “Changbin mentioned that you were a free agent, so to speak, and we thought you might wanna join the team.”

What the fuck?

“And — it wasn’t supposed to wind up like this.” His shadow’s hands gesture vaguely at the room you can’t see. “I did try to warn you. You just didn’t turn around in time.”

There are too many questions swirling around in your skull to choose from. One of them must break free and nudge your retinal chip back into place because something turns the lights back on. Glitching wildly, your vision flickers from low contrast to high definition. It doesn’t hurt, but the surprised gasp you choke out could easily be interpreted that way.

The man next to you is back on his knees in a second, both hands finding your shoulders to either comfort you or immobilize you — and you aren’t sure which. Against your better judgment, you ignore the reflex that tells you to fight or flee. Instead, you reach out and touch his cheekbone to confirm that the faint spots you see are freckles and not lingering sensory damage on your part.

He doesn’t even blink, much less say a word. There’s no jerk to get away, and there’s not a single question asked about what the fuck you’re doing — just tolerance. Far more than you’d be extending if the roles were reversed.

Freckles.

You aren’t embarrassed, but you drop your hand quickly and scowl at him until he does the same. Once again, he raises them as he leans back. Notably, he doesn’t wiggle his fingers like the first time you crossed paths.

That reminds me —

Abruptly, you draw your arm back to deck him in earnest. 

Just like the last time, he catches you before you can strike him; however, instead of capturing your wrist, it’s the entirety of your fist. His palm absorbs the shock, fingers closing around your hand. It’s the gentlest trap you’ve ever been ensnared in, which you hate.

Smart of you to prevent another attempt.

“Can I finish explaining myself?” He asks, voice soft. 

Bright doe eyes scan over your face cautiously as he contemplates letting your hand go. It’s disarming, sure, but you’d rather die than admit it. 

You give him absolutely nothing to work with, so he adds, “You can hit me when I’m done, if you still want to.”

All you give him in return is a glare, which he somehow correctly interprets as permission to keep going. The grip on your fist loosens, although it wasn’t constricting to begin with. Like nothing happened, you pull it away and cross your arms.

As if nonchalance has ever been your strong suit.

He stares at you, deep in thought, for longer than you know what to do with. Eyes sweeping over your features like he’ll be quizzed later, taking in every detail. It’s unsettling — what about you is even worth gawking at?

When he frowns, that spark of light in his eyes stays put. “You don’t remember me.” 

It’s not a question because he isn’t asking; he’s telling. And you have no goddamn clue what he means, no matter how loudly the voice in your head screams that you should. The familiarity buzzing through your brain can’t place him — not the button of his nose, not even those fucking freckles.

“I don’t know anyone named Yongbok,” you counter, frustration evident.

You wouldn’t be this harsh if you know how not to be. Part of you feels guilty when you see the hurt flicker across his face, but both emotions — his and yours — are gone as quickly as they appear. Consequently, the walls stay up, refusing to give. Despite you, the corner of his mouth hitches up in a lopsided version of a smile. 

That’s familiar, too.

“Never really went by it,” he chuckles. As he does, he tilts his head quizzically. 

Another bell rings, yet you can’t name the note.

Shyly, he takes his half-smile with him and looks anywhere else. The anticipation is spinning cartwheels in your stomach, tingling down the back of your neck, and you’re seconds away from trying to smack the trapped words right out of him. 

Who are you to me?

After a deep breath in and out, he glances back at you from the corner of his eye. His hesitation does nothing to prepare you for his response, which isn’t his name at all. It’s yours — a nickname, more specifically. One no one has used in damn near a decade.

“Been a while, Scraps. Hasn’t it?”

Felix has never seen anyone freeze the way you do when the realization finally hits. For a minute, he worries that Minho did more damage to your poor brain than either of them initially diagnosed; it wouldn’t be the first time. Minho’s never been known to be careful or tactful.

Your silence — and your total lack of physical response — doesn’t last, though. He nudges your kneecap with his knuckles just to make sure you can feel it. You blink rapidly, as if you’re just now remembering how.

He starts to ask, “Are you ok—?”, but your fist flies out, pops him right in the jaw, and he chokes on the rest of that question. Hands flying up to cover his face, he collapses back onto the floor with a groan. When the initial shock wears off, it dissolves into laughter that shakes his shoulders.

Honestly, what did he expect?

In a flash, you shove yourself off your cot. You’re on top of him before he can blink, pinning him down. You grip his shirt in one fist and raise the other. He braces himself for impact but doesn’t flinch, too taken aback by the fury you’re capable of communicating without a single word.

“You’re fucking with me,” you spit, breaking the silence.

Your glare is borderline feral — burning — and that makes him laugh even harder. 

“You haven’t changed a bit, you know that?”

To both of your surprise, you don’t hit him again; you don’t even try. You freeze, but unlike the last time, your eyes are shaking. Your raised arm is, too, like it’s taking all you have to keep whatever you’re feeling to yourself.

Classic Scraps.

You mutter, “You’re dead,” and it’s not a threat. 

Not even close, really. It’s a declaration, one accompanied by an expression that’s as close to vulnerable as he’s ever seen from you. All at once, you lower your arm; the rest of you slumps, too. Whispering, you repeat, “You’re dead.”

Something about your tone hurts worse than the burgeoning bruise near his mouth. It aches, even more so when he frowns. You deserve an explanation — an apology, too — but Felix doesn’t know where the fuck to start.

Maybe he should cash that reality check first.

“Is that what people are saying?” He asks.

He’s not sure what about that trips him up. It makes perfect sense that this is the conclusion people wound up jumping to. After all, he left without a word and never came back — didn’t leave a trace, either. 

Felix wasn’t the first teenager to slip through the cracks, so he’d figured that his would be another run-of-the-mill disappearance. Sure, people tend to notice when kids go missing; but that doesn’t stop the world from turning. Sooner or later, people stop looking, either too busy or too hopeless to keep holding a torch.

Eventually, they forget.

At least, that was the reality Felix had subscribed to — that, after a while, he’d slipped through the cracks of collective consciousness. It was easier to tell himself that he wasn’t missed. His guilt couldn’t keep him up at night if nobody remembered that he existed in the first place; especially when a decade slipped past in his absence.

But you did remember. 

You missed him.

You lift your knee so that you’re no longer straddling him and drop onto your back at his side.

It’s funny, he thinks as he stares up at the ceiling. The two of you spent years just like this, albeit on the hood of some junkyard sedan. Two pairs of wide eyes were always fixed on constellations, dreaming of something bigger than both of you. Of some future where you weren’t still stuck in the gutter.

“There was no trace of you anywhere.” You speak so softly that Felix is left to wonder whether you’re talking to him or yourself. “No records that you fled, no word from you, no hits on CCTV — nothing. The cops said there’d be a trail if…”

Your voice fades out before you can finish that thought, so Felix picks up where you left off: “If I was alive to leave one.”

There’s a long pause before you speak again. 

“This is where you disappeared to?”

He feels a shift beside him. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the way you’ve tilted your head to gaze at him. By the time he does the same, the moment is gone, and you’re taking in the room around you. 

It’s not much, but it’s all he has: A small room in a decommissioned factory, smelling faintly of sawdust despite not containing any. The cot you just sprang from is where he’s spent most nights since he was fifteen. 

The floor underneath it — underneath you — is more dirt than concrete now, no matter how many times he’s scrubbed it; and the few iron shelves that hang along each wall are just as gross. So are the knickknacks he’s set on them, but he doesn’t mind.

The site itself is long forgotten. It’d be an eyesore if anyone ever looked, but no one bothers.

Even satellites have stopped paying it any attention, leaving it to fade into dirt and obscurity, not even a shadow of what it used to be. Once plush and inviting, the surrounding forest was leveled in a firefight that ended with ninety-percent of the nearby buildings getting blown to shit. 

The New Republic could’ve easily organized a relief team to dig through the shattered city. At any point in the last fifty years, they could’ve rebuilt what burned in that failed uprising, but they didn’t; and Felix knows they never will because that rubble has a function. Apart from burying one of the country’s most impoverished districts, it serves as a cautionary tale. A threat left behind to the masses: this is what happens when people pose risk to profits.

Still, flowers can grow within cracks in concrete. After all, his life with you started just a few kilometers away.

“Are we still in Changwon, or did you and that asshole drag me out of the province?” 

That edge of yours is ever present, and Felix is glad. It’s one of the million things he’s missed about you; a feature on the long list of reasons he wishes he could’ve called — messaged, sent a smoke signal, anything — to keep you around in whatever capacity he could.

But he didn’t. 

He couldn’t.

Felix feels the weight of a lost decade sitting heavy on his chest, so he does what he always does: he chooses light. Smiling brightly, he asks, “D’you remember that junkyard we used to run away to after curfew?”

You roll your eyes. You don’t have to say it out loud; he knows you do. The two of you spent more time there than you did in your own homes, lining glass bottles along the wooden fence posts and firing stones at them with a homemade slingshot.

“We’re a few kilometers up the road, actually.”

At this, you sit up so that no part of your body stays pressed against his. Dead silence settles in the space between you like a brick wall. You bristle, then you snap, “All that time you were dead, you were still within spitting distance?”

Felix opens his mouth to respond, but your rigid posture makes it clear that you have no desire to listen. He closes it again without saying a word. It’s what he deserves, isn’t it?

“Traded in your family, your home, your — Me.” You clear your throat to hide the fact that your voice breaks. It’s too late. “And for what, Felix? To haunt some abandoned building like a ghost?”

You clench your fists, like a grip tight enough might keep you together. That part of you hasn’t changed either, it seems. Neither has the extremely unsettling way you get quieter, the more upset you are. Just like that, he’s reminded of what you used to say: the more it hurts, the less it shows.

“I couldn’t pick you out of a fucking lineup despite all of that history,” you whisper, deflated. “And you were here the whole time.”

Talking won’t do him much good, so Felix opts to show you. Palms pressed to the ground, he pushes himself to his feet, and he doesn’t bother dusting off the back of his pants once he stands. It won’t make a difference, anyway, when the whole damn city is covered in it.

Once he steadies himself, he extends his hand to you, half-expecting you to slap it away. You don’t budge. You never do, he recalls fondly.

“One chance?” His eyes are pleading, even though you don’t look up to meet them. “It’s hard to explain, but it’ll make more sense if you see it.”

Without looking, you lift your arm and slap your hand into his. A small concession, but it’s enough to make his smile reappear. He’s practically beaming when he hauls you to your feet, and you grip his forearms to keep steady.

“Fine,” you concede with a huff. 

Then, you round on him with one pointed finger, jabbing him in the center of his chest with force. It’ll bruise, but he supposes that’s the whole point. 

“This better be worth all the fucking theatrics, or I swear to god —”

“You’ll make me swallow my own teeth?” He rolls his eyes with a low chuckle and tugs you along after him on his way to the door. “Yeah, yeah, yeah — Heard that threat a thousand times, Scraps, and you’ve never once made good on it.”

Just to emphasize his point, he looks over his shoulder at you and grins with all thirty-two of them.

All things considered, you take everything in stride. You don’t react much at all when you discover that the abandoned building is anything but; refuse to bat an eye when the two people you woke up to are revealed to be a tiny fraction of the whole.

You even keep your hand in his as he ushers you from room to room — through the clinic, the makeshift and woefully under-equipped armory, the Hub — and introduces you to whoever you come across. He might even go so far as to call you friendly, which is a first. Receiving any kind of warmth from you typically requires high-level security clearance. 

Or, at least, it used to. Felix has to remind himself more than once that, small echoes aside, there are parts of you he doesn’t know anymore. This could very well be one of them.

Halfway through the tour, you finally offer up more than a lukewarm greeting and your name. It’s just the two of you now; you don’t have to make yourself palatable anymore. Blunt as ever, you throw out, “This is a cult, right? You ran away from home to join a cult?”

There she is, he thinks.

Felix pulls a face in disapproval, which you either don’t catch or don’t care about. Instead, you turn your head in the opposite direction and let your gaze sweep over the loading dock you currently stand upon.

It’s the closest thing they’ve got to a sitting room, filled with the only comfortable furniture they could get their hands on — half-busted arm chairs, ratty old couches, tables held together with duct tape and a prayer. You drop suddenly onto one such couch, jerking him back until his ass winds up next to yours on a tattered cushion. 

Felix can’t tell if you pulled him down on purpose, or if you simply forgot that you were holding onto him. Either way, he doesn’t mind, but part of him hopes it was the former.

“It’s a collective,” he corrects you, lips flattening into a firm, straight line.

“You don’t have to sugarcoat it. If it’s a sex cult, just say so.”

He tries not to laugh — really, he does — because the last thing you need is an enabler, but your deadpan delivery has always hit him where he’s weakest. He tries again while swallowing a chuckle: “It’s the Black Screen, home to the most talented and ungovernable motherfuckers on the peninsula.”

You don’t look impressed. Felix doesn’t take it to heart.

“We’ve got a reconnaissance team, netrunners —” 

As if he’s doing a roll call, he points to nearby stragglers with every position he names. 

“— corporate defectors, combat vets, medics, ex-fixers —”

He nudges you with his elbow, wiggles his eyebrows and murmurs, “— Edge runners —” 

If that look in your eye is any indication, you still hate it when he does that.

“And a couple of wayward drunks who — well…” Felix pauses for a moment to think. It doesn’t help, so he shrugs, snickering, “I dunno how they got here, and they don’t contribute much, but they’re fun to have around!”

The corner of your mouth twitches, ever so slightly. He grins down at you, as if to say gotcha. 

“So, it is a sex cult,” you repeat flatly after a beat.

Felix can’t beat your bit, so he may as well join you in it. Bested, he sighs, “Yeah, pretty much.”

You hum in acceptance of his defeat, clearly amused by how easily he still gives in to you. 

With pursed lips, you continue to take in your surroundings. Your brow furrows while you process the information you’ve been bombarded with so far, but you don’t offer up any further questions or snide comments. Thankfully, the silence that falls over you both feels a lot less like lead than the previous one.

Felix’s gaze stays fixed on you, though you’re too busy looking elsewhere to notice. Maybe you couldn’t recognize him, but shit — he’d know you anywhere, anytime. You’ve gotten older, of course, finally grew into those features of yours. Still, there are hints of the kid he used to know hidden all over your face.

Original traits aside, the new additions — the tattoos, for starters — all read like you. In fact, Felix is fairly confident that he’d know who they belonged to, even if the other context was removed. After all, the cyberware installed into your hand can’t undermine the familiarity of it resting against his palm. 

And it sure as shit still hits like it used to.

He considers it a blessing, really, that so much of you survived the years that flew by without him. That the scrawny girl next door — ready and willing to fight God over a single slight — still rolls her eyes the same way, still speaks in that satoori his non-native tongue could never mimic.

“Maybe I’m missing something,” you announce suddenly. The unexpected sound of your voice startles Felix so much that he jumps, knocking his shoulder into yours in the process. You ignore his reaction and continue, “This just looks like someone is collecting people as a hobby. What are you all doing here?”

Oh.

Yeah, that’s a fair question.

“We’re… starting a fire,” Felix muses. 

You arch an eyebrow expectantly, although the rest of your face remains impassive. It’s less of a demand for him to continue than it is permission for him not to stop.

“And we’re going to burn it all down.” He hits you with a devilish grin, drops his voice low in a way that makes you shiver involuntarily. “The corpo-rats, the lies they sell — all of it.”

“Sounds like anarchy,” you say, tilting your head to the side. There’s a beat, then you grin to match his. “Sign me up.”

Felix stands at the far side of the dining area with his arms crossed and his head leaning back against the cinder blocks behind him. His legs are crossed at the ankles, knees aching from the sheer amount of time he’s been holding the wall up. 

As much as his body wants to sit, the rest of him is out of options. The only table that isn’t full is the one you’re occupying with Changbin and Jisung. After the day you’ve had, you deserve time alone with something familiar. He recognizes that he isn’t that. 

Not anymore — and not yet, either. 

He finds it hard to stray too far, though. You’ve always been able to fend for yourself — that black-and-blue jaw of his is proof enough — but it’s a role he can’t help falling into, looking out for you. Muscle memory.

Although Felix can’t quite make out anything that the three of you are saying, it’s clear as a damn bell when you slam your palms down on the table. Just as obvious is the split second in which your anger gives way — when the pain in your right hand finally registers in your brain.

“That one going to be a problem?”

Hyunjin, as usual, seems to appear out of thin air. He sidles up to Felix and takes up the spot next to him along the wall. All it takes is one quick glance to confirm it — he’s exhausted. Dark half-moons sit in the wells beneath his eyes like ink, silently informing Felix of yet another all-nighter; still keeping secrets as to where he goes at night when everyone else is sleeping.

But Hyunjin isn’t a mystery Felix will ever be able to solve, so he looks back in your direction and asks, “Who, Scraps?” Then, with a shake of his head, he sighs, “No. She’s a cherry bomb, but she’s reliable. Far more than most, actually.”

It’s odd, Felix thinks, that Hyunjin didn’t already know the answer to that question. As the reconnaissance leader of the Black Screen, there isn’t much Hyunjin isn’t aware of. Felix doesn’t comment on that piece, however. Instead, he does his best to interpret your reaction.

“If I had to guess, Changbin just told her about the fake kidnapping.”

And Hyunjin doesn’t do a damn thing to conceal his smirk. That was his plan, after all. 

Two weeks ago, Seo Changbin stumbled upon a lead by accident. While Felix isn’t privy to the details of what Changbin dug up, he knows it must’ve been significant. That’s the only explanation Felix can come up with as to how Changbin wound up at the rendezvous point. Nobody — not the corporate ghouls, their war dogs, or any other sorry soul  — finds the Black Screen unless they want to be found. 

Felix is privy to what happened next because it’s the only reason he wound up involved in this at all:

Whatever intel Changbin had was groundbreaking enough to score an invitation to the revolution, but he had more to offer the higher-ups than that. He dropped the name of someone who could be an asset, under the right circumstances. Someone who wouldn’t follow a breadcrumb trail for free but would tear the peninsula apart to find whoever owed them.

For what it’s worth, Felix disagreed with that characterization the second he heard it. Despite the mask you like to wear, you’re incapable of being self-centered. You’ve never been profit-driven, heartless, or attachment-avoidant. Just hellbent on survival for you and the people you feel responsible for, even as a kid. 

The only reason Felix hasn’t asked you about your motive outright is because he knows you’d lie. The truth is simple: Unless it was for someone you care deeply about, you wouldn’t waste gasoline on speeding back to a place you hate.

Hyunjin clears his throat, pulling Felix out of the daze he’d fallen into. Given the pointed look on his face, Hyunjin must be repeating himself when he says, “She got you bad, huh?”

Confusion forces Felix’s brow to furrow. 

“This?” He takes a wild guess and gestures to the bruise on his jaw before waving dismissively. “Nah, her form is terrible. Truly garbage-tier follow-through. I can teach her, though.”

Hyunjin pushes himself off the wall and moves to exit the dining area. As he passes by, he gives Felix a patronizing pat on his shoulder. “Not what I meant, Yongbokie.”

Felix frowns, unsure how to take what he’s being given. 

The fuck?

“Not even close,” Hyunjin calls over his shoulder. 

He shoots Felix a wink, and then he’s gone, disappearing out the door the same way he entered it — like a goddamn apparition.

“Wow. Recruited? That’s — wow.”

Jisung is doing a terrible job of pretending he isn’t blushing. He clears his throat to keep his voice even, but it’s useless. He’s not fooling anyone. 

“I didn’t realize we were so sought after.”

“You’re not,” Changbin responds bluntly. He gestures across the table to you but maintains his eyes on Jisung. “She is. You just happened to be present, and they couldn’t leave a witness behind.”

Jisung doesn’t bother to hide the way his face falls. When he opens his mouth to whine, you raise your hand and silently demand that he spare you the earache. It seems to work; he slumps dejectedly and leans with his elbows against the tabletop. You proceed to ignore him.

Affect flat, you stare straight ahead at the source of all your fucking problems. The half of you that wants to hug Changbin for being alive and well is significantly quieter than the half of you that wants to grab him by the nape of his neck and shove his face into his yukgaejang.

Bastard.

“I no longer give a shit how I ended up here,” you state coolly. Liar. “That ship has sailed, and to keep it a buck with you, Binnie —” 

He cringes at the nickname, which is exactly the reaction you sought. 

“— I’m not interested in stroking your ego for getting one over on me. It won’t happen again. What I’m still waiting on —” 

The only reason you leave that clause hanging in mid-air is to see the anticipation stir in his eyes. From where you’re sitting, it’s what he deserves: a little bit of unnecessary suspense. Really, it’s a form of reparations for the giant fucking inconvenience he’s been lately. His balance is way past due. 

Jisung, perpetually along for the ride, shovels shrimp chips into his mouth while his eyes dart back and forth between your face and Changbin’s.

You shoot Changbin a sly smile and grab his beer, tilting the can his way in lieu of a bow. His eyes narrow, visibly annoyed with your stalling, but he doesn’t audibly complain when you down the rest of his drink. Resigned, he accepts the empty can that you hand it back to him

At long last, you clear your throat.

“— is an explanation for why you’re here,” you finally sigh.

Changbin rolls his eyes so hard that they go all-white for a moment. Then, to your surprise, he glares across the table at Jisung. 

“You know, my life was way more pleasant before you dragged this one,” he huffs, gesturing to you with his chopsticks, “Into my bar.”

Just for a moment, Changbin sits with his annoyance. He’s entitled to some of it, you’ll concede. You’re not easy to love — you never have been — and you’re occasionally even harder to like. Despite that, he’s been known to look out for you in his own, mostly useless way; even in moments like this, when you’re being a fucking gash simply because you can. 

But the fact remains that you dragged your ass across a peninsula for him. He knows damn well that you accept payment in the form of secrets when cash is too hard to come by, so…. 

“Spill,” you demand.

That tough exterior of his collapses like wet cardboard, just like you knew it would. He glances around the room quickly to confirm that no one is listening in, then he pushes his empty bowl out of the way. With the threat of staining his white t-shirt neutralized, Changbin leans in and asks, “Do either of you know Jung Wooyoung?” 

Simultaneously, you and Jisung respond:

“The boxer?”

“The biter.”

Just the same, your friends turn to you with identical looks of bewilderment. You shrug, declining to elaborate because Changbin asked if you knew him, not how or how intimately. Truth be told, you’re not sure that he’s prepared for that answer.

“Anyways,” Changbin segues after clearing his throat. “He’s not up to either of those tasks these days.”

Genuinely curious, Jisung asks with a frown, “Did someone finally kill him?”

Fair question, you think.

With the way Wooyoung runs his mouth, it’s a wonder he’s lived as long as he has — assuming, of course, that he’s still alive. Beyond picking fights with people three times’ his size, his specialties include fixing matches and swiping other fighters’ significant others. If he’s not dead yet, you figure, it’s only a matter of time until the consequences of his antics come calling.

Changbin shakes his head, and the look on his face seems weirdly solemn, like the answer is even worse than that. It’s sobering; it knocks the smirk right off your face.

“He was short on cash, so he signed up for some clinical trial promising a million won for participants.”

Jisung, the resident non-doctor, sits up at this development. “Thanotech?”

You’re in the middle of rolling your eyes when Changbin intercepts, grimacing: “No, that’s the fucked up part. Well, one of the fucked up parts.”

Two pairs of expectant eyes lock on him.

“It’s Ulsan running the trial.”

You don’t pretend to be well-versed in any of the biomedical, cybernetic shit going on around you, but you do know that this particular corporation never leaks details of its research and development — not ever. Doing so would run the risk of a lesser titan swooping in to try and to dupe it. 

But that’s not the only revelation that smacks you upside the head.

“Ulsan pays for lab rats now?” You scoff, surprised by your own interest. “Here I was, thinking they used ex-employees for that shit.”

It sounds callous when you say it out loud, but it’s a universal assumption. Part of the New Republic’s mythology, so to speak.

In your lifetime, you’ve never come across a single person who used to work for the Ulsan Corporation — not one. Just the same, you’ve never heard about anyone leaving; no one you’ve ever met has. It’s beyond the realm of possibility that a corporation like that has no turnover, so where do people go when their turn is over?

The dumpster out back, some say. According to others, they wind up in a secret mass grave in the oil fields.

“When he came back, I didn’t know where he’d been or why; I just saw him wandering around like a fucking zombie.” Changbin shivers. “He’s empty now, all sucked dry.”

Jisung looks pointedly at you, shit-eatin grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Is that what happened when you —?”

An elbow to the center of his chest stops his question before he can finish asking it. He yelps instead, scooting his chair further down the table to get away from you, your sharp edges, and your even sharper glare.

“It freaked me the fuck out, and I didn’t have any answers, so I started poking around for something — anything — that might make sense of it.”

“So, that’s how you got pulled into the web.”

The voice from nowhere makes all three of you jump. You whip around to find yet another stranger. 

How many fucking people do I have to meet today? 

This particular wild card sits on top of the table directly behind yours with arms gently crossed over her chest; not closed off but cold, judging by the goosebumps making themselves known across her bare arms. Her boots rest on the chair in front of her, one chrome leg shining next to flesh-and-blood.

Whoever she is, she’s beaming. That fact confuses the shit out of you because you’re not often met with friendliness, especially from unknowns. Or maybe, you think, it’s a well-concealed effort to disarm you. Whatever it is, it’s working; the urge to snap at her for intruding is dead on arrival. 

You open your mouth to ask what she means, but you can’t get the words out before someone else interjects. 

Minho, that bastard, shouts from across the room, “Spider! Got a minute?”

Her eyes light up in a way that says she has several, so long as he’s the one asking. Without another word, she hops to her feet and pushes the chair that held them back under the table. As she heads his way, she sends you an apologetic smile, like she somehow owes you anything.

“I don’t know what they unraveled by pulling that thread,” Changbin sighs, nodding towards the pair exiting the room. “But this place has been buzzing since I got here.”

You need something to chew on that isn’t this, so you reach over and grab the bag of shrimp chips from Jisung’s unsuspecting hands. The frown he gives you is cartoonish, but as usual, he doesn’t put up a fight. Your version of an apology is holding a spare chip out to him, which he happily accepts.

After shoveling a handful into your mouth, you mumble, “So now what?”

“I don’t know about you, but if these guys —” Changbin gestures vaguely around the room with his index finger pointed. “— Give me a target to point at, I’ll pull the trigger.”

You snort, “That’s a lot of trust.” 

It doesn’t mean much, coming from you. Your metric is beyond fucked, and you know it. That word is foreign, though; so far out of your grasp that you can’t wrap your brain around it.

“Maybe it is,” Changbin mutters while he looks down at the empty can in his grip. 

For a moment, that’s all he says. All he does is stare into the black hole of its opening, as if there’s some answer lurking in the emptiness below it. He must not find it, though, because he crumples the aluminum like a piece of scrap paper. 

When he glances back up at you, you see the uncertainty in his eyes. It reads like fear, which manages to unsettle you.

“I just — I can’t see what I saw and do nothing.”

Your second month in the compound starts with a bang — no, a thud. 

With your body being forcibly ejected from your cot, crashing onto the ground, and your jaw clenching shut quickly with a click of gritted teeth.

“How many fucking times are we doing this?” You growl, less than half-awake. 

Already past today’s quota for rage, you form a fist and swing your arm back violently against the capsized cot; it scrapes along the cement floor and skitters further away from you. The sudden burst of movement doesn’t do anything to make you feel better, but it was worth a shot, you suppose.

Felix, whose sunshine smile is too goddamn bright for this hour, crouches down in front of you. He at least has the decency to look apologetic when he lilts, “Until you learn to wake up to an alarm, I fear.”

He pauses, eyes scanning for any genuine distress beyond your shitty mood.

“Does that hurt?” He frowns.

Bleary eyes follow his pointed finger to your elbow, now prickling with blood where you skinned it against the floor. It doesn’t; and you’re not even remotely concerned about it, so you swat his hand away without answering his question and shove yourself to your feet. Once standing, you wander over to your steamer trunk to grab something clean enough to wear. 

The shadowy one, Hyunjin, brought your shit to you a week ago —  thank god. He provided no explanation whatsoever for how he knew where you lived or how he managed to get inside your building, but you’re a beggar, not a chooser. You’d rather enable his burglary than keep wearing the same, re-washed clothes you came here with or borrowing from people you still don’t know well.

As you peel yesterday’s tank-top up and over your head, your gravelly voice flies out to Felix, who stands and moves to lean against the wall. “You at least going to feed me breakfast before you bore me with more target practice?”

That’s most of what your time together has been so far, anyway. The chain of command is sorting out details above your pay grade; and you condition yourself to jump as high as they may eventually ask you to.

Felix doesn’t answer you, which isn’t like him. You look at him out of the corner of your eye and find him staring up at the ceiling, like his life depends on it.

“What are you —?” 

Oh.

You glance down, cutting your question off midway through. He’s giving you and your semi-exposed body privacy, that’s what. 

Sensing blood in the water, you swim in to scoff, “You have no problem flipping my bed when I’m in it, but bras are where you draw the line? What kind of gentleman are you?”

Still averting his eyes, he rolls them. You do him the favor of tugging on a different, slightly wrinkled tank-top; but you don’t give him the courtesy of letting up.

“Where do you stand on ass, Felix?”

“Are you always this annoying, first thing in the morning?” 

Amusement slips through the cracks despite his efforts to conceal it. You slip out of the cotton shorts you slept in, dip your toes under the fabric pooled around your ankles, and flick them at him. He concedes his staring contest to the panels overhead in order to catch them.

Impressive reflexes.

“I’m this annoying at all hours of the day.” You grin impishly for just a second, then shrug. “You’re just less able to handle it, first thing in the morning.”

Bending back over your trunk, you dig through for something denim. You land on black, high-waisted shorts with a triumphant, “Aha!”, and make a big show of raising your trophy overhead. Once again, you glance at Felix to see if your attempt to get a rise out of him was successful. In a way, yes, it was — just not in the way you expected.

Based on the way his gaze lingers on your thighs and the curve of your ass, you don’t think Felix even noticed your theatrics. You don’t think he means to stare, either. As far as you can see, it’s the perfect opportunity to fuck with him further.

“Admiring the tattoos?” You arch an eyebrow and wait for him to blush out of panic at being caught. “I can recommend the artist, if you want to hit them up.”

To your surprise, you don’t rattle him. Dark eyes flick up from your body to your face, and they don’t seem ashamed of where they’ve been. Your plan backfires. More than that, it blows up right in your face, which is starting to heat up.

“The cantine closes in five minutes. Training starts in ten,” he states matter-of-factly, holding your gaze. “So, you can either eat, or you can keep pretending you’re not trying to flirt with me.”

Your mouth drops open, but you can’t even snap back at him before he chirps, “The choice is yours, Scraps,” with a playful smile.

With nothing more to say, Felix leans away from the wall. On his way out the door, he gives you a lazy, two-finger salute. Dumbstruck, you stand there, watching him leave; wondering where the hell your bumbling, sweetly shy friend from back home managed to disappear to. 

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about.” Felix waggles his finger at you. A smug smile toys at his lips when you let out a frustrated grunt. “That’s the problem.”

He takes a step away from you, raises his fists to mimic your posture, and throws a right jab out into the air ahead of him. When he draws it back, he pauses with his shoulders even.

“D’you see the issue with this?” He asks, loosening one fist so that he can gesture from shoulder to shoulder.

You roll your eyes. “Is it that nobody’s currently hitting you?”

Felix, to his credit, is completely unbothered by the attitude you keep giving him. He’s far more patient than he should be with you. You, however, do not take criticism well.

“You square yourself off instead of retriggering an attack,” he gently corrects you. “By not turning and leading with your shoulder —” He twists slightly backwards, so that his body is angled similarly to the way it was when he struck in the first place. “— you leave all this surface area open.”

Okay, fine. 

You’ll concede that this makes sense, but you will not admit to poor blocking. In fact, deflecting is what you’re best at, so that’s precisely what you do. 

“And how exactly am I supposed to block hits that aren’t coming?”

Felix relaxes his stance with confusion scribbled all over his face. You don’t wait for him to ask what you mean, plunging right into your notes for him:

“This sparring shit doesn’t feel real because you refuse to hit me. It’s been weeks, and there still aren’t any stakes. If you’re going to insist that I learn this — which, by the way, feels pointless when I’m already armed —”

You gesture down to your thigh, where your pistol is normally strapped. 

“— then you have to make me care.”

He doesn’t say anything for a minute, opting instead to quietly chew on the challenge you’ve raised. For a split second, you think you’ve finally grasped the straw that’ll break his back. He turns towards the door and walks away, seemingly giving up on trying to teach a rabid dog new tricks.

But Felix defies your expectations yet again, grabs your gear off the counter at the far side of the room, and heads back to you. As he walks, he pulls back the slide to fish out the round that waits in its chamber. Bullet still in hand, his focus shifts to the magazine, which he easily removes from the base of your pistol’s grip. After tucking your ammunition into the back pocket of his jeans for safekeeping, he holds your now-empty firearm and thigh strap out to you. 

“Gear up.”

Now, it’s your turn to be confused. You accept the items he pushes into your hands with both eyebrows raised.

“Are we giving up on hand-to-hand, then?”

“Absolutely not,” Felix snorts with a shake of his head. “I’m just going to prove the necessity.” When you don’t budge, he waves his hand to hurry you along. “C’mon, Scraps. Strap in.”

Eyeing him suspiciously, you slip the vertical strap over your belt loop and fasten it before doing the same to the horizontal piece around your thigh. Once it’s nestled snugly against your skin, you slide your weapon into its resting place. 

Holding your hands up, you fire off a saccharine smile like the brat you are. “All done,” you chirp.

The smirk that appears on his face makes your stomach flip for two reasons, the least of which is the anticipation of his next move.

“You want it to feel real, right?” His voice drops so low that you feel it deep in your abdomen. “Fine by me.”

Like before, Felix steps slightly backwards. With a nod of his head towards your firearm, he challenges you, “Draw.”

It’s unfamiliar, seeing him counter you like this. Growing up, he was content to go in whichever direction you nudged him in. The version of Felix you knew back then was passive, agreeable to fault. You may not know what the fuck he’s planning now, but he radiates newfound authority that you almost want to respect, so you listen.

“Fine,” you demur while your fingertips trail over the cool, metal grip. “Make your point and move onto something useful.”

The next sequence of events flashes by so quickly that your brain can hardly keep up. 

Just as soon as you pull the gun from its holster, Felix turns in his spot, channeling the momentum into a strong push off the ground. He’s in the air before you can even level the barrel; and in the blink of an eye, the side of his boot collides with your hand, forcefully ejecting the gun from your grip. The power behind his kick sends the weapon flying several meters away, where it clatters to the floor with a smack amidst the quiet.

Gasping more so out of surprise than pain, you recoil your stinging fist and clutch it to your chest. He reads your expression incorrectly, if his widened eyes are any indication. Immediately, Felix breaks his stance to step across the distance in between you.

Worried hands come to rest on your biceps, squeezing gently. He urgently asks, “You alright?”

You blink back at him, throughly stunned by how fucking fast his reflexes are, and he misinterprets that, too. 

“Shit, I’m sorry,” he sputters. His next words come out so frantically that they bleed together over the course of one breath. “I really didn’t want to hurt you; I just needed you to understand that your gun can’t always save you. Sometimes, you have to —”

“That was insane,” you blurt out.

Felix’s eyes widen, caught completely off-guard by your interruption. It’s understandable, you think. After all, it’s the closest thing to a compliment you’ve given him over the past few weeks. 

He peeps, “Oh?”

You nod vigorously — and there’s that sweetly shy boy from down the block, blushing slightly under the weight of your attention. 

Somehow, seeing him this way feels like home; the one you knew before he disappeared, that you might actually admit to missing. Acting solely on instinct, you unfurl your right hand and seek out the warmth of his cheek, like it’ll flip a switch and turn the clock back.

It doesn’t. Of course, it doesn’t — but you can’t help feeling like this is fine, too.

Until you realize what the fuck you’re doing, and you see the starry-eyed look he’s giving you. Then, you do what you always do.

You dodge.

Patting his cheek patronizingly, you breeze, “I guess I’ll let you train me, then,” before turning to retrieve your gun.

“Oh, really now?” He laughs, like he’s already forgotten the way your mask just cracked. You can’t tell if you’re grateful for this, or disappointed. “Is violence all it takes to win you over?”

Disappointed. 

You wish he’d called your bluff again, like he did so long ago in that closet you’re currently calling a bedroom. Once wasn’t enough; you want to be caught out, to have someone refuse to let you get away with the bullshit you’re always trying to pull. For some proof that you’re not the bulldozer you pretend to be.

Felix raises an eyebrow as he tilts his head teasingly to the side. “Are you actually going to shut up and take instruction this time?”

Like that.

“Maybe.” You crouch down to grab your discarded pistol off the ground, lips pursed to keep the satisfied smile off your face. “Are you going to stop pulling punches?”

Three weeks of sparring tick by before you manage to clean his fucking clock.

It came as a surprise to both of you; not just that Felix slipped up in the first place, but that you were fast enough to capitalize on an opening he’s otherwise never created. You might’ve gasped even louder than he did when you managed to seize the opportunity — but that memory is fuzzy already. It doesn’t matter, anyway, not to him. Either way, the point stands: 

You actually learned from the shit he’s been trying to instill in you.

Having hobbled from the training room to his bedroom, Felix now sits on top of the old, metal counter that once served as a workbench. It’s not comfortable by any means, but he’d rather die than move from his current position. Between his knees, you stand close to him, holding a frozen sponge to his left eye with your right hand. 

Funnily enough, that particular hand is the reason he needs an ice pack in the first place.

For a while, the pair of you exist in comfortable quiet. It’s nice, he thinks, just being present. He would’ve been happy to carry on that way for as long as possible, but the shitty voice in the back of his brain keeps yelling that he’s letting more moments slip by than he has to spare. Wasting time that he should be making up.

He clears his throat to shake off the rust, prompting you to glance down from his forehead to his eyes. Your expression is hard to read, but there’s anxiety in there, somewhere. Felix worries that you’re worried; you’re searching for a sign that you’ve somehow injured him further.

“You’re a quick study — if and when you want to be.” His teasing sounds pathetic because his voice is barely more than a groan. Still, he smirks, “Those corporate mercenaries won’t stand a chance.”

With his good eye, Felix watches as your mask cracks a little further in the shape of a smile. 

For once, you simply nod in acknowledgement and let the compliment slip through your defenses without trying to deflect it. He wants to compliment you for that progress, too, but he’s hesitant to push his luck when he’s already flying half-blind by the seat of his pants. 

Then again, it might be worth the risk to push the envelope — even if you succeed in punching his goddamn lights out for good. He doubts that he’d complain, if that were the case. You’d be an incredible last sight to ever see, wouldn’t you?

His internal monologue pipes up again, demanding that he gamble.

Every single muscle he has aches after spending hours sparring with you, but that’s not at all what he’s talking about when he says, “You’re a knockout, Scraps.”

It’s a cop out, but it’s something. 

Just for a second, Felix wonders if you heard what he meant, and not just what he said. All his doubt disappears when that shy smile tugs even harder at the corners of your mouth.

“Shut up.” You roll your eyes, chuckling quietly. “If you want to get technical, you didn’t even lose consciousness —” 

Carefully, you bring your free hand up to his forehead and brush flyaway strands of hair out of the way of the makeshift ice pack. By contrast, your fingertips are warm enough to simmer on his skin.

“— so you’ll have to try that joke again when you actually do.”

Although you could, you don’t take your hand back after unsticking his hair from the condensation on his skin. You lower it gently, let it rest on his shoulder, and leave Felix to wonder if it’s a choice, a convenience, or a reflex. 

This eats at him.

A long time ago, this little gesture wouldn’t be something he’d have to guess at. He used to just understand, never once needed to be told. So far out of practice, he’s no longer fluent in your body language — and he hates it.

Unwilling to leave anything else up to interpretation, Felix looks up at you with one, unobstructed eye. “Wasn’t joking,” he murmurs.

You freeze without meeting his eyes. 

If he didn’t know better, he might think your retinal mods had been knocked loose again. You don��t seem to see him, and that’s all he wants. All he gets is quiet, so he tries again: “And I’m not bullshitting you, either.”

It’s his low voice speaking your real name that finally draws you out of hiding. Surprised for just a moment, your expression softens when you notice the way he’s studying your reactions. You don’t speak at first, but your bottom lip is pinched between your teeth; a telltale sign that you’re trying to.

“Since this is apparently honesty hour,” you start with an exhale.

Felix braces himself for whatever evasive maneuver you’re going to throw next. 

Shockingly, you don’t throw out a joke to change the subject. You take the ice pack off his eye so he can see you properly, set it down next to his thigh on the counter, and scrub your hands sheepishly over your face.

“You freak me the fuck out.”

You laugh despite yourself, and then you pause just like that; like you’re waiting on him to laugh at you, too. When he doesn’t, you take it as your cue to keep going: “Am I insane, or does this feel easy?

“I think both things can be true.” You shoot him a look that could — and might — kill him. He holds his hands up in surrender, but he keeps his eyes locked on you. “And I know you’re not used to easy.”

Felix doesn’t know what he expects you to do next, but your next move isn’t one he would’ve guessed. In the end, it’s your still-chilled palms reaching up to meet him, and your fingers filling the empty spaces between his. Brow furrowed, you study the way you fit together, like the words you’re searching for are hidden somewhere in the gaps of your chain-linked knuckles.

“I’m not used to it because I avoid it,” you correct him, frowning. “Easy scares the shit out of me. It just feels like a trap, you know? Like, the second you stop looking out for it, the other shoe will drop and knock your unsuspecting ass to the dirt.”

Keeping his fingers interlaced with yours, he lowers your joined hands until they rest against the tops of his thighs. You watch them go; he watches you, and he can’t help thinking that he’s the reason you armored up in the first place. That him leaving was the blow to the head that taught you to wear a helmet.

“I’ve got good reflexes,” Felix whispers, squeezing your hand.

At this, your eyes flick upwards. A microscopic crease forms between your eyebrows, and he knows exactly what’s coming next, so he says it first: “Excluding today, obviously.”

When you smile, it hits him even harder than your right hook did.

“What are you saying, exactly?” You ask, head tilting to the side as you narrow your eyes.

“Fuck the shoe.”

The look on your face suggests that he can’t possibly be serious, but he’s never been more so. Maybe he can’t promise you easy in a world like this one; and he can’t keep that fucking shoe from dropping, but he swears he’ll catch it when it does.

Felix has to let go of your hands to hold you properly. You lean into his touch when he snakes his arms around your waist; and you rest your forehead against his, careful not to press into the bruise that borders his eyebrow.

“I’ll make you a deal,” he whispers. You hum in reply, confirming your willingness to trade. “Kiss me now, and we’ll batten down the hatches later.”

Felix may have called you a quick learner, but you have to wonder what his basis for comparison is. From your vantage point, it’s him that catches on in a heartbeat, like nothing unexperienced is truly new to him. 

Coincidentally, it’s also him that’s kneeling between your thighs, bearing the weight of your hinged knees over his shoulders and making you shake with his tongue alone.

“Fuck, fuck — nngh — fuck!” 

It’s all you can say because it’s the best you can do. 

Over and over, too drunk on the sensation of his mouth, you let profanity spill out of yours. He has you dripping in more ways than one, pooling on that godforsaken counter, and you can’t spare a single thought about the mess you’re making.

Every neuron fixates on him, the cotton-candy blue strands gripped tight between your fingers, and the way he devours you, like he’s making up for skipped meals.

“F-Felix,” you beg, breathless.

Looking up at you from under his lashes, he feigns innocence. It’s bullshit — he knows you’re on the brink of death, knows your whole damn body is buzzing — and his sweet smile doesn’t match his actions. You jolt, wailing, when another kitten lick trails over your clit.

“Hmm?” That low timbre of his vibrates through you when he pulls back, panting.

God, you’re spent already, but you can’t collapse until you know what he feels like, buried to the hilt in you. Something about that need makes you shiver; has your bottom lip quivering when you manage to squeak, “Please.”

Absolutely boneless, you slump against the wall behind you. With far more grace than you, Felix maneuvers his way out from under the tangle of your legs. He ensures that they fall gently back into place on the countertop.

“Gotta work on that stamina if you’re gonna help wage a war,” he teases.

The half-powered glare you shoot at him doesn’t stop him from leaning in and pressing a kiss to your forehead. It doesn’t keep his fingertips from tracing languid lines down the lengths of your bare thighs, either.

Your voice is fucked out and weightless, far softer than you’ve ever heard yourself sound. “Is that what this is? Conditioning?”

The hand not caressing your thigh comes up to cradle your jaw, like it’s something fragile. It’s the first time anyone’s touched you as if you’re breakable, worth protecting — and motherfucker, you’re one soft smile away from crying.

“No.” 

He states it much more firmly than he kisses you. So gentle that you can’t believe it’s real until you taste yourself on him, so warm that you dissolve like a sugar cube on his tongue. 

Fuck any other person that’s ever pressed their lips to yours and called it a kiss. They’re liars, all of them. One by one, their names disappear with every passing second in which you know better.

“Need you,” you moan into his mouth. 

Fistfuls of his shirt can’t bring him close enough. Even when his head dips down and his lips are at your throat, the ache wins out. You crave him anywhere — everywhere — all over you. 

“Going crazy —” You gasp when his teeth nip at your collarbone. “— waiting on you.”

Greedy hands drop to the button of his jeans, fumbling to no avail. Apparently, your dexterity flew out the window two orgasms ago. A frustrated whine jumps out after it, pushing your head back as it goes.

Felix’s low chuckle soothes you, but it’s nothing compared to the relief you feel when his hands nudge yours out of the way. That, too, is a drop in the bucket; bliss crashes in waves when there’s no denim left to separate you. His hands land on your hips, fingertips pressing into your flesh as he guides you further down his length. 

Never — not fucking ever — have you made a sound quite as pathetic as the one you bury into the crook of his neck. You can’t classify it, not as a moan or a whimper. It’s desperate — loud. It’s an air raid siren; every fucking barricade you’ve built over the years being blown to smithereens.

This is it, you think.

Fuck your bank account. 

Fuck staring at the sky and waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

Fuck your contracts, your shithole apartment, and the million different ways you were set up to lose in this life.

This isn’t about you at all. It’s about you and him; all the space and time you’re dead set on reclaiming.

This is for us.

a/n: thank you so much for reading! i’ve been working on this since JUNE, and it’s a much bigger undertaking (creatively and….. mentally) than anything else i’ve done before, so i’m scared and also excited to start sharing it with y’all.

while likes are appreciated, comments/tags/reblogs with your thoughts are really what make my brain go brrrtt.

tagging: @saintriots, @mal-lunar-28, @dabiscrustyfeet

wanna be tagged for future uploads? sign up here.

[lovscb97]

# smau/fake texts masterlist

. . .

key: f = fluff, s = smut/suggestive, a = angst/hurt, c = comfort, m = social media au

↻ stray kids !

⥽ … BANG CHAN: 

#one. reacting to his railway stage (f, s)

#two. reassurance from bf!chan (f, a?, c)

#three. suspect is.. trend w/ bf!chan (f, s)

#four. bf!chan forgetting your anniversary (a, c)

⥽ … LEE MINHO: 

n/a.

⥽ … SEO CHANGBIN: 

n/a.

⥽ … HWANG HYUNJIN: 

n/a.

⥽ … HAN JISUNG: 

n/a.

⥽ … LEE FELIX: 

n/a.

⥽ … KIM SEUNGMIN: 

n/a.

⥽ … YANG JEONGIN: 

n/a.

⥽ … OT8/MULTI-MEMBER:

#one. suspect is.. trend w/ lmh, scb, hhj (f, s)

#two. suspect is.. trend w/ hjs, lyb, ksm, yji (f, s)

↻ enhypen !

⥽ … LEE HEESEUNG: 

n/a.

⥽ … PARK JONGSEONG: 

n/a.

⥽ … SIM JAEYUN: 

#one: operation: sim's girl (m, f, s)

⥽ … PARK SUNGHOON: 

n/a.

⥽ … OT4/MULTI-MEMBER: 

n/a.

[barbaracleboy]

Bugtober 2024 Day 14: Bounties

This was a fun one to do, even if it doesn't have much to do with Bounties specifically.

...I dunno, the False Monarch's neat. Have fun!

Out in the Forsaken Lands, far away from both the Ant and Termite Kingdoms, lay a city of perfectly normal insects that don't go around luring in randos that they then proceed to kill and maybe eat. The people of this society live entirely average lives, doing nothing dangerous or out of the ordinary, living just as anyone else would. Their faces are often sideways or upside down and some of them have more eyes than they maybe should and in general the kind of Insect that they are is ambiguous but they're still your usual, average, every day folks.

So, like, the king of this place was sitting on his throne one day, minding his own business, when one of his subjects came up to his throne with a funny-looking paper.

False Citizen: Greeting, my king [singular]. I will now bow to you because this is what followers of a monarchy are supposed to do lest they be thrown into a dungeon or something to that effect.

False Monarch: Wah, indeed! What's that you're holding? Is it paper? Or skin? What is skin, anyway?

False Citizen: It matters not, my lord [again, just the one]. It has writing on it, as well as your...visage? Visage, is that a word?

False Monarch: Wah dunno.

False Citizen:...Anywho, Take a look:

BOUNTY

FALSE MONARCH

REWARD: A LAST STAND MEDAL

LOCATION: THE FORSAKEN LANDS

False Monarch: Weh, it is me! And what are those scribbly bits above and below myself?

False Citizen: I dunno, looks like garbage.

False Monarch: Waha, I love garbage! Give it here!

The False Citizen gives their (as in singular "they", obviously) king the paper, which he proceeds to stick into his cloak and chew up.

False Monarch: Wehhhhh...6/10, I've had better trash.

It's at that point that a loud burst of murmuring breaks out amongst the other members of the certainly-not-false society. The False Monarch and the False Citizen he was speaking to exit the throne tent room and find a bizarre trio of Bugs staring at them, with a tiny Chomper following along.

Horned Green Bug: Dibbydibbydubdub, dooby dug!

Little Yellow Bug: Buzz booz, buzz booz?

Lanky Blue Bug: Fffsseh fseh, ffffsoffso.

Tiny Chomper: Fuck.

False Monarch: Weh, hello visitors! Welcome to our humble home! "Our" referring to my entire kingdom, of course, and not me individually, for I am indeed an individual.

False Citizen: I think you specifically are allowed to just say "our", actually, even solo.

False Monarch: Wah, really? Oh cool! (To the weird Bugs) Doesn't that sound cool, guys?

LYB: BUZZABUZZABOOZABOOZA!

The Little Yellow Bug throws a weird, crescent-shaped thing at the False Monarch, and not only does it smack him upside the head it flies back to do it a second time.

False Citizens: GASPING SOUNDS!!!

False Monarch: Waaaaooowww, wah'd you do that for???

LBB: Fsssfsssfss...

LYB: Booz, bozz.

After that they group start doing a bizarre series of things: the Green Bug shoves a rotten meal down the Yellow Bug's maw, the Blue Bug starts yelling at the Yellow Bug, the Chomper just kinda dances in place, and the Yellow Bug starts eating these funny-shaped brown beans.

False Citizen:...Yo boss, I think these guys are kinda stoopid.

False Monarch: Wehhhh, are you okay-

The False Monarch gets obliterated by the Yellow Bug, and by the time it's done all that's left is a small purple robe and his busted up face. The False Citizens all run off in terror, meanwhile the terrifying Yellow Bug grabs the Monarch's crown off of his remains.

LYB: Booz buzz booz!

HGB: Doba doba doba!

TC: Fuck!

The weirdo Bugs yuk it up and head off, taking the stolen crown with them. Once it's confirmed that they're gone the False Citizens step out in varying levels of fear. They look to the purple robe...and watch as several pained, frustrated Mothflies come out of it. One gets up and is particularly angry-looking.

Mothfly A: Damn it! How long have we been sitting around, trying to be a society, only to get interrupted by douchebags coming out of nowhere and just attacking us!?!?

Mothfly E: My buttocks hurt.

Mothfly A: We're trying to be civilized! We got buildings!

One of the buildings collapses.

Mothfly: We got culture!

A False Citizen: Your mom.

Another False Citizen: Is that a joke?

A False Citizen: Yes.

Another False Citizen: I hate you.

Mothfly A: We've even got commerce!

False Citizen Next to a Food Stand: And soon we'll even have soul-crushing capitalism! :D

Mothfly A:...Y'know what? Let society rot ! Let """""civilization""""" rot! Let all those fancy shmancy creations of so-called cultured insects eat my round-ass ass!

The False Citizens all cheer and begin flying out of their costumes, revealing all of them to be Mothflies, proud and true.

Mothfly A: We're Mothflies, and that's that! If they don't like it?

Mothflies: They can SUCK! OUR! NUTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mothfly A: (While doing a crotch chop motion) We! Are! Moth! Flies! Yeah, yeah, yeah!!!!!!!

In a large, terrifying swarm, the Mothflies rise into the air and laugh collectively.

Mothfly A: We'll show all those other Bugs who's really at the top! And I know just where to start...

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

Patton the Acorn Weevil was sitting in his lab, napping in his arms again whilst at his work station. Eventually he woke up to a weird smell.

Patton: Ehhhh bubbabubba, bleh, ech...*sniff* *sniff*...

There is frass all over his floor.

Patton: Gods damn it! You can't even go into torpor without someone poo'ing on your property!

[strongest-shall-survive]

CAST LIST!!!!!!

lot of images under the cut. putting them there because this is quite long for a pinned post

sorry one of the refs was holding us up from getting this out.

We'll start with:

(owned by @encore-lyb)

And then continue to the cat of team rgb:

(owned by me, @reroute-artist-strategy)

And then to the war general:

(owned by @tristallyn. lol lmao)

and uh. is he neutral? is he team rgb? not even rubber ball knows.:

(owned by me, @reroute-artist-strategy, given to me by my brother)

and then to the resistance!:

(Owned by me, @reroute-artist-strategy, the first character designed for this au!)

and the other rice on the resistance!:

(owned by me, @reroute-artist-strategy, i've always wanted to give rice a scarf. also my first object oc)

and the. the . the. the:

(owned ((technically)) by me, @reroute-artist-strategy. fotoshops outside of the retakes creator doesn't have a tumblr but they are mationsbomb on youtubes brother.)

the [note for screen readers. the rest of the text here is white/black cubes] ██████:

(owned by me, @reroute-artist-strategy)

fun facts will go in the replys section below! also these are just who you can ask. the cast has more members but these are the significant ones for now.

[cool-rubbberball-facts]

so iwent and entirelyupdated rubber balls wiki page. its a fandom wiki though so im,putting the here. if you care

Rubber Ball (created 20 November 2019) is a camp contestant who has competed in 2 seasons of CCC and the second season of CCI (Complete Conflict Isle). He placed 10th in CCC season 1, 41st (dead last) in CCC: New, and "won" in CCI season 2. He competed in the team "Shiny Electric Posers" in CCC 1, "Team Fortress 2" in CCC: New, along with "Team FortrAss World 3" and "Team FortrAss World 3 Again" in CCI 2.

Created on November 20th, 2019, Rubber Ball originally competed in an object show called BFTP (Battle For The Placeholder). For my sanity, I will not be providing any further context to that. After its cancellation on the first episode, Rubber Ball went on to be unused until 2020, where he signed up in CCC season 1. He went on to get 10th place after DNPing (Did Not Participate) 3 times, leading to his elimination. In CCC: New, he joined the team "Team Fortress 2" and then got eliminated after the first challenge because lyb (the user competing as Rubber Ball) didn't let someone who wasn't Trist or himself be The News Spirit. In CCI Season 2, the season was cancelled shortly after the 4th challenge. However, later, a joke challenge was announced, which Rubber Ball won, along with the whole camp.

He was also stabbed fatally early on in the run of CCC season 1. This did not have any in-camp effects (due to his recovery abilities) until 2022, in CCI season 1, where he was merely used for roleplay, when he lost an entire chunk of his head. This is due to AU Ril being a big meanie head.

He currently does not compete in any camps.

Life

Created in 2019 as a shading test in a White Void (Unrelated to any currently-existing/currently-relevant voids), Rubber ball was immediately put into an object show called Battle For The Placeholder. After its cancellation following the first episode, Rubber Ball sat dormant (only appearing as a recommended character in an unrelated comic, where he ended up being stabbed) until January 2020, when he signed up for CCC. He DNP'd 3 times, earning him an elimination at tenth place. Rubber Ball was in RP a decent amount. During said RP, he was temporarily muted by Blue D. Void. He holds a grudge to this day, despite Void being long gone.

After CCC season 1, he lost the ability to recover himself temporarily - instead needing the use of a Rubber Ball Recovery Center. It is unknown how he regained this ability.

In the roleplay of CCC: New, before the challenges started, he was permanently killed by Random Doodle Thing, being "revived" the same day by placing a version of himself from 3 days in the past into the (at the time) present. During the time of CCC: New, it was also then established that Rubber Ball had 1 family member, being RUBER BALE!!!!!!. He then proceeded to get eliminated.

During the middle of CCI 1, in the roleplay, the stabbing took effect, taking an entire quarter of his head/body out, leaving him without the ability to bounce (or at least bounce well). It was later found out that this was AU Ril's doing. Somewhere in between the previous and the next event, RB got stuck in the void. On Halloween, thanks to incrediblyboyse (aka the Goldy Quotes Robot), Rubber Ball got a chunk of an UNDERTALE/deltarune soul to replace the missing part in his head. In CCI 2, Rubber Ball signed up and won. There was no major lore point or traumatization involved here, aside from a hatred between Low Quality MS Paint Logo and Rubber Ball forming. This has been resolved off-screen as of BOSS (Blunder Over Something Stupid) 1.

In another place, CON (Clash Over Nothing), Rubber Ball split himself in half (the way a single celled organism does mitosis), leaving him with one version with the soul chunk, and one without.

[binniebimbo]

sunshine (m)

lyb • smut • 1.7k

sunshine Felix has a thick goth gf 

sub!felix, dom!fem!reader

Warnings under the cut <3

Warnings: smut, oral (m receiving), praise, pinch of degradation but not much, reader is referred to as ‘mistress’, cock slapping (this is so funny to write), blindfolds, felix is tied up, licking, descriptions of a thicc reader

It’s my first time really writing sub!member so i hope it’s not too bad lol. idk why but i’ve been picturing felix with a goth/alt gf so this was born lmao enjoy!

They say opposites attract. But it doesn’t make it any less shocking when people see Felix, the sunshine incarnate himself, holding hands with you; intimidating and badass, walking with an air of confidence in your steps. It was the exact reason why he was scared to introduce himself when he first spotted you in the campus library.

Though he was intrigued, he was content just sneaking glances at you from across the room. He thought you were very pretty, but he was particularly enjoying the peek of your thick thighs underneath your short skirt, wrapped in fishnet tights. His eyes traveled up to the way the collar of your top dipped down between your full breasts. Even your combat boots had him fantasizing about you stepping on— why are they walking towards him?!

Felix all but internally short-circuited when you sat in the chair across from him, a teasing lilt to your voice when you said, “I noticed you staring.”

“I– I’m, uh, sorry. You just look so… cool,” he stuttered, wanting to pinch himself for being so uncool in front of you.

You let out a small chuckle, a sound Felix immediately wanted to hear again, even with its slight tone of condescension. It lit a fire inside him, a certain flame he didn’t know he harbored. You shrugged. “It’s okay, I’m used to people staring. But I thought you were cute, so I came over.”

Felix opened and closed his mouth, trying to find the words. “Oh, um, can I get your number?” A blush spread across his freckled cheeks and he let out a nervous laugh, the words spilling out of his mouth before he could stop them. But your response— nodding and pulling your phone out— made him happy he didn’t.

And he was especially happy in times like this; naked, his hands bound behind his back, and a silky blindfold concealing his vision, making the barely there feel of your fingers on his bare, sensitive cock that much more intense. As you sat on your knees between his legs, whispering the filthiest shit as you teased his cock, all Felix could focus on was the need between his legs.

“You have such a cute cock,”  You said, dragging a finger up his twitching shaft. Your finger made it to the head, pressing a finger into the slit before swiping the precum, your fingertips softly dragging down his length to his balls. You looked up at him, his head thrown back as he moaned out, an urge to taste his flushed, sweaty skin.

“Please, yn.” Felix aimed his face down towards you, but his puppy eyes were no match for the blindfold. You’d been teasing him like this for the past 15 minutes, ignoring many of his pleas.

“Aw, but I’m having so much fun,” you say, though you finally decided to give in. After all, your boyfriend’s sweet moans made you drench your black lace panties, your neglected cunt begging for some attention too.

“Hmph!” Felix stifled a moan as your tongue finally met the underside of his cock, dragging up the smooth skin to the head of his cock. You swirled your tongue around it, humming brightly as if you weren’t making your boyfriend squirm in his seat. You placed his cock on your tongue, moving your head slowly side to side, massaging the underside with your tongue. “Feels so good,” Felix moaned, throwing his back again. “More, please…”

You stopped moving your head and stuck your tongue out further to cradle his cock on your tongue, moaning at the weight of him, before closing your lips around him and moving down his length. You sucked him off slowly, Felix wishing he could see you in this debauched state that you both loved so much. You took him down deeper, letting him hit the back of your throat as your hand found its way to his balls. Felix whined, the touch coupled with your mouth too much, and the sensitive boy bucked his hips up before he could realize his mistake.

“No, no, I’m sorry!” he begged as you pulled off his cock, fearing that he knew what was coming next. Your hand came down hard on his hard cock. He gasped and your hand came down again.

“What do you fucking say?” Another slap.

“Thank you—Ah! Mistress, thank you!” He trembled underneath you, tears wetting the blindfold, some slipping past it and down his cheeks. His arms fought to be freed from the ties behind his back, but to no avail.

You stood and ripped the blindfold off of him. Dark, lust-blown pupils looked up at you, his teary eyes matching the tear-trails on each of his cheeks. He looked so cute when he cried, when the sweet boy was desperate for a release.

“Please mistress,” he begged. You straddled him, your hands on his shoulders as you mockingly pouted at him. He groaned at the feel of your plush thighs on either side of his hips. “Poor baby, what do you want mistress to do?”

A leftover tear rolled down his cheek, and you rolled your hips on his as you leaned in. You held his face in one hand, your thumb softly wiping the wetness underneath one eye. He leant into your hand, not registering the sadistic smirk on your face. The softness was starkly contrasted with the way you licked a tear that had fallen beside his mouth on his other cheek.

“Fuck,” Felix cursed, the scene making him harder than ever as he chased your lips. You pulled away, your hand finding his messy blond hair and pulling his head back. “Such a dirty word coming out such a pretty mouth,” your lips kissed down his jaw to his neck, licking a stripe before kissing and sucking over it as you rolled your wetness over his cock. “Sorry mistress,” Felix bit his lip, another pang of neediness shooting into his groin.

“You’re breaking a lot of rules, sunshine,” you dragged a finger down his flushed chest, thumbing his nipple as you continued to work on marking his neck. When you finally pulled away, he looked at you with glossy, half-hooded eyes that traveled down your body, licking his lips when he saw the way your pussy was split over his shaft, hyper aware of your engorged clit gliding over him as you moved slowly. You scoffed at his inability to look away from the sight.

“Do you need to cum that bad? Are you that dumb for pussy?”

It pained Felix a bit to move his eyes away, but he looked back up, a pleading look. “Answer me, bad boy.”

“I‘m not a bad boy,” he started, his breathing deeper as he got more turned on, his voice and accent deepening. You could hear him struggle to free his hands. “I’m dumb for you, dumb for your pussy. Please let me fuck you, please ride me, anything, I just need to be inside you.”

You acted like you were thinking about it, all the while pressing your clit harder into his length. The friction was delicious and you desperately needed more too, but you didn’t let that show to Felix. He was losing his mind as you took your time teasing him, his eyes once again glued to your cunt.

“Fine, I’ll ride you. But you better not make a sound, and you better not fucking cum.”

You sat up, your hand guiding his dick, drenched in your arousal, to your entrance. You teased his tip over your slit a bit before finally sliding down. Felix bit his lips, trying not to make a sound as his head rolled back again, your tightness making him lightheaded. He let out a voiceless gasp when you started riding him slowly. “Look at me, baby.”

Felix slowly pulled his head up, looking you in the eyes. His mouth was slightly opened as he breathed heavily, his eyes half closed, his brow furrowed. You ran your fingers through his hair, his fucked out expression causing you to gush out more wetness, almost enough to pool in Felix’s crotch, the squelching sound becoming louder.

He looked down, the messy image of your hips driving his cock in and out of you, strings of wetness connecting you both each time you lifted your hips, your warm tight cunt clenching just right around him; he couldn’t help but let out a whimper.

Your hand suddenly found his neck, forcing him to look you in the eyes again as you squeezed the sides. His cock pulsed inside you, another whine leaving his throat. “You’re so fucking bad. I told you not to make a fucking sound.” Your hips picked up their speed, riding Felix like your life depended on it. He bucked his hips up trying to meet your thrusts. “It’s so good, you feel so good…” he moaned.

Your hands found his shoulders again for balance as you bounced on top of him, and Felix decided your bra was concealing too much of your chest. “Mistress, please,” he said breathlessly. “Wanna see all of you.”

You understood what he meant, pulling down the cups of your bra and freeing your breasts to bounce along with your movements. Felix licked his lips at the visual, his orgasm drawing closer. “Fuck, baby, I’m gonna cum,” he warned.

You didn’t answer, continuing to ride him until he finally let out a loud groan, his seed spilling inside of you. You slowed down to ride his high out, your lips meeting his in a messy, heated kiss. You stilled, giving your burning thighs a break as the kiss turned more sensual. You kissed down his jaw, catching your breath. When you finally pulled away, he smiled at you mischievously. “Broke another rule, huh?” he said, thinking you were too tired to continue. “Untie me, let me make you cum now.”

You looked at him, shaking your head. Felix’s eyes widened before his eyelashes fluttered, trying not to close his eyes as you began grinding on him again. He threw his head back with a loud moan, his toes curling as a cool heat rushed through his body. His release mixed with your arousal was dripping out of you, making a mess in his lap.

“Baby, it’s too much,” he whimpered, his body once again fighting against the ties around his arms, his hands itching to grab your hips and stop your movements on his overstimulated cock.

“I told you not to cum,” you shrugged. “But I don’t have to untie you for you to make me cum.”

“Bad boys don’t get what they want. Now take it, and maybe later I’ll let you eat your cum out of me.”

[eak1mouse]

Salutations! Greetings!

Here’s another question for the very lovely LYB.

If could be in the drama, where would you like to show up? All major characters remain the same, which House would you like to be a member of?

Prince Jing’s staff? MSC? An unnamed court official or court lady? (As examples.) You would watch the drama unfold, which seat do you want? You can interact with everyone but the ending is still the same.

You know I don't think I have the scheming necessary to survive in the court and also all the ministerial examinations seem terrible, so I think I would want to work in MSC's house and secretly be part of the jiangzuo alliance!

How about you, partner?

[februaryflowers-main]

the bookshelf

group

 member name w/ all fics for them - specifically their fluff fics - specifically their angst fics (name tag for genre)

group reactions

a.c.e

park junhee - fluff - angst (pjh)

lee donghun - fluff - angst (ldh)

wow // kim sehyoon - fluff - angst - (ksy:ace)

kim byeongkwan - fluff - angst (kbk)

kang yuchan - fluff - angst (kyc)

group reactions

seventeen

s.coups // choi seungcheol - fluff - angst (csc)

yoon jeonghan - fluff - angst (yjh)

joshua hong - fluff - angst (hjs:svt)

wen junhui - fluff - angst (wjh)

hoshi // kwon soonyoung - fluff - angst (ksy:svt)

jeon wonwoo - fluff - angst (jww)

woozi // lee jihoon - fluff - angst (ljh)

the8 // xu minghao - fluff - angst (xmh)

kim mingyu - fluff - angst (kmy)

dokyeom // lee seokmin - fluff - angst (lsm)

boo seungkwan - fluff - angst (bsk)

vernon // chwe hansol - fluff - angst (chs)

dino // lee chan - fluff - angst (lc)

group recs

stray kids

bang chan // christopher bang - fluff - angst (bc)

lee know // lee minho - fluff - angst (lmh)

seo changbin - fluff - angst (scb)

hwang hyunjin - fluff - angst (hhj)

han // han jisung - fluff - angst (hjs:skz)

felix lee - fluff - angst (lyb)

kim seungmin - fluff - angst (ksm)

i.n // yang jeongin - fluff - angst (yji)

group reactions

tomorrow x together

choi soobin - fluff - angst (csb)

choi yeonjun - fluff - angst (cyj)

choi beomgyu - fluff - angst (cbg)

kang taehyun - fluff - angst (kth)

huening kai - fluff - angst (kai)

victon

han seungwoo - fluff - angst (hsw)

kang seungsik - fluff - angst (kss)

heo chan - fluff - angst (hc)

lim sejun - fluff - angst (lsj)

do hanse - fluff - angst (dhs)

choi byungchan - fluff - angst (cbc)

jung subin - fluff - angst (jsb)

group reactions

wayv

qian kun - fluff - angst (qk)

ten // chittaphon leechaiyapornkul - fluff - angst (ten)

winwin // dong sicheng - fluff - angst (dsc)

xiao dejun - fluff - angst (xdj)

hendery // huang guanheng - fluff - angst (hgh)

liu yangyang - fluff - angst (lyy)

group reactions

[ericvick]

6 Dividend Stocks With Big Payouts and Less Risk

Text size

A Dow facility in Germany. The company was yielding 4.5% recently.

Courtesy of Dow

High dividend yields are great for equity income investors, but it is possible to get too much of a good thing. The very highest yielders can be value traps, and vulnerable to cuts in their payouts.

The S&P 500 High Dividend Index, screened via an approach espoused by Savita Subramanian, head of U.S. equity strategy at BofA Securities, offers a way to get high payouts with more modest risk. The index, composed of 80 high-yielding dividend stocks culled from the S&P 500, has easily outperformed the S&P 500 so far this year, with a total return of 23% through Monday, compared with 18% for the broader benchmark.

Subramanian suggested that instead of buying the more vulnerable stocks in the top quintile of the S&P 500 in terms of yield, investors should look at the second quintile. Barron’s applied the same approach to the S&P 500 High Dividend Index.

We divided the index into quintiles, each with 16 stocks. The first contained the highest yielders, so we looked at the six highest yielders in the second quintile, based on FactSet data. All six of these companies have avoided dividend suspensions due to the pandemic, though one had to cut its payout. All but one have put through dividend increases this year.

One is Simon Property Group (ticker: SPG), a real-estate investment trust that specializes in regional shopping malls. The stock yields an attractive 4.6%, having returned about 50% this year through Aug. 2, dividends included.

The company recently declared a quarterly dividend of $1.50 a share, up 10 cents, or 7%, from $1.40 in the second quarter.

During the pandemic last year, the company slashed its quarterly payout to $1.30 a share from $2.10. The increase declared in June marked the first boost since it was cut.

Company/Ticker Dividend Yield Recent Price YTD Return Market Value (bil) Simon Property Group/SPG 4.6% $126.32 51.4% $47.5 People’s United Financial/PBCT 4.6 15.63 25.1 6.7 International Business Machines/IBM 4.6 141.42 15.1 126.8 LyondellBasell Industries/LYB 4.6 98.90 10.0 33.1 Prudential Financial/PRU 4.5 100.20 31.6 39.5 Dow/DOW 4.5 61.22 12.7 45.7

Data as of Aug. 2

Source: FactSet

Also weighing in with yields of 4.6% were People’s United Financial (PBCT), a regional bank based in Bridgeport, Conn., with a footprint that stretches across southeastern New York state and parts of New England; International Business Machines (IBM), and the chemicals company LyondellBasell Industries (LYB).

Shares of International Business Machines (IBM) have done respectably this year, returning about 15%, versus 18% for the S&P 500. The company is a relatively new member of the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrat Index, a grouping of businesses that have paid out a higher dividend for at least 25 straight years.

IBM in April declared a dividend increase of a penny, or less than 1%, to $1.64 a share.

LyondellBasell Industries recently declared a quarterly disbursement of $1.13 a share, a nearly 8% boost from $1.05.

Meanwhile, insurer and money manager Prudential Financial (PRU) was recently yielding 4.5%. The company in February declared a quarterly dividend of $1.15 a share, versus $1.10 previously, for a nearly 5% increase. In an interview with Barron’s earlier this year, CEO Charlie Lowrey described the company’s dividend as “something you don’t mess with.”

Chemical company Dow (DOW), which also was yielding 4.5% recently, has maintained its quarterly dividend at 70 cents a share. Its year-to-date total return was about 13% as of Monday.

[jobisite11]

VOE Clerk

LyondellBasell (NYSE: LYB) is one of the world's largest plastics, chemical and refining companies and a member of the S&P 500. LyondellBasell ( www.lyondellbasell.com ) manufactures products at 55 sites in 17 countries. LyondellBasell products and VOEClerk from Job Portal http://www.jobisite.com/extrJobView.htm?id=110868

[jobsinmanatee-blog]

VOE Clerk

LyondellBasell (NYSE: LYB) is one of the world’s largest plastics, chemical and refining companies and a member of the S&P 500. LyondellBasell ( http://www.lyondellbasell.com ) manufactures products at 55 sites in 17 countries. LyondellBasell products and Click Here to Apply : VOE Clerk

[jobsinpinellas]

Master Data Specialist

As a member of our dynamic North American Supply Chain Team, the Master Data Specialist will act as a subject matter expert in Supply Chain, specifically in Master Data supporting the Order-to-Cash processes. The role is expected to manage LYB Master Data Click Here to Apply: Master Data Specialist

[elizabethbcn]

3️⃣ MINUTES • BREAKFAST 💕🦋 simple, easy, no chemicals, no added sugar, gluten free, made for vegans, lactose free and made out of 17 fruits 🍉 and vegetables 🥒 😱👏🏼 every single member in the family should eat it, daily. trust me! don't even question it ❤️ Today having extra chewables to kick this relapse! Can't wait for my magic beans to arrive #LYB

[thebigcitynightsband]

ROSTER REMEMBRANCE PT 1

Over the galloping years we’ve had a number of people in and out of the band. It is BCN policy to induct into our ranks whoever is in the room at the time of recording, though this open policy is only activated during vocal sessions. Singing vocals with BCN is a fantastically good time. One of my fondest memories is doing “Born to Bar Band” with Ryan Taylor (who’d formally joined the group just six weeks prior to the recording of that song) and Eric Lister (who I’d known for years through a mutual friend). But I’ll get into the specifics later. Suffice it to say that our inclusive policy has created a veritable roster of secondary members over time, a number probably approaching forty. Having just got back home from working a very long wedding, with the sun coming up and the birds coming out, I am currently smoking today’s last cigarette and will attempt to come up with a comprehensive list off the top of my head of everyone who has ever sung with us. I’ll use our records as a way of triggering the memories.

1. Brandon Fleet (”Mathematics,” “Desperate Man,” “Did Someone Make A Fool Out of You?” “Waiting”) 2. Mitch Syrnyk (Drums: “Mathematics,” “I’m That Guy,” “Why I Didn’t Hate Summer 2003,” “Catch You,” “Leave Your Man,” “The Fog,” “Carry Me Ontario,” “Into the Empire”) 3. Sam Catalfamo (”I’m That Guy”) 4. Eric Lister (”Born to Bar Band,” “Don’t Fuck With Me,” “Lost Between Houses,” “Supper Story,” “Hold Our Hearts”) 5. Mike Kuehn (Vocals ”Murray Street,” “Run Home,” “The Great Distance,” “Let’s Go To Hell,” “Weird Weather” Drums: “Let’s Go To Hell,” “Weird Weather,” “Evil,” “Sunshine City,” “One Of Those Years,” “I’m A Skymaker,” “Skeleton Man” Bass: “That Evil Beat” Piano/Keyboard: “Murray Street,” “I’m A Skymaker,” “The Great Distance”) 6. Melissa Bula (”Don’t Fuck With Me,” “Hockey Night In Canada” LYB version) 7. Spencer Linton  (”Born to Bar Band (Reprise)” Drums: “Shamrock Shock,” “Haystack Song,” “Time Forgot To Change My Heart” ) 8. Carey Linton (”Born to Bar Band (Reprise),” “Everybody Got A Beef With Me,” “In The Street,” “Grandpa Bizness,” “Doin Drugs” Drums: “Miss Me Baby”)  9. Mike Winfrow  (”Born to Bar Band (Reprise)” “Be Mine This Xmas,” “Do The Do”) 10. Amanda Deon (”Hockey Night In Canada” - LYB version) 11. Mike Mikocic (”Horseshoes,” “My Momma Poppa”) 12. Brentertainment (”Gonna Have A Lotta Fun,” “Hey Emon”) 13. Paul Norrish (”Hey Emon”) 14. Jessica Fisher (”Canadian Baseball,” “Greensong,” “I’m A Skymaker”) 15. Ricardo Elbandito (”Hey Emon”) 16. Omri Horowitz (”Hockey Night In Canada,” “My Private Radio,” “Evil”) 17. Sam ____ (Drums: “My Private Radio”) 18. Mike ____ (Drums: “Reena”) 19. Darcy McMann (”Make Tracks”) 20. Russell Holley (”Hey Thirsty!”) 21. Jake Foley (”Hey Thirsty!”) 22. Ryan Hacker (”Carry Me Ontario”) 23. Stefan Kupych (”Into the Empire,” “Four Wasted Years”) 24. Reena Masrani/Taylor (”The Sleeper,” “World Finds You,” “Your Love,” “Chicken Bones,” “Time Forgot To Change My Heart,” “The Sloan In Everyone”) 25. Geoff Nantes (”Make Mine Marvel!”) 26. Paulina Portyrala (”Lost Polaroids,” “Like A Lifetime,” “Millions”) 27. Jamie Harvey (”Longers & Goners,” “Hurts To Wait,” “Heart Still Sings”) 28. David Contin (”Hell Song,” “In The Street,” “In The Morning”) 29. Courtney Vanderploeg (”Brampton Mall Dreams,” “More & More Mortified, “Time Forgot To Change My Heart”) 30. Dave Thacker (”Chicken Bones”) 31. Andrew Emon (Vocals: “Be Mine This Xmas,” “Come Back 2 Me” Bass: “Be Mine This Xmas,” “Catch You,” TL version, “I’m That Guy,” “Terror to Know,” Exile version, “Karth Prooks,”  32. Andrea Plouffe (”Come Back 2 Me,” “Millions”) 33. Sam Duguid (”Millions”) 34. Jamie Jackson (”Murray Had A Birthday”) 35. Bianca Roy (”Everybody Got A Beef With Me”)

All delightful people, all of ‘em, save for Brentertainment, who was a bit of a hassle. He got hammered and walked off into the night and we never saw him again. I hope he found his way back alright from that industrial park out by Torbram and Derry Road. Not exactly a pulsing hub of civilization out there, though I believe there’s a 24-hr Petro Canada. Maybe he got a job there as a grease monkey in the auto garage out back and never left the area, spent his first few weeks there sleeping in a burlap sack in the back of a 1987 Chevrolet Daytona that a customer brought in back in ‘98 and never came back to claim. Or maybe he walked all the way home, which was near Kennedy and Queen, if I recall. We’d run into him at the Beer Store there, the one across from where The Traveling Musician used to be, and he’d mentioned that he lived nearby. That’s a hell of a walk though. Maybe I’ll ask around. Try to find him. A little missing persons project. I know that he knew Steve Sandhu, who plays in Hormoans. And Steve’s longterm girlfriend Sandra works at the Royal Bank right near my place. That’s only three degrees of separation.

It’s settled. I’ll ask Sandra next time I see her. I have to go to the bank tomorrow anyway to take out some cash to do laundry. So I might as well pop my head in and see if she’s there. If she is, I’ll ask her to text Steve re: Brentertainment. I will solve this mysterious matter once and for all. if I find anything out, you’ll be the first to know.

Oh, in other news, I’m starting a new record tomorrow. Depending on where it goes and who ends up playing on it, it may or may not be a Big City Nights release. I’ll be playing drums on most of the songs, but I’ve done that a few times before, most notably on Gimme Gardens which I drummed almost all of, but it still felt like a BCN record so I called it one. This new one a highly personal record though, a stack of 12-16 songs I smashed together last month, all about some of the shit I went through over the past few years. It’s not a “concept album” or anything, as I’m not crazy about those, but it does have a deliberate lyrical arc. It feels different than a regular BCN record to me, which is why I’m leaning toward using a different name. We’ll see. I have a few days off this week and will be working on vocals for the BCN record too. Either way, there will be something out soon under the Big City Nights name. Whether it’s the stuff I’m going to start tracking tomorrow or the Yogi Ottawa album or the big long double album we teased least year with “Fighting Ways” and “Laundry Days,” I’m not sure. But I’m never sure.

I’m not even sure where that Brentertainment guy got to. 

That’s the news, I gotta snooze, lose yer blooze.

[jobsinmanatee-blog]

Administrative Assistant/Sr. Administrative Assistant - Compliance Department

Administrative Assistant/Sr. Administrative Assistant – Compliance Department

LyondellBasell (NYSE: LYB) is one of the world’s largest plastics, chemical and refining companies and a member of the S&P 500. LyondellBasell ( http://www.lyondellbasell.com ) manufactures products at 55 sites in 17 countries. LyondellBasell products and tec Click Here to Apply : Administrative Assistant/Sr. Administrative Assistant – Compliance Department

[jobsinpinellas]

Administrative Assistant/Sr. Administrative Assistant - Compliance Department

Administrative Assistant/Sr. Administrative Assistant – Compliance Department

LyondellBasell (NYSE: LYB) is one of the world’s largest plastics, chemical and refining companies and a member of the S&P 500. LyondellBasell ( http://www.lyondellbasell.com ) manufactures products at 55 sites in 17 countries. LyondellBasell products and tec Click Here to Apply: Administrative Assistant/Sr. Administrative Assistant – Compliance Department